They began to riffle through the many tiny drawers and compartments. He held up a piece of paper. “Her will?”
“She doesn’t have a will. She’s superstitious about it, says she’ll dictate it on her deathbed and leave me something if she feels like it. If I’m naughty, she’ll leave it to a charity for wayward girls.”
“It’s someone’s will. Ah, yes. Your grandfather’s will…but that’s your name there.”
“Where?”
“Right here,” he said, tapping his finger against the page. “He leaves the house to his daughter Perla, and upon her passing to his granddaughter, Inés. That’s you.”
“Let me see,” she said. “The house is mine? But Grandfather disinherited my mother. He made no provisions for me.”
“Upon her death. No mention of wayward girls. Let’s see if we can find money. She must have cash,” he said as he folded the will and tucked it back in place.
Inés opened a drawer. It was a stack of letters. For a moment shethought to look elsewhere, but a name caught her attention:Inés Inclán,the envelope said. She opened it and began to read.
“Finally! Let’s see, one hundred, two hundred…”
He was counting bills, but Inés had stopped listening. She sat down on the bed and opened another letter. Then another. She was about to faint, all the blood seemed to congeal in her veins and she felt a pressure in her chest. Ulises turned around.
“That’s two thousand pesos in cash and not even a measly traveler’s check. I can’t believe—” He paused and looked at her. “Is something wrong?”
“My father died.”
“What?”
She extended one of the letters with shaky hands and he grabbed it and read it while she sat there, feeling as though she’d been stabbed. Clean in the heart, that’s how deep the wound ached.
“Buried on March third, 1942,” Ulises said. “That’s a year ago.”
“I didn’t know. My aunt always told me he cut off all contact with us. But look at these letters,” she said, holding them up. “That’s several letters asking if I would write back to him. She never told me.”
She let the letters fall from her fingers. He clasped her hands.
“Inés…I’m sorry,” he said.
He sounded sincere but it didn’t matter. She felt as if the blood really were spilling from a wound in her body as she sat there, weak from exhaustion.
She remembered her father’s voice, back in the apartment in Puebla. Aunt Perla always said she looked like him, with not a stitch of the Incláns in her blood. When she’d compared her features to those of her mother, Inés had to agree. Her mother had bequeathed her eyes and her locks of black hair, but Inés’s mouth, chin, and nose seemed to come from another source.
She’d wondered about him through the years. How could she not when the word “bastard” was used so casually? It indicated a taint.Eventually she stopped wondering, knowing she’d never speak to him, that he did not care for her.
He’d cared a little, it seemed. Her aunt had snatched that trickle of feeling from her.
Inés ran to the bathroom, where she had to splash water on her face to keep herself from fainting. She pressed her back against the door and stood there, breathing slowly.
Ulises knocked. “Inés, we need to put these things away. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
When she walked out, he had already put everything back in place and was sliding down the lid of the desk.
“Come on,” he said. “We don’t want your aunt to catch us in here.”
He took her by the hand, and she stumbled behind him. “I could kill her!” she yelled, for the sake of yelling something, because if she didn’t scream, she was going to begin crying.
“You’d get a house, but then you would end up in jail,” he said lightly. “Get back in bed. You’re supposed to be indisposed.”
He opened the door to her room, but she stopped at the threshold and looked up at him. “What do you mean I’d get a house?”