Make money doing the work you believe in
The Mother
Isabella, the only warm thing. The second of Eyes Open.
I am going to give you one warm thing, because there was one, and because you should know what the rest of this got measured against. She had my hair. That is backwards. I had hers, the blonde that does not belong on a girl from Chiapas, the blonde that made strangers look twice and made my father look the way he looked. On her it was just hers. She combed it out at night, hers and then mine, the same brush, and that is the one memory I have never once been able to make ugly, and believe me I have tried, because a thing that soft is dangerous to carry.
She died when I was ten. I am not going to make a scene of it. Mothers die. The only thing that matters about it for this story is the date, because everything I became started the week she stopped, the way a clock starts the second you wind it.
My father took me out of school that same month. He told the nuns I was needed at home. He told me I was the woman of the house now, that I would cook and clean and take care of my family the way Mamá had, that I was a good girl and she would be proud. I was ten and I believed every word, because I wanted to be good, because I wanted her to be proud, because I did not have the word yet for what the woman of the house was going to mean. I got the word soon enough. I am not going to give it to you. It lives behind a door in me and the door stays shut, same as every other door in this story. Just know the schooling stopped the week she died and the other thing started, the same week, through the same hole. The warm went out and the cold came in by the same door.
He used to say my hair reminded him of her. He said it like it was tender. I learned what tender meant in his mouth, and after that I could not hear the word from anyone without checking their hands. The blonde was hers and he made it his, the way he made everything that had been hers his, me included. That is the last I will say about him straight on. He does not get more of these pages than that. He has had enough of me.
So when people hear, later, that I sold myself to a cartel, and they want to know how a girl gets that desperate, here is the answer and the only one I will give. I was not desperate. I was doing math. I had spent eight years in a house with a man who taught me exactly what my body was worth to a man and exactly how little say I had in the spending of it. Then one day I was big enough to walk out the door, and on the other side of it the worst men in Mexico were offering me the same arrangement, except this one had an exit and a price I got to argue. You run the comparison. I did. The cartel was the better father. Mija, let that sit where it lands. The cartel was the better father, and I walked toward it the way you walk toward the smaller fire.
That is the warm thing and the cold thing in one note, because for me they were never two things. The only love I ever got and the start of the worst of it came the same week, wearing the same hair. I have spent a long time unable to comb my own hair at night without thinking of her hands, and his. I have decided to let her stay soft anyway. She stays soft. She is the one thing on this whole road I would not let them have.
