Empty-nesting. She knows it's true. Bent over therma-lined dusky boots, Regina's breasts flatten against the soft mounded scoops of her knees and, give or take, she knows it's true.
If she lived someplace wild, she'd roll under great trunks clinging with sap, and invite threads of welcoming trees to join her. Shake it out then, push the earth and needles from each long blackened cord of her hair, but leave the earth's moss where her head's gone silver.
Here and there. Sparsely silver, that's appropriate, but her throat and womb are dense with grumblings of things she can't explain. Regina liquefies: dark sugared apéritifs spin a thick salve around three mean fingers of Gordon's vodka in the heavy tumbler. Is it misery? She clicks the half-moon ice cubes against uneven front teeth, lavishing the drip beneath her tongue. It's just this new and arrogant confusion, that's what she admits -- all the rest is just what happens.
El 'jito is definitely leaving; that's a fact. Not like she'd imagined: not at twenty-five, moving from her family to another. No, this boy has gone and given himself to the U.S. military, and he's just turned seventeen. Regina still can't think it through. It's a box of rocks in the heart. A stock of blades, a rectangle of tissue. She liquefies.
He calls and says, "Mom. I'm leaving now. Gonna come home. Want me t'bring anything?" Already talking in Morse code, tapping out data on a need-to-know basis. I want you to bring me another five years, is what she's thinking. "Lettuce," is what she says.
How she has lived with this person her whole adult life and still can be surprised by him is a mystery to her. She swears they communicated telepathically when she was in labor, delivering this first child at home, 19 years old, standing alone in the shower with him. "Mijito, tell me this is not gonna hurt, and I'll tell you I can take care of the rest." And he said -- she swears it -- "I won't hurt you. We'll do this together."
The photograph of his christening always makes people nervous. Regina likes that effect. But, while others struggle to understand the image of a baby covered in blankets and flowers, with eight pair of hands atop him in blessing, what Regina can't get over is his eyes: el 'jito greets the lens, in that photo, and something about it tells you he just knows. How is she supposed to let that go so young?
"You're not losing a son..." the recruiter intoned, "you're gaining a Marine." Regina gave an extravagant roll of her flattened green eyes, lighting another cigarette. "I can't believe you actually said that to me," she decided. Young Sgt. Stump shifted against her sofa. Went on and on about the camouflaged glories of military life.
"I don't need to hear this." Regina cut him short. "I'll tell you straight up that I'd rather my son be a homosexual ballerina than a goddamned Marine."
"Yes, ma'am," the young sergeant assented, and launched into a dwindling monologue about his favorite sister's lesbianism.
"Which is not the point," Regina fired. "I don't want my 'jito dead. And I don't like the odds here."
"Ma'am," the foolish recruiter attempted, "on my last reconnaissance mission, I took out 18 men, and there was only one casualty."
Regina leaned forward just an inch. "I have. Only. One. Son," she spat.
The recruiter fumbled, but kept right on talking. Regina turned her focus to her boy. He moved uncomfortably, recently seeming too large for everything in the house. She thought then of jailed Mexican poets, heard the somber metal of los gritos. Her son's forefingers locked and pressed against the arm of his chair. Let him go, she told herself. He will announce himself. It's time.
The freeze slices down abruptly in Colorado, the moment the sun blinks behind the flatirons. Regina walks today the way she sees the viejas walk: cardigan unbuttoned but bunched up in both hands, tight across her chest; fingers folded into her sleeves; head flattened against the panes of wind. Chamber of Commerce flags bounce from lightposts. She enters the egg-yellow light of a shop and shakes out snow-damp hair, releasing herself. Somewhere else, Regina's only hijo salutes.
