The Year the Swallows Came Early (5 page)

“S
he was an Aquarius,” Mama said, like that would explain it all. “Creative and intellectual. She slept past noon every day, and collected small porcelain statues of owls because they were creatures of the night—something she was always studying.” She leaned in close across the table to tell me more about my great-grandmother.

I knew Mama had always thought of her as being someone very special, because she named me after her.

“Well, you know she wrote science fiction novels,” Mama told me. “But you might not
know how extraordinary she was. For example, she only worked after midnight. Usually until four
A.M
. She said it was the best time to write because people did and said things then that they normally wouldn't in the daytime. From her apartment window in New York, she could watch all kinds of people passing through the night. She even thought she saw paranormal events from time to time.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Events that don't normally happen. Things that can't be explained, Groovy. Like that time last year when the entire crew of the
Lovely Anna
disappeared. The harbor patrol said they had set a course for home, but they never made it. It was a huge mystery.”

Mama kept talking and as she did, her story started to sound like one of those that camp counselors tell around a fire after dinner. When everyone is tucked away in their sleeping bags with flashlights and chocolate bars, wearing their pajamas.

Her face glowed from the light of the red candle on the table, and the smoke from the flame rose up around her in little gray wisps and then disappeared into the air.

“What does this have to do with Daddy?” I said, trying to keep her on track.

“Well.” She dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “I'm getting to it. You see, your great-grandmother was very smart. She had so many books stacked up along the walls of her apartment that it was hard to walk without accidentally kicking over a pile of them. Some of the piles were as high as the top of my head. She always said that good writers are even better readers, and she was a great reader. She probably liked reading better than talking to most people.”

Mama looked out through the window, and stared into the fog for a moment. I could see her being careful not to knock over one of those stacks of books as she walked through the memory of Great-grandmother's apartment.

“But her most favorite books were those
written by Isaac Asimov,” Mama said, and she turned back again to look at me. “She read those over and over. She kept them in a special pile by themselves. I remember she used to read to me from that pile when I visited her.”

Mama stopped talking and put her napkin on the table. She smoothed out the wrinkles she had made while holding it on her lap, over and over with the palm of her hand, like it was suddenly very important that her napkin was completely, 100 percent wrinkle-free. She breathed in deep, and for a minute I thought I might be in trouble for something I did, from the look on her face.

“What's wrong, Mama?”

“Groovy…this brings me to the part about you and your father.” She made sure I was listening good, and I was. I knew she was finally going to tell me what I wanted to know.

“Your great-grandmother left to you
Foundation,
written by Mr. Asimov. A first edition from the year 1951. She came out to see you after you were born and gave it to me. I have
been keeping it for you in a box filled with all of her unfinished stories, which she also left to you. There are pages and pages of her writing in that box. I was waiting until you were older to give them to you, so you would be able to take good care of them.”

Mama stopped and took my hands in hers, rubbing her thumbs over my knuckles real slow and frowning just a little. Her lips were pushed tight together and she had wrinkles between her eyes.

“Mama, please, what are you saying?”

“You see, Groovy,” she said, “the first Eleanor Robinson, being the emotional type, was so touched to have someone named after her that she passed along her most prized possessions to you. She knew you would know what to do with them, being that you have the same name,” Mama explained.

I wasn't sure why she was acting so strange and ignoring my questions about Daddy.

Mama looked straight at me then. “Groovy,
you know she left some money to you, but I've never told you how much it was. I wanted to wait until you got older and were ready to go to college.”

I nodded. “I know, Mama. I told you, I'm going to use it for cooking school. I have it all planned out.”

Mama looked down at her plate. She pressed her fingers to her forehead like she suddenly felt a sharp pain. Then she said, “It was twenty-five thousand dollars, baby. All the money she had.”

I looked at Mama in shock, and she looked back at me. My mouth dropped open and Mama just kept nodding, like she was trying to believe it too. Neither one of us could say anything.

I'd never known anyone who had twenty-five thousand dollars. I couldn't imagine where all that money would fit. And I thought that my great-grandmother must have been a really good writer to save up all that money.

Then after a real long time of looking at each other with amazement, and all this can-you-
believe-it feeling in the air between us, she said, “Well, should we order now? They must be getting ready to close up the place soon.” And she motioned for the waitress to come over to our table with the most everyday, normal look on her face. Like she had just told me something about the weather, or what was on special at the market.

W
e sat at that table for a long time waiting for the waitress to come. So long that I could feel the backs of my legs getting indentations from the wicker chair. Mama pressed her lips tight and kept staring at me. It was as if she was trying to decide something.

Me, I am embarrassed to admit that with the news Mama told me…I felt a smallish wave of hope flood into a corner of my brain, unexpectedly of course, about my future. It came quick, surprising me that I could think about myself, so selfishly, at a time when everything bad was
happening to Daddy. The thought got bigger and bigger, until finally it was the only thing I could think: I would actually definitely be able to go to cooking school when I got older because I could
pay for it
. I was sure twenty-five thousand dollars would be enough. Yes, I could sell my chocolate-covered strawberries if I wanted to, like Mama'd suggested, but I already had enough money without doing that.

I would learn how to dice vegetables without lifting the top of the knife off the cutting board, like they do on TV, and use a real flaming kitchen torch, and make pastry cream that comes out all fancy from a bag. I would use a zester to make the skin of lemons float off like confetti onto the tops of pies and cookies.

I would write a cookbook, listing my perfect menus for every situation, the ones I'd copied into my notebook.

I looked at the floor to keep Mama from noticing the tiny grin of happiness I couldn't hold back anymore.

But Mama let out a loud breath and stood up, like she'd read my thoughts. She waved at the waitress. “Can we have two specials to go, please?” she yelled across the room to her.

“Why are we leaving?” I stood up with her.

The waitress nodded and hurried back to the kitchen, stuffing her order pad into the front pocket of her apron.

“I think we should run by the salon.” Mama started walking toward the cashier. She reached for her wallet deep inside her purse. Her makeup bag dropped to the tile floor as her hands fumbled inside. Lipsticks spun out in half circles, their silver cases twinkling as they caught the light. Eyeliners and compacts and mascaras scattered.

“But we haven't eaten dinner. And it's practically
midnight
.” I watched her stuff her things back into her bag, like she was racing against time, like we were practicing a drill at school and had to leave our classroom while the emergency bell rang loudly in bursts of three over the intercom.

“You need a deep conditioning,” she told me.
“Your hair looks dry. Plus, you're way overdue to have your bangs trimmed.”

I stopped in my tracks. “What's wrong, Mama?” I knew her idea for fixing any problem was a deep-conditioning hair treatment. It was used as a cure-all for emotional problems; or female stresses, the monthly type that ladies sometimes had; or illnesses; or as a pick-me-up for really,
really
bad days. The last time she'd insisted on giving me one was the day Daddy'd lost a job he'd kept for almost a year.

She paid the cashier quickly and picked up the paper bag that held our dinners, thin ribbons of hot steam streamed behind her as she walked out the door. “Come on, Groovy.”

“I'm not going,” I told her as I ran to catch up, but only to protest. “Tell me what's wrong. I know something's wrong, Mama. And by the way, I am
not
getting my hair done.” I stood my ground, watching her walk up the street.

But Mama kept going. “Hurry up,” she yelled over her shoulder. “It's getting late.”

Anger rose inside me. I ran to catch up. Her body was like a magnet, and I couldn't help myself from being pulled into her path of explanations.

I knew her words might disappear into the fog if I wasn't there to grab hold of them while I could.

T
he smell of mangoes and peppermint filled the air at the salon, as I sat there with my hair wrapped tight in a mound of white towels. Mama had rubbed her favorite special-reserve conditioner through it. Our dinners sat untouched in the bag on her table. Nobody was hungry.

“Any time now,” I said, feeling angry.

“It's a good habit to put moisture back into the hair every two months or so,” she told me in an automatic voice, like she was talking to a new client who didn't already know this. “Just another few minutes, and your hair will shine like
the ocean on a sunny day.”

“My hair is shiny enough,” I told her.

She led me to the washing sink and unwrapped the towels.

After she rinsed out the conditioner and sat me in her chair, in front of the mermaid and the mirror, I knew the time had come for her to tell me. I knew it by the way she'd worked the conditioner through my ends so hard. And how her face seemed a million miles away, like she was thinking about something she'd never thought about before.

“Mama,” I said finally, “I need to know.” I watched her through strands of my wet hair, which were now combed straight out over my eyes and dripping little drops of creamy soft water from all that deep conditioning.

Mama nodded and I could see her give in. Her shoulders curled inward, and her face softened. She combed my hair from the back and the sides, walking barefoot around me with her professional scissors tucked into the front pocket of her
working apron. I waited while she kept parting my hair and then combing it out, and parting it again in a different place. She looked tired. And a little sad.

Finally she took a deep breath. “It was in the middle of the winter,” she said as she adjusted the black cape around my neck. “When the El Niño storms came and the weather station had to issue a flash flood warning for the whole county. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“We had four inches of rain falling every hour for three days straight, and some of the houses on the hill above the harbor were beginning to show signs of slipping down with the mud.” She concentrated on cutting a straight line of bangs.

“Are we almost done with the cutting, Mama?”

“Almost,” she answered.

“Is this the part about Daddy?”

“I'm getting to it,” she said. “There were little rivers of water running through the streets, and
people were piling up sandbags around their homes. The palm trees were bent over sideways from the wind coming onshore so strong.”

Mama went on with her story while the memory of that time swirled through my head. With the help of Luis and Frankie, we'd filled twenty-two burlap bags with beach sand and stacked them up against the doors of our house to keep the water from coming in. Our garage had leaked so much that there had been a puddle of water four inches deep standing around the fishing poles and crab nets that Daddy kept piled in the corner.

Luis had even closed the Swallow for a week straight, on account of the rain coming through the roof in places where the red tiles were separated or broken. He said there were only so many buckets of water a customer could be expected to walk around before it became bad for business.

“With the oil spill offshore having slowed down the real estate market already, your father knew the flooding meant selling houses would be impossible for a long time. The damage would
take months to repair because according to him, we only had one good construction company in town.” Mama sighed.

She was cutting wisps of blond off the back of my hair now. I watched them fall to the floor.

“Couldn't he get another job?” I asked.

Mama didn't answer.

“He always did before.”

“He came by to see me at work that day,” she said finally. “I was busy, and I couldn't take the time to talk to him just then, with one client processing color and another waiting for a cut. I guess he left before I could take a break because when I went outside to find him, he was gone.”

“Where did he go?”

“Down south, to Mexico,” Mama answered. “To get out of the rain and think, and come up with a new plan and a new job. Only problem was, when he got to the Mexican border, the police wouldn't let anyone through. The authorities had closed the border to all cars and trucks on account of the heavy rain causing so
many mud slides in the area.”

“It was that bad?”

Mama nodded and stopped cutting for a moment, pulling both sides of my hair down to see that they were even.

When she was positive that my cut looked perfect, she said, “Your father sat inside that small building at the border, the one where all the people who are stopped have to wait while the immigration officials check their papers. He tried to wait until the mud was bulldozed away and they opened the roads again.”

Then her voice changed. “You see, Groovy,” she said, “this is where your father should have remembered what I taught him and checked his daily horoscope instead of the
Daily Racing Form
he said was sitting on the table there. He should have seen that
that
day was
no
day to take any chances. Everyone knows not to take chances when there's a new moon. But…” She stopped and turned to look out the window.

“But what?” I leaned forward a little.

“But being a Sagittarius, he couldn't help himself.” Mama's voice was louder now.

She put her comb and scissors down with a bang on her counter, and the mermaid fell over on her face. Mama was all set to blow-dry my new cut. But she unplugged her hair dryer and wrapped the cord around the handle, like she forgot the steps to finishing a haircut.

I pushed my hair to the side again. My breath caught in my throat. “What did he do?” I asked, ever so quiet, almost not wanting to hear what she was telling me.

Mama's voice sounded even madder. “What he should have done was driven straight home and given you back what was yours. The money he secretly took from the bank. Because he was listed as one of your guardians, he had access to Eleanor Robinson's money, and he took it with him.” She stopped for a moment then and shook her head back and forth, sighing real long and loud. Her hands were firm on her hips, and her lips were bunched up.

My mouth dropped open as I looked at Mama. I couldn't believe what she was saying.

“Instead,” she said, “he went to the only place
he
knew to go with that kind of money.”

“Where did he go?” I stood up from the chair and began to breathe real fast because this was
not
the story I thought it was going to be after all. The words
he took it with him
played over in my head, making me dizzy, and I held on to the wall.

“Baby,” Mama said, “I'm sorry. I know you had plans for that money, how you want to be a real cook. That's why this is so hard to tell you. Why I've been delaying telling you. I've been trying to think up another plan. It's why I brought up the idea about selling the strawberries.” She reached to touch my cheek; her hand was soft.

I looked away. I wanted her words to disappear. I wanted my daddy to come back and everything to be normal again.

Mama turned my chin toward hers. She waited. I could feel that she didn't want to say
anything more by the way her eyes searched my face, looking for the right words, the ones that didn't exist.

Then she whispered, “You see, he went to a racetrack to see the horses run. And he lost all that money on a single bet.”