My gosh, guys. Here's Chapter 23. Can you believe we've made it this far? I'm going to be so sad when it's over. :(
Santana began her morning ritual, brushing her teeth while her flat iron sat on the counter warming up. She would have to be careful about that; the last time she tried straightening her crazy hair in this hotel room, she short-circuited the whole floor. She wasn't sure who should have been apologizing: her, for, well, short-circuiting the whole floor, or the manager, for running such a shitty establishment. Needless to say, she was tired of hotel life, living out of a suitcase. She missed her New York loft. Good thing they were leaving soon. But she still had one more thing left to do in Lima.
"Ready to go?" Puck called from the bedroom, poking his head through the door jamb. He had his electric razor that she had gotten in some swagbag at some party sometime somewhere in his hand, shaving the stubble off of his jaw.
"What are you doing?" she whined, "I like it when you leave it."
"Sorry, babe. We're going to my mama's for dinner," he said, not in the least way apologetic. Santana pouted, and he came over and kissed her earlobe, his lips catching on the gold hoops she wore. He could feel the head of the toothbrush, whooshing around the inside of her mouth through her skin.
Oh, darn.
She didn't know what she looked forward to less: dinner at the Puckermans or trying to reconcile with her mother, which she absolutely had to do today, or at least try to, because they were leaving tomorrow in the middle of the night. This was their last day in Lima. Strangely enough, she was a little bit excited for both.
"So how about you visit your mom today?" he suggested.
"Yeah, maybe. But I can't just show up," she retorted.
"So call her again. For all you know, she might not even know you're in town. It'll be a nice surprise."
"Yeah, if my jackass dad isn't around." She spit out a mouthful of toothpaste and rinsed her mouth, as if she was erasing her words too.
"You have to try," he said, handing over her phone, glancing at the home screen, which she had changed from the default picture of kittens or something to a bouquet of flowers he had brought back the day before from the farmer's markets (He claimed they were cheap; she knew better). The wildflowers certainly hadn't been red roses, but it was all good. She wasn't a red rose kind of girl anyways.
"Okay," she said, picking up the phone and feeling the weight of it pull her body to the ground so that the coldness of the tile floor penetrated through her skin and made its way up to her core.
She punched in the numbers that were so familiar, and walked through the doorway and slumped onto the edge of the bed. He came around behind her and began to knead her shoulders, which were tense from the intermittent stress and relaxation that came with vacations. She collapsed at his touch and let him send his energy through her.
The dial tone felt like forever, and she started to count music in her head, something she did when she was nervous. Sometimes she would add in choreography she would pull from her head, just for kicks. She used to dance to music, and now she only strutted to it.
1…
Plie…
2…
Kick-ball change…
3…
Releve…
4…
Grand-plie…
1 and 2….
Chasse…
And 3 and 4…
She was certain this had to be the ugliest dance ever.
"Hello?" The connection had been made, and she could hear her mother's warm but formal voice on the other end.
She let the relief and fear sink in, emotions that had sunk in when she realized someone had actually picked up on the other end. It must have been a long moment when she realized that she wasn't talking because he nudged her from behind.
"H-Hello?" she mumbled. When did she lose her voice? Damn it! Not again!
"Yes, who is this?"
"Mama?" she whimpered, hating herself for doing it.
She could hear a clatter in the background. Her mother must have actually dropped whatever she was holding, although the crash ensured Santana that it was, thank god, not her Bible. No pun intended.
"Who is this?" her mother repeated. This time, Isabel's voice was more uncertain, yet more stern. For a moment, Puck could feel Santana tense again, but Santana rested when she realized that Isabel just thought someone was playing a cruel joke on her.
"Mama, it's me. Santana. And I just…I just wanted to say I'm in town. And I would really, really, really like to come home." She could barely get the words out, but she did, releasing a deep breath. He rubbed circles on her back, even tracing a stupid little heart with his fingertip.
"Oh, baby…"
And it only took those two words for Santana to crumble and burst into tears. Her body convulsed, and she shook and shook until her body could not shake anymore, and settled for hiccupping.
"Oh, mom. I'm so glad. I'm so glad." She didn't know why she was repeating things over and over again. Maybe it was because these feelings were too good to be true, so surreal that she had to just make sure she wasn't dreaming, although big dreams had never stopped her before.
"Let me just tidy up a little bit, and you can come over."
"You don't need to do that, mama. You're fine. I'm fine," she laughed through the tears, leaning her head back to rest on his shoulder. He dropped his hands from her shoulders, and wrapped his arms around her stomach from behind. He rested his chin on her shoulders.
"Okay, I need to go now, Santana, but don't you back out on me."
"Yes, mama."
"And don't drive and park your car in the driveway now."
She wasn't sure if she was supposed to be offended or some shit like that, but she understood. Isabel didn't want to take any chances.
"Yes, mama."
"So your first time in New York, mom. What do you want to see? Statue of Liberty? Empire State Building?" Santana asked nervously. She didn't know why she kept looking over her shoulder every five seconds. Who was she afraid of seeing them? Her father, who was all the way in Ohio? Or maybe a colleague of hers, who still thought she was from a city somewhere on the West coast?
"I don't need any of the tourist stuff, Santana. I just want to know about you," her mother said, although her eyes were staring at the skyscrapers that surrounded them in awe. When Isabel had immigrated to America with her husband from Nicaragua, this was always how she had envisioned America to be. Why they settled in Lima was a mystery, but they had gone on living there too long to move. Santana was secretly relieved her mother didn't want to any of the tacky tourist things, because she herself wouldn't have known how to do them either.
"Work is going great. I think I'm going to be promoted to one of the head Angels for the winter catalogue…" Santana knew she couldn't make it sound convincing. Work was not going great. Well, it was financially and career-wise, but everything else was a sham. The other girls hated her, and she had no friends. This part wasn't too much of a stretch, because she never been one for gaggles of girls. And even though she had lived in New York for a few years now, she still felt foreign. She wondered if she would ever call this place home.
"And it's steady? You think you can keep this up, Santana?" Isabel's words came out like a taunt, daring Santana to come home.
"Yes."
No.
She would prove to her mother and father and everybody else for that matter that Santana Lopez could do something well for once in her life. She could sustain a relationship with her career, even though she had never had any type of healthy relationship with anything.
"I'm not coming home, mom. I love you. You can come visit me whenever you want, but I'm not going back." She said this, even though she know very well that another visit from her mother was going to be a rarity, if not an impossibility.
Isabel looked closer at her daughter. She did not look the same. She did not have the same Santana flavor that had made her deliciously notorious in Lima. She looked worn out and out of her element. She was the shell of the vivacious girl she had once been, for this lifestyle had taken away her spirit and replaced it with a submissive aura of fear.
The two women turned the corner on the sidewalk, walking past all the expensive boutiques. To Isabel, every block looked the same, and Isabel stopped in her tracks out of habit to make sure she knew where she was.
"Come on, mom. We want to beat the afternoon rush." Santana looked over her shoulder again and beckoned to her mother, who was a couple steps behind her. Her mother nodded.
"One could get lost in these streets," Isabel replied, looking straight at her daughter.
"You ready?" he asked from the front seat of his truck, looking over at her. He had picked up his old car the other morning. It had been waiting for him all these years at Burt's storage garage. He pulled up in front of the Lima Heights Adjacent house. Although he had known Santana since they were fifteen, he could count on one hand the number of times he had been to her house. And he had only met Isabel twice. Everything else he had heard through Santana.
She was shining in the passenger seat, her eyes misty with excitement. He didn't need an answer.
"Okay, I'll pick you up in a little bit."
"Okay. Bye," she hollered as she jumped out of the car. She looked like a kindergartener getting off the school bus on the first day of school, beaming with eagerness.
She trotted up the front steps, smoothing her wool pencil skirt, trying to calm the windy flyaways in her hair.
She rang the doorbell, her fingernail grazing the rust that was growing over the screen door. She cursed her cheap-skate father, who despite having a white-collar job, would not spare the extra dollars to give her mother a nice house and nice belongings. But it wouldn't have mattered anyways. Her mother was too proud and too dignified to accept material items anyways.
When the door opened, she was surprised at how old her mother looked. She was in her 60s now, and the silver streaks in her hair couldn't be hidden, no matter how complicated a chignon she used to try and disguise them. Her mother's previously wrinkle free forehead had wrinkles now, and her lips, painted coral with cheap lipliner—Santana could tell—were pursed in a thin line. Only her eyes remained bright.
The two women did not exchange words; they simply embraced and held on for dear life.
When Santana got inside, she was surprised by the look of the house she had grown up in. Although her mother had changed, the house had not. It looked exactly the same, like it had been frozen in time. None of the technology had been updated. The flat screen plasma her parents bought her senior year remained hooked onto the living room wall. Santana was sure that if she turned it on, there would be years of telenovellas saved on the DVR. That was the problem with Latinas. Telenovellas. They had made her mother weak and sappy. Which was why the only form of television Santana watched was the new reality show about female mobsters. Those women certainly were not romantic.
The mantle still housed several Virgin Mary figurines and a couple of Santana's school pictures from grade school, and one of her with Dolly Parton when Dolly had come to the mall for a concert tour. She and her mother had waited in line for three hours, but it was worth it. One central thing had changed though. Above the mantle, once where a giant family portrait had been mounted, was a new portrait, just of her mother and father sitting in a drab, grey studio. To any random person, the portrait would not seem out of the ordinary. But this new portrait was slightly smaller than the old one, and Santana could see a border of fresh yellow paint around the piece, where the old piece had protected the wall paint from fading.
Santana snickered when she saw that her father's Barcalounger housed a deeper butt-impression than it had ten years ago. She used to call that chair the pity chair, for every night when her father came home, he would sit in the chair and talk about how hard his day was, working for so long. Her mother ate it all up, but Santana was disgusted at his helplessness.
Next to the Barcalounger though, was the only sign that the Lopez family even had a daughter over the age of eighteen. On the night stand was a small framed Vogue cover, her first and only up until now. It was at least eight years old, because she had landed it when she was 20. She had the exact same picture blown up and put in her den. Once she had come home, and Puck had drawn obscene things all over the glass frame in dry-erase marker. She had been livid until he wiped it all off, after laughing his ass off. Then she was just pissed at the fucking prick.
Santana sat down on the couch, and her mother sat across from her, her hands folded in her lap. She handed her mother the expensive eye cream she liked, the Crème de la Mer. If her mother actually knew how much it cost, Santana was sure she would be paying for surgery for a cardiac arrest. Her mother took it appreciatively, and kindly suggested that perhaps it was time Santana started wearing it. Santana ignored the dig.
"How long have you been in town?" Isabel started.
"About a week."
"Oh. See any of your old school friends?"
"A couple," Santana said nonchalantly, taming a flyaway hair.
"You know, Quinn just had another baby. He's absolutely beautiful." Santana was a little bit agitated by the fact that her own mother knew Quinn better than she knew Santana, but Santana knew that was no one's fault but her own.
"Well, that's Quinn for you."
"When are you going to have some of your own?" Isabel rightfully pried. Santana grazed the edge of the sofa cushions with her fingertips, feeling the tweed itch at her cuticles.
"I'm not."
"You know, Santana, if Quinn can do it, so can you."
"Mom, Quinn can most certainly not do it. She treats her children like projects, not people."
Isabel let the conversation rest at that point, because she knew Santana had a point there.
"What about Brittany? You two used to be so close," Isabel commented. She had never fully understood the context of her daughter's relationship with Brittany S. Pierce. All she knew was that for nearly a decade, they had been more than inseparable, and then the two had just stopped being friends suddenly one day.
"I don't know. Isn't she still out in Los Angeles with Artie?" Santana commented herself nonchalantly. She had never understood the end of their friendship either. All she knew was that she had outgrown Brittany one day in high school, and never looked back. She didn't give a flying fuck what Brittany was doing, as long as she wasn't dead.
"I suppose she is then," Isabel said with a tone of finality.
And that was that.
"What are you doing here?" he asked mindlessly, as if a girl hopping through his bedroom window was just something that happened every day. For him and Santana, it was almost a weekly basis. Whether the fact that they got away with it every time was pathetic or impressive, he didn't know. But he was going to go with the latter.
They were currently stuck in a trough in the wavelength of their relationship. Of course, they continued to hook up on a regular basis, but they certainly weren't as close as they had been once.
"I'm done," she declared, not feeling particularly triumphant or sad.
"With?" Santana had a million things going on. She was just starting into the whole modeling shindig, and even though he was the one who suggested it, he didn't really expect her to go all out.
"Brittany."
He stopped what he was doing and looked up. Naturally, he had always known what the deal was with the two girls, but they never talked about it.
"Why?" He knew he sucked as a conversation partner right now, but he didn't know why she was starting to act like they were best friends again at this very moment.
"Because. She's never going to get it. And I'm going to stop trying."
He understood, even though she spoke in few words. He had never understood why Santana had hung out with Brittany. Yeah, she was hot, and kind of funny, and sweet. But she was also kind of dumb. She and Santana were on two separate levels. Puck didn't get how two completely different people even had anything to talk about.
"Cool," he shrugged, "As long as you're giving up only Brittany, not who you are."
"I know," she promised. She would never give up on herself, bisexual or not.
"So where's dad?" Santana said awkwardly, when they had run out of small talk topics. Surely her mother was expecting that question sooner or later.
"He's chaperoning Lola's cheerleading fieldtrip to the city."
Santana didn't know which part of that sentence was more comical: her father chaperoning any school function, or the fact that it was her annoying little cousin's school function. She remembered Lola. She was a prissy attention whoring preteen when Santana last left. Why was her father chaperoning Lola's fieldtrip to Dayton, when all he had said when his own daughter had announced she was going to New York City for Glee Club, was well, nothing?
"Now I know what you're thinking Santana. But your father, he has taken your absence very hard." Santana didn't know why her mother kept talking like she was dead or something. On that same note, Santana didn't know why this entire house seemed as if she was dead.
"No, you don't know what I'm thinking, mom. And he doesn't have to. I'm still here, you know. Just not here. I don't need him to pursue a relationship with me, or anything. I don't care."
"Oh, let's not fight about that again, Santana." Isabel's lips pursed into a thin line.
"Mom, how can you even live with him? He's such a prick!"
"Your father is a good man, Santana Lopez, and don't you ever forget it. And you will find when you get old enough, Santana, that love can be learned." It was the only time during the whole conversation Isabel had raised her voice, and Santana was only slightly startled.
"Come on, let's talk about something happy now. Are you seeing anybody?" Isabel inquired. Santana scoffed because surely her mother knew the answer to that.
"Why don't you just Google it?"
Her mother stayed silent, and Santana was unsure as to whether or not that meant Isabel already had, or actually knew nothing about her daughter.
"Well, I guess I am them," Santana said.
"Who is he?"
"Noah Puckerman," Santana said, knowing very well it was the kiss of death for her mother to hear it.
"Really, Santana? Not him."
Isabel sat in her husband's Barcalounger, a glass of wine on the table and a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera in her hand. The fireplace roared behind her, and the magical realism of the tale was almost enough to make her forget her loneliness. It must be deep into the morning now. She glanced up at the grandfather clock in the room, her eyes peering over her reading glasses. It was late, one in the morning, and her husband had still not returned from an emergency surgery consult.
She heard a tiptoeing down the stairs, and Isabel sighed. It was the third night this week Santana had tried sneaking out. The first time she let it slide, but the second, she had stopped her daughter in her tracks and turned her right back around into her bedroom. Of course, that didn't really mean anything, because Santana just as easily could have jumped out her bedroom window onto the roof and shimmied down the gutter. It wouldn't have been the first time.
"I can hear you Santana Maria. Don't even think about it…" Isabel warned, continuing to read.
Santana slumped her shoulders and walked down the rest of the stairs and met her mother in the den.
"Mom, please I need to go. I have to tonight. I can't leave him alone," Santana pleaded.
Isabel sighed and took off her reading glasses, setting the book down. She rubbed her thumbs on the bridge of her nose.
"Santana…"
"He just lost his baby, mom. He needs me."
Isabel had only met Noah Puckerman once, at a football game. He had been a decent running-back, and a decent boyfriend to Santana back in the day, as far are she knew. But what Noah Puckerman needed was a father figure, sex education, after school tutoring. Not her daughter.
Whether or not her daughter needed Noah Puckerman, though, was a whole other question, and Isabel wasn't sure if she wanted to know the answer.
"Yes, him, mom. You don't even know him," Santana declared annoyedly, and she felt herself heating up, her temper flaring. This conversation was getting too diplomatic. Weren't family reunions supposed to be joyous?
"He is serious about you then? And you feel the same?" Isabel knew she was prying, but she had to, out of concern for her daughter. Noah Puckerman had always been bad news.
Santana nodded, and she knew what her mother was thinking. Marriage. Commitment. Babies. Settling down. All things Santana tried to avoid in general. And for that reason, hoping that this would be the last time that night, Santana changed the subject again.
"So, tell me all about you, Mom. What have you been up to?"
So, what'd you think? Drop me a review! Please and thank you. xoxo.
Questions to think about, and answer if you want to make me happy. I will say though, between their reviews and my responses, that those who answer these often understand the story better and on multiple levels.
1) Consider Isabel's sentiment, "One could get lost in these streets." What does she mean? And don't give me that literal crap!
2) Consider Isabel's other sentiment, "Love can be learned." How has Santana applied this in her life without even knowing it? And is learned love considered "Real" love?
And tell me any other significant bits you see!
Until next time guys!