gabriella navas

After she hooks up with her ex-boyfriend at the construction site behind their old middle school, after she asks him if he wants to see her again, after he says no—she returns to her abuela’s house for dinner.

By the time the girl arrives, the table is already set, her abuela’s second largest caldero at the center of it, filled with rice so sticky it looks as though it’s been glazed with resin. Next to it, a pot of sancocho is still steaming. The aguacate has been sliced, the plátanos fried, the tostones salted. Somehow, nothing is cold. As she sits down and takes her first bite—a spoonful of malanga fished straight from the pot of sancocho—her abuela asks about her day. She asks in the same way all abuelas ask: like she just got done talking to God and He told her everything.

The girl serves herself a bowl of rice and pours the sancocho over it to avoid the question. Her abuela stands in front of her now, never one to sit still, her hands wringing an already dry pañito, her head bobbing up and down in agreement with or understanding of something the girl has yet to say. She says her day was fine. She doesn’t know how to explain where she’s been. She doesn’t know how to say, I feel most like a woman when I do things that make men hate me.

Her abuela asks the girl if she wants pique for her sancocho and she nods, and seconds later the bottle is placed in front of her, and the man in the charro and sombrero is smiling at her, and the girl wonders if he’d hate her, too. She wonders if there will always be a line, and if she’ll always be the one to cross it.

After she eats, she paints her abuela’s nails red. She can tell her abuela is restless, unable to let the girl hold her hands for more than a few minutes at a time. The girl tries to make a joke, asking her abuela if the reason she wants her nails painted is because she has a date. Her abuela laughs and calls her estúpida, which she knows is meant with love, not cruelty, though it is impossible for her to forget that sometimes the border between these two is only an imagined thing, only a thing put in place to try and avoid pain, which she knows is unavoidable.

With each stroke of the brush against her abuela’s fingernails, each coat of polish, she gets quieter, a quiet that only she notices, and not even her abuela’s voice can penetrate it. She looks up at her abuela, then at the pot of sancocho still on the table, still hot. She thinks about how it stays that way for so long because there’s so much of it, and she wonders if she’ll feel like this forever, if her guilt will stay hot inside her or if, eventually, it’ll all run cold.