Yep, I’m in Bedlam. And visions of Rafe tap dancing are pushing me over the edge.
“That Carmen could talk a dog into doing the hula. Hell, I remember the time she taught me to moon walk.”
“You can moon walk?” Tony said. “I didn’t know that. Show me.”
“NO!” Helen cried, and they both looked at her. Her nerves were shot. Good Lord! First tap dancing. Then moon walking. Next, it would be dipping. More softly, she said, “Did you guys come here for some particular reason? Other than my cookies?”
“Yes. You’ve got to get back together with Rafe. He’s really hurting,” Tony said.
“Man, I’ve never seen him care so much for a woman, and it’s obvious you’ve got the hots for him, too,” Eddie added.
“I do not,” she protested.
“You are so crude, Eddie,” Tony criticized his brother. “Hots? Geez, didn’t I teach you any finesse?”
“Hah! You wouldn’t know finesse if it hit you in that ugly face.”
“Ugly? You’re just jealous because women mistake me for Antonio Banderas. Don’t you think I look like Antonio Banderas?” The latter question was addressed to Helen.
“A little,” she said, and a headache the size of Tony’s ego bloomed behind her eyeballs.
Eventually, she walked them to the door, getting more harangues on why she should be with Rafe. She heard Eddie comment to Tony as they walked to their car, “What the hell’s a tongue hard-on?”
“Damned if I know. But you can be sure I’m gonna ask our big brother. He’s been holding out on us.”
“Oh, brother!” Helen mumbled, and went to bed for the day.
The next morning she went Christmas shopping, early, just in case any more of Rafe’s family showed up. She didn’t get home until late afternoon. As she parked her car, she glanced up and groaned. Four Hispanic women were sitting on her doorstep, chattering to beat the band. She wondered how any of them could get a word in edgewise. Three children were racing across the lawn and stopped abruptly in front of her. “Where’s the cookies, Tia Helen?” one of them asked.
Tia? Doesn’t that mean aunt? Oh, my goodness!
She assumed these three kids belonged to Juanita, Rafe’s oldest sister. There were only eight nieces and nephews total.
This time she served wine and Christmas cookies to the adults — she would have to bake another batch — and cookies and diet soda to the kids — she was out of milk. She listened to Rafe’s four sisters tell her in a chaotic hodgepodge of Spanish and English why she should knock some sense into their brother and take him back.
“Take him back? I never had him,” she said, but no one paid any attention to her. They were too busy spouting their own opinions.
“Caramba! You should have seen him when I picked him up at the prison,” Inez related, rolling her eyes. She was the L.A. policewoman, the person in the newspaper clipping with Rafe. “He didn’t ask about Mama, or his office, or anything. All he wanted to know was, ‘Where’s the telephone number?’ He had everyone in the world searching for your phone number and address. I wouldn’t be surprised if he called the FBI. Of course, that was before they locked him up. Then they wouldn’t let him talk to anybody.”
“Well, I think Rafe is ill,” Jacinta interrupted. Jacinta, Helen remembered, was a nurse and had just started graduate school.
“Ill? Rafe? What do you mean?”
Everyone turned at the anxiety in Helen’s voice, and they smiled knowingly. She flushed and tried to backtrack. “I mean, he was thin when I saw him, but not ill.” He didn’t kiss like a man on his death bed, that’s for sure.
“Oh, not that kind of ill,” Jacinta said, waving a hand in the air. “He’s heartsick. No, no, don’t look at me like that. People can make themselves physically ill when their hearts are broken. It’s a scientific fact.”
Oh, Lord!
“Well, I don’t care about that. I want to know how I can plan the church Christmas party if Rafe won’t dance with me.” Carmen — the youngest, the dancer, Rafe’s favorite — tossed her mane of curly black hair over a shoulder and cast an accusing eye at Helen, as if Rafe’s refusal to dance was the biggest tragedy in the world.