Free Vida by Patricia Engel

frustration, but she refused to give him the pleasure.
    Or she’d talk about all the things she was going to do in a few years when she retired. She had all these trips in mind: Southeast Asia, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa. She even wanted to go back to Jamaica to see the Kingston boarding school where the nuns tormented her, the place where she first understood what it meant to be alone and possibly forgotten. And of course, as soon as she retired, she would finally start reading all the books that formed a fortress around her apartment.
    But these conversations hardly ever happened because people didn’t give her the chance. Only my mother. When Mami was done feeding the people and taking compliments on the food and party, she’d go straight over to Paloma, and the two would fall into their song of history, exchange glances packed with gossip and innuendo about the other guests, which only the two of them could understand.
    My mother’s mother died of cancer. Mami said it was because her husband’s infidelities had already demolished her that she handed herself over to the disease. She didn’t undergo any treatments and refused to go to the hospital. She stayed in her own bed, her body shrinking into the same sheetsshe’d embroidered for her wedding, while her absent husband returned home from the apartment he now shared with a mistress, to be with his wife during her last days.
    Mami says that during that last month, when she left my brother and father behind to go home to Colombia, is when she really got to know her mother. All the daughters spent hours in bed with their mother, told stories, rubbed lotion on their mother’s legs and skin until she said that the pain was too great, her flesh burning from the inside out. For her last days, my mother says that her father became the perfect husband. There was no mention of his mistress or the child he’d had with her. As he sat at his wife’s bedside, he told her she was the love of his life, asked her to forgive him, and said there was no other woman that compared to her in beauty and in spirit. Mami said the worst part was that she could see in her mother’s eyes that she didn’t believe him. And he wasn’t forgiven.
    When their mother died, Mami returned to Puerto Rico but Paloma stayed in Colombia for a while. My mother says they were not close then, but she heard from others that Paloma became addicted to sedatives, fell into an enormous depression, and that she spent months crying into the pillows of her mother’s bed.

    It was no surprise then when Paloma was diagnosed with cancer. Her mother’s had appeared in the pancreas, lethal, the kind of cancer that seems to take pleasure in the killing. Paloma’s cancer revealed itself in her uterus. More than one doctor told her it was because she’d never had children, as if she were to blame.
    I was twenty, at college in Manhattan, when my mother told me. I was impatient and asked her flat out if this meant Paloma was going to die.
    “It’s not like in the old days,” Mami told me. “They say they caught it early and she’ll go right into chemo. She should be fine.”
    Paloma lost her hair. At first she wore a scarf around her head or one of her old hats left over from the seventies. She lost a ton of weight with the treatment; her cheeks sank and her eyes bulged, while her lips became floppy. Her large breasts began to sag even farther and she held a constant expression of terror. Mami said we should be extra nice to Paloma, so I tried calling her every week to see how she was feeling. She was still working despite her fatigue and treatment schedule, never mind the nausea and depression that followed each session. She was still holding out for her retirement, her pension, saying once she kicked this cancer and got that cash in her pocket, she was going on a world tour.
    My mother went with her to the doctor sometimes. It was on one of those visits that a new doctor who was seeing her for the first