Tigers, Not Daughters - Samantha Mabry Page 0,18
be ratted in the back.
But there were other theories about Ana’s death: she leapt, intentionally, after a fight with her father; she leapt, intentionally, after learning she was pregnant and that the baby’s father was an older married guy; she leapt, intentionally, because she was a sad girl trapped in a sad house.
At Hector’s, it was hard to watch the Torres girls shuffle from room to room and politely receive various words of sympathy because we could see the pain in their faces—the pain of their loss and the pain that comes along with forcing small smiles and pretending that kind words from their neighbors made any kind of difference.
In other parts of the house, there was the usual stuff whispered in corners about Rafe being a tragedy of a man. He’d never been the same since his wife, Rita de la Cruz, had died shortly after giving birth to Rosa. He’d become a shell, helpless. He couldn’t make the most basic decisions, like what to get for takeout or which shirt to wear to church. For a while, he’d taken up with an older widow from the neighborhood named Norma Galván, and after that had fizzled out, he’d been involved with various other women. He wanted them to take care of him; they wanted to take care of him. Unfortunately, none of them lasted for longer than two months, and, in the end, all he could truly rely on, or so he said, were his girls. In this life, family was all there was.
We heard that he’d told his daughters that if they got jobs, the money would have to go to the family—for groceries, bills, house repairs, stuff like that. Once the girls graduated and if they decided they wanted to keep going to school, it had to be at one of the nearby Alamo Colleges, close enough for them to commute from home.
The weight of Rafe’s neediness was heavy enough to crush all four of the Torres sisters, but Ana, being the oldest in a motherless household, bore the brunt of it. She packed her father’s lunches for him in the mornings, made sure his Negra Modelos were poured into frosted mugs when he got home, and went to neighbors’ houses to try to smooth over bitter feelings after Rafe borrowed money he couldn’t repay.
The women gathered in the Garcias’ kitchen on the day of Ana’s funeral shook their heads—pitiful, they said, patètico. Some said it wasn’t his fault, the way he was.
“He was born out of God’s favor,” Kitty Bolander’s mom claimed. “Anda mal. The clouds, they follow him. He walks outside, and it starts to hail.”
Father Canty, who’d led Ana’s graveside service, hadn’t arrived yet, but three other priests from the local parish were there, pinching small paper plates in their large sausage fingers while shoveling down heaping forkfuls of Calvin’s mom’s famous King Ranch chicken.
The priests didn’t notice us lurking nearby. We watched as they spilled sour cream down the front of their robes and dabbed at the little white blurs with their napkins. One of them burped and didn’t even say excuse me. The things they were talking about to each other were like the things we heard people say in mobster movies. One said that Rafe was in a bad spot and that he owed someone named Edgar Rivera Lopez—we’d never heard of him—a boatload of money. The situation had gotten so bad that Rafe was living in a perpetual state of fear. He was marked.
Another priest said, “He will be forced to leave San Antonio and go back to Crystal City.”
Another added, “He cannot hide forever.”
For a moment, the priests were quiet. One of them put his empty plate on a side table and took a long drink from his plastic cup. Then he sighed. “Rafe is overwhelmed,” he began, “and was never equipped to raise four daughters on his own. It doesn’t help knowing now how rebellious Ana was. It’s possible she was also a liar. It’s all because she has no mother.”
The first priest shook his head and muttered something we couldn’t really hear, but by then we weren’t listening. Our attention had shifted to Jessica, who’d suddenly and silently appeared in the doorway. From the expression on her face—blanched