A year later she married Brent. I don't remember the wedding much except that I wore a yellow dress and was supposed to throw petals and threw them all in one handful at the start, and everybody laughed. Brent was a big, loud man who sold trucks at a dealership on Sprague and who called me "kiddo" and never once called me by my name that I can remember. Sadie was born not long after. Then four years after that Brent met Ashlynn at a boat show, and then he lived in Kennewick, and then he was a voice on speakerphone on Sadie's birthday, some years, and on Christmas, most years, saying "Hey, princess, you being good for your mom?" while we could hear a television in the background.
My mother didn't say bad things about him in front of Sadie. I'll give her that. She didn't say anything about him at all. When Sadie asked why her daddy didn't come up for her recital, my mother said, "He's busy, baby, he loves you," in a voice so smooth and practiced you could have skated on it. Then she'd go into the bathroom and run the fan.
My mother. I've tried a lot of times since then to describe her right, and I always get it wrong in one direction or the other. If I tell you about the shoes, you'll think she was a monster. She wasn't a monster. She worked fifty hours some weeks. She drove a 2009 Corolla with a heater that only worked on high. She packed our lunches every night, both of them, and she always cut my sandwich in triangles because I'd liked it that way when I was six and she never stopped. When I got strep in sixth grade she sat up with me all night with a cold washcloth. She could fix a running toilet with a paper clip. She had a laugh like a goose honking that she was embarrassed about and that I loved.
But there was something between her and me that wasn't between her and Sadie, and I'd felt it for as long as I could remember feeling things. With Sadie she was soft. She braided Sadie's hair every morning, and she sang while she did it, and Sadie leaned back against her stomach with her eyes closed like a cat. With me she was careful. She was polite, almost. She asked me how school was the way you'd ask a coworker how their weekend went. When I did something good, like the time I won the district spelling bee in sixth grade, she was proud, I think, but her pride had a little catch in it, a little wince, like it hurt somewhere.
I look like him. That's the thing I didn't understand until later. I have his dark hair that won't hold a braid, and his eyebrows that go straight across, and his long feet, and his chin. There's a photograph of him at fourteen, at his fourteenth birthday party in Moses Lake, standing next to a cake, and if you put a picture of me at thirteen next to it you would think we were twins born thirty years apart. My grandmother has both pictures on her refrigerator, side by side, under a magnet shaped like a chili pepper.
My grandmother. My father's mother. Consuelo Arriaga. Everybody in Moses Lake called her Connie, and the men at the bus barn where she worked for thirty-one years called her Connie or Mrs. A or, when they thought she couldn't hear, the Wrench. She was a diesel mechanic for the county transit system until she retired at sixty-five. She had started in 1982 as the only woman in the shop, sweeping floors and changing oil, and by the end she was the lead mechanic, and she could, by her own account, rebuild a Cummins engine with her eyes closed, though she said she never had to try, because she always kept her eyes open, which was the whole point.
She was sixty-seven that November. She was five foot one. She had short gray hair that she cut herself with clippers, and forearms like a man who works on a dock, and she wore my grandfather's old brown canvas work jacket over everything, even dresses, even to church, even though my grandfather had been dead for eleven years and the jacket was so big on her that the cuffs came down over her knuckles. She drove a 1994 Ford F-150, two-tone, maroon and silver, that she had rebuilt from the frame up, and she called it Gordo. She chewed cinnamon gum constantly. She cussed in two languages, separately and also sometimes in the same sentence.
I called her Abuela. She called me mija, or Noemi with all the vowels, No-eh-mee, the way nobody else said it.
She and my mother did not get along. It wasn't a screaming kind of not getting along. It was more like two people who are being very polite at a funeral. My mother called her Connie. Abuela called my mother Joanna, the whole thing, never Jo. When I was little, Abuela used to drive up from Moses Lake every other weekend in Gordo and take me to the park, or the library, or the big hardware store on Division, where she would tell me what everything was for. After my mother married Brent, the visits got less frequent. My mother would say it wasn't a good weekend, or we had plans, or Brent's family was coming. After Brent left, the visits picked up a little, but not to what they'd been. Every month or two, maybe. Holidays sometimes. Abuela called me every Sunday night at seven, no matter what, and asked me three questions, always the same three: Are you eating? Are you reading? Is anybody giving you trouble?
I never told her about the shoe. I don't know why. Partly I didn't want to get my mother in trouble, because I knew how Abuela could be. Partly I was ashamed, which is a strange thing to be about something you didn't do. Partly I think I believed my mother, that it was a one-more-month problem, and it didn't seem worth all the noise it would make.
I didn't tell her. But I showed her, by accident, which is how most true things come out.