Welcome to Washington, Fina Mendoza by Kitty Felde

Author:Kitty Felde [Felde, Kitty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Published: 2016-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

I smelled pancakes the next morning. Gabby was trying hard to make this seem like a regular Sunday. I didn’t say anything, even though they were kind of raw in the middle. “Better than Abuelita’s,” I told her, crossing my fingers under the table.

Sundays we went to mass.

Here in Washington, we went to a different church every week. Papa said we were “church shopping,” trying to find a parish that felt like home. Back in Los Angeles, people at Sacred Heart sang songs in Spanish and English, held hands across the center aisle when we sang the “Our Father,” and decorated a special altar for Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Nothing felt familiar here in Washington, not even Sunday mass. None of the churches felt like home. We tried out the small stone chapel on the House side of Capitol Hill and the brick one on the Senate side, but Papa said they were too partisan. That meant too political. Democrats went to one church and Republicans went to the other one. Papa said he didn’t want to be a politician on Sunday. So we kept looking.

We even tried the “Nat’s Mass” at the church near the baseball stadium where everybody wore red jerseys and caps. But the sermon was always about baseball and Gabby hated baseball. Papa said maybe they would talk about hockey once the playoffs were over, but we kept looking.

This Sunday, Gabby said we’d play hooky. “The weather’s too nice to stay inside all day. Let’s do our boxes and explore.”

Gabby tore open her first box. She grunted. It was the extra toilet paper rolls. Pretty boring. Inside my box, I found a stack of file folders. Some of the papers inside had spilled out. On the top, they said “CA.gov Sample Driver Written Test,” with multiple choice bubbles penciled in all over the page.

“Gimme those,” Gabby said and grabbed the files out of my hands. She marched upstairs like she was mad at me. I guess we weren’t going to explore new neighborhoods today.

Gabby was still upstairs with her precious file folders when I heard the clomping on our iron front steps. I ran to the front window and peeked around the boxes and through the lacy curtains. Maybe it was Papa, coming home early!

It wasn’t. It was Claudia, wearing jeans instead of her usual office clothes. I opened the front door before she had the chance to knock. She pulled a binder out of her shoulder bag.

“I brought these for your father to look at when he gets back to town on Tuesday. Proposed amendments to the water bill.” She handed me the binder.

“Are you working on a Sunday?” I asked.

“I work every day,” she said.

“Really?”

“Not really. I thought I’d see if you guys needed anything. If you were okay without your dad around.”

“Did Papa ask you to check up on us?”

“Not exactly. Your dad gets in trouble with the Ethics Committee if he has his staff run personal errands for him.

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