Fiction: Four Vats(a short story)

By Pat Hamilton

Billy said that his talk of huevos con chorizo yesterday compelled him to tell the story of Carlos’s abuelita and her four huge, tall pots.
    “When I was newly arrived in El Paso, I met Carlito in a Lit class at UTEP. When he found out I played guitar, he introduced me to two guys in his apartment building who played and sang, and so he brought us all together, and that night was so great, it enhanced the bond between Carlos and me, one result being that one evening, he took me to meet his grandmother at her house.
    “Well, she loved me right away, and I, her. Tiny, wiry, with gray hair pulled tightly back, she made me feel a part of her family, and I have no idea how she managed that so effortlessly. The door from the carport opened into the kitchen, and I noticed first four huge pots, one on each burner of the stove. I have often attempted, from memory, to tell what each of those vats contained, but I can’t. Of a certainty, pintos simmered in one.”
    “Oh, yes,” Paula concurred.
    “And yellow, tomato-sauced fried rice in another.”
    “Those two are a given. Givens?”
    “Yes, but in the other two? The meal stands out in my memory, as you shall hear in elaborate detail, but yet the part that made the meal unforgettable and still burns are the words with which tiny Abuelita shamed me at the end.”
    “Well, start with those, why don’t you? I don’t need another round of your excessive food porn, but some shaming sounds enticing.”
    “Oh, I am sorry, Dahling! But I have started now, so it’s too late and I’m raring to go, so you’ll have to bear with me, but I will strip the yarn of all porn. So I know the third pot held meat of some kind, beef, doubtless, but it’s that fourth one I can’t remember that maddens me to this day.”
    “Sopa? Queso? Menudo?”
    “Helpful, darling, but no. You do, though, remind me to tell you about this same granny’s menudo that she served me on my next visit.”
    “Then it could only be tamales.”
    “Ha! Delightful! I wish, but no. I’d remember those.”
    “Well, I guess I’ll order some egg rolls and tempura shrimp to tide me over till you get to what she said that shamed you. Hand me my phone, please, baby. You never asked her name?”
    “Of course I did! Emilia. But she said Emily, so I asked was it really Emilia, and she nodded, but then she swore me to secrecy, and I swore I’d reveal her secret to no one. We embraced in the pantry.”
    “Liar!”
    “Mollusk! Sea urchin! Pearl without swine!”
    “All quite weak.”
    “Thank you, young bride. Anyway, it must have been some salsa made from dried red chiles, but....”
    “But who cares? No one.”
    “No one, yes! But I do. I remember the three, but not the fourth one. So, omitting the pornography, a small group gathers around the table. No grandpa, but mostly the third generation: grandson Carlos, his cousin Hector, a couple girls I didn’t know who they were.
    “Gran fills my plate for me. I wolf it down. Everything is delicious and filling and I’m full, already. She snatches my plate when I am scooting my chair back and kind of mildly stretching and just beginning my compliments and gratitude, and she plops another heaping plate before me, so I thank her, of course, and dig in, because, really, her cooking was that overwhelmingly delicious.
    “But now I am truly overstuffed and she’s already filling my plate with thirds and I’m protesting ‘No, no!’ while vaguely recalling some rules and customs about not offending my host, and Abuelita stands over me now with my plate in her hand and a sudden scary scowl on her mouth, saying, ‘Whatsamatter? You don’t like it? It’s not good enough for you?’ to my mortification.
    “Hahaha ha! I recoiled in shame in that instant, unable to conceive any reply, but now I know she was just fucking with me, the new gringo, all alone and afraid.”
    Paula let a pause hang while she cradled her husband’s head in both hands and pulled it to her breast. “I know her,” she said. “Emily.”
    “Not really,” said Billy, as a half-question.
    “Not really. But whether she was born in Texas and her family had been there for generations, or she was born in Chihuahua or somewhere....”
    “I never asked.”
    “She had lived so long in these United States that she had surpassed her gringo neighbors in smartassery. She had witnessed the white-flight phenomenon that left her bordertown with but a tiny percentage of pinche gueros. She didn’t need a reason to love you or me, had I been there, for her nature beautifully loved everyone until proven unloveworthy. She might have believed that because she’d lived so long as a tiny scrappy chica, she’d just love as freely as she wanted in what life remained. The generosity in sharing with you as with her family was but one expression of her love, not just for you but for any stranger in need of welcome and hospitality, nourishment and love.”
    “She had no way to foresee I’d love her forever from just two encounters.”
    “Or probably she did know, having seen the same love grow over and over again through the decades, which proved to be much shorter than long.”
    “A Catholic thing, you think? They take that love-thy-neighbor mandate seriously there.”
    “Could be,” she said. “Or just a love thing, above names and labels. Like Juarez is called a sister city to El Paso, such a beautiful appellation coming from family meaning more to our relations on and south of the border than it does in the dog-eat-dog dollar-is-God shallower hearts of us paler neighbors who feel that the invisible line in the sand marks the spot at which some people become illegal, but even those outspoken persons know, in their deeply loving hearts, no one is illegal, and that even such terminology lacks the force of truth, that all people are Abuelita, ready to feed a stranger, to call an ambulance, to reunite a puppy found on the highwayside with his family. All of us share the world, her sunsets, her rain and other musics, and we all embody love. Love your neighbor as you do yourself, and not only just as you love yourself but because love moves the world and conquers your own will and other opposing wills, maybe in spite of your belief, but no, because you believe in love, in spite of everything.”
    “Hey, Paula?”
    “William?”
    “Are you talking to me?”
    “No, sir. Guess I got up on my soapbox. But wasn’t I grand?”
    “We haven’t fought! We have absolute agreement, and yet it’s overwhelmingly, thrillingly erotic. Let us to bed!”
    “Okay,” she said. “But I prefer the fighting part.”
    “I guess I do, too, but this is the shock of the new.”
    “You never let me have the last word!”
    “This time, it’s yours, if it’s yes: I need some Ben & Jerry’s after that long parching diatribe about love. May I bring you some, mi amor?”
    “Mais oui.”

Copyright © 2022 by Pat Hamilton Pat Hamilton has written three novels, hundreds of songs, and a handful of book reviews for the papers. He taught College English for 30 years, which helps him blend popular and classic literature in his writing. As an Army brat, he traveled the USA and Europe before settling into the beauty of Tennessee, but the rock star he used to be still lives on inside him.