Free How Tía Lola Came to (Visit) Stay by Julia Álvarez Page B

and now weVe got over seventy,”
    “!Exactamente!”
Tía Lola smiles as if she has had nothing to do with it.
    On Saturday morning, while Mami putters downstairs, Tía Lola finally calls a secret planning session in her bedroom. She is wearing her purple Charlie’s Boys baseball cap atop her high
moño
and carrying a clipboard in her hand as if she were assigning positions to the team.
    “Diez y siete…treinta y ocho.
…
setenta y cinco,”
she counts. Seventeen… thirty-eight… seventy-five. Suddenly, her head jerks up. They have seventy-five guests coming to Mami’s party! They can’t fit that many people in the living room!
    “I was trying to tell you,” Miguel sighs, foldinghis arms and giving his aunt a pointed look.
    “I know! I know!” Juanita is waving her hand in the air as if she were still in school and had to ask for permission to talk. “Why don’t we have the party in the back field?”
    “!Muy buena idea!”
Tía Lola says, checking that item off the list on her clipboard.
    Miguel brings up another problem. “How are we going to cook for so many people? Mami will notice if we start making all this food in the house.”
    “Déjame pensar un momentico”
Tía Lola says. She needs to think a moment.
    When Tía Lola thinks, you can see her thinking. Her painted-on eyebrows move slowly toward the center of her face in a thinker’s scowl. And just when you think they’ll run into each other and become one brow, she jumps up and says, “Aha!” and some Great Idea pops out of her mouth.
    This time, nothing pops out of her mouth but a heavy sigh. Nothing pops out of Juanita’s mouth or Miguel’s mouth, either. They can’t figure this problem out.
    The phone rings downstairs. Their mother answers. “Oh, hello, Rudy. Let me get her—Tía Lola!” Mami calls up the stairs.
    Miguel, Juanita, and Tía Lola look at each other and cry out, “Aha!”
    “I think maybe your aunt and Rudy are becoming very fond of each other,” their mother notes to Miguel and Juanita a few days later.
    “Is that so?” Miguel says, trying to look surprised.
    “She’s over there all the time. Maybe Tía Lola will get married after all,” Their mother smiles as if she has planned this all along, “Why not? Poor Rudy’s been widowed for five years. And Tía Lola,
bueno
, she could do with some good company,”
    Miguel remembers that his mother once told him that Tía Lola is very sensitive about the subject of marriage, “Mami, why didn’t Tía Lola ever get married?”
    A sad, wistful look comes over her face, “Remember how I told you my mother died when I was only three? Well, my mami had a younger sister, Tía Lola, When Mami died, Tía Lola took care of me. Maybe Tía Lola was too busy being my mother to find a husband,”
    This is a surprise to Miguel and Juanita, Youcan be a mother without really being
the
mother-You can be a family even if your parents are no longer married.
    At last count, seventy-seven people are coming tomorrow. Miguel and Juanita sorely wish they could add one more person to the list of guests.
    “You have to remember,” the wished-for number seventy-eight reminds them that evening on the phone, “it’s your
mother’s
birthday, not yours-”
    “But it won’t be the same without you, Papi,” Miguel says, lowering his voice-
    His mother is having a pre-birthday massage in the living room from her friend Stargazer-Stargazer looks like a hippie to Miguel and Juanita with her long, flowered skirts and natural-fiber tunics, her curly hair and dangly earrings-But Stargazer says she is no longer a hippie but an Irish-Armenian-Native-American with her moon in Cancer-You can’t get Stargazer started or you’ll ruin Mami’s massages with too much conversation.
    “I don’t see why you can’t come,” Juanita tells her father-She is on the upstairs extension-
    “I’ll be there,” Papi says-“Really-Just look up,and you’ll see a brush stroke of white in the sky, and that’s