Holly Romero

Word Count 1415

Just outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico, stands the World’s Largest Pistachio, 30 feet tall, the lurid green nutmeat peaking out between the two shells. It’s an eye-catching tourist attraction, cheesy yet weirdly majestic despite the crowd of RVs and the smell of exhaust. Seemed like as good a place as any to dump my mother’s ashes. I was furious. And there was really no other way to punish her.

The night before, I sat on the floor of her dusty living room, sorting photos and letters, jewelry, and bits of debris, from matchbooks and corks to cocktail napkins and baby teeth. Finally, I found what I was looking for, the thing nobody would show me, my parents’ divorce papers, the thing that split our family into two equal halves. They were married barely 13 months, yet continued to hook up for years afterward. Drunk in love, it was impossible for either of them to go cold turkey, so the four of us found our way back to each other again and again, with me, a baby, and my 8-year-old half-brother, Mark, in tow. “I carried you in a shoe box,” my father used to tease. I remember none of that: the hotel rooms, the long drives across the Texas Panhandle, the weekends that ended in shouting and accusations.

Mark remembers all of it and wanted nothing to do with the leftovers. I hadn’t seen him in over 20 years, yet he returned to New York the day after the funeral, leaving me to deal with the house in Amarillo and the 60 years of hoarding that filled every corner from crawl space to attic. The woman had never even thrown away a single tube of lipstick. Dried up and worn nearly flat, they lined up like spent soldiers in a bathroom cabinet that reeked of old lotion and musty towels.

“Send me a check when you’re done,” he said, a fat joint dangling from his lips. When I protested and demanded his help, he shrugged as if the dice were falling exactly where they should, “You were abandoned once. I was abandoned over and over again. There’s nothing here for me. I lived it.” And then he was gone.

What kept me from fleeing back home to my happy life were the paintings: every wall, every closet, and of course, the light-filled studio out back. She really did become an artist. Not a wanna-be, but the real thing. Even at the end, when Parkinson’s made her brush strokes wide and chaotic or frustration drove her to slash a canvas with a knife. Still, there was beauty everywhere. It couldn’t have been easy, in the beginning, for a woman in the 1960s, to go from artist’s model to artist when nobody took you seriously. They just wanted you to take off your clothes and drape your beautiful body over a sofa with a sheer scarf over your face.

It was also unusual in the 1960s for a judge to grant sole custody of an infant to a father, a Hispanic man when there was a perfectly capable white woman standing in front of him. Nobody could answer that question, which is why I dug so relentlessly for the divorce papers. Thin as onion paper and faded, I found two sets, dated a month apart. The first gave her full custody. The second set gave it to him with no other stipulations altered, not even spousal support. Only this note in my father’s handwriting:

I must discuss what in my heart is a real touchy subject: Holly. In this regard, you and I will abide by the divorce decree. I have reread it, and it’s very clear. I hope you read your copy also. She remains our only common interest, and I demand the minimum of interference. I know that if the tables were turned, you would expect the same of me….I will not degrade you in any manner or blame you for anything.

That’s when I knew. She sold me.

And that’s how I found myself pulling off I-40 and standing in the shade of the World’s Largest Pistachio, yelling into a cell phone at the one person who offered to help sort through four closets, two storage units, 10,000 books, and a crystal and mineral collection that would make a grown gypsy weep. Too hurt and full of rage to shush the voices in my head, I had to know. It couldn’t wait.

How much? Silence.

When I was 13, my father married a fierce woman willing to take on a bitter, motherless teenager while still raising two boys of her own. She is who I called, my voice shaking.

“Your father never wanted you to think you weren’t wanted. That’s why he didn’t tell you.”

HOW MUCH!?

“$3000. She needed money for art school.” Pause. “You know…that was a lot in those days.”

Uh-huh.

“Just come home mijita. We’ll talk more about it then.”

So he took that secret to his grave, I guess.

“Well…he took a lot of secrets to his grave.”

I knew how much that confession cost her. His secrets had left her with her own shrapnel.

Perhaps that’s part of my inheritance, the habit of secrets, a squirrel with a stash. That’s why I took this trip alone without my husband, family or friends. Unearthing this woman, I’d spent a lifetime mourning. I wanted to grab ahold of each detail of her life and hoard it for fuel. I couldn’t possibly cry. My sorrow burned too bright.

At the funeral, Mark sobbed so hard I was afraid he was going to tumble off the chair, so I wrapped my meaty arm around his matchstick shoulders and tried to quiet the keening and wracking. It seemed impossible that I was so removed, so spine straight, a stone in my heart. But the sobbing…I had to make it stop. So I squeezed. Hard and rough. Till he flinched, then shuddered to a halt.

The photo montage ticked past on the movie screen in front of us. Each dissolved into the next, Bette Midler’s voice dramatically rising…some say love, it is a river that drowns the tender reed. Some say love, it is a razor. That leaves your soul to bleed. Each photograph is a story I haven’t read yet: standing in front of the Sphinx in Egypt, on a beach in Hawaii. Paintings on easels, in galleries. Modeling in bathing suits, draped over armchairs. Men I don’t know, standing close with ownership. Bootlegger parents long dead, funerals she never attended. She, too, must have had a straight spine and a stone for a heart. A wedding at age 15. And Mark, such a cute baby, then a teenager looking just like his dad, same smirk and big boy whirl of hair over the forehead. Another shot of Mark, a musician in New York, free at last. But still hungry-looking. He once told me our grandmother taught him how to cook when he was six so he wouldn’t starve because our mother would step out to run an errand and sometimes wouldn’t return for days. Or, she’d be in a psychiatric ward after another failed suicide attempt, and he’d get tossed around between relatives, other artists, neighbors.

I am nowhere to be found in those photos. Neither is my father, with his brown skin and slick of black hair. No baby pictures with fat cheeks and startled blue eyes. Or gawky long-limbed, laughing photos of growing like a weed. I was never there.

Yet, one image catches me. A black and white class photo of a second grader. I know her! The spray of freckles across the nose, the uneven short bangs, the shape of the eyes, almond and slightly hooded. But wait. That’s not me. It’s her, a smile full of the bright side, before all her choices, all her twists and turns came to this: a haunted child hugging the ashes of a stranger in a parking lot off an interstate, the desert wind turning to blades.

With the backseat of the truck filled with paintings, a coffee can jammed with used paintbrushes still smelling faintly of turpentine, and a loose bundle of love letters from the 60s, I settled the urn next to me and secured it with a seatbelt. I’m not done with her. Not yet.

Snow begins to dust the top of the giant pistachio as I pull out onto the highway and head west. Towards love.

Holly has worn many hats yet never tires of transformation. From newspaper crime reporter and magazine marketing director to university creative writing teacher and small town yoga therapist, she loves how words make the world. Happiest hiking and kayaking near her home on the Oregon Coast, her long-term goal is to own a pack of huskies. Until then, she plans to continue traveling to countries near and far, always curious, often content, in any language.