Part Three: The Phone Call, and What Followed It
Carmen was in the kitchen when her phone rang — an unknown number, which she almost didn’t answer. She answered it because Emiliano was at a library session and she always answered unknown numbers when he was out, just in case.
“Hey,” said the voice. Unhurried. Familiar in the worst way. “Is it true about the boy’s award?”
Carmen felt a profound stillness settle over her, the way it does when you have been rehearsing for something for a long time and the moment arrives and the rehearsal turns out to have been sufficient.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well.” A pause in which she could hear him calibrating. “Isn’t that something. Sharp kid. It might be useful — in interviews, in the business world, you know — if he used my full last name. Salgado. Opens doors.”
Carmen let out a short, dry sound that was not quite a laugh.
“He opened his own doors,” she said. “Working from before dawn.”
“Don’t act all high and mighty, Carmen.” His voice shifted, the old authoritative edge returning, the tone of a man accustomed to being the largest presence in any room. “At the end of the day he still carries my blood. I’m still his father.”
“When the world sees who he really is,” Carmen said quietly, “you’ll understand the full weight of what you threw away.”
She hung up. She stood at the kitchen counter for a moment, then finished the dishes she had been doing when the phone rang, because the dishes needed to be done.
Five months after that call, a letter arrived from the National Program for Young Researchers at the San Ildefonso Institute of Applied Science. Emiliano had been selected from applicants across the entire country. Twelve spots. He had been chosen unanimously. The induction ceremony would be held in the institute’s main auditorium, attended by government officials and industry leaders and the national press.
Carmen read the letter three times, then set it on the table, then picked it up again. She was ironing Emiliano’s only white dress shirt — carefully, the collar first, the way her mother had taught her — on the morning of the ceremony when her phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number. It took her a moment to understand who it was.
Daniela here. Just so you know — Ricardo and I will be there later. He wants to be in the front row. He has the right to be there. He’s still the father.
Carmen set the iron down. She read the message twice. She thought about what she knew that Daniela did not know, what she had learned from Emiliano three days earlier when he had come home late and sat across from her at the kitchen table and, with the measured calm he had possessed since infancy, explained to her what he had been doing for the past eight months.
She picked the iron back up and finished the shirt.
There was a knot in her stomach, yes — but it was not fear. It was the particular tension of someone who knows something enormous is about to happen and has made their peace with it.
