by Carol Roper

A pink and orange sunrise bathed the mountains and valley outside the windows of the custom home Lucy Green and her husband, Greg, designed together and hired a contractor to build for them upon a cliff  on the North Pacific Coast of Mexico.

She sat in in the kitchen nook her open laptop on the shelf looking at her mother Ruth’s face, the good side that was smooth and unmarked, the result of skilled surgery to remove a skin cancer her mother’s treatment with Aloe Vera gel failed to cure. Seen from this angle it reminded Lucy of her the way she’d looked when Lucy was growing up.

“It’s a good thing Daddy isn’t alive to see what you are doing,” Ruth protested.

“I miss him too, mom.” There were days she entered the quarters she’d added for her parents and felt as if he was still there in the guest apartment listening to a talk on his iPad. Lucy was happy and the arrangement worked until her mother tripped and fell off the patio that resulted in a concussion.

“Well, you didn’t live with him for sixty-seven years. How long are you and your husband going to keep me prisoner here?”

“You are a not a prisoner, you’re a guest.” In the beginning it seemed Ruth had completely recovered from her fall and was completely healthy.

“Call it whatever you want I’m not free.”

But one evening as she and Lucy were standing side by side in the kitchen preparing lunch and Ruth dicing cucumbers for a salad, she suddenly stated cursing her daughter and swiped at her with a knife cutting her arm ordered her out of her house. Lucy ran into the bathroom locking the door till Greg disarmed and subdued her mother.

A local physician arrived and gave Ruth a tranquilizing injection. He explained that paranoia and violence were sometimes a result when there’s been a serious insult to the brain like a concussion.  

After that incident it was obvious Ruth could no longer live with them. Lucy, at her husband’s insistence located a small, assisted living facility in a converted mansion just ten minutes away.  Lucy was impressed with the owner, Mexican woman who was licensed doctor in Mexico and the United States. She met the staff who were, young, dedicated and bilingual staff. The general ambiance of the place felt more like a luxury Bed and Breakfast hotel, not a hospital.

“Mom, I’m working on it, it’s just impossible…”

” I don’t like Mexico. I want to go back to the United States of America where I’m from.” Ruth said turning her head. The other side of her face was mottled with lined, creases the result of neglect and cigarette addiction, seeing it made Lucy think of the perceptual illusion drawing in which the brain switched between seeing a young woman and an old one. Ruth could have had matching surgery but had refused because the healthy skin was considered an elective surgery and not paid for by Medicare. Ruth decried this denial as elitist, because she could afford the procedure but not everyone could and a government was “for the people by the people,” not only for the rich. She declared she would not have additional surgery to the inequality in taxpayer medical care.

In theory Lucy admired her mother’s opinion, though she leaned more toward the practical and later wondered after she had attacked her with a knife if her mother been always been slightly peculiar.  

Concurrent with her mother’s screen image, Lucy glimpsed herself in a tiny onscreen box at the bottom of the monitor; her white hair pulled back and tied in a ponytail, her angular face, make-up free, appearing vibrant at age sixty-five.

“Thank God your father isn’t alive to see this,” she repeated. “I blame you. This us your fault,” Ruth accused. “This was all your doing. I get sent away but not your precious father. He got to stay with you and Greg and have his own nurse, but not me.   Your precious father always protected you from reality. He was a liar, you know. Everything he said was a lie and you believed him lie he was a saint. He treated you like a princess and me like a lady-in-waiting.”

“He was good to us,” Lucy said.

“Pul-leeze, spare me.” 

It was true that Lucy’s youth was sheltered in New Rochelle, Westchester but she was observant, bright child who by the time she was enrolled in exclusive private secondary school and made friend and attended sleep overs with classmates, had figured out a few things about her father. She recognized her classmates’ fathers worked regular hours on Wall Street, or law offices, or owned manufacturing companies. They had offices and secretarial staff. Compared to Lucy’s dad who had a dozen Dry Cleaning stores in the East Bronx, wore a suit, but she had seen a shoulder holster with a revolver in it under his jacket and knew other fathers didn’t. His chauffer/assistant was a burly, ex-pro wrestler who drove Lucy to school every morning from their sprawling home in New Rochelle before going to pick up his “The Boss.”

She knew that behind the wall in their basement that had a stuffed Swordfish he claimed he caught in the Bahamas was a large steel safe full of cash and valuables.

When anyone asked what her father did for a work, Lucy replied “He’s a management consultant.”   

Ruth leaned forward, peering into the camera. “Are you listening to me or staring at my freak face?” she demanded.

It was useless to lie, her mother’s concussion seemed to given her telepathic powers.  “No lie, Mom, it’s a grabber.”

“Why don’t you listen to me instead of your husband, that rat bastard. You don’t need his permission. It’s your money, sis.  I hope you have a prenup.

“He has grown children and his own assets, so it was common sense.”

“Good. I’m glad. You’re too soft Lucy, you want to save everyone and that is your problem, Lucy, you only see what you want to see just like with your dad.”

 “I’ll come see you later. We’ll go to Rosarito for lunch.”

“Don’t do me any favors. Tell me do you know who your dear husband voted for?

“Mom,” she her tone warned. “Let’s not go there. We’re having a nice conversation.”

 “I’m being nice.  You just keep telling yourself Greg’s not a fascist.”

“He’s Jewish.”

“You think we’re born inoculated? You think there are no self-hating Jews?”

“I think you don’t like Greg.”

“I’m grateful to him. He married you when you were forty-eight and I’d given up trying.”

Lucy heard the front door open and breathed in relief. Greg was back from his morning walk.

---

Stepping into their light-filled entry, Greg Green caught the sound of his mother-in-law’s gruff voice and knew his wife was being emotionally pummeled again. He didn’t understand why Lucy couldn’t set a boundary with her. It wasn’t Lucy’s fault her mother took a dive off their patio and hit her head. Truthfully, the woman was no picnic before she had a concussion and gone downhill, so to speak, since the fall. He and Ruth had little patience for each other. He knew she thought he married for financial advantage, though in fact Greg had walked away after thirty years employed by an aerospace company with a fat portfolio, a pension, and a three-unit apartment building in Santa Monica, California. He’d married because the time was right. He was long divorced, his three children were grown, Lucy was sexy and smart, had a great tennis backhand when they played doubles, and adored Greg. The only opinion he and Ruth shared in common was that he too would like to return home. It was Lucy’s idea that they have a second home in Mexico, and he went along with it because it seemed a good investment. Located along the North Pacific Coast of Mexico, a forty-five-minute drive to the U.S. border, Rancho La Puerta was like an American bubble inside Mexico, similar to any white suburb of mostly retired U.S. citizens where everyone there spoke English and local restaurants served typical American fare, printed menus in English, and charged in dollars, which saved him having to check currency exchange rates to be certain he was getting the best rate, which changed by the hour.

Greg didn’t like Mexico. The concept of “an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure,” nearly a religious precept in the USA, was absent. It shocked him that Mexicans waited till things broke and, if not repairable, abandoned things with a shrug in places like the estuary where he took his morning walk. Through Greg’s efforts reviving the Rancho La Puerta’s Home Owners Association, he and others of like mind had paid for the removal of an ancient, rusted-out Chevy Impala that had blocked the river’s flow to the ocean and a washer-dryer. They drove as if, like the Terminator in the movie, any damage to their bodies would reassemble, and as if death was just a concept, and when they did die, they had annual fiestas at cemeteries for the departed. Yes, it was economically a rising country, but culturally it left Greg cold. His chief complaint was the complacent shrug of acceptance of corruption that had made it possible for a giant, hideous mobile home to be placed on the empty lot across from Greg and Lucy’s home. Outrage burned in him at the violation of their private community’s Home Owner Rule that established Rancho La Puerta did not permit mobile homes. Yet somehow, before dawn several weeks ago, this yellow barracks-style thing had been snuck in and deposited to despoil their community. From that moment, a single thought dominated Greg’s thoughts: “Not on my watch,” he thought. Never. He would see that monstrosity removed if it was the last thing he ever accomplished and began his campaign.

Making Mexico his permanent home had never entered Greg’s mind. It was meant to be a vacation home and altered only when Lucy’s parents began their slide toward the end of life, which in Greg’s assessment was negotiable as he had undergone bypass surgery at the Veterans Administration in San Diego where he had all his medical care. Hanging his sun hat and walking stick on the brass hook next to the door, he prepared to rescue his wife from her loudmouthed mother-in-law.

---

Entering their custom-designed kitchen, Greg saw his wife’s shoulders drooped and knew his sweet-tempered wife, who’d abandoned animals and found them homes and couldn’t bear to see any creature in pain and desired nothing more than for everyone she knew to be happy, was on the emotional ropes, soon to be dropped with a knockout by her verbally pugilistic maternal parent.

“Have you taken your medication today, Mom?”

“Right here.” Her mother shook a pill bottle at Lucy. “I’m saving them to kill myself,” she said with a sneer.

“Mom, please.”

Greg strode to his wife’s side and rested his hand on her shoulder and felt her ease at his touch.

“You act like your mother’s too much trouble.”

A waft of his cologne filled Lucy’s nostrils and comforted her.

“But you are trouble, Ruth, and you like it.”

He leaned forward toward the screen. “But Lucy thinks you’re serious, and it worries her.”

“Now you’re Sigmund Freud?” Her mother growled and smiled at the attention.

“How are you doing, Mom?”

“Stop calling me Mom. I’m not your mother, and I wasn’t a teenaged bride! You’re seventy-two. I’m only fifteen years older, and I don’t know what my daughter sees in an old man like you.”

“I don’t either,” Greg grinned.

“He’s good in bed,” Lucy teased.

“Thank you, babe.” Greg pressed her shoulder and straightened his six-foot frame.

“I think I’m going to vomit,” said Ruth.

“You need anything from the States?”

“Bring some quality toilet paper. Mexican stuff is like wiping my ass with sandpaper.”

“Will do,” Greg said. Turning to Lucy, he mouthed, “Coffee?”

She nodded. Greg moved toward the kitchen’s granite counter with its gleaming home brewing system.

A young, portly Mexican woman in a blue scrub appeared on Lucy’s screen next to her mother.

“Señora Ruth, it’s a nice day to go to the beach,” she said in accented English.

“Hi, Salina,” Lucy greeted her mother’s caretaker with a wave.

“Speak English,” her mother admonished.

“She is speaking English, Mom.” Ruth pointed a finger at the screen as she leaned forward. The app closed.

“She hung up on me!” Lucy slammed her laptop closed. “And just after she threatened to commit suicide.”

“It was a box of Tic Tacs,” Greg said. “Patients don’t have access to meds.”

Lucy pushed her chair back and stood, smoothing her shorts. He grinned at the sight of her in shorts, her tanned, toned legs, a cute yellow top, her hair pulled back like a nineteen-fifties teen. She looked younger than her years. And no shoes or sandals.

“What are you looking at?”

“You look like a kid.”

“Do I? I think it’s Mexico. I mean even with all the stuff we’ve been through with my parents, it’s just easier, doctor’s make house calls and The Hacienda where Mom is costs the equivalent of a month in the least expensive facility in the States and here it’s luxurious, not that she appreciates it. She wants to come back. She wants to live with us again.”

“Why isn’t there someone to stab where she is?”

She smiled and asked. “What kind of humor is that called?

“I call’em as I see ‘em. I worry when you visit her.”

Lucy appraised her clean-shaven, narrow-hipped husband. His salt-and-pepper hair creased after removing his sun hat. His ironed jeans and plaid blue Ralph Lauren shirt open at the collar.

“I like that you worry about me. It means you love me.”

“What a strange thing to say, of course. You’re my wife.”

She paused, waiting for him to add, “I love you.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Everything. “I’ll go see her later.”

“Don’t you have a Spanish lesson today?”

She studied Spanish because it was a theory that learning a new language helped create new circuits in the brain. Given her paternal history she wanted to be proactive. Plus learning the language of the country made her feel more confident.

“I’ll go afterwards.”

“She’s lucky If your mother were an animal, she would’ve been shot long ago.”

“Greg!” she snapped.

“Sorry, that was insensitive,” he apologized. “I spent boyhood summers on my grandfather’s farm. I saw a lot of stuff.”

Greg pulled Lucy into his arms. “You know I want the best for Ruth.”

Lucy leaned into her husband and had a wave of pleasure through her body. “You smell so nice.”

“I know.” He grinned.

Looking up at him, she saw the tip of his surgery scar from cardiac bypass surgery through his open shirt.

She pressed her hips against Greg. He gently turned away. They’d been married seventeen years and enjoyed regular sex, though not recently.

He kissed the tip of her nose and disengaged. “Coffee?”

“Yes.” She felt the warmth of his touch dissolve and wanted him back.

Lucy looked out the windows. “Another day in paradise,” she said without irony. “Did you remember to buy reflectors for the windows?”

“I will.”

“We really need them, Greg. Birds can’t see the glass without reflectors. They see the sky and fly right into them and get stunned or die.”

“I forgot. I’ll get them this time.”

“It’s really important, Greg.”

“I know,” with a stony look.

“Okay, so see anything interesting on your walk?”

“In my official capacity as Secretary and ombudsman for our Home Owners Association,” he said, mimicking a theatrical voice, “Rancho La Puerta is a total mess. There’s a guy who’s a renter who has chickens in a coop in his yard. He’s selling eggs. Rancho La Puerta doesn’t permit client businesses.”

Lucy thought it better not to mention she’d bought four dozen there for the orphanage. “Does that mean we can’t get massages at Jackie’s house here? You like massages.”

“The HOA can issue a permit. I’m sure Jackie wouldn’t object.”

Lucy was sure of the opposite but kept silent.

“The important things on my list are getting a night guard and the removal of that hideous trailer across from us. It’s against the CC&Rs.”

“Rancho La Puerta has Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions?”

“Yes, when the old fisherman from New Orleans and his Mexican partner bought this so-called ‘worthless’ piece of earth that was too salty for farming and moved their wives, children, and mistresses here, they had the foresight to pay lawyers to create a community.”

Lucy smiled. “You’ve really done your homework.”

“This is kid stuff for me. Compliance was my specialty in the aerospace industry.”

“I’m just an amateur, but I hang out with the ladies and we talk and, um, well, there are a few people here who’ve been here longer than us, and you know they don’t have the resources we have.”

“Listen, we’ve been here seven years—a legal definition—and we have permanent resident status. We’re legal here.”

“It wasn’t such a big deal. I mean, Mexico is practical. They’re not crazy by-the-book, squeeze-every-nickel-out-of-people. They don’t deport you for not having a visa.”

“Well, they should. How the hell does the government know who is here? What about crooks and murderers?”

“Oh, they find them and they get sent back.”

“If someone is living here, a renter who can’t afford it, they can find cheaper rentals outside the gates at the bottom of the hill in the Mexican village.”

“Greg,” she drew out his name. “Be reasonable.”

This was as close as they came to having a political discussion. Early in their relationship they’d recognized they were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. He’d voted for George W Bush twice and couldn’t fathom why Lucy voted for Gore than Kerry, both of whom lost. After that they avoided political discussions and kept their votes secret as was their right.

She rationalized that Greg was not prejudiced because he’d spent months making hundreds of wooden toys for the village children and donated them to the local church for distribution.

“I couldn’t be more reasonable. Do you know that almost half the homeowners here are not full-time?”

“Yes.”

“And some haven’t paid HOA dues in five years! $150 a year! Yet they rent their houses for vacation renters, enjoy the very qualities that make their places attractive vacation rentals, but don’t pay their fair share of maintenance. Where in the USA would anyone find HOA dues of twelve dollars and fifty cents a month?”

“The Rancho La Puerta HOA rules are unenforceable,” Lucy stated flatly. “Unlike the States, the Mexican government doesn’t recognize private governments in its country.”

And there it was. His wife was nobody’s fool. Lucy knew how the world worked yet remained an idealist.

The coffee machine’s Ready light glowed orange. It was a good moment to end the discussion before it escalated.

“Stevia?” Greg asked lifting the carafe and pouring a cup for each of them.

“Already added,” Lucy replied.

“I only want to make things better and safer, to stabilize the community. I mean, what if we want to sell this place?”

“You want to sell?” This was the first she’d heard.

“No, not now. I mean, we want it to be an option. What if one of us dies? Would you want to live here alone?”

Hearing Greg’s assume he would be the first to go upset her. “Do we have to talk about this now? Are you feeling alright?” She worried about his high blood pressure and cholesterol. She followed a strict Mediterranean diet, though he loved a juicy steak.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, for now. We need a plan in place.”

“Why?”

“Have you gone Mexican now?”

“What kind of racist remark is that?”

“Have you joined the politically correct police?”

“I’m not alone here. I have friends here and outside of Rancho La Puerta. Mexican friends.”

“Look, this place was probably great for drinking beer and tequila and fishing and hiding your mistress ninety years ago, but we’re a long way from there. When we bought the land and built this house, it cost a hundred and seventy-five thousand American dollars. You know what it’s worth today? Twice that. You know what it’ll be worth in seven years? A million. This isn’t a poor part of Mexico. This is the Riviera north coast of Mexico. It’s as if we’d bought in Malibu or Santa Barbara in the nineteen seventies.”

“I don’t know what you mean…”

“Having a trailer across the street affects our investment. I can’t let that happen.”

She wanted to ask, “Why?” but offered instead an explanation, hoping it could help shape a mutual agreement.

“The manufactured home across from us is owned by a Mexican woman, a single mother with two children, who bought it so that her children can attend a better school in this area than where they lived before.”

“Whatever, they’re not our kind.”

“What are you saying?”

“Oh, Lucy, come on. I know your history—that your dad owned dry cleaning stores in the Bronx that were actually money laundering operations. He was part of what they called ‘The Kosher Nostra,’ Jewish mobsters in business with the Italian Mafia. But you and your mother, you lived respectably in New Rochelle, attended private school, had your own horse, and generally lived like his princess, studied international economics at a private college while playing competitive tennis until your knees gave out, and then one of his pals in the mortgage business hired you until the financial collapse of 2008, but that didn’t harm you or your family.”

“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

He mused a moment. “How are your knees doing these days? Is the physical therapy helping?”

Lucy drew in a breath and exhaled. “What are you telling me?”

“Just that I never cared about your background. It didn’t matter to me.”

“But it matters now?”

“Not really, it’s just sometimes our differences loom large. You grew up and were exposed to all kinds of people—Italian guineas, Irish Micks, Puerto Rican Spics, the blacks.”

“Stop.”

But he didn’t.

“You need to understand that I grew up in a small Pennsylvania mountain town, cut off from a city. My family was the only Jewish family, and we lived there because my town had offered my father a job in the nineteen fifties when Jews were relegated to back-room jobs if hired at all. The town was desperate for a General Practitioner. The pay wasn’t much, but the town council provided us a house. I survived there because I am tall and blue-eyed and once-upon-a-time blonde and athletic. I played decent basketball.”

“It must’ve been tough…”

Greg interrupted. “Not at all. I learned that’s how it is in the world. What I’m saying is the Mexican woman and her children who think putting a trailer that belongs in a slum next to valuable custom homes is okay is illogical thinking, and people who don’t think straight can’t be helped to a better life. Certain kinds of people are beyond help. And honestly, you should face that, Lucy. I can tell by your expression you think I’m wrong, but you would be surprised at how many of our neighbors agree with me. I’m not alone. We have to protect ourselves.”He smirked.

Lucy saw her husband now in his truth. It had taken a long time for him to reveal who he was but he had at last.  Her mother was right: Lucy was in denial about him, or had been, till that moment. Of course, there had seen hints, but she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge them, she needed not to know. She’d married Greg as a bulwark against loneliness that seeped into her life as her parents aged and she realized they wouldn’t always be there and she would be alone. Though it didn’t seem possible she could feel lonelier than she did at that moment.   

She watched as he picked up a Mikasa spoon and stirred his coffee as if he had not just upended their life together.

A loud thud on the window caused them both to look. Lucy, seeing a stunned red bird sliding down the glass, spun into action; fleeing to the kitchen door, she dashed outside hoping the red bird had survived.

ⒸCarol Roper Copyright 2025

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