The World in Half by Cristina Henríquez Page B

nothing good in the cookbooks,” she said. “It’s all that thirty-minute crap. Listen, sit down here for a second. I need to ask you something.”
    I sat and waited. I could feel the cold air pressing through the pane of glass at my back.
    “Do you know ‘Isle of exile’? It’s four letters.”
    The book on her lap was a crossword puzzle book. In the past few months, she had grown obsessed with crossword puzzles. She did at least one, sometimes more, every day. She thought they were good for her, for keeping her mind limber, as she said.
    “ ‘Isle of exile’? Maybe Elba.”
    “Elbow?”
    “Elba.”
    “I don’t think that fits with twenty-three across. Unless I have that wrong. Damn it.”
    “Mom, did you buy that book?”
    “Do you know ‘Susan of L.A. Law ’?”
    “ L.A. Law like the television show? No idea.”
    “You never know the ones about TV.”
    “That’s because I don’t really watch TV.”
    She scribbled a word quickly into a series of boxes.“Tango,” she muttered. “I should have gotten that one earlier.”
    “Did you already buy it?”
    “What about ‘Last letter in Leeds’? I thought it was s, but apparently the answer is three letters long. Then I thought maybe it was E-S-S, but that’s stupid, right? You can’t spell letters. Letters are what you use to spell other things.”
    “You can spell letters. One of the final five words in the 1998 National Spelling Bee was the spelling for h. A-I-T-C-H.”
    My mother stared at me in disbelief.
    I laughed. “What?”
    “How do you know things like that?”
    “Come on,” I said, trying to get her attention back on the puzzle. “Maybe it’s ‘zed.’ ”
    “Excuse me?”
    “That’s how they say the letter z in England, where Leeds is. Leeds, England.”
    My mother shook her head—“Complicated,” she said—but she wrote it in. “And no, I didn’t buy it yet, but I’m planning on buying it. Don’t worry.”
    “I’m not worried.”
    “The hell you aren’t.”
    She knew, even though I had never said so out loud, that for the past few months I had been worrying as if it were my full-time job and someone were paying me a multimillion- dollar salary to do it well. At least, that’s what it felt like. I worried whether she was getting enough to eat, whether she was getting enough sleep, whether it was good-quality sleep. I worried whether she would pay the bills on time and whether she would write the checks for the right amount, whether she locked all the doors before she went to bed, whether she turned off the oven when she was finished using it, whether she would trip on something on her way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, whether every next time I talked to her she would sound worse than the last.
    I got her up, and we waited in a short checkout line while my mother clutched the crossword puzzle book to her chest.
    “So what did you buy?” she asked, signaling toward my bag.
    “A book.”
    “What book?”
    “Just a book.”
    “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
    Behind us, an older man with a beard and ice-blue eyes coughed and looked to the side, but I could tell he was listening to us.
    “Maybe it’s a gift for you,” I said.
    “Why would you get a gift for me? Christmas is over.”
    I shook my head. “You’re right. I can’t think of a single other reason why I would get you a gift.”
    “Well, that was mean.”
    “I was being sarcastic! Come on, don’t worry about it.” I crumpled the top of the bag—it made an awful crinkling sound—and gripped it in my fist.
    A minute later we were at the counter to pay. My mother slapped down her book and started unzipping her purse for her wallet. I watched as the cashier flipped through the book’s pages—a routine inspection—and stopped at the puzzle my mother had half filled. I swallowed. The cashier—she was young, maybe in high school—slid the open book to the lip of the counter. Her fingernails were short and bitten.
    “Did you