“Celebrate each other, yes, I know Apá. But I don’t feel very celebrated with you breathing down my neck like this,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. I tried not to wince at the pain this brought to my wrist, but that move really fucking hurt. I refused to remove it right away. It would just be more ammunition for my father who seemed to be on a shooting spree right now. Especially as he scoffed and shook his head at me. I glowered, adding, “And I don’t appreciate you laughing at me either.”
Movement from beside me caused me to look up my shoulder.
“He’s laughing because wejusthad a giant party for you, and yet you say you don’t feel appreciated,” my mom said, appearing out of absolutely nowhere. She’d entered the room and materialized above my head like a spirit. Planting a kiss on the top of my head, she reached down and untangled my arms, as if she knew I was hurting myself. Then in a teasing voice she added, “Pinche chiqueara.”
I couldn’t help the smile that pulled across my face, however fleeting it was. Some people might find it offensive for their own mother to call her daughter a‘fucking spoiled brat’, but I found it increasingly amusing how comfortable she was getting with us girls as we got older.
Even though my sisters cringed at some of the looser talks about sex and men and anything else they didn’t want to picture our mother once doing, it felt like I could finally relate to her a little better now. Being able to talk to her on the same level rather than being the little troublemaking daughter she always had to keep in line.
“Hi, Mami,” I said. “Did you come here to attack me too?”
“No one is attacking you, mija,” she replied in a tone that radiated patience. Sauntering over to my dad’s side, she took a seat on the arm of his chair. I watched as he snaked an arm around her waist, pulling her into him and holding her to his hip. My eyes narrowed. Looks like she just chose her side. “We’re just worried about you.”
“And I’m saying you don’thaveto. I’m fine.”
“Oh, yes? And getting into fights and wandering around with no purpose isfinenow? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” she asked.
“I didn’t get into a fight Mami, I fell.” I wasn’t usually a liar, but to save my own ass, there needed to be some level of self-preservation. “And I don’t understand what the point of this conversation is other than rubbing my face in the dirt and reminding me that I don’t know what I want to do. Trust me,I know.”
And I did. Boy, did I know that I was still the only Fernandez heir who didn’t have their shit together. How humiliating it was that the one who had always been too much for everyone to handle was now too little in collation to her siblings. My parents didn’t have to remind me. I couldn’t possibly forget it.
“No one is rubbing it in, Celestia. We’re just saying that maybe you need some urgency,” Amá said.
“Is it a race?”
“No, but you at least need to get on the starting line, mija,” Apá interjected. “What are you interested in? Do you know? We can at least start there.”
I thought about my siblings and all the things they were doing. Ox, my happily married uber successful businessman of an older brother paving the way for the rest of us to be what and whoever we wanted to be. Alta, my shy sister, taking her passions for marketing and branding into her own hands, on top of contributing to the family business in her own way. Lis, who had always been a knockout with numbers and finances, had just been promoted to CFO at the young age of twenty-seven and was hitting new thresholds of perfection with every passing day. And Mateo had his whole mogul thing going on. Business ventures seemed to just fall out of him like leaves falling from a tree. They all had their thing, and they were all great at their things.
Ihad nothing.
I had gone to school for general studies for as long as possible, and when it came time to choose a field of study, I chose business administration and struggled through the boring classes because that’s what I thought Ishoulddo. When I graduated, no one immediately pushed me to do anything with my degree because there was really no rush. We had money and we had time. But as more and more of that time went on with me not showing an interest for anything, save for my little game of secret friends with Connor, that’s when the questions started rolling in.“Up to anything good these days, Ceci?” “Apply for any jobs lately, Ceci?” “Anything new these days, Ceci?”. And the answers had all been the same.
No, no, and even more no.
It’s not that I didn’t do anything. Most days I rotated my time between visiting my brothers and sisters and finding other random tasks to occupy myself. I usually reserved one sibling for each day so I had enough visits to fill my week, including a day with my sister-in-law Clementine, or ‘Fergy’ to me. I never missed a week of paying Fergy a visit especially since she spent most of her days at home, working hard amongst her recipe trials and cookbook drafts.
And it was because of her that I found another one of my weekly activities.
Visiting the local women’s shelter wasn’t something I ever told anyone about, but it was something I’d stumbled into doing after making a donation (of stolen revenge money) and having a claims operator contact me when it was flagged and returned for fraudulent activity. When it all happened, I’d felt so bad about the failed donation that I wrote a check out myself and marched it down to the small shelter at the edge of town.
I was only supposed to drop off the check and leave, but I was reeled in almost instantaneously by a guest speaker who had taken the floor of the small dusty common area and was both rendering a story about perseverance and overcoming and floating around the room gathering up all the children and babies. Along with her team, she created a makeshift daycare circle in the middle of the room so the mothers and guardians living in the shelter could have a break while they listened or slept or simply stepped away for a moment.
“What’s going on there?” I had asked the faculty member who I’d just given the check to.
“Oh,” the woman chirped. “Once a week we try to have some sort of community engagement for the women sheltering here. It’s always something educational, direct board orders, you know? Apparently, it’s supposed to boost morale and inspire the women, but to be honest that’s something those stuffy men on the committee came up with. Anyone who’s here day in and day out knows what these women really need. A break, some laughs, a change. The board doesn’t seem to agree. So as a compromise, we try to mix the two as best as we can.”
I wasn’t the volunteering type. My family donated money to various charities regularly, but I’d never had the urge to go out and insert myself into any of them. The women’s shelter was different. Something about it caught me like a net. Reeling me in and not allowing me to leave. Not that day at least, and I had been going back religiously ever since.
As schedules went, mine was pretty weak. When I laid it out like that, I guess it really was nothing. Especially compared to my perfect siblings and their perfect aspirations. I guess I’d gotten away with it for so long because no one seemed to know what to do with me.
From a young age I’d trained myself to be headstrong. Seeing the way they treated my softie of an older sister Alta, babying her and hanging on her every breath, I’d never wanted to be like that. So I was as loud and self-sufficient as possible, forcing my family to quickly learn that I didn’t want to be coddled. That if I faltered, I’d grit my teeth and grind through it until I eventually figured it out on my own. Just like when I learned to read, write, ride a bike and more. They were probably waiting for the same thing when it came to my “purpose”, only it hadn’t come yet.
They weren’t the only ones waiting, and I probably wasn’t the only one embarrassed because it wasn’t happening for me. Compared to my siblings, I was a disappointment.
I turned my gaze away from my parents to hide that embarrassment, mumbling, “I still don’t know.”
“Well, mija, it’s time to figure it out,” my dad said and something in his tone had me looking over to him in worry. That ball I’d felt in my stomach earlier rearing its ugly head.
