When I first met her, I was happier than I’d ever been. I’d finally triumphed over the mother who abandoned me, my whole ugly childhood. I had everything I’d ever wanted: a husband who adored me, two beautiful children, a stunning glass house high on a hill. More than anything, I had this year in Mexico, rising before me like a stark white sail.
A few days before leaving the States, Tom and I had thrown a party. Three couples we knew and their children. Because we’d rented out our house furnished, it was as I always kept it, full of flowers I’d cut from the garden, stacks of art books and polished silver dishes and leather trays holding keys. On every surface, a curated clutter, as if we were leaving in a rush for nothing more than a long weekend.
After the meal, we sat amid empty platters and wine bottles, talking about the country’s problems, how envied Tom and I were for getting out. It was a time, much like the current one, in which it was almost compulsory to express disillusionment, a kind of resigned despair. Leaving was something our friends had floated more than once—first in reaction to the Iraq war, then the election. “I’m moving to Canada,” someone would say at a dinner party. “No, I’m serious. I actually spent an hour looking through the Canadian immigration website.”
Inevitably one of the children would ask in their tiny voice, “Are we really going, Daddy?” and the speaker’s fierce resolve would crumble. “If only we could.”
Not that it was our ideology that was taking us to Mexico; in a way, it was the opposite. Tom, an architect, had been asked to oversee the construction of an elaborate community aimed at wealthy Mexican and American retirees. Toward the end of the evening, when we were well into our drinks and sharing stories and laughing, Tom told everyone what had happened the night before; someone had rifled through our unlocked car. He felt violated, he said.
“Really, violated?” I scoffed, gesturing to the dishes stacked everywhere, the empty bottles of wine, like: What do we care? Look at all we have; it’s obnoxious. “So they took a few dollars in change,” I laughed, “so what? I just hope it was enough to get a beer or whatever, a bottle of mouthwash.”
“Mouthwash!” someone barked out amid a ripple of laughter.
“And what about the fact it’s wrong?” Tom cut in, in his pedantic way, a way I couldn’t help feeling dampened everyone’s joy. “What about it?”
“It doesn’t upset you, that we were robbed?”
“Not really.”
“Wow. Okay, then.”
I sensed people becoming embarrassed. It was silly to me, their unease. If Tom and I argued, it was only because we were so close, like one person split in half. Disagreements like this were just the sparking of our passionate connection.
“Should we maybe get some air?” my neighbor Jessica asked, touching my arm with that fatuous look of concern so many women have mastered.
When we stepped outside, the children were running along darkened lawns scattered here and there with signs protesting the war, little shadowy figures rushing past. With a stab of love, I saw my son whooping and pumping his fists as Jessica’s twin daughters chased him.
“I can’t stand it,” Jessica said. “They’re all going to miss this so much!”
It was only a year, I consoled her; we’d be back before she knew it. In truth, though, I was already indi,erent to her, to everything. My house, my things. I’d learned this in girlhood, trailing my mother from town to town after she left my father, in and out of other relationships, our fortunes synchronously rising and falling. Rather than attachment, I had learned to cultivate a reckless joy in our inevitable leaving, the opportunity to remake myself, the defensive scorn of seeing people and places as disposable: I never liked them anyway.
“Still—a year! Poor Mavis and Etta, they’ll be miserable without Henry.”
Mavis and Etta, I thought, what names for two little white girls in eighty-dollar shoes; what could girls like that possibly know of misery? We had reached the end of the block and, without speaking, turned around. These sad conventions; these American ways of being, pacing to the end of a block and back like hamsters. Soon it will all be different, I told myself. Soon everything will be new.
And how I loved Mexico! From the beginning. I loved the freedom of it, driving around with no seat belts the way all the locals did, Ida and Henry straining through the open windows, their mouths wide with delight. I loved walking them to school in their tidy plaid uniforms, past makeshift shrines where women knelt and crossed themselves, through four-hundred-year-old squares with their sounds of pigeons lifting at once like a flurry of slapping rags, their church bells ringing nonsensically, fallen out of time.
After dropping them o,, I’d wander the vast covered market buying the things María needed for the afternoon meal. The tortillería. The produce seller’s stand, with its tall pyramids of shining fruits. The poultry store, with its bright stench of blood and bleach. At noon, I picked up Henry, waiting with the other mothers on a stone bench beneath a huge old pepper tree for the kindergarteners to be brought out. Ida, who was in second grade, would be done with the older children at two o’clock. One afternoon, as I sat waiting for Ida, one of the younger-looking mothers arrived having just bobbed her hair. It made a stir as she strode through the gate, the other women springing forward to touch it, test its weight, its bounce, while she turned her head from side to side loudly criticizing herself—it was too short, wasn’t it? It was ugly! No, they rebuked her, don’t say that! It’s so pretty!
I smiled to myself. Somehow it didn’t bother me as much here, their competition masquerading as concern. Maybe it was the novelty of seeing it in a different context, being an outsider. I let the conversation wash over me, inhaling the reek of the littered arroyo that trickled beside the school, the ubiquitous smell of roasting corn and dust and the lavender soap that the maids dumped into the street each afternoon when they had finished cleaning. I checked my watch—nearly two o’clock—and lazily glanced up the hill beyond the wrought iron fencing.
It was then I noticed her: an older woman standing outside the gate a short distance up the hill. She struck me immediately as an impressive person. Tall and exceedingly slender, she was dressed in a faintly androgynous way. Tailored button-up shirt, dark slacks, her cropped silver hair combed sleekly back. She held a cane in one hand, an over-sized black leather bag crumpled beneath her other arm. One foot poised above a milky stream of discarded mop water as if above a cool brook. In spite of everything, she possessed a very definite sort of elegance. She reminded me of an old greyhound rescued from the races, its body broken but its pedigree intact.
Her face turned safely in profile, I continued to study her. I had a habit of casting around for older women I found appealing. A way of reckoning with the inevitability of aging, maybe. Or the fact I hadn’t seen my mother since I was a girl. I suppose I did it with all women—that brutal process of deciding in a few wordless seconds whether someone counted or didn’t.
Into these chronic musings, she suddenly turned her face, and our eyes met. I tried to arrange my mouth into an expression of neutrality, as though I’d only just noticed her, to which she smiled in a way I couldn’t read. My cellphone was in my hand, a rudimentary !ip phone I rarely used. Self-consciously, I brought it to my face now, just as the school bell rang and the end-of-day pandemonium erupted, throngs of children flooding into the concrete breezeway, pushing and laughing. Right on cue, the ice cream man beyond the gate began calling out, his high voice cracking, “¡Paletas y helados! ”
I spotted Ida among the fray, alone as usual. I could see her already speaking to me, a river of words that never paused, not even to reverse their flow when she reached me. I could put a cardboard cutout of myself in front of her, I often thought, and she wouldn’t notice, so relentless was her focus on her own ideas.
Outside the courtyard, I stole a glance over my shoulder. The older woman had gone. Just as well. I had to return to the market—I’d forgotten limes—and as I continued on past our car, Ida seemed not to notice. She spoke fervently, touching her fingertips together in tense excitement. In this state, she would let me lead her anywhere, close at my side yet infinitely far away. I bought the limes at my usual produce stand, lingering for a moment to chat with the young seller. Then, as we were making our way out along a corridor that sold pottery, I suddenly caught sight of the woman from the hill.
“Ida, darling, hold on; can you wait here a moment?”
I hurried after the woman—to do what exactly? I had no idea. But I felt an almost primitive attraction to her. She had turned down another corridor. When I reached it, she was nowhere to be found, though, absorbed into the noisy thrumming of the market.
I doubled back, only to discover that Ida, too, had vanished. I looked up and down, my panic mounting as people brushed past me obliviously, talking, laughing. I retraced my steps. She wasn’t at the produce stand. I moved along the tables selling toys, ready to break into a run if only I’d known where, everywhere seeing other mothers holding their own children’s hands tightly. At an intersection crowded with plastic bins of flowers, I stopped, turning a slow circle as the claustrophobia of the market closed in on me, overwhelmed by my helplessness, my hampered Spanish, the limits of my belonging.
It was only a few minutes. Soon enough, I found her in the very corridor where I’d left her, crouching in concentration with several “fairy things” lined up on the concrete floor before her: tiny clay plates and pots, tiny straw brooms, tiny glass bottles, all of them handmade, smaller than a mouse might use. She seemed unaware of having been lost as I seized her shoulders in relief, kissing the fragrant crown of her head, her cheeks. Ida shook me off, maintaining her focus on the objects.
“I need these for my project.”
It was what she’d been talking to me about, I realized. I glanced at my watch. We were late. “Maybe tomorrow, my love.”
“Please,” Ida pressed, staring up into my face.
I relented. I smiled at her. Yes, she could have them. Only now she couldn’t decide which she wanted. I tried to hurry her—she could have all of them—at which she bristled and seemed to begin the process again, setting her mouth stubbornly as I pleaded and tried to reason with her: Daddy would be home already; María would be setting out the comida; we needed to bring her the limes.
At last, she handed me three things. I paid. We hurried to the car, Ida clutching the paper bag with her treasures. Inching up the steep Cuesta, caught behind a gas truck, I reproached myself for losing her, buying things for her and not for Henry, the trivial amount of money I’d spent and Tom’s imagined disapproval at it. Somehow the small exchange had left me unaccountably frazzled, almost bereft. What did it say of me, of my weakness and need, that I had chased after this woman I didn’t know?
As I was parking the car, I tried to extract some small measure of gratitude from Ida. “Do you like your new things, my love?” I always called my children by those names—love, darling, sweetheart, angel. When she nodded, I told her maybe it would be best if we didn’t mention anything about the gift to Daddy or Henry.
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From Mia by Leslie Bazzett. Copyright © 2026, Leslie Bazzett. Reproduced by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
