Lone Star Legend (3 page)

As she crossed the tiny main room of the garage apartment, she stole a glance at the front windows, making sure that hers
was still the only car in the driveway. If Sandy was lucky, she could change her clothes, call and find someone to hang out
with, and then leave before her landlady got home.

In the bathroom-slash-dressing room, she switched out her work jeans for evening jeans and her short-sleeved maroon knit work
top for a slightly darker maroon T-shirt. Pulling it over her head, Sandy readjusted her glasses and checked her reflection.
Her dark hair had stayed in its ponytail okay. Her makeup wasn’t smudged because she hadn’t put any on that day. Therefore,
she looked fine.

Making the three steps back to her living room, Sandy was sighted from the front windows before she could even think to hide.

“Sandy! What are you doing home so soon, m’ija? Come in the kitchen, baby—I’m gonna make quesadillas!”

Her landlady was home. Obviously. The woman had seen Sandy’s silhouette and had no qualms about simply yelling up invitations
from the backyard.

Sandy stood still in the middle of her room and considered declining the offer. In the end, however, she turned and headed
for the stairs. It wasn’t a good idea to hurt your landlady’s feelings, she decided. Especially not when your landlady was
also your mother.

Sandy sighed as she took her little staircase down to inevitability. It’d been sixteen months since she’d moved out of her
mother’s house, into the garage apartment, and she’d paid rent every month on time. But her rent money hadn’t bought her the
independence—the
privacy
—she’d been hoping for.

It was true that she wasn’t yet independent enough to afford a real apartment—not at Austin prices, anyway, unless she wanted
to live with a roommate or three. But she’d hoped that establishing a formal business relationship with her mother would also
put in place a sort of professional buffer zone.

She’d been mistaken, though. At best, she was merely helping her mother with expenses on the two-bedroom yellow house Sandy’s
father had left them. At worst, she’d become a fellow working woman in her mother’s eyes, and therefore someone her mom would
try to commiserate with more often.

As Sandy crossed the backyard to the door that led to her mother’s kitchen, she told herself that she’d just eat one quesadilla
and let Mom probe her life a little. The woman worked hard and got lonely. She needed Sandy to humor her once in a while.

I
N HER MOTHER’S
kitchen, which was about eighty percent yellow Formica, Sandy sat and ate the quesadillas, the generic sandwich cookies,
and the fruit-flavored drink that were set out for her. It was the same snack her mother had been serving since Sandy was
in elementary school, except that Sandy had finally, mercifully, convinced her mother to switch from Kool-Aid to sugar-free
Fruit-Ade.

“So how’s my Danny doing?” her mother asked first thing. She meant Daniel. She called him Danny after John Travolta’s character
in
Grease
. She called Sandy Sandy for the same reason. Sandy’s real name was Dominga, after her paternal grandmother. Domingo meant
Sunday in Spanish and, as her mom reasoned, Sunday
kind of
sounded like Sandy, which is what she would’ve named their baby if Sandy’s father had let her. Thus, the nickname had been
born.

Mrs. Saavedra, as she liked to be known, had been feverishly excited when Sandy started dating Daniel two years ago. She was
convinced that Daniel was Sandy’s soulmate, just like Danny was the other Sandy’s, in the movie. Never mind that her mom’s
favorite movie seemed to be all about this Sandy person getting a slutty makeover in order to keep Danny from cheating on
her. Every time the real Sandy pointed that out, or pointed out that no one called Daniel Danny, her mom just blew her off
and started singing “Summer Nights.”

So Mrs. Saavedra wanted to know how “her Danny” was doing, and Sandy told her that she didn’t know, that she hadn’t seen much
of him lately.

“Uh-oh,” her mother immediately said. “That’s not good. He’s not hooking up with one of those little hussy students of his,
is he?”

Sandy saw her mother’s eyes gleam as she licked the filling off her chocolate cookie. It was as if the possibility of Daniel
cheating was fascinating enough to warrant any hurt feelings Sandy might have over it. Her mother always loved stories about
adultery, for some reason.

“No, Mom,” Sandy said firmly, wishing she’d never confided in her mother about Daniel’s flirty students to begin with. She’d
learned her lesson since then and now gave her mom as little information as possible.

“You know, Sandy, maybe it’s time for a change.”

Sandy already knew where her mother was going with this, but there was no stopping the woman, so she didn’t even try.

“A change with your hair, m’ija. Maybe it’s time for some highlights.” Her mom patted her own brassy curls. “Or you could
go red. This Elvira thing you have…. Men like to see a little color, you know?”

The Elvira thing to which she referred was another old movie reference, this time to Sandy’s natural dark hair and to the
fact that she preferred dark clothing. Sandy wore a lot of dark colors, in general, because it was easier that way. She was
petite, so pastels had the tendency to make her look too girly. And she needed to be taken seriously if she was going to give
this writing thing a serious shot. When she wasn’t at LatinoNow—Nacho Papi now, she reminded herself—she was at software and
engineering companies interviewing serious men about serious products, then turning their scientific explanations into words
that normal people could understand. Serious as a heart attack, at triple minimum wage per hour.

“And when are you going to get rid of those glasses, m’ija? Jesus Mother Mary, those glasses!”

Her mom made a move as if to reach for said glasses, and Sandy shielded them protectively. She needed her glasses—not only
to see, but to look professional. No matter how many times she’d explained it, her mother had refused to understand.

Mrs. Saavedra had the same naturally dark hair and the same nearsighted eyes, and the same petite frame, plus about twenty
pounds that she swore Sandy was responsible for, since Sandy had come out of her via C-section. But their personal style philosophies
couldn’t have been more different.

Sandy’s mother always wore bright pink or purple or orange, preferably all at once, along with some kind of animal print.
And she’d been covering her gray with golden blond and sporting long, razored-to-hell layers for years and years, before Sandy
had begged her to cut off all her split ends and assume a blunt bob like a normal mother.

“Mom. Please. I’ve already told you. I’m not going to change my hair, my clothes, or my anything. Daniel’s just fine with
the way I look.”

She pouted a little, but Sandy could tell her mom had gotten the message and wasn’t going to risk driving Sandy out of the
house by saying anything more on the subject. Instead she switched to mining info on Sandy’s job.

“So, how was work today, m’ija? Your new boss is there now, right? The fancy lady from New York?”

“Yes. I met with her yesterday.” Sandy left it at that. There was no use telling her mom that the fancy lady from New York
hadn’t even decided to keep Sandy on as a staff writer yet. Sandy had until Sunday night to get her audition samples done,
and she needed to concentrate on that without any maternal distractions. She’d had a hard enough time convincing her mother
that writing for a Web Site was a real job, in the same way that sitting in her apartment typing software manuals for faceless
employers was also a real job that paid Sandy real money. Her mom knew what a freelance writer did, in theory, but Sandy suspected
that she preferred to imagine her daughter crafting paperback romances under a pen name.

“So, your old boss, what happened to him again? Did he get fired?”

Sandy reflected, not for the first time, that her mother should have been a journalist herself. She was always trying to sniff
out a scandal.

“No, he didn’t get fired. He got transferred to another media entity. He moved to San Antonio.”

“And so they brought this lady in from New York? Sounds like a demotion for her. I wonder what she did.”

“I don’t think it’s a demotion,” Sandy said, hurrying to explain before her mother got carried away and started up rumors.
“She was in charge of putting
Mujer
magazine online, and she was really successful at it. So, LatinoNow’s new owners hired her away from them.”

“Oh-h-h!” breathed her mother. “You didn’t tell me she ran
Mujer
! That’s my favorite! I always look at their Web page at work.”

Sandy nodded. She’d seen the
Mujer
site, of course. She’d looked it up the moment she and her co-workers had first discovered Angelica was taking over. And
she’d learned that Angelica had taken the glossy, gossipy magazine with its endless features on Latina stars and their boob
jobs and made it into the most successfully interactive Web site Sandy had ever seen. Readers were invited to comment and
vote on every photo on the site, and it was chock-f of contests and promotions by advertisers. Even though
Mujer
had gone out of print, it was apparently making all kinds of money in its new incarnation as a Web site, and Angelica was
the one responsible. Sandy had to admit that it was exactly the kind of entertainment that would appeal to her mother, and
to thousands or maybe millions of other women like her.

“Is your new Web site going to be for Latinas?” her mother asked.

“Sort of,” Sandy answered, keeping her tone vague. Nacho Papi would be like Levy Media’s other new sites, Don’t Call Me Sassy
and Banana Nation. Sandy hadn’t examined those sites in depth yet, but she could already tell that they’d follow the lead
of Levy Media’s flagship “news” site,
Hate-O-Rama.com
, where celebrities, politicians, and media professionals got the “hater” treatment on a daily basis. She didn’t feel like
trying to explain the ironic, irreverent, mean-spirited-but-funny tone to her mother, for whom
Mujer
magazine and the occasional romance novel were the highest-level reading.

Having finished the last bite of her quesadilla and washed it down with the pink saccharine juice, Sandy stood. “All right,
Mom. I’d better go upstairs. I have a lot of work to finish.”

“Work? Baby, it’s Friday. You’re young. Why aren’t you going out tonight?”

Enough of the third degree
, Sandy thought. It was time to resort to a dirty trick to get her mother off her back. “Speaking of going out, who was that
I heard at your door last night?” she asked.

Immediately, like magic, her mother clammed up. “Never mind,” she said primly.

Sandy smiled. She may have been secretive, but she came by the trait honestly. Her mother could be quite the secret keeper
herself when she wanted to be. Sandy knew Mrs. Saavedra was probably dating someone, but that was all she knew, because that
was all her mom would let her find out.

They cleaned up the snack debris in relative silence and then Sandy turned to go.

“Wait, Sandy, I forgot to ask you: Can you still go with me to Aunt Linda’s house tomorrow? Remember, I told you last week?”

Sandy hadn’t remembered, actually. She’d completely forgotten until that moment that she’d half promised to help her mother
clean her recently deceased aunt’s house and finish putting the old woman’s affairs in order. That meant a long drive out
to the dusty, hilly middle of nowhere. Not exactly how she wanted to spend half her weekend.

She wanted to make up an excuse. She
had
the perfect excuse—she had her Nacho Papi audition posts to write. But her mother was looking at her so hopefully that Sandy
decided to give in. She could write the posts after, she told herself.

“Yeah, I’ll go,” Sandy said, feeling relieved at having something else to do, all of a sudden.

She ignored the fact that the relief only barely covered an underlying, slow-simmering sense of panic about her career.

Blog entry from My Modern TragiComedy, Saturday, March 11

sometimes she drives me crazy. I’m sure you’re familiar with the feeling.

In my particular case, it’s like my mother and I are complete opposites. The way we act, the way we dress, the things we watch,
listen to, and read (or don’t read)… Everything about us is different.

I take after my dad. Which is strange, when you think about it, because that means he married someone completely different
from him. I wonder, sometimes, if those differences are why they divorced.

And I wonder, sometimes, if he’s ever realized how much he and I are alike.

Maybe that’s why he left me to deal with my mother—as a sort of substitute for himself, when he couldn’t handle it anymore?

Okay, sorry to get so deep there…. I’ve already written tons of angsty stuff here about their divorce and all the trauma it
caused me. Thanks again, guys, for reading this site and saving me the therapist fees.

I’m overanalyzing, I guess, because I’m about to take a road trip with my mom to deal with some somber family issues. And
what better time than a road trip to hash out your differences with someone, right?

Wrong. I intend to keep the conversation light and the radio on, all the way.