Margarita Wednesdays by Deborah Rodriguez

Author:Deborah Rodriguez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery Books

THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER AN intensely fitful night, I was interrupted mid-bite in the dining room by a ponytailed man with a guidebook tucked under his arm.

“Encounter any ghosts last night?” he asked, as he slid his chair in between Sharon and me. I hate ponytails on men. And nothing was about to keep me from those fluffy, cheesy egg enchiladas.

“Ghosts?” Sharon’s eyes widened as she pushed her bangs aside. I shot her a look.

“Stop scaring my friends,” chimed in Cynthia, from the kitchen. But as soon as we were done eating, she graciously offered to satisfy Sharon’s curiosity with a tour.

“In this room, there is an Indian chief, and also a woman, Pluma Blanca, who was a cook for the nuns who used to live in the house,” she told us as she unlocked one of the heavy wood doors circling the courtyard. “They’re happy spirits. We let them stay.”

“How do you know? You’ve talked to them?” I obviously needed more coffee.

“What’s the matter, Deb? You don’t believe in ghosts?”

I had to laugh. “I don’t know. In Afghanistan, they blamed everything on the jinns.”

“Afghanistan?” Cynthia raised her eyebrows and lowered her chin.

“Yeah. I lived there for a while. A few years.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. So, anyway, jinns are supposed to be sort of like genies. Over there, they say that the jinns were responsible for winning wars in the old days. They’d make the enemy’s eyes see way more advancing warriors than were actually there, so that they’d retreat in fear of being outnumbered.”

“Smart cookies,” Cynthia said.

“And my girls, my students over there, they’d point to the jinns whenever a glass would break or a door would slam. Everything I thought was the wind, they thought was a jinn.”

“Yours sounds like a story I want to hear, girl.”

“Oh, Deb’s got a story, all right,” Sharon piped in.

“Well, we don’t do jinns here in Mexico, but we do have what they call duendes, sort of like gnomes. I’ve never personally seen one. We did have a curandera come visit.”

“A what?”

“Curandera. A spirit cleanser. They clean the spirits from your house.”

“They do that?” Though so far I had only felt good vibes from my house on Carnaval Street, I wondered if these people might be able to apply their skills to other parts of a person’s life.

“They do. The curandera actually went into trances while she was here doing the cleansing, the limpia. She’s the one who told us the spirits were happy. And she isn’t the only one who has seen them. Some of our guests have encountered Pluma Blanca, always in a white nightgown, always calm. Men sometimes think it’s their wife getting up in the middle of the night, but then they turn over and see their wife still in bed.”

Again I could feel those goose bumps start to crawl up my arms. What was up with that?

“We plant roses for her,” Cynthia continued. “The curandera told us she’d like that. And then there’s the little boy, who we think arrived hurt and hungry, and was taken in by the nuns.

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