Unsettled Floorboards

The second day broke with that sticky, suffocating mugginess that always heralds the late-summer thunderstorms across Buenos Aires.

The sky over the zinc rooftops hung like a ceiling of sodden ash, and not a breath of wind stirred the air. Dora had been up since five-thirty to press two bolts of linen a client from Pasaje Giuffra had dropped off the month before. Her steam iron exhaled a sharp hiss every twenty seconds, soaking the room in that unmistakable scent of scorched starch and tap water boiled a thousand times over.

"Hand me the yellow tape measure," she instructed without turning around, three straight pins pinched tight between her lips.

I picked up the tape and passed it to her. Its brass end-clips were worn smooth from decades of measuring strangers' waists. My mother checked the hem allowance with relentless precision, easing the fabric's edge through her calloused fingertips. Her fingernails were coated in a faded pale-pink polish, chipped along the cuticles like peeling enamel on an abandoned baseboard.

"Doña Zulema wants the dress ready for her grandson's christening," she muttered suddenly, her speech muffled by the pins in her mouth. "We need to leave an extra inch across the armholes because she says the parish gets hot during mass."

A chill went down my spine.

"Mom, Doña Zulema passed away five years ago. We both went to the wake on Calle Chacabuco, remember?"

Dora released the fabric very slowly. She plucked the pins from between her lips one by one, sinking each into the tomato pincushion strapped around her wrist with frayed black elastic. Her eyelids never blinked. She pushed her horn-rimmed glasses up with the back of her wrist, gazing out toward the interior patio where a faded blue plastic bag hung snagged in the bare branches of the fig tree.

"What can you do," she murmured, as if commenting on the evening weather report. "Sometimes the names get scrambled. When you've seen this many people pass through this workshop, you lose track of who's still breathing."

And with that, she went right back to pressing the collar as though the dead had never been mentioned.

By late afternoon I began sorting through the old dress patterns stacked beneath the cutting table. They were bundles of brittle butcher paper, tied off with butcher's twine and labeled in carpenter's pencil: «Winter Coat '94», «Beba's Pencil Skirt», «Valeria's Communion Dress».

Shifting the final bundle aside, my heel came down on a pine floorboard that gave way with a long, hollow groan. That board had always creaked. Ever since I was a little girl, I remembered my father stepping carefully around it whenever he came home off his night taxi shift so he wouldn't wake the house. He would slip off his leather driving shoes at the threshold, walking in stockinged feet with his night's cash folded neatly in a manila envelope tucked inside his trouser pocket.

I knelt down with a dull butter knife and worked the tip under the seam of the plank. The recess between the floor joists smelled of slaked lime and damp, decaying sawdust.

Resting there, wrapped in an oily flannel rag smelling of rancid motor lubricant, lay a flat tin of Canale butter biscuits. Its lithographed corners were pitted with rust, the lid sealed tight by years of grime. I pried it loose with the blade.

Inside there was neither cash nor love letters. Only a black oilcloth spiral-bound notebook: my father's taxi trip ledger from the autumn of 1998. Page after page penned in his cramped, left-handed scrawl, cataloging departure times, mileage meters, and drop-off addresses throughout Dock Sud, Lanús, and Pompeya. Along the margins, scribbled in faint red ballpoint, license plate numbers had been crossed out alongside cash totals that bore no resemblance to standard meter fares.

And tucked beneath the ledger lay a sheaf of yellowed postal slips from a registered-mail counter on Calle Perú, addressed to a post-office box in Colonia del Sacramento.

Dora walked back into the shop carrying the unplugged iron. She set it down onto the tin trivet with a sharp, heavy clink. Clack.

"What are you doing digging up the floor?" she asked, her voice quiet with a calm that unnerved me far more than any shout.

I held up the open notebook, pointing to an address listed beside a bonded customs warehouse in Avellaneda.

"Dad didn't just pack up and walk out because he was tired of us, did he?"

Dora didn't take a step closer. She wiped her graphite-dusted palms on a damp rag and looked at the ledger the way one looks at a stray dog hit by a truck at an intersection.

"People who drive at night learn never to check the rearview mirror when the back seat is empty. Your father ran fares for heavy operators down along the docks," she said, her voice dry and stripped of theatricality. "He hauled packages nobody could declare on paper, and they paid him three times what he made driving old ladies to the opera."

"And you knew all along?"

"I knew that the night two men pounded on the front shutters at three in the morning with a length of lead pipe, your father climbed into the Peugeot and kept his foot on the gas until he hit the north wharf to catch the dawn ferry to Uruguay. He left me two bolts of gabardine and the keys to the Singer."

She fell silent, staring at the dark circular scorched mark that the iron's base had seared into the wooden tabletop.

"What I never understood," she added, turning toward the doorway, "is why it took you fifteen years to come home and ask the questions."