Page 78 of One Year Ago in Spain
The room erupted in another wave of sorrow-tinged laughter.
“Did you each end up with a big box of cookies for Mother’s Day?” one of the older ladies asked once everyone had calmed down again.
“Quite the opposite,” Soledad said. “First of all, seven-year-old boys may understand that their mothers like cookies, but they do not think about how important it is for those cookies to be whole.”
“What do you mean?”
Lucia chimed in. “She means that my Carlos may have had an early aptitude for scheduling, but he had not yet grasped the finer details of project management. He didn’t plan for any boxes for the cookies they stole.”
“They put them in their pockets!” Guadalupe said, snorting.
“Oh no!” someone said.
“Oh yes,” Soledad said. “What cookies they managed to snatch were crumbs by the time they reached us. But do not think that they went from cookie theft straight to their mothers—the plan was not executed so smoothly! Because the second thing we must remember about seven-year-old boys is that they are not as stealthy as they believe they are.
“Their early-morning walk-bys were successful because the panaderías were very busy at that hour. It was easy enough for a scrawny boy to dart in through the delivery door, grab a couple cookies from the extra racks in the back, and slip back out.
“The late-morning thefts were also, apparently, successful. But their third round—in the noon business lull—was when their arrogance caught up with them.
“It so happened that Lucia, Guadalupe, and Leo’s and Facu’s mothers—Pilar and Carmen—were at my apartment for ourusual Saturday coffee and gossip when my phone rang. It was the baker at Pastelería la Favorita, who said, ‘I have a little thief here who says his name is Matías. Does he belong to you?’ ”
The women in the room tittered. Being mothers, too, they were not unfamiliar with juvenile mischief.
“I asked the baker to hold,” Soledad said, “and I told Lucia and Guadalupe what the call was about. And then, to no one’s surprise, the call waiting on my phone beeped. It was Lucia’s husband, Esteban, calling to say that a baker at El Pan Dulce had caught Carlos pocketing cookies. We told him we would call him back soon with instructions on what to do. And then Guadalupe’s husband, Salvador, called to report that Diego was being held at Panadería Corona for the same offense.
“By this time, it was clear that this was no coincidence. Therefore, the Council of Wise Mothers—Lucia, Guadalupe, Pilar, Carmen, and me, of course—deliberated, and we decided that the best gift we could request for el Día de la Madre was to have a little fun with our sons.”
The eyes of the women next to Soledad widened, and those on the farthest couch leaned forward to better hear.
“We asked a policeman to pick them up. And he brought a priest with him.”
“¡No!”
“¡Dios mío!”
“¿De verdad?”
“Yes, really,” Soledad said, grinning. “One of Carmen’s friends is an officer. He was off-duty, but he got into uniform, picked up Father Perez along the way, and then stopped by each bakery to retrieve the boys. He told a white lie—that he could arrest them, but that Father Perez had begged for mercy for them instead.They were taken to the church and ‘charged’ with community service for the afternoon instead of prison time.”
Guadalupe giggled. “We were terrible mothers to scare them like that.”
“But they were much smarter about the trouble they got in from then on,” Lucia said.
“Exactly,” Soledad said. “Also, the church was very clean ahead of Sunday mass.”
Everyone in the room laughed appreciatively.
“And we still got cookies at the end of the day!” Lucia said. “Crumbled and stolen, but with love.”
“To be clear, wedidpay the bakers,” Soledad said. “Well, the boys did, along with handwritten apology letters.”
Guadalupe and Lucia smiled beneath their tears.
“I have a story to share,” said Isabella, one of their oldest friends. “Leo’s and Facu’s parents cannot be here because they are in Valencia by their sons’ bedsides, but I know they would want me to tell this.”
The crowd murmured their approval.
“It was the summer when the boys were sixteen. The five of them had known every aspect of each other’s lives until that point. But with hormones come changes, and while Carlos, Diego, and Matías were busy looking at girls, Leo and Facu had begun stealing glances at one another, although only when the other one wasn’t looking.
