“That’s definitely how I feel about kids,” Tamara agrees. “It’s probably how I’ll feel even in ten years.”
“You don’t know that.”
Tamara sighs. “I can’t see myself as a mother,” she says. “I can’t see myself as anything, really.”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
“I mean…”
She sighs again, deeper, and it makes me feel strangely sad somehow. She looks lost. Just like I was a few weeks ago.
“I don’t know,” she admits. “I just don’t see myself in traditional roles. A wife, a mother. But you make it all look so easy.”
“I’ve barely begun being a wife and a mother,” I point out. “I might suck at it.”
“You won’t,” Tamara says, with so much confidence that it makes me curious.
“How can you be so sure?”
Tamara looks at me with a measured expression. “You just have that maternal vibe,” she tells me. “You used to look after me a lot. Every time I freaked about something—mostly boys— you used to talk me down off the ledge. You were always so calm and comforting. It made me feel better.”
“That was Cesar, not me.”
She shakes her head. “No, it was you, Esme. You helped me. And you helped him, too. He leaned on you.”
I frown at that. “He never leaned on me,” I tell her. “I was always the one running to him. The one leaning on him.”
Tamara shrugs like I don’t know what I’m talking about. “I dunno. There was just an air about the two of you,” she says. “It’s like he used to come to you when he was most broken, and you’d just fix him right up again. Even if you didn’t know that’s what you were doing at the time.”
I try and think back to old memories, something that might ring true with what Tamara is telling me.
But I don’t seem to come up with anything.
“I think you’re wrong.”
“I’m not,” she says, shaking her head. “He told me so himself.”
That jolts me. “Um… what?” I ask, wondering if I’d misheard her.
I can’t ever remember the two of them talking. Cesar tended to avoid the house when Tamara was visiting. He’d never been a huge fan. She was too loud and too excitable for him—at least, that’s what he used to tell me.
“Yeah,” she says. “I was spending the weekend one time and I ran into him in the garden.”
“Where was I?”
“If memory serves, you were sleeping off a hangover,” she chuckles. “I’d convinced you to get drunk the night before.”
Plausible enough. That had happened a few times, so it wasn’t like I could pinpoint when exactly this memory occurred. I could have been anywhere between fourteen and sixteen.
Close to the end of Cesar’s life.
“Anyway, I always bounced back much quicker than you did and I got bored in the room,” she continues. “So I went down to explore the gardens and I ran into Cesar.”
“And he… he talked to you?”
“Trust me: he tried hard to avoid me,” she laughs. “Broke my heart, too. I always had a little crush on him.”
“Ew, Tamara!” I say. “He was your cousin, too.”