driver leaves as suddenly as he arrived.
Ten, fifteen minutes go by. Then one by one, couple by couple, the guests approach Mom and hug her and wish her many more happy birthdays. They all need to leave no matter how much they wish they could stay.
Soon the courtyard is empty except for the family and Luz. The tamale and taco vendors pack up their steam tables and fry stations and roll their carts out the door. Adiós. Gracias.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth says to everyone and no one. “But that guy was wrong. He was putting the squeeze on us. I didn’t owe him any money. I don’t know why you paid him.”
“It hardly matters.” Mom shrugs.
In fact it matters a lot. Ruth has ruined her party and will never be forgiven.
When Rocco and Ruth break up, his family will be delighted. It almost makes Rocco want to break up with her on the spot, just to make everyone happy. At the same time, it makes him want to stay with her forever, just to piss everyone off.
Only Daisy seems unbothered. She sits at the table, eating tacos and pasting things in her book. She’d taken up a collection from the guests: business cards, sales receipts. A few people gave her small bills that she glued onto one of the pages, and now she’s trying to make a coin stick to the paper.
Charlotte asks Mom if she’s tired, if she wants to lie down. Her mother turns on her, enraged. Charlotte must have forgotten that solicitous care is not the way to Mom’s heart.
Mom says, “If I lie down, I’ll vomit,” and no one says anything for a while.
They begin straightening up the patio, throwing out plastic cups and plates, scraps of napkins and food, mopping up slicks of tequila and beer.
“We didn’t get to do the pi?ata,” says Eli, and they look up and see Bart Simpson hanging from a high rope, still waiting to be beaten to death by a blindfolded child.
Charlotte says, “There weren’t enough kids here to make it fun. Daisy hates pi?atas anyway, don’t you, Daisy?”
“I guess so,” Daisy says.
Rocco thinks she probably likes them. Or at least she likes the candy.
Just then the doorbell rings, and Luz goes to answer it.
She reappears with four men and a boy of about twelve, all in black mariachi suits and white sombreros bordered with black. They’re carrying musical instrument cases.
The mariachis seem bewildered. Why is no one here except a gringo family and a maid cleaning up? The men look at their watches. The boy checks the phone he wrests from the pocket of his tight vaquero trousers. No, they haven’t gotten the time wrong.
The tallest, the one with the violin case, looks around. Who’s in charge here? It’s the elderly gringa’s birthday. The maid has told them that. But the lady is obviously in no shape to sort things out.
Rocco should do something. But the party has exhausted him. First the worrying about where Ruth was, then her showing up, then the tension between Ruth and Reyna, and last but not least the shit show with the driver.
He hasn’t spoken to Ruth since then. Something happened with that guy, but Rocco doesn’t know what. It’s an effort not to ask Ruth.
Thank God he stopped drinking. Who knows what he would do then . . .
Let someone else deal with the mariachis.
Luz says she’s sorry. No, the musicians aren’t late. Early, even. It’s nobody’s fault. The guests have gone home.
“Nosotros te pagaremos,” someone says. “We will pay you.”
It takes Rocco a moment to realize it’s Mom, who says to Luz, “Tell them we will pay them what we would have paid them for playing.”
The head mariachi protests. “Se?ora, please. Maybe . . . half.”
Mom shakes her head. “You don’t need to play.”
“Why not?” It’s Ruth who’s spoken up. “We totally love your music.”
She’s gone over the heads of the hostess and the family—straight to the mariachis. “You’re here, you’re getting paid anyway, so couldn’t you play a couple of songs for us? We would love it so much.”
Ruth has cojones, that’s for sure. Rocco has to give her credit. And he finds her nerve—the hard nut of toughness under that fragile shell—surprisingly sexy.
The mariachi leader looks to Luz to make sure he understands. He nods at the rest of the band, and they nod back. They seem pleased. The lady has just told them she loves their music.
Rocco is lucky to have Ruth in his life, even if she