She wrote that one evening Mateo had asked, while she was putting him to bed: Why doesn’t Grandma Meche come to our house? And she had told him she would explain when he was older, and then she had gone to the bathroom and sat on the cold floor and cried for a long time.
She did not ask for forgiveness. She asked for nothing. The letter ended: I don’t expect this changes anything. I just needed you to know that I know what I did.
Mercedes sat in the courtyard with the letter in her lap and the bougainvillea above her moving slowly in the late afternoon. She sat there for a long time.
Then she went inside, found her fountain pen, and wrote two paragraphs on a single sheet of cream notepaper.
I am not ready to see you. I don’t know when, or whether, I will be. That is the honest answer and you said you are learning to appreciate honest answers.
Mateo may come on Saturdays. My door is open to him. It is not, for now, open to you. That is not cruelty. It is clarity.
Your grandmother, Mercedes
That Saturday, a car pulled up to the house on Coyoacán.
The back door opened and a small boy climbed out in a blue sweater, holding a drawing executed in crayon with the particular intensity of a four-year-old who has taken the project seriously. He walked up the path and stood at the door and when it opened he looked up with his mother’s eyes and his great-grandmother’s directness.
“Are you my Grandma Meche?” he asked.
“I am,” she said.
He held out the drawing. It was a house — her house, recognisably, with the courtyard wall and what appeared to be the bougainvillea rendered in enthusiastic pink. Two figures stood in front of it. A small one and a tall one.
“That’s us,” he said.
She looked at it for a moment.
