We caught a flight from Salt Lake City to Miami, but there was no available flight to Honduras until the next day. So, we spent a miserable 24 hours or so living in the airport. We slept on the floor, and the only form of entertainment my sis and I found was hunting for change under vending machines.
When we finally made it home, we were happily reunited with Candy and our cool tomcat, Nacho. Well, I don't know that Nacho was very happy that we came back. We were kind of rough on him. We'd dressed him up and roughed him up, and I even swung him around by his tail once or twice. He had been a gift to us from our former nanny, an attempt on her part to make us like her. Unfortunately for her, it didn't work, and we ran her off by throwing Nacho at her. His claws did enough damage that she gave up the job. We'd hated her from the get go, but the last straw for us was when she tried to make us take showers one night when my mom was out late. She couldn't get both of us at the same time, so she locked me out of the house while she forced my sis into the cold water (there was no hot water in Honduran homes). My sis was screaming, so I climbed up to the bathroom window and broke it. The nanny was so freaked out by the sound of the shattering glass that she let my sis go. She didn't last long after that because we did all we could to get rid of her.
One night when we no longer had a nanny, my sis and I were sitting in my mom's room watching TV while waiting for her to come home from work. When Fantasy Island came on, we got excited because Mom rarely let us stay up late enough to see it. When it ended, we got scared because we realized that something had to be wrong. Mom was never that late. Suddenly every little noise was a burglar or wild animal trying to break in, and we were very aware that we were all alone in a house that was mostly surrounded by monte.
A while later my mom came home. She was visibly shaken and looked like she could fall apart at any moment. At our insistence, she explained that Alfredo's wife had shown up at Mom's office and started a fight. Mom had scratched Sofia's eye in self defense, but the police took her to jail for it anyway. Only after hours of pleading with the officers and begging them to let her go home to her girls, did they finally have compassion on her and let her out. I don't think she told us the whole story, but we didn't really care. We were just glad that she was alive and home with us.
The relationship Mom had with Alfredo was off and on over a span of 10 years. He'd promise her he was working on a divorce. She'd get tired of waiting and break up with him. He'd convince her that the divorce was about to go through, and they'd be back together again. It was a confusing and viscious cycle. When they were off, Mom would get really close to Sis and me. We'd go on Sunday drives along random countryside roads and sing songs and play games together. When they were on again, she'd spend most of her time with him; and even if we were with them, her focus was on him. I grew to despise him, because it always seemed that he was taking her away from us.
I also found myself daydreaming often of living a more comfortable life in the U.S. with my father. In Honduras, we had no air conditioning, though temperatures were generally around 100. We had no washing machines, and did all of our laundry by hand in an outdoor sink. There were no lawn mowers, so we paid a man to chop the grass with a machete. The water was not safe to drink without being boiled, and we actually found a tiny fish in our tap water once. Electricity was unreliable, and we usually lost power a few hours each day. And we had no telephones.
There was some building downtown where you could go to pay to use a phone, and I remember doing that a couple of times to talk to my dad and my grandparents. The only other communication I had with my father was by mail, which was very slow. I remember getting a letter from my dad and not wanting to write him back because I hated writing. But my mom made me write to him, and I was glad she did. I found out years later that my dad didn't want to write to me...not because he didn't like writing, but because it would make him sad that he couldn't see me...but his wife pushed him to keep writing to his daughters, no matter how painful. I love my stepmom for that.
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