Ride (Bayonet Scars) by JC Emery Read Free Book Online

questions , and for far too long after her death, he hadn't allowed us to even mention her. I shrug, feeling guilty, like I should have asked questions and the fact that I didn't meant I don't care. The awful weight of my selfishness presses on my shoulders. I’m a horrid daughter.
    "I've spent a long time deciding what I would say to you and how I would say it when you finally got around to asking me about your mother. But you never did, so consider this my gift to you, amore." She smiles at me with the saddest expression I've ever seen, sadder than even the one she wore at my mother's funeral. Tears pool in her eyes and slip down her cheeks.
    "She was my best friend," she begins the story of my mother's life, telling me all about how they met in Sunday School one summer when she came up from Florida to spend the summer break with her grandparents, and eventually moved in with them full-time after her mother left her abusive father.
    " Even then, she was a free spirit—wild, unrestrained, loud. Mean, too. She had so much fire, that one." The woman she describes doesn't sound like my mother. The Esmeralda I knew had been docile and quiet. She practically tip-toed around my father, and I only heard her raise her voice maybe once. But I don't dare interrupt Gloria's story, I find myself wholly fascinated.
    "The last time I saw your mother," she says, holding my hands in hers with a sad smile on her face. "She said two very important things to me. The first was that no matter what, I was to keep you and your brother safe, and you trust that I'm doing that now. Don't you?" I nod, not understanding where this is going, but I do trust her. She’s all I have.
    "The second thing she said to me was that her sister will take care of you." She opens the photo album up to the first page, which displays a photo of two baby girls lying next to each other in a crib. At the bottom of the page, written in choppy cursive, are two names: Esmeralda and Ruby.
    "I didn't know my mother even had a sister," I admit, feeling even guiltier for not asking more about her. I’ve never met any of my mother's family before and haven't a clue how an aunt I’ve never known existed can care for me. I’m no longer a child, old enough to be married off, old enough to leave my father’s home for my husband’s bed. My mother is dead, my brother’s been shot, my father’s been arrested, and only now do I find out about an aunt I’ve never known. I want to be excited over this piece of history, to ask so many questions. But I don’t. Gloria smiles brightly. How she has so much energy , I'll never know. I’m so tired, my eyelids are dropping. I reach for my Coca-Cola from the coffee table and take a large drink. The caffeine is supposed to wake me up, but it’s done nothing but make me sleepy.
    "Oh, she did. They were twins , just like you and Michael." She continues on through the album. As the girls age in the photos, their personalities become more apparent. One of the girls is always smiling politely, while the other usually has a cheesy grin on her face and stands in some grand pose. The girl with the polite smile, who seems to accept being in her sister's shadow, has slightly darker caramel brown hair than her sister, but other than that, they have the same brown eyes; same small, swooping nose; and same full lips. I touch my face, realizing how very much I look like my mother.
    "Which one is my mother?" I ask, unsure. The way Gloria talks about my mother, it seems she was so very different in her youth than her adulthood—lively, joyful, rebellious. The Esmeralda Mancuso I knew was none of those things. Loving, gentle, kind—sure. But she most certainly was not rebellious. She lived by my father's word.
    Gloria points to the photo before us—showing the girls in their late teens—and lands her finger on the girl with the lighter hair and her tongue sticking out. "This is Ruby," she says. Then she points at my mother. "This is Esmeralda."