12.21 by Dustin Thomason Read Free Book Online

about their dinner plans.
    “This place used to be a lot cleaner,” Ha’ana said as she stepped inside and saw the state of the house. “When Patrick was here.”
    Patrick. Chel had dated him for almost a year and Ha’ana wouldn’t let it go. The reasons they’d broken up were more complicated than Chel ever felt like getting into with Ha’ana. But her mother was right: Since he moved out four months ago, Chel’s house near the UCLA campus had come to feel like little more than a stopover between her offices at the university and the Getty. After exhausting days, she often came home, undressed, and fell asleep watching the Discovery Channel.
    “Are you going to help me?” Ha’ana called from the kitchen.
    Chel joined her and helped unload the groceries. Difficulties with her back had made physical activity more challenging for Ha’ana recently, and even though the last thing Chel wanted was to sit for a meal, she’d never been good at saying no to her mother.
    Dinner was a four-cheese and spinach lasagna concoction with an excess of garlic. Growing up, Chel usually couldn’t get Ha’ana to cook Maya food—she’d been stuffed with macaroni and sandwiches on white bread. These days her mother watched the Food Network nonstop, and her continental cooking had improved. As they ate, Chel stared at her and listened to her chat about her day at the factory. But Chel’s mind was always in the other room with the codex. Ordinarily she would’ve been attentive to her mother. But not tonight.
    “Are you all right?”
    Chel looked up from her plate to see Ha’ana studying her. “I’m fine, Mom.” She doused her lasagna with red pepper. “So … I’m excited you’re coming to class next week.”
    “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’m not going to be able to next week. Sorry.”
    “Why not?”
    “I have a job too, Chel.”
    Ha’ana had hardly missed a day’s work in thirty years. “If you told your boss what you were doing, they’d want you to go. I can talk to her if you want.”
    “I’m working a double shift that day.”
    “Look, I’ve been telling the class all about the village’s oral history, and I think it would be fascinating for them to hear from someone who actually lived in Kiaqix.”
    “Yes,” Ha’ana said. “Someone must tell them all about our incredible Original Trio.” The irony in her voice was hard to miss.
    Beya Kiaqix, the tiny hamlet where both women were born, was rife with myth, particularly the legend of its origins. The story went that a noble man and his two wives had fled their ancient city, under the rule of a despotic king, and had founded the village. More than fifty generations of Chel’s ancestors had since lived in the Valley of the Scarlet Macaw, in the El Petén region of Guatemala.
    Chel and her mother were among the very few who’d left. By the time Chel was two years old, Guatemala was at the height of
La Revolución
, the longest and bloodiest civil war in Central American history. Afraid for her daughter’s life and for her own, Ha’ana had taken them out of Kiaqix—as the villagers called it—and never looked back. Thirty-three years ago they arrived in America, and she found a job and quickly taught herself English. By the time Chel was four, Ha’ana had her green card; soon they were both citizens.
    “You lived in Kiaqix too,” Ha’ana went on as she took another bite. “You know the myths. You don’t need me.”
    Since she was a child, Chel had watched her mother do everything she could to avoid talking about her past. Even if it could have been proven that every word of the oral history of their village was true, Ha’ana would find a way to ridicule it. Long ago, Chel had realized that it was her mother’s only way to escape the trauma of what had happened.
    Suddenly she wanted nothing so much as to run to the closet, retrievethe codex, and drop it in her mother’s lap. Even Ha’ana wouldn’t be able to resist its pull.
    “When was the