“If it hurts you that much, then remember this: you were never really part of this family.”
My stepmother said it with a smile, a glass of wine in her hand, like she had just delivered the cleverest line at the table. I lifted my own glass and answered without even shaking.
“Great. Then stop asking me for money.”
Veronica’s smile disappeared at once. My father, Rogelio, looked at us like the whole table had just collapsed. Around us, cousins, uncles, and even my stepbrother’s fiancée stopped eating. The smell of mole no longer felt warm or comforting. My father’s birthday dinner, in his house in San Miguel de Allende, had suddenly become something far uglier.
It had been supposed to be a happy evening. My father was turning sixty-five, and Mauricio, Veronica’s son, had just announced during the toast that he and Ximena would be getting married in November. Everyone clapped. Veronica, carried away by the wine and the attention, pulled out a beige folder and proudly announced that she and my father planned to put the vacation house in Valle de Bravo in Mauricio’s name, “to secure the inheritance for the next generation.”
