The Night Before by Luanne Rice Page A

she was studying painting at Black Hall College of Fine Arts, her teacher—a man obsessed with her grandfather—had taken the class to San Miguel de Allende, a charming hill village in Mexico; it was the last week of July twenty years ago, and that’s where she’d met Sara Castillo, the bride’s mother.
    Her second day in Mexico, she had wandered away from the plaza in San Miguel, alone up a steep, winding road, attracted to a sharply graded lemon grove on a promontory overlooking the valley. The straight rows of trees reminded her of home, her family’s spruce farm.
    She thought about the people who had planted them, wondered if they, like her family, worked the land together, if the mother loved farming as much as the father, if she had raised her children with soil under their fingernails. One of the boys, high on a ladder, sang a ballad. Painting depth, shadows, and a thousand shades of green, Lydia could almost hear her mother whispering in her ear and lost track of the time.
    “Can I look?”
    At the sound of the voice, Lydia turned and saw a young woman about her own age approaching through the lemon trees.
    “Sure,” Lydia said.
    The young woman came close, leaned toward the canvas. She wore a white muslin blouse over work pants, dirty Adidas on her feet. Her thick black hair was tied back with red yarn. Up closer, Lydia saw she was older than college-aged; when she smiled, she had crinkled sun lines around her eyes.
    “Not bad,” the young woman said.
    “Huh, thanks,” Lydia said, taken aback.
    “Your perspective’s a little off,” the young woman said in perfect English with a heavy accent.
    “You’re an art teacher?”
    “No, chica ,” she said. “But this is San Miguel. You think you’re the first artist to paint the valley? I check out all the work. Yours is really pretty good. It’s not bad at all.”
    “Do you live here?” Lydia asked, looking around, seeing no houses.
    “I work,” she said, gesturing at the rows of lemon trees.
    “Your family owns the orchard?”
    She snorted. “Come on, what world are you from? I pick lemons so gringas can drink lemonade.”
    “Sorry,” Lydia said. She started wiping her brush with a rag, wanting to get out of there.
    “ Mira , I’m an idiota ,” she said, clamping her hand around Lydia’s wrist. “I just had an attack of being jealous, but it’s gone now. My whole family works the orchard together, what do I have to complain about? That’s my brother singing. You’re with one of the college groups, sí ?”
    “ Sí .”
    “I had to drop out,” she said. “I used to go to University of Texas at El Paso. Yeah, I’m Mexican, but I was on an exchange program. I stayed with my grandma in Ciudad Juárez, I just crossed the border with my student visa. It was so easy, I didn’t know how lucky I was.”
    “Why did you drop out?”
    “My mom got sick. My papá told me she was getting really bad, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything, so I left school.”
    Lydia stopped moving. “What happened to her? Is she okay?”
    “She died.”
    “I’m sorry.” Lydia felt dizzy from the paint fumes or the high altitude or the memory of her mother’s face. Then, “Did you get home in time? To see her before she died?”
    She nodded. “I came back with some Faulkner books I was going to read to her, and souvenirs from the U.S., and that’s about it. She passed after I was there for one day; it was like she waited for me. We went through the novenario —nine days of mourning and Masses. It wasn’t enough. Why don’t we mourn nine years when our mothers die?”
    “We do,” Lydia said.
    “Are you Catholic?”
    “Sort of.”
    She laughed. “How are you ‘sort of’ Catholic?”
    “Born that way, went to Star of the Sea Academy elementary school, and lapsed big-time after my mother died.”
    “Oh, you have all my sympathy,” the young woman said, and gave Lydia a spontaneous hug that made her eyes sting. “When did you lose