A time. Nothing else. Valentina had suggested we include a map because the property was difficult to find.
I told her the drive was part of it. Doña Teresa, I was told by a cousin who still occasionally texted me with the specific guilty warmth of someone who has witnessed a wrongdoing and never found the right moment to say something, called an emergency family assembly after receiving the invitation. “If she wants to embarrass herself,” she told them, “we’ll all be there to watch.”
All thirty-two of them showed up on Easter Sunday.
They dressed for it, not casually, but for performance. Sharp blazers. Heels.
The Cortez family at its most assembled, ready to witness something small and return home with a story. I watched them arrive on the security monitors from the house. I watched the convoy of three luxury SUVs and four additional cars pull up to the black iron gate.
I watched the gate guard, a man named Cesar who had worked security for my mother for nine years, approach the lead car window. Rodrigo’s window rolled down. Cesar’s face was professional.
