Chapter 9 - Natalia’s Horizon
The speaker grille outside crackled with the damp evening air.
"Alejandro!" my mother’s voice came through the small speaker, distorted by proximity and volume. "Open this gate! Open this gate this instant! I am your mother! You do not lock me out like a street vendor!"
Inside the house, Natalia stayed at the kitchen table, her hands flat on the open pages of her aerospace mechanics text. She didn't flinch. She didn't get up. She simply looked toward the hallway with that calm, analytical expression she had inherited from my father.
"Don't go out there, Dad," she said. "Call the private security patrol. That’s what the neighborhood fee is for."
"I’m not going to hide behind the security guards, Nat," I said, unhooking my jacket from the hall tree. "This needs to be finished."
I walked down the flagstone path toward the front gate. The night air was cool, carrying the scent of impending rain from the mountains toward El Marqués. The iron buzzer was still whining, vibrating against the stone pillar.
I reached the gate, unlocked the heavy deadbolt with my brass key, and pulled the iron panel open six inches.
Dolores immediately lunged forward, trying to jam the toe of her orthopedic leather shoe into the gap.
"Stand back," I said.
My voice wasn't loud, but it had the flat, hard edge of a command issued on a factory floor before a crane lift. She stopped, her chest heaving under the crumpled housecoat.
Behind her, Patricia dropped her cigarette onto the cobblestones, crushed it with the heel of her boot, and walked up the steps. Her eyes were rimmed with mascara that had run down into the creases of her cheeks, her hair tangled, her voice raspy from forty-eight hours of screaming.
"You think you’re so smart," Patricia spat, pointing a shaking, manicured finger at my face. "Diego is in his bedroom destroying his furniture! He won't eat! He’s been throwing up since noon! You ruined his life, Alejandro! A six-year-old girl at the gate told him he wasn't allowed in because his father was a deadbeat!"
"His father *is* a deadbeat," I said, looking over her shoulder at Daniel, who remained seated inside the Audi, staring straight through the windshield with the engine idling, his face illuminated only by the blue light of the dashboard. "And you are an incompetent mother who spent his tuition money on designer sunglasses and weekend trips to Valle de Bravo."
"How dare you!" Dolores shrieked. She reached through the gap, trying to grab the lapel of my jacket with fingers that looked like dry claws. "How dare you speak to your sister like that! We are your family! We are your blood! You owe us everything! Your father left that money for *all* of us!"
"My father left that money to ensure Natalia had a future," I said, knocking her hand away with a clean, sharp movement of my forearm. "And he left that penthouse under strict conditions that you have already violated."
Dolores froze. The hysterical fury in her pale eyes flickered, replaced for an instant by that sudden, rodent-like suspicion she always showed whenever she realized someone else held the ledger.
"What conditions?" she whispered.
"The property taxes, Dolores," I said. "Thirty-eight thousand pesos. Delinquent since March. The second administrative warning arrived at your building on the twelfth."
"That’s... that’s an administrative mistake," she stammered, her voice losing its brassy volume. "The accountant handles that."
"You don't have an accountant. You fired him in 2020."
"I... I have life tenancy!" she shouted, rallying her outrage, stepping closer until I could smell the stale menthol and black coffee on her breath. "Bernardo Trejo told me himself in 2016! Life tenancy! You cannot touch me! You cannot move me from that house! It is mine until the day I am buried next to your father!"
"Read Clause 14, Subsection B," I told her. "Trejo has the original. If the taxes and the HOA assessments are sixty days delinquent, the tenancy terminates automatically. Day sixty is October tenth. If the municipal treasury does not receive thirty-eight thousand pesos, and the HOA does not receive thirty-two thousand pesos by five o'clock on that day, the deed transfers directly to my name."
Patricia stared at our mother. "Mom... what is he talking about? What clause?"
Dolores didn't answer her. Her mouth was open slightly, her throat working as she tried to find a lie big enough to cover the hole that had just opened beneath her feet.
"You wouldn't," Dolores whispered. Her fingers began to tremble against the iron scrollwork of the gate. "You wouldn't evict your own mother. You wouldn't throw me onto the street. The family would never speak to you again. You would be dead to everyone in Querétaro."
"The family already isn't speaking to me, Dolores," I said. "Aunt Lupe called me a monster. Uncle Hector told me I was going to hell. I don't care about the family. I care about my daughter. And my daughter is leaving for Monterrey on Thursday."
"Alejandro, please," Patricia broke in, her voice suddenly shifting into that nauseating, high-pitched whine she used whenever she needed Daniel to sign for another department store card. "We can fix this. We can sit down like adults. Just pay Diego’s school for this trimester. Just five thousand dollars. We’ll pay you back in January, I swear! Daniel has a huge commission coming from the shoe manufacturers in León!"
I looked at Patricia.
I remembered her face on Sunday night, leaning against the stucco pillar, raising her glass of white wine while Natalia’s acceptance letter dissolved in the chlorine. I remembered the laughing emojis on her Instagram story. I remembered the cold, deliberate malice of her text messages.
"No," I said.
"Alejandro—"
"No."
I stepped back into the courtyard and pulled the heavy iron gate shut.
The deadbolt engaged with a heavy, metallic *clunk* that sounded like the closing of a bank vault.
Outside, the screaming started again—higher, louder, more frantic now that they realized the door was truly locked. Dolores began pounding on the iron with her fists, her rings rattling against the metal like hail on a tin roof. Patricia was cursing, calling me Sofia’s lapdog, calling Natalia an arrogant bastard, shouting every vulgarity she had picked up in forty years of spoiled tantrums.
I didn't turn around.
I walked back down the flagstone path, entered the warm kitchen, and locked the sliding glass door behind me.
Natalia looked up from her notebook.
"Are they gone?" she asked.
"Not yet," I said, setting my keys on the granite counter. "Daniel will convince them to get in the car in about five minutes when the neighbors start coming out."
She nodded once, picked up her fountain pen, and turned back to her equations.
May you like
Through the double-paned glass of the kitchen window, the garden was dark, the pool water still and black, reflecting only the distant, uncaring stars.
***
