Displaced

Chapter 41

"Mama! Up!"

Gabriela Carreno put her knife down beside the half-chopped onion and bent down to scoop up her beloved son. She grunted as she lifted the two-year-old up to eye level. "You're getting heavy, Javier. You're Mommy's big boy now!" she said to the giggling toddler as she bounced him in her arms.

Carrying him against her shoulder, she walked over to the nearby table, grabbed the cheap plastic toy truck that was sitting idle on the table top, and set Javier down in the corner next to a crib. "Here, play with your truck for a while. Mama has to cook."

Before she turned back around, Gabriela took a moment to glance into the crib. Inside, Anahi slept soundly. She smiled at the sight of her precious daughter. Only six months old, the baby still slept a lot, which was good. Gabriela didn't know what she was going to do once they were both able to walk around at once.

Turning back towards the kitchen counter, Gabriela walked the six steps it took to go from one side of the room to the other, weaving around the table and the wheeled cart where a small television rested. Even with just her and her two children, the room felt cramped and crowded, but it couldn't be helped. Her tiny apartment only had two rooms, after all, their bedroom being the other, so this space served as the kitchen, the dining room, and the living room all in one.

She sighed. This place was already too small for them, and it would only get worse as her babies grew. But there was only so much that she, a single mother, could afford. So much of her income already went to pay Maria, the kindly elderly lady next door, to take care of them while she worked her two jobs, one cleaning office buildings and the other at a warehouse.

Every day she would come home from her jobs, collect her children from Maria, cook dinner and the next day's breakfast and lunch all together, and spend a few hours with her children before passing out, then get up the next morning and do it all over again. The strain of caring for her babies on her own with her low income pressed down on her daily, but she refused to buckle under the pressure. She was determined to give her children the life she'd never been lucky enough to have: a life of love.

Gabriela had never met her parents. Left at an orphanage here in Mexico City just days after her birth, she'd never known the feeling of family growing up. Sure, the adults at the orphanage had tried their best to fill that void, but nothing really could. Every night she'd fallen asleep to the sound of the sobs of a child who knew they were alone, but didn't know why. Sometimes those sobs had been her own.

Life had remained tough even after leaving the orphanage. Her lack of a family meant that she had basically nobody to lean on, be it for money, friends, or companionship. Through her strong work ethic she'd landed herself a job that provided a modest but steady living, but even at work she was alone. In part due to her upbringing leaving her with little in common with others and in part because she wasn't the prettiest girl around, friends and relationships were hard to come by and rarely seemed to last. Then, one day four years ago, she'd run into Juan again.

Like her, Juan had been a child at the orphanage, though he'd been a few years older so they hadn't interacted as much. She'd been shocked to find that he had been going through many of the same issues she'd been dealing with. Perhaps as a side-effect of the isolation in her life, she'd always thought her problems were hers and hers alone, impossible for others to understand. Juan had shown her just how wrong she'd been.

It had started as a chance meeting in a bar. They'd chatted about this and that, catching up on things after ten years of separation. But what began as two lonely people clinging to each other for a momentary reprieve from their involuntary solitude had grown into something more. They'd decided to meet again to chat. Soon, those chats turned into dates, and then those dates had become something serious. Very serious.