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Gran took a sip of her tea, letting Abuela continue but I didn’t miss the way her eyes glassed over and her lips thinned as she forced herself to swallow.
“My cancer. It’s gone.”
I leaned back against the counter as relief poured through me. No sooner did I find out Abuela had cancer, it was gone. Just like that. A bad dream I woke up from the moment Asmodeus put his hands on her.
“I guess I have a demon and a witch to thank for that.” She chuckled low with a shake of her head before she sipped her tea again. “Can you believe it?”
“Everything feels believable to me these days.” That was the truth. It was like the universe was full of all these things I would have scoffed at before but now a mere whisper of them was truth.
“How I prayed on this Eden, and then a witch throws me through a desk and a demon heals me.” Her eyes clouded with tears. “Nothing feels like it should.”
Gran took her hand.
“I know.” I turned, giving them my back as I looked out the window over the kitchen sink. Everything I learned about Asmodeus was a contradiction to what I was taught. To the brand of religion I still wore on my flesh, though I’d done my best to remove and hide it.
I gripped the counter, dropping my head between my shoulders.
“The doctor couldn’t believe it. He made them triple-check… called it a miracle. Who would have thought a miracle was the work of a demon?” Gran shook her head in disbelief as she took another sip.
“I want to yell at you,” Abuela admitted. “I want to tell you messing with things you don’t understand with your friends was a big mistake. I want to force you to come to service with me and Lulu so you can sit and ask for forgiveness…”
I turned to look at her, my throat seizing when her eyes glassed over.
“How can I do that now? How can I tell you how wrong all that was when the consequences of that was my life?” She rubbed a hand over her brow before she pushed back from the table. “I don’t know how to feel about all this.”
Gran sat in silence.
“I need to speak with him,” Abuela said. “Where is he?”
Her question reminded me of his disappearance. “I’m not sure. He was here and then he… wasn’t. I don’t fully understand him.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay…” Another sigh left her. “I may feel better than I have in years, but all this has tired me. I think I will go lie down.”
I nodded and watched her go.
Abuela paused at the end of the hall, looking back at me. “I’m sorry, baby. It hurt me not to tell you something so important.”
My heart still ached, but I nodded again. “It’s okay. Get some rest.”
I waited until she rounded the corner to go up the steps before I grabbed her mug to rinse and wash. I scrubbed at it like it was something that would never be clean until my Gran stepped up behind me and shut off the tap.
“Want to talk about it?” she asked.
“No.”
“Fine. I’ll talk. I know how you must feel. You’re my flesh and bone and because of that, I know you’re as stubborn as I am. We’re similar, you know. That’s why you and your mom used to butt heads so much. She was so attached to her father as a child. It always felt like the two of them against me. It’s easy to be on your father’s side when all he cares about is fun. It’s easy to only care about fun when it’s all you had to do for the day.”
Though Gran sounded like she was talking bad about grandpa, I knew better. He was the love of her life and she missed him with everything she was.
“You and me though… we’re birds of a feather. Because of that, I know you’re feeling guilty now. Guilty because even though you’re so happy Catalina is healthy now, you’re still so mad. That was a big secret we kept from you. One we both regretted every day and one I was happy to take responsibility for when…” her words fell away.
“When Abuela died?”
Gran leaned her cheek into my back. “It’s a hard thing to decide to live for yourself. To forget about responsibility and do something for yourself when you’ve lived every day of your life for someone else. It was a different time for us when we were young. We raised babies that weren’t ours. Did chores meant for grown men. Then we got married so we wouldn’t be a burden anymore. If you got lucky like Catalina and I did, you did it for love too.”
There was so much I wanted to say, but I said nothing knowing there was still so much more Gran had to tell me.
“Then we both lost our husbands and for a brief moment the world was ours but then…”
