Never Too Late by Carmen Rita

Author:Carmen Rita [Rita, Carmen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2017-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Cat rounded the corner of the prewar, subway-tiled hallway, the iron railing cold in her fingers. She breathed in the memories. She grew up in this building, full of railroad apartments, tiny, clanking elevators and narrow, marbled stairs. She hadn’t been here in years. And though she now had a family of her own, she was alone here. This was hard, going to her mother. Visiting the apartment was loaded with not only memories but dreams, both good and bad. Reaching out and asking to see someone—her mother—who had been so difficult to live with at times, Cat felt like she couldn’t breathe. Dolores’s needs, demands, and expectations were suffocating. And once Cat had lost her television show and decided to take a big step back to do the show she wanted to do online, then, the sin of all sins, had a baby with a black Dominican-American, out of wedlock! Well . . . That was the last straw for Dolores.

But today was an expedition, an exploration of sorts. Cat needed to know what this fear was that she had living inside of her like some symbiotic parasite. Tomas was everything she needed and wanted. So why did the thought of committing to the father of her child have her breaking into a cold sweat? And why was she tempted by someone who was nearly the opposite of Tomas, the man she loved? Calculating, unstable, even coldly ambitious. Cat had a deep sense that her mother hadn’t always been straightforward about what kind of man her father had been, and she hadn’t seen him since she was four years old. She only knew for sure that her mother had a love-hate relationship with the whole male gender. She acted enamored of her Telenova stars, yet Cat never once saw her mother on a date or alone with someone of the opposite sex. She knew Dolores wasn’t a lesbian, so why this intense holding-at-a-distance of men? And why did Cat seem to share some of this pathology? The knot in Cat’s stomach yelled at her to turn around and go home. But her head prevailed. She needed answers.

“Hi, Mami,” Cat said, her voice cracked. She surprised herself with her emotion.

Dolores stood in the doorway of the apartment, waiting for Cat to come out of the elevator, just as she used to do when she’d come home from school or when her mother would yell down the hall toward the open doors at the other end, all the children on the floor hanging out with each other, the hallway an extension of everyone’s home, making the floor one big, communal apartment.

Usually in this stance, Dolores’s face would be stern and Cat’s anxiety would come from what punishment was coming her way that day, whether it was a whop on the back of her head as she walked in or a trail of shrill admonitions following her in Spanish. Cat had trained herself to shut down that part of her brain and not hear a thing but chatter.

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