Chapter 7

I walked in the door and found myself in a Spanish convention. There were voices in Spanish all around me – Rudy in the "company chair" to my right, Cecelia and Rudy's wife Sara on the sofa, and Darlia and Gacela, Rudy and Sara's daughter, in the window seat to my left, in the dining room. I speak a little Spanish, but not enough to make sense of full-spate conversations by multiple people fluent in the language. And at that moment I was the only person in the house who wasn't fluent in Spanish.

I'd given Cecelia her introduction to Spanish, on our first trip to my desert place in Lanfair Valley. She'd found she enjoyed the language, and had taken a class at the University of New Mexico, and discovered a natural talent for it. Her accent has always been American, that hasn't changed, but she speaks Spanish well enough now that I've known her to carry on technical literary conversations in it, and Rudy tells me that she's just as fond of big fancy words in that language as she is in English.

Rudy and Sara – he's my best friend and she's Cecelia's – are Chicanos, who grew up with Spanish as their first language. Gacela has the same background, and Darlia picked it up from both Gacela – who's her best friend – and Cecelia. I'm the only one who just can't get the language down. I've learned a little more over the years, living in a bilingual household, but I haven't moved much off the plateau I'd been stuck on when I met Cecelia.

As I hung my hat on the rack by the door Darlia and Gacela came running up. Darlia let loose a spate of Spanish in which I could only catch comeremos and camarones, leading me to think she'd said something to the effect that we were going to eat shrimp. I grinned, and said, "Sabes, hija, que solamente hablo poco español. Otra vez, por favor, en inglés."

"Sorry, Daddy," Darlia said. "Mommy's going to cook shrimp tonight and we're going to eat out on the patio."

"Mommy's gonna do it? And what are you and Gacela and Sara going to do?"

She lapsed back into Spanish in her excitement. "¡Los comeremos, papá!"

That much I understood. "Well, you can't eat 'em if you don't remember to include me. I'm the huero here, remember?"

"Sí," Gacela said. "Sé que es mi tio huero." The girl has a soft voice, like her mother, and actually spoke slowly enough that I didn't need a translation.

"Yeah, I'm your Uncle Whitey." I saw Cecelia jerk her head in my direction, and realized what I'd said. "No, that's not right. I'm your white uncle. Now you and 'Lia go and play."

They did, running back to the window seat jabbering away in Spanish and, as is the custom among New Mexico Chicanos, bits and pieces of English. I walked over to the sofa, and Sara scooted toward the end so that Cecelia could give me room to sit down. "I'm sorry, C," I said. "It came out without me thinking."

"I know, Darvin – it was, I suppose, a natural thing when you were trying to deal with a language which gives you difficulty. But as you know, there is no one in this family whom we may call 'whitey.'"

"I know. But it could have been worse. There's a word you've had to deal with in your time."

"I have, but that is not the point here – and since you have taken my point, I think we can adjourn this discussion sin día." For once I knew what she'd translated - sine die, a Latin phrase meaning that there was no appointment to take it up again.

"Sounds good to me, C. So when's the shrimp?"

"Now that you're here, Sara and I will commence operations in the kitchen. She is going to teach me to grill the creatures, a proceeding which I am surprised I never thought of attempting before."

"That does sound good. But you're gonna leave me here with Rudy?"

"But of course," my wife said, rising and pulling Sara up by her hand. "And don't pretend to me that this distresses you; there are spouses who love each other less than you love your friend." And with a grin, still hand in hand with Sara, Cecelia went toward the kitchen.

I grinned at Rudy. "So how goes the marriage?"

"Better than it was the first time," he said, with a smile that proved that he was telling the truth. Sara had divorced Rudy several years ago, when he was still a uniformed police officer, and had only began to reconsider after he'd spent several years as a detective in Missing Persons. When we'd returned from our August vacation he and Sara had surprised us with the announcement that they were getting remarried – and I'd performed the ceremony in my brand new study. I still couldn't say which was the bigger or more pleasant surprise I'd received that day – the study, or the news that my friends were repairing their marriage. Probably the study, since Cecelia and I had both been telling the couple for a while that they ought to do it.

Rudy and I have known each other almost as long as I've been in Albuquerque, and we long ago dispensed with American society's notions of how men are. We've cried on each others' shoulders, we hug each other without shame, and I don't mind saying plainly that I love Rudy more than anyone on earth besides my family. Maybe it's wrong, but I'm closer to him than I am to my own brother.

Rudy looked at me. "Yes," he said, "better than the first time. We know how much we love each other, now that we've had to live apart." Not that they'd ever been all that far apart – they'd acted almost married even while living separately, and the only real difference in their lives now is that Gacela doesn't go between them. "And we know how to make it work now. Sara's gotten stronger, and I've gotten – I don't know, wiser, maybe. I leave the job at work more, instead of bringing it home."