Teresita would hear his sighs and occasionally, but not very often at all, their bed frame knocking against the walls and María’s voice, guttural as a cat’s, urging him on: “Dámelo fuerte, hombre,” and “More!” and “Just a little longer, please! Give me more, and strongly, carajo!” Suppressed female cries, the sucking in of air, as if inhaling fire, the bed rocking more loudly, and then all such noises abruptly ceasing, Gustavo, portly by then, falling back or rolling to his side and gasping with exhaustion.

Then nothing more, until the next morning, when the three would share breakfast before Gustavo and María went off to their jobs, and Teresita, an honors student at Miami Northwestern High, awaited her bus. A solemn silence, Gustavo good-naturedly cooking up the eggs with chorizo, María, a bandanna wrapped about her hair, smoking her Virginia Slims, the lady’s preferred cigarette, one after another, and barely eating more than a few bites of her food. Then a voice from a Spanish-language station, WCMQ in Hialeah, chattering away about traffic patterns before introducing yet another old classic Cuban canción while María, straightening out the buttons of Gustavo’s crisp blue shirt, asked him tenderly, “More coffee, my love?” but with her mascara eyes saying something else. Some old Benny Moré heartbreaker, or perhaps a danzón by the Orquesta Aragón, but occasionally, as well, another of those songs from that epoch when “Cuba was Cuba,” sonorous with violins, a flowing piano, and a beatific baritone, Nestor’s own, in his rendition of “Beautiful María of My Soul.” Just then, Gustavo, hearing those strains, rapped the tabletop and, dabbing his mouth, announced, “Well, I’ve got to go.” Kisses for his stepdaughter, a kiss on María’s cheek, the door opening, and the dense humidity of a Miami morning wafting into the air-conditioning of that kitchen like a mist. “Cuídate, amorcito,” María, running hot and cold, would call after him. The door closing, she would stub out a cigarette, click off the radio with a sigh, as if one memory too many had been provoked by that song.

The discord saddened Teresita. She’d grown close to that man. He may not have been the most dynamic stepfather a girl could have, but he was good to her. And he may have disappointed María lately in some ways, but with Teresita, he never went wrong. She loved their tranquil promenades along the streets at dusk, on their way to get ice cream from a truck that always showed up on a certain corner at seven in the evening. He liked to take her places on his days off, and if some book in a shop window caught her eye, he never hesitated to buy it for her. He smelled nice, never raised his voice against her, and not once, in all those years, had he ever laid a hand on her. Best of all, on his days off, he’d sometimes have his friends over from the Relief Services center and cook up a feast, Cuban style. And when it came to celebrating her birthday, he always made that a fiesta too, going to the trouble of getting her a birthday cake, with candles, the kinds of niceties that María, who grew up without such simple rituals, would probably have never bothered with. She was just that way.

But whatever María and Gustavo lacked, as Teresita would speculate years later, it hardly affected the image they presented during those dance nights sponsored by the Gallego Society or the Cienfuegos Club. Held in the ballrooms of Miami beach hotels, these were merry affairs, packed with people, live bands, and more Cuban food than any such crowd could possibly consume. (Having too much food, as opposed to the paucity of such things back in Cuba, was the point.) Teresita loved to see them out on the floor, most elegantly dressed, dancing to boleros amongst other couples of every possible age, from los ancianos to los nenes; enjoyed observing that ritual of stance and attitude in which, with their faces pressed gently together and heads tilted slightly upwards, both of them smiled, as if seeing something magnificent in the sparkling globes revolving below the ceiling. A good enough dancer, Gustavo never stepped on anybody’s toes, and he even had a certain grace.

Teresita knew this because, seeing her sitting alone, he’d pull her out into the crowd, that dear and sweet man, who always had something nice to say to her-“If those fellows only knew what they’re missing” and “Don’t be shy, you’re as pretty as your mother,” which she knew was a lie but appreciated anyway. Though she would have preferred to stay home and study, or chat with her friends on the telephone, or simply watch some TV-in those days she really didn’t care about “boys” one way or the other-Teresita, having no choice about the matter, did her best to enjoy herself, mainly by overdoing it with the food, crispy tostones and the rinds of suckling pig-lechón-cooked up in the proper Cuban manner with tons of garlic, salt, and lemon juice, along with a nice heaping plate of rice with black beans, and maybe a little fried yuca. It was food that, as some of her Jewish friends at school would say, was “to die for.” Sucking in her stomach, whenever Teresita felt that someone’s eyes were on her, her greatest downfall came by way of the pastry tables, which were stacked with sweets, the diabolical napoleons being her favorites.

On one of those nights, Teresita had been sitting off to the side, gingerly nursing each scrumptious bite of one, when she noticed Gustavo coming off the dance floor with a pronounced limp, and when he sat down, María off somewhere in a frenzy, showing off with some young caballero during an upbeat mambo, he kept rubbing his shin and ankle, as if to get something working again. Back home, later that night, he took off his black patent leather shoes to find that both his feet were swollen and lividly purple; the more he rubbed them, the more he groaned in pain. A local doctor, who couldn’t have been very thorough, Teresita would think years later, diagnosed him with gout, but it turned out to be the boiling point of a diabetes-induced heart-related malady that, undiagnosed, only worsened in the following months and culminated in a stroke, which befell him as Gustavo sat in his office, helping a newly arrived exile couple with the paperwork for the government-subsidized purchase of a house.

That was God’s reward for all his good deeds, María kept thinking. “Gracias pa’ nada, Dios”-“Thanks for nothing, Lord”-she snapped at the sky after the priest had finished leading them in a final benediction and the cemetery workers, hoisting down ropes, lowered his coffin into the ground. Grasping her mother’s hand, Teresita, only fourteen at the time, was in tears. She had been crying for days. From the strange moment when María, late one afternoon, found her reading a book in her bedroom and told her, almost nonchalantly, that her step-papito was no more. And through the three days of his “showing” at the Gomez Brothers funeral home-“formerly located in Havana ”-Teresita had been mystified by María’s indifference. For her mother showed hardly any emotion. He may have been only her step-papito, but she missed him.

The house already seemed emptier without Gustavo, and on one of those evenings after they’d gotten home from his three-day wake, just the sound of the ice cream truck’s chimes at dusk brought her to tears, and every time she worked up the nerve to touch something that had belonged to him, like the plump brown wallet he had in his back pocket the day he died, which the police had returned to them in a plastic bag along with a rosary and comb, it broke her up too. But María? She had hardly shed a tear.

“Oh, but don’t you understand, mi hijita,” she said to Teresita, “that Gustavo’s passing was God’s will? There is nothing to be done when someone’s time comes-believe me, I know.” And when Teresita, feeling as if that was not enough of an answer, asked her: “But tell me, Mama, did you love him?” María said, “Of course, I cared very much for him, but was it a deep and burning love? No… If I chose him when I could have looked around for someone else, it was because he was a decent man, and I wanted you to benefit from his decency.” Then: “Did I want him to die? No. Did I want to deprive you of him? No. That was in El Señor’s plans, and nothing changes that. Es el destino- It’s destiny.”