daily routine

We don’t know how to move through this house the way we once did. Tía and Mama and Abuela and me, every hour of ours unfolding in a series of fours—four mugs filled up to the lip with café de olla. Four sets of pills and capsule vitamins counted and swallowed from the bottle, every chair filled and our bodies claiming a side despite our table’s circular shape. The half-full jar of Tía’s green salsa passing smooth from hand to hand and spooned onto the eggs for flavor, women of routine.
               Maybe we turned on the morning news. Or spoke of our plans, the work left undone and checks unsigned for mailing while Abuela concerned herself with neither. A woman intent on filling the empty inside, scraping her plate clean of its offerings.
               Y tu, ¿por que no comes? she demanded of me, afraid of this habit of mine to leave crumbs behind and return no reply because I’d forgotten the Spanish to say it.
               But now we have whittled down to three and no longer know how to balance our bodies against each other’s, somehow less of us in our number but more clumsy than before. We bump into one another’s shoulders, forced to steady ourselves against the kitchen doorframe. From the cabinet, we grab her bib, folded tight into a roll, and don’t remember why not. We sting our fingers on the hot stove, cook for four and don’t realize our mistake until we notice the pot still carrying a quarter of beans in its belly. We sit down and make-believe the noise of the one who’s missing—the handles of Abuela’s walker colliding with the wall, the wheels against the floor like rolling thunder approaching from her sleeping place. We turn towards the hallway as though she will emerge in her slippers worn at their heels and her pink bathrobe over four layers of clothes —her t-shirt printed with stripes and her long-sleeved top and her knitted vest and her sweater more itchy than soft because what she feared most of all was the cold—and almost ask, Where is she? as though she’s not dead but sleeping.
               We become experts of deception. When callers ask us how we’re doing, we mumble halftruths into our landline, if even speaking to a friend—We’re fine, just hanging in there. Coping as best as we can. We refuse to mention how we weep to ourselves in the shower, turn the water pressure up to hide it, and emerge without redness or puffiness around the eyes because our skin too is learning to deceive. Or how we miss her most when toweling wet dishes dry because she was the one who did it after each meal, wanting to be useful, longing like all of us to be needed. While attending an online class in my bedroom, I no longer listen to her panic at the sound of the mailman, a neighbor walking past, a car parked at the curb that she doesn’t recognize, an anxious tick she’s now passed on to me. Instead, today I overhear Tía and Mama discussing Abuela’s body and mute the classmate who’s speaking without caring if it’s rude.
               They’re saying it won’t be cremated until April, Tía says, her voice muffled but unmistakable through the closed door.
               Something twists in my chest, or maybe it breaks the way hearts do. I raise my hand then, not for permission to leave or turn my camera off but to comment on a classmate’s response, though I barely remember saying a word.
               Before bed, we walk through Abuela’s bedroom as though it’s her tomb, a previously forbidden place—her necklaces with pearls on the string and rings nestled between the folds of their box, glittering under the light, still alive despite having no one to wear them. We open Abuela’s drawers, feeling like thieves despite our desire for nothing, and find a gold pair of hoops, a pair of diamond studs, her three-gemstone ring that she promised to me, Mama, and Tía, respectively.
               Holding the hoops up to my earlobes in the mirror, I forget why I agreed, the elegance and age of the metal transforming the earrings into a piece of costume jewelry against my skin as though I’m acting, playing pretend.
               Still, I’m the one who searches her closet with purpose and not just nostalgia— Remember she would wear this inside out? Tía says, holding up a skirt in the pattern of a psychedelic vision, because Abuela was always afraid of wearing too bright colors—because I am the only one among the three of us small enough to dress my body in Abuela’s clothes. On a hanger, I find a cream sweater with black buttons on the ribbing that suits my liking but fits all wrong. The sleeves bunching at my elbows, the size of my flesh ballooning under the shoulder pads that I didn’t see sewn into the yarn before. Instead of giving me a piece of her to carry on my body, the sweater reminds me that its allegiance belongs to someone else.
              We’re not hungry anymore. Gone is Abuela’s soft padding to the kitchen for warm milk before bed but not too hot, half a bottle of water, a quesadilla or two, her leopard-print robe hanging past her knees. We ignore any rumbling inside and brush our teeth despite not remembering if we ate anything and if we did, what.
               We become strangers with sleep. We wake up at all hours, bolting up in bed. We swear we hear Abuela shuffling around the house at four in the morning, her slippers catching on bumps in the floor. We hurry in our bare feet to find not her or her body making noise but vacancy, her bedsheets untouched even in the sleeping hours.
               But worse are the silent nights. I huddle closer to Mama, wishing our bed was big enough for three bodies, for Tía, the oldest of us and the new matriarch. I think of her in the room next door and wonder how she’s survived sleeping alone for so long, how I used to. I wish for Abuela’s pain, the times she couldn’t sleep and moaned instead, because at least then I could hear her, could know she was near, just down the hall.
               As though she can hear my thoughts, Mama whispers into my braids, You know what, she’s in our heart. It’s heavy and it’s empty but all we can do is remember, Mama’s voice both healing song and stinging salt in the wound.
               I don’t ever remember falling asleep, only that I don’t dream of Abuela, her face, her voice and fear that someday I’ll forget. That any child of mine will never know her the way I did, will never ache the way I do as the darkness fades to day and it all begins again.