Alright, let’s have a chat. Sit. You have to be strong, because you’re all grown up now, right? Yes, yes you are. I’m going to leave and you two are going to stay, but it won’t be forever. Nothing is forever, I’ve told you that before: it’s just for a little while, then you’ll come live with me and everything will be better. No, don’t make that face, that’s exactly the face I don’t want to see you make. Do you have to cry over everything? I need to leave because, well, what am I doing here in Mexico? Yes, I know I said that the last time, but last time was different. It was different because it was different. You were different, I was different. But you know what doesn’t change? Exactly, you keep eating more every day. Get it? Sure, you get it, you understand perfectly. Have you thought about Diego? So little, so helpless, so good. Just look at him. When you were his age you were already playing on your own, but this one’s so dependent, he’s like his father, just like him, except not just like him, because we’re going to raise this one to be different, right? And that’s where you come in. It has to be you, who else can I trust? My mother? Your granddad? I need to trust you and you need to trust me. Enough with the oh woe is me, I don’t know what I want. Maybe you don’t know, but no one does, and that’s just how it is. You’re going to help me because it’s only by helping each other that we can help ourselves. What you do today, what you decide today, is going to help you tomorrow. Right? And that’s why you’re not going this house, this city? You don’t want that. Even if you think you do, you don’t.
And I didn’t say a thing, didn’t cry, didn’t say yes, didn’t say no. My mom and her soliloquies, Mom being Mom. And then she left. One Monday morning, while Diego was still asleep. Shhh, she said, keep quiet, or you’ll wake him. And I scowled at her, scowled hard, as if my eyes could communicate everything she wouldn’t let me say. I hate you and you hate me, and we hate each other, and you hate my brother and how he keeps you awake all night, and you hate everything: you hate yourself and my grandparents and your dead husband and me. You hate me and that’s why you’re leaving me with your son, and that’s why you act like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, but really, you’re already picturing yourself on the plane, you’re already on the plane, you selfish jerk, you’re already there. You’re already picturing yourself all European, all sophisticated, strutting right onto that plane. And I said all of that with my eyes, but my lips were pressed together and my stomach was clenched up, like it wanted to fuse with my intestines and join in their endless goddam gurgle gurgle.
Give me a kiss, she said, bringing her cheek close to mine, and it felt cold but soft. Because my mom was always cold. She was so thin and so hypoglycemic that she always had a cold body, and, I imagined, a cold heart. Come on, she urged, and she brought her cheek to mine again and I made a kissing sound: mwah! Then I sighed. She patted my shoulder and stared straight into my eyes: We’re going to see each other again, you and Diego are going to come to Madrid to be with me and everything will be different. Better and different. Everything always gets better and different.
Right? And she left . . . And I saw that she had forgotten her earrings, the ones she always wore, and I picked them up and went outside to see if the taxi was still there so I could give them to her, but it wasn’t, it was already gone. I was about to start crying, but Diego cried first and I ran to his bed to pick him up and I thanked him for being a little kid who didn’t yet know how to ask questions.
*
It wasn’t a short time, mom. It was nine years. That’s what I told my mother when she tried to convince herself that life had played a dirty trick on her. Yes, it was a short time, it was the time that it took. Or you think you just arrive here and the king of Spain is waiting to greet you at the airport: Hi there, welcome, how are you today, please, come right in, we’ve been waiting for you? No. It was a short time compared to the people who have it harder; not everyone can do this, flights cost a lot of money. Or what, you think I can just say: Oh, I’m already starving, but now I’ll eat even less, while they’re over there gorging on the euros I send them? Or what, you think I don’t know you two took advantage of me and extorted me and made me say yes to everything you asked for because I was far away?
You didn’t say yes to everything, Mom. You always said no when we asked you to come see us at Christmas. You didn’t come, but you did go on trips, you did travel through Spain while we were waiting for Diego to fall asleep on those nights when he was upset because you didn’t call him. You didn’t say yes to everything, Mom, because a lot of times I asked for your permission to go out with friends and you called and sent messages and wanted to know where I was all the time and I told you to leave me alone, that there were more than eleven thousand kilometers between us, and still I had you breathing down my neck. And you said no, that you weren’t going to leave me alone, because women get killed, they get raped, they get kidnapped, and that’s why you were going to bring us here. And now look at us.
And were you raped, were you kidnapped, was your body found in the Remedios River, is your face on a “missing” poster? No. You’re still here. That’s what she said, always the same sermon. And she flopped face-down on the bed to cry like Diego when he was five years old and I had to stand over him and tell him that’s enough now, calm down, that he had to take a bath, and he would shove me away and tell me I wasn’t his mom, and he’d keep crying until I got sick of it and offered him candy, and then he’d look at me differently and say ok, fine, but what was the point of taking a bath when in no time at all he was just going to get dirty again?
And that’s what my mom got stuck on: How long, how long? How much time did I really have with him? And it was true that it hadn’t been much: She didn’t even get two thousand days with Diego. His first three years of life, plus the time he lived in Madrid. That’s what my mother had: five years total with Diego. But still, I didn’t believe that life had played any dirty tricks on her. Didn’t matter how good a mother she was or wasn’t, didn’t matter how good and devoted a worker, life didn’t cheat her, not when it came to Diego, or to Spain, or to me.
It was true, though, that she’d had a hard life. Not like Aunt Carmela, who had someone to support her and take care of her and shower her with luxuries. Not like my grandmother, who was all, I hate you, my husband, but then cooked him mole and purslane whenever he asked and told him that was love. No, my mom was the ugliest in her family, the awkward, dull one. Not like her sister Carmela, who my grandparents boasted about because she was blond, or like Aunt Margarita, my uncle’s wife, who wore tight leggings so people could get a good look at that round ass of hers. No, people really called my mom ugly: big broad nose, dark skin, thick but shapeless lips. Skinny, squat. But also ugly in her voice, ugly in her sense of humor, everything ugly. And that’s why when she got married to Diego’s dad, everyone was happy and we all wanted a party and for her to wear white: because it was her moment. Her time to shine. That’s why we danced and sang and put flowers in her hair and my grandfather took out a loan from the bank and we set up tables and chairs and a white tent in the yard and my grandmother ordered carnitas from Michoacán and hired a lady to make tortillas on a hotplate, and Abuela herself made salsa and charred the chiles and made sure that the music was loud and that everyone knew her daughter was getting married. And the groom, what a husband, they all said, so good, so hardworking, so stoic, so tame. Full salary, nine-to-five job, the perfect spermatozoid to make Diego.
And we went on like that for two years, two, until the man was diagnosed with cancer and wasted away in just a few months. Boom, out of nowhere, overnight: one day, everyone was happy; the next day, all sad. And my grandfather’s house turned dark, or at least that’s how it seemed to me: darker, dirtier, more normal. An average house with some average grandparents, with a mother who wasn’t just ugly but also depressed, and I didn’t have anyone to play with, except for Diego, who was tied to my apron strings.
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Excerpted from Eating Ashes: A Novel. Copyright (c) 2026 by Brenda Navarro. Translation © 2026 by Megan McDowell. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved
