Thirty-Two Degrees in My Stepmother’s Shade

Mateo arrived on a Thursday with an enormous suitcase, a backpack slung over one shoulder, and the expression of a twenty-year-old who has been moved to another country by a decision he did not make. The flight had been long, the city was unfamiliar, and his father greeted him at the airport with the same brief, awkward hug you give a distant acquaintance, not a son you have not seen in years.

In the car, on the way home, Ricardo asked questions about the flight, about Mateo’s mother, and whether he had eaten anything. Correct, spaced-out questions that Mateo answered with the same formality, and both of them stared out the window with that quiet relief of people who have already done the social part of something difficult.

The apartment was spacious and well located, in one of the city’s better buildings, on the fourteenth floor with twenty-four-hour security and an elevator that made no noise. It was not a mansion, nor did it pretend to be one, but it had that tangible solidity of spaces inhabited by someone who earns well and knows how to spend it: living room with a home theater, fully equipped kitchen, little Tomás’s room decorated with a criterion that clearly had not been his father’s.

Ricardo showed him everything with the efficiency of a real estate agent: the living room, the kitchen, the study he was not to enter without asking, his little brother’s room and, at the end, almost as an administrative detail, the guest room that would be his. View of the city, private bathroom, neutral furniture. Functional and personality-free, as a guest room ought to be. Mateo set the suitcase on the floor and said nothing, but that word, guests, lodged somewhere in him that he preferred not to inspect right away.

—Breakfast is at seven-thirty —Ricardo said—. I leave at eight. I have a meeting.

He always had a meeting.

That was when Marcela appeared.

Mateo heard her before he saw her: light steps in the hallway and a voice calling for Tomás with that perfect mix of authority and tenderness young mothers have. When she rounded the corner with the boy on her hip, Mateo suddenly understood several things he had only intuited before. Why his father had married her. Why, in the company-event photos he had found online, Ricardo’s partners looked at him with that particular blend of envy and respect. And why the world distributed its gifts with an injustice that was sometimes hard to accept gracefully.

Marcela was thirty and had the kind of beauty that needs no introduction and no effort. Tall, with long, straight black hair framing a face of clean features and skin that seemed never to have known neglect. Honey-colored eyes, too light for a face like that, the sort you look back at to make sure they are real. And the body, which neither her house clothes nor the child on her hip could conceal: generous, firm breasts beneath a thin cotton blouse, hips that asserted themselves with the same naturalness as sunrise, long legs ending in simple sandals. A fully formed woman since youth, one of those who do not improve with age because there was never any room to improve in the first place.

—Welcome —she said, offering him her free hand with a smile that was sincere without being calculated—. This is your home.

Mateo shook her hand, felt the heat of her fingers, and said thank you very much with a composure that cost him more than he would have liked to admit. Then he looked at the child. Tomás had just turned two, had his mother’s black hair and big dark eyes, and was appraising him with the unfiltered seriousness very small children reserve for strangers. Mateo made a face at him. Tomás stared a second longer and hid his face in Marcela’s neck.

—He’ll warm up —she said, laughing.

Well, well, old man, Mateo thought when he saw her for the first time. And immediately felt a little miserable for having thought it.

***

Ricardo had met Marcela three years earlier at his own company, an appliance importer where he was CEO and she had joined the sales department with a university degree, good references, and that combination of intelligence and presence that quietly rearranges the way people stand when they enter a room.

Ricardo, who had spent years getting what he wanted with the same methodology he used to run his businesses, had started flirting with expensive details and measured attention, the projection of a solidity that at that point was not yet entirely false.

Marcela, for her part, had reached twenty-eight with a romantic history that was basically the same disappointment in different wrapping. Handsome, charming men her own age who, without exception, ended up being some variation of the same thing: freeloaders, irresponsible, incapable of committing to anything that was not their own navel. She had loved intensely and had been disappointed with equal intensity, and somewhere between the last boyfriend and Ricardo’s arrival she made a decision she never said out loud but that her behavior made clear. She had already tried the immature men of her generation. Maybe a change of perspective was needed.

Ricardo was not the man of her dreams, and she knew that from the start with that honesty toward herself that was one of her strongest traits. He was fifty-five when they started dating, with an energy that was no longer that of a young man and a way of being in the world that was orderly but not exactly warm. And yet he had things her previous boyfriends, for all their looks, had never had: he showed up when he said he would, solved problems without drama, made a woman feel protected in a way she did not realize she had missed until she had it.

When, a year later, Ricardo proposed with a ring that cost what she earned in six months, Marcela said yes thinking about the future. Not only hers. The children she wanted, that child she was already imagining with almost physical clarity, that boy who deserved everything she had not had: stability, security, a school where there would be nothing to worry about.

She had known about Mateo from the beginning. The son from Ricardo’s first marriage, living with his mother in a neighboring country, would eventually come to study university with them. Far from unsettling her, it seemed like a good sign: the fact that Ricardo acknowledged that financial responsibility, even if the emotional one was something else, said something about him. Or so she thought then.

Little Tomás arrived eight months after the wedding. Healthy, beautiful, with his mother’s exact features and a smile that appeared early and stayed forever. Ricardo looked at him with the genuine pride of a man before his heir, and for a few weeks Marcela allowed herself to think she had chosen well. That the kind, attentive version of Ricardo she had met first was the real one, and the other a passing phase.

It wasn’t.

Something began to change so slowly it was hard to point to the exact moment. As if, for Ricardo, she had ceased to be a woman the instant she became a mother. Their nights together became less frequent without explanation. The little attentions disappeared. Late arrivals became routine, and the cheap perfumes that came with him, perfumes that were certainly not his, confirmed what she preferred not to confirm. Marcela was not naive. She was very intelligent, and sometimes that intelligence weighed on her, because it would not let her ignore the obvious.

But Tomás slept in a room decorated in the best neighborhood in the city, had a private pediatrician, and a life she had designed down to the last detail long before he existed. And that, she repeated on the nights Ricardo did not come home or came home without looking at her, was worth what it cost.

***

Mateo took exactly two days to understand the dynamics of that apartment.

His father was a peripheral presence: he arrived late, left early, talked about business on the phone during dinner the few times he showed up, and looked at Marcela with the same functional expression with which he looked at the doorman. He loved Tomás; that much was obvious. He held him with a tenderness that contrasted completely with how he treated the rest of the world. With Mateo he was polite, attentive in practical matters, punctual with spending money. But there was something in the way he treated him Mateo could not name until the third night, when he realized: his father treated him exactly like a guest. With the proper courtesy and the right distance. As if he were someone passing through, someone who would at some point pick up his suitcase and leave, and the real life of the apartment would go on without him.

Marcela noticed before Mateo said anything. She saw it in Ricardo’s small gestures: the study locked even though Mateo had never shown the slightest interest in going in, the way he divided up house chores without including him, as if his presence were temporary. One night, with Ricardo already asleep, she found Mateo in the kitchen making himself a sandwich with that quietness of someone who does not want to make trouble in someone else’s home, and something in that image hurt her in a way she had not expected.

She put a hand on his shoulder for a moment.

—Mateo. This is your home too.

He looked at her. He nodded with a smile more grateful than the phrase required. Marcela went to bed thinking about that gesture and angrier at Ricardo than she had been in a long time.

With Tomás, by contrast, Mateo was something else. The boy had adopted him with the absolute speed and determination of a two-year-old, and Mateo reciprocated with a naturalness Marcela found endearing. He picked him up, dropped to the floor to play with his things with a patience many adults would not have had, made faces until he got that baby laugh that is impossible not to catch. Sometimes she found them in the living room, Tomás climbing all over Mateo as if he were available furniture, the two of them watching cartoons with the same concentration, and she thought Mateo was going to be a good big brother. He already was.

With her, Mateo discovered from the first day a ease he had not expected. Ten years separated them, but they shared references with disarming ease: the same shows, some music, the same way of finding small things funny. Marcela had the gift of making people comfortable without visible effort, and Mateo, who had arrived expecting to feel out of place, found in her something that made the situation not only tolerable but genuinely good.

They went out together almost every day. Shopping malls, university visits, the movies when Tomás allowed it. Mateo pushed the stroller without being asked, carried the bags, held the door. Not out of calculation, but because that was how his mother had raised him, with that basic, solid upbringing that is sometimes the only thing a single mother can guarantee. Marcela noticed and appreciated it without saying so.

***

Mateo tried not to look at her too much. He really did try, with mixed results. There were moments when the effort was simply insufficient: at the movies, when the screen light caught her profile and that neckline; at the mall, when she bent to pick something up for Tomás and her clothes molded in ways he preferred not to register so precisely. Marcela was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen up close, lived in the same house, made breakfast in pajamas, and sometimes looked at him with those light eyes and smiled as if she did not know perfectly well the effect she had.

He was not a boy with bad intentions. He was simply a twenty-year-old boy in a situation no twenty-year-old is designed to handle calmly. Back in his country he had left Carolina, his first serious girlfriend, with whom he had come almost to the end without quite getting there. The moment had been cruel: six days before he left, Carolina had sucked him off for the first time, awkward and brief, finishing him with her hand because she was afraid he would come in her mouth. To Mateo, who had built certain expectations from years of videos where things worked in a rather different way, it had seemed like an unsatisfying outcome, although he said nothing because it was not the time. She had also sucked his breasts, which had been notably better. That was the full extent of his experience with real women, and it was a good deal less than a situation like this demanded in order not to lose his composure.

At night, in his room with a view of the city, Mateo processed all of that in the only way available to a boy in his situation: he started thinking about Carolina and inevitably ended up somewhere else, and then fell asleep with that concrete mixture of relief and mild guilt that is the emotional signature of twenty. The universe, he concluded before closing his eyes, has a particularly cruel sense of humor.

***

It was on a Sunday, at dinner, when Ricardo showed up with the face of a man bringing an announcement, not a question.

—I bought an apartment on the coast —he said, pouring himself wine without offering any—. Three hours from here. Ocean view, new building, good area.

Marcela looked at him.

—When?

—This week. It’s an investment. And a place for weekends, once it’s ready.

Mateo listened without commenting. Tomás was demanding attention from his chair with the renewed energy of someone who had just woken from a nap.

—There’s still stuff to install —Ricardo went on—. The kitchen, the air conditioning, the new furniture. It’ll take a few days. I want you all to go next week and stay while everything gets organized. I’ll go on weekends; during the week I have work.

—For how many days? —Marcela asked.

—However many it takes. Two weeks, maybe a little more. The workers will be there. Someone has to supervise.

What he did not say, but what Marcela understood perfectly, was that that someone had to be anyone but him. Because he had more important things. He always did.

Mateo said nothing. He looked at his plate and then at Marcela, who held his gaze for a second with an expression that said what she could not say aloud: I know, and I’m sorry, and it isn’t fair.

***

The seaside apartment was, indeed, beautiful. Direct view of the sea, a small terrace, floor-to-ceiling windows that turned the ocean into something that looked painted. Ricardo did not skimp when the taste was for him; that was undeniable. Three bedrooms: the main one, with an en-suite bathroom and the best view. Tomás’s room, small and still undecorated, where Marcela would improvise something with what she had on hand. And the third, the guest room, for Mateo. Again. Always the guest room.

Marcela noticed. She noticed that Ricardo had not hesitated for a second when assigning the rooms, that he had considered no other option, that the word guest was still what defined Mateo’s place in any property of his father’s. That night, while unpacking, she decided that at least in that apartment, during those weeks, Mateo was not going to feel that way if she could help it.

Otherwise, the place was a half-finished floor, with a makeshift kitchen of microwave and small fridge, and a humid, constant heat coming off the sea that crept in through every window with a democratic, relentless persistence. Thirty-two degrees with humidity that made it feel like thirty-seven, a temperature that changed everything: your mood, your clothes, the distance you kept between your own body and someone else’s.

The WiFi was not there. Cable TV was not there either. The provider had informed them, with the equanimity of someone delivering bad news that was not his, that in twelve business days the connections for the new residential area would be ready. Twelve days in which the only available entertainment was the noise of workers installing the kitchen, the discussions over the color of the walls in Tomás’s room, and the sea, which was beautiful but after the first day was simply the permanent backdrop to everything.

Marcela organized the rooms, set routines with Tomás, coordinated the workers with an efficiency that would have surprised Ricardo had he been there to see it. Mateo helped where he could, carried Tomás when she needed her hands free, went down to the boardwalk to get ice or whatever was needed without being asked.

The heat changed everything, and Marcela in particular it changed in ways Mateo would have preferred not to be changed so much, or more, depending on the time of day and how much control he had over his own thoughts. In the city, Marcela dressed with the discretion of a married woman in a setting where appearances matter. On the coast, with thirty-two degrees clinging to the skin and no meetings to attend, she dressed with the simple logic of survival: shorts that ended quite a bit higher than Mateo would have found convenient, thin-strapped blouses that did things with that neckline he tried not to register too often and with results that got worse by the day. When Tomás took his nap and the workers stopped, she would lie on the terrace overlooking the sea in just enough to not technically be in a bikini, and Mateo found reasons to be in the living room, which had a window onto the terrace, with a frequency he himself recognized as not at all casual and which nevertheless he could not manage to change.

Goodbye shopping malls, universities, and movie theaters. The days were for hearing drills, discussing finishes, and going out all three of them to the boardwalk to find somewhere to have lunch and somewhere to have dinner, with Tomás in the stroller and Ricardo’s card with a daily limit that was enough but not excessive. The nights, when the boy was asleep, were the two of them alone in the half-finished apartment, with a deck of UNO cards as the only form of entertainment.

***

Mateo always won. With a regularity Marcela found somewhere between irritating and amusing, he racked up victories without celebrating too much or rubbing anything in. He had earned himself two weeks without washing his own clothes, which had been the first bet, and had gotten her to promise to talk to Ricardo about the TV for his room, the apartment’s most immediate object of desire in the city and one his father considered unnecessary given the home theater in the living room.

The third night, Ricardo called at eight. Marcela listened with the face of someone receiving exactly what she expected. Early meeting the next day. He could not make it that night. Tomorrow he would see whether he could stop by, though probably not. She hung up, looked at the phone for a moment, and set it on the table.

Tomás had been asleep since seven-thirty. The apartment was quiet and the sea outside sounded with that constancy that after three days was simply the silence of that place. Mateo was on the sofa with a book he had brought in his backpack.

—Want to play? —Marcela said.

Mateo lifted the book.

—I’ve already beaten you all day.

—Then let’s make it more interesting —she said. She sat across from him on the floor, crossing her legs, the thin straps of her blouse tightening with the movement. Mateo made the usual effort with his eyes—. The chores are done. The TV is done. Let’s bet something else. Something you actually care about.

Marcela looked at him, waiting, genuinely curious.

Mateo gathered his nerve. He said it with that half-smile of someone ready to turn it into a joke if things got awkward.

—Clothes. That would interest me.

Marcela was not offended. She was not scandalized. She looked at him for a moment with those honey-colored eyes and something quick and pragmatic went through her head: he was a twenty-year-old boy, not a predator. They had been bored for three days and had nine more ahead of them. Her husband was not coming. Tomás was asleep. And she had spent months being invisible to the only man who should have seen her.

A prank. Nothing more than that.

—Deal —she said, and began to deal the cards.