"The Little Grandfather died on a Tuesday in the time of the rain. He had an attack of the heart while driving on the periferico and crashed into a truck filled with brooms. The Grandfather's face looked startled. This would not be the death he had imagined for himself. An avalanche of brooms of all colors spilling onto the windshield like crayons. The thwack of brooms under car wheels. The thunk-thunk of their tumbling on metal. Brooms twirling in the air and bouncing. The Grandfather, who never lifted a broom in his life, buried under a mountain of plastic brooms, the ones Mexican housekeepers use with a bucket of sudsy water to scrub the patio, to scrub the street and curb. As if Death came with her apron and broom swept him away"(p.249).
I started the blog with this excerpt from the book because Narcisco, The Little Grandfather, has been a main character in my last few blogs. They said that when they pulled him out of the car he muttered the name of a woman from his past, but it was not that of his wife. The 3 Reyes brothers fly down from Chicago to help their mother. Lala goes with her father and when they get there the Awful Grandmother is beside herself. She talks non-stop as if the death was not her husbands. At the funeral it takes 5 strong men to hold The Awful Grandmother back when they begin to lower the casket into the ground. She does what is expected of all Mexican wives and screams his name while trying to throw herself on the coffin. Once back at the house the grandmother abruptly decides to sell her house and move up north with her sons. So once again the Reyes kids miss another summer stuck driving down to Mexico but this will be the last time. This time it is to sell the house on Destiny Street. The Grandmother goes back into her room to clean it out. She misses her husband now that he is gone. She misses the smell of stale cookies and iodine that he had to put on his war wound everyday of his life. She misses hugging him until he fell asleep and how his cold feet would push between hers like fat tamales. When Lala walks in to help her grandmother she picks up an old sephia picture of her grandfather when he was in his twenties and asks who the person was that is cut out. The grandmother yanks the picture out of Lala's hand and slams the door shut. Lala can hear her silently crying behind the closed door.
The Grandmother convinces Inocencio to take his family and move to Texas. She takes the money from her house on Destiny Street and they buy a fixer upper in Texas. The other brothers and sister are very upset that all the money from the house is for Inocencio and his family and not split equally. The house that they move into in Texas is not a nice house, but they plan to fix it and it is theirs. Celaya is upset because she has to move and leave her friends that she has known her entire life. The girls in Texas make fun of Lala because she is only half Mexican. Her mother is from Spain and she speaks broken Spanish. They say she is not a real Mexican. Her father attempts to open his upholstery shop with a friend that he fought with in the war. They do well at first, but Inocencio has to pay his friend rent and they start having trust issues. During this time Lala falls in love with a boy. He is a friend of her brothers and she likes his awkward and shy ways.They run off to get married and haul up in a hotel. They do things that people who are about to elope do and before they decide to get married he has a change of heart. He calls his mother and tells her what he plans to do. While Celaya is asleep he leaves her sleeping on the bed with a note basically saying he changed his mind. Lala is forced to call her father to come and get her. Needless to say he is not happy and it sets up for another awesome chapter.
Time read 90 minutes on December 4 while my husband and daughter napped :)
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