Blow Your House Down by Gina Frangello

Blow Your House Down by Gina Frangello

Author:Gina Frangello
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2020-12-23T00:00:00+00:00


The Summer of Light and Dark

When I dream of fire

You’re still the one I’d save

Though I’ve come to think of myself

As the flames, the splintering rafters

—Lucy Grealy

I don’t trust my daughters to want to be on a solo vacation with me—much less a “service trip” in a gritty Guatemalan city, where we will need to make use of our shabby Spanish and my profoundly introverted daughters will have to engage with scads of strangers—so before diving in deep at my friend Julie’s educational foundation in Quetzaltenango (called Xela by everyone here), I aim to bombard Mags and Kaya with a few days of beauty in Antigua. It is July, and I have been separated for three months. This trip feels like some kind of Hail Mary to help me assess where I stand.

Our Antiguan hotel, Casa Santo Domingo, is magnificent, built on an old convent and containing ancient tombs within, aglow nightly with hundreds of candles to illuminate walkways and ruin sites. Even though Julie got us a discount and our luxurious three-room suite costs less than many chain motel rooms in the United States, the hotel’s decadent vibe makes me nervous, makes me imagine my ex’s irritation at the money I am spending on a trip that doesn’t include him, even if he no longer wishes to be included in anything that involves my presence anyway.

Kaya and Mags promptly unload the minibar, snapping selfies while holding up unopened cans of Guatemalan beer and tiny bottles of booze. My daughters are freshly fifteen, with shimmering hair nearly to their waists and the kinds of coltish, long legs I envied on other girls in my teenhood. Kaya can ace every standardized test that crosses her path and attends the top-ranked high school in Illinois; Mags is a visual art major at another selective-enrollment school and has gotten exactly one B in her straight (and Type) A career. She can also spell any word backward, at lightning speed, as though reading the letters off a chalkboard in reverse. Give her a lengthy sentence, even, and watch her roll. Kaya, by contrast, can take that same sentence and alphabetize the letters in it: a feat I can’t even track to see if she’s right until she repeats it over again for me more slowly. I used to cajole the girls to take their twinly act to their elementary school’s talent show when they were younger, but both despise being the center of attention, and scoffed. Now I watch them hamming it up with their liquor, even pose with them for a few shots, holding the closed bottles up to my own mouth theatrically. At this, too, I’m imagining my ex’s reaction should he see these shots on social media—his disapproval that I am “condoning underage drinking,” perhaps—but I don’t have the energy or even the desire to pretend that two fifteen-year-old inner-city teens have never had access to alcohol on their own. By their age, I had friends who’d already gotten pregnant, raped,



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