Chương 1
""The first sound that made me doubt my marriage was a woman trying not to moan behind my father’s bedroom door.
I stood barefoot in the hallway of my parents’ house, still wearing the T-shirt I had pulled on after my wedding reception, with one hand resting against the wall because my knees had suddenly become unreliable.
The door was open barely an inch.
Warm yellow light cut across the dark hallway, and through that narrow gap I could see long black hair falling down a woman’s back.
She was about Mariana’s height.
For several seconds, that was enough to destroy me.
Three hours earlier, Mariana had been dancing with me beneath strings of rented patio lights while my cousins shouted for us to kiss again.
Now my wife was missing from our bed, and a woman who looked like her was inside my father’s room.
Another muffled sound came through the door.
Then my father said something too quietly for me to make out.
I reached for the knob.
My hand stopped before touching it.
There are moments when you imagine you would be brave because imagining courage costs nothing.
I had spent most of my adult life believing that if somebody betrayed me, I would confront them immediately.
Standing there, I discovered I was capable of doing absolutely nothing.
I backed away.
The old floorboard beside the linen closet gave a small complaint beneath my heel, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Nobody opened the bedroom door.
I returned to the room Mariana and I had been given and found the bed still empty.
Her phone was charging on the dresser.
Her wedding dress hung from the closet door, white fabric pooled over a chair because neither of us had possessed the energy to hang it properly.
I stared at the bathroom door.
Open.
Dark.
Empty.
My stomach tightened.
I sat on the edge of the mattress and listened.
Five minutes can be a ridiculous amount of time when you are waiting for your new wife to return from your father’s bedroom.
I counted the green digits changing on the alarm clock.
12:48.
12:49.
At 12:50, the kitchen door opened somewhere behind me.
Mariana appeared through the small connecting passage carrying a wet T-shirt.
She stopped when she saw me sitting upright.
“You scared me.”
I looked at her hair first.
It was tied into the loose knot she had worn when we went to sleep.
“What happened?”
She lifted the shirt.
“I bled through it.”
The embarrassment in her face looked real enough that shame briefly mixed with everything else inside me.
“The bathroom sink is tiny, so I used Teresa’s utility sink.”
“My mom’s?”
“The one by the pantry.”
I kept staring.
Mariana lowered the shirt.
“Daniel?”
“Did you go down the hallway?”
“No.”
“Near my dad’s room?”
Her eyebrows pulled together.
“No.”
I waited for something else to appear in her expression.
Fear, perhaps.
Or guilt.
Instead, she looked tired and increasingly irritated.
“Why are you asking me that?”
“No reason.”
“That’s obviously not true.”
“I heard something.”
“What?”
I almost said it.
Then my father’s favorite sentence came back to me in his own voice.
Family problems stay inside the family.
He had used it for unpaid loans, drunken arguments, my cousin’s divorce, my mother’s hospital stay, and once when an employee threatened to sue his equipment company.
In our family, privacy and secrecy had somehow become the same virtue.
“Nothing,” I said.
Mariana stared at me for another moment before spreading the damp shirt over the back of a chair.
“You’re being weird.”
“I’m tired.”
“So am I.”
She climbed into bed without touching me.
That morning, my father made pancakes.
Rogelio Sterling believed breakfast could repair almost anything, particularly if the person who had caused the problem was Rogelio Sterling.
He stood at the stove in gray sweatpants, humming along badly to an old Spanish song playing from his phone.
My mother, Teresa, sat at the table with her pill organizer open beside her coffee.
“You put enough butter in those to kill us before lunch,” she told him.
“Then nobody has to clean up from the wedding.”
“That’s your plan?”
“I always have a plan.”
Mariana laughed.
I watched my father turn toward her.
Nothing happened.
That was somehow worse.
No secret glance.
No hesitation.
No guilt.
He slid two pancakes onto her plate and added another when she protested.
“You’re family now,” he said.
“I was hoping marriage came with fewer carbohydrates.”
“Wrong family.”
He put an arm briefly around her shoulders.
My fork stopped halfway to my mouth.
Mariana noticed.
My father did not.
Or pretended not to.
Mom pushed the syrup toward me.
“You look terrible.”
“Thanks.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Didn’t sleep.”
Rogelio glanced over.
“Wedding-night problem?”
Mariana nearly choked on her coffee.
My mother slapped his arm with a dish towel.
“Rogelio.”
“What?”
“You have no boundaries.”
“I have boundaries.”
“You walk through all of them.”
Everybody laughed except me.
My father’s eyes settled on mine.
Only for a second.
Then he turned back to the stove.
By noon, most of the wedding had disappeared.
Rental chairs were stacked near the driveway, garbage bags filled the pickup bed, and the dance floor company had removed the temporary panels from the lawn, leaving flattened rectangles in the grass.
Mariana went inside with my mother to organize leftover food.
I was folding a table near the workshop when Uncle Ernesto came around the shed carrying two extension cords.
He was fifty-four, thin as a fence rail, and possessed the permanent squint of a man who had spent thirty years working outdoors without adequate sunglasses.
He dropped the cords into a plastic tote.
“You were awake late.”
I looked at him.
“What?”
“Last night.”
He kept his attention on the tangled cords.
“Were you in the hallway?”
A cold pressure returned beneath my ribs.
“Why?”
May you like
Ernesto finally looked at me.
“I heard your father’s side door.”
