Mothers and Other Liars Read Online Free PDF Page B

thick adobe walls.
    The older women jostle each other as they dance between stove top and oven and counter, putting finishing touches on the meal, pulling bright colored platters and bowls from the pine cabinets. Across the room, the younger generation, Antoinette and her cousins, set the long farm table with Fiestaware the colors of the New Mexico heavens: sunset red, sunrise yellow, big sky blue.
    They all talk at once, voices in a perpetual game of rock, paper, scissors, Antoinette’s new job at the court house, a cousin’s new boyfriend, an aunt’s old pains. Sunday dinner at the Monteros’ is as much a ritual as morning Mass.
    “Off your tush.” Aunt Tia pokes Ruby, points to the refrigerator. “Get the salad on the table.” Despite her redundant name—Tia is Spanish for “aunt”—she is Ruby’s favorite of Chaz’s aunts. Tia and two others are Celeste’s sisters; one is Chunk’s sister.
    “Grab the water pitcher while you’re there,” Antoinette calls. Her own sister, Linda, holds the bucket of ice.
    Ruby is grateful that they assign her these tasks, making her a part of the family rather than treating her like company. As she pours water in each heavy blue goblet, she tries once again to imagine growing up in this house, surrounded by abundance and mess and boisterous relatives, so different from the quiet space she and her grandmother inhabited.
    All conversation halts as, in a grand crescendo, Celeste dumps a mound of pasta into the biggest bowl, steam rising like a choir of angels. In the time it takes Ruby to refill the water pitcher and return to the table, the TV is muted, children’s washed hands are inspected, and the throngs crowd around the table for grace.
    Antoinette grabs one of Ruby’s hands in her slender fingers; the other is clasped in the farting uncle’s dry, meaty palm. Lark is across the table, between Chaz and Linda, the baby of the family and the only one of the three siblings who is married. Ruby likes her fine, but her suburban life down in Albuquerque is very different from Ruby’s or Antoinette’s.
    Chunk says grace, adding an entreaty for God to watch over the Dallas Cowboys as they train this summer. The amens are whispered, mumbled, spoken, then punctuated with the traditional Montero squeeze. Antoinette holds Ruby’s hand a moment longer, gives it an extra squeeze, making Ruby feel all the guiltier for lying to her.
    The dinner table looks like a crowded bazaar, platters circling, arms reaching, Chianti flowing. Ruby watches in awe as the prodigious amount of food disappears from the table. Even the mountain of pasta, which in most universes would be bottomless, is chiseled down to the platter in Monteroland.
    Throughout the meal, Ruby thinks she’s faking it just fine. No one seems to notice that she doesn’t touch her wine, and for the first time in days, she is actually hungry, lustily munching warm, buttery garlic bread, shoveling in the rigatoni drenched in better-than-any-restaurant Bolognese sauce.
    Then from across the table, a snippet of conversation wafts toward her. Lark and Chaz. Discussing soccer.
    “When the community league starts up next spring,” Chaz says, “how ’bout I help out with coaching your team.”
    “That would be awe-some, Chaz.”
    Ruby feels the color drain from her face. Next spring . There might not be a next spring. Her stomach flails. Ruby covers her mouth with her hand, pushes back from the table, overturning her chair. She runs to the bathroom, falling to her knees at the toilet just in time.
    Chaz opens the door as she stands at the sink, mopping the sweat from her forehead with Celeste’s guest towel of the month, cheery yellow with an embroidered beach umbrella.
    “Well, that was one way to make the announcement,” Chaz says. “Maybe a bit dramatic, but hey…”
    Ruby stares at him a moment, not comprehending his words. And then it hits her. “Oh, God. Oh, no.” The hot color floods back to her face. She buries