Mañana Means Heaven

Chapter 39.

213 39 By six the next morning she was standing in line at Union Station, among the big-hatted women and their matching luggage, with her own bags in hand, anticipating the train ride home. The sun had yet to come up that morning, and all of Colorado was beneath an immense sea of gray. As the train chugged away from the cold downtown buildings of Denver, Bea thought about Loretta, and knew that if she was every bit of the woman she appeared to be, she’d understand why her newest employee would not show up to work that day, or any day thereafter. Still, she couldn’t help but feel bad about it. Loretta had been nice to her, and if not for her frequent talks over whiskey and cigarettes, Denver might’ve left an impression on her as the coldest city in the world. The train rattled and charged up the incline of the Front Range, picking up speed and burrowing through the great divide. As it cut through the gorge town of Morrison, a flotilla of clouds sunk down over Denver, and from within their frigid bellies they let drop a veil of white flakes. At first the flakes arrived slow and sporadic, but within minutes, all the traffic on Colfax slowed to a near halt, and children stood on front porches and sidewalks wagging their pink tongues to taste it. On the small windows of El Chapultepec a pattering of wet flecks kissed the glass and whispered across Market Street, and down onto the Platte River, where each flake dissolved and was whisked away by the slow-moving stream.They fell on the railroad tracks and dusted heavily the eastern plains,and turned the concrete ashen gray. So close was Bea to witnessing this, that had she sat in the last cart, the caboose, and turned her head around to look back, just once, she might’ve caught a glimpse of it. But she had looked back once before, and was done with it. She slid her body down on the seat cushion, nestled her ear against her sweater, and fixed her eyes out the window. As the Rocky Mountains scrolled past, she thought about her father and wondered why, with the money they’d made as a family, harvesting all those years, he had never once purchased a home for them to call their own. She vowed to one day confront him about it.The train released a plume of smoke as 214 they rounded an immense cliff, and suddenly, staring out at the towering white peaks that inched past her window, she recalled the look on her father’s face. That curious smile that gripped him upon entering Irapuato some seventeen years ago.A warm calm fell over her,and though she would never come to terms with his way of doing things, or understand fully his complete disregard for anything that resembled love, she knew at last the answer to the question that had nagged her ever since that first train ride, when she was only ten. How, in the midst of their own deportation, among the pleading of the herded and the cold stuttering of boxcars, among the prodding boots of immigration officers, the excrement and the wailing, the curses and the prayers—how in God’s name her father was able to conjure something that resembled a smile. Back then she could only attribute it to his callousness, and his utter disdain for anything that resembled emotion. But now she knew better. It had nothing to do with leaving, and everything to do with returning. ...