Héctor and I have been married for five years. From the first day he became my husband, I had become accustomed to his cold words and his indifferent glances. Hector was not violent or loud, but his indifference made my heart dry up more and more every day.
After the wedding, we lived in his parents’ house in a neighborhood in Mexico City. Every morning I woke up early to cook, do the laundry, and clean. Every evening I sat and waited for him to come home, only to hear him say, “Yes, I’m eating.” I often wondered if this marriage was any different from being a tenant. I tried to build, I tried to love, but all I got in return was an invisible emptiness that I could not fill. Then one day,
Héctor came home with a cold, blank face. He sat down opposite me, handed me a divorce paper, and said in a dry voice: – Sign this. I didn’t want to waste any more of our time. I was freezing, but I wasn’t surprised. As tears welled up, I picked up the pen with a trembling hand. All the memories of waiting for him at the dinner table, of the times I’d suffered stomachaches in the middle of the night alone, suddenly came flooding back like a deep wound.
After I signed, I packed my things. Nothing in his house belonged to me, except for a few clothes and the old pillow I always slept on. As I dragged my suitcase out the door, Héctor threw the pillow at me, his voice filled with contempt: – Take it and wash it. It’s probably about to fall apart. I picked up the pillow, my heart aching. It was really old; the pillowcase was faded, with yellow stains and torn spots.
This was the pillow I had brought from my mother’s house in a small town in Oaxaca when I was a university student in the city, and I had kept it when I became her husband because I had a hard time sleeping without it. She used to complain about it, but I still kept it. I quietly left that house. Back in my rented room, I was confused, staring at the pillow. Thinking about her sarcastic words, I decided to take off the pillowcase to wash it, at least so that it would be clean and I could sleep well tonight, without dreaming of painful memories.
As I opened the pillowcase, I felt something strange. There was something lumpy inside the soft cotton fluff. I held my hand out and stopped studying. A small bundle of paper, carefully wrapped in a nylon bag. I opened it with shaking hands. Inside was a pile of money, all 500-peso bills, and a piece of paper folded in four. I opened the paper. My mother’s familiar handwriting appeared, trembling and shaking: “My son, this is the money I saved for you in case of hardship. I hid it in the pillow because I was afraid you might be too proud to take it. No matter what happens, don’t suffer for someone, my love. I love you.”
My tears flowed freely onto the yellow paper. I remembered the day of my wedding, my mother gave me the pillow, and said it was so soft, so I could sleep soundly. I laughed and said, “You’re getting old, Mom, it’s strange to think about it. Hector and I will be happy.” Mom just smiled, with a distant, sad look in her eyes. I hugged the pillow to my chest, it felt like my mother was sitting next to me, stroking my hair and comforting me.
It turned out she always knew how much a daughter would suffer if she chose the wrong man. It turned out she had prepared a backup plan for me; not a wealthy one, but one that kept me from despair. That night, I lay on the hard bed in my small rented room, holding the pillow to my chest, my tears soaking the pillowcase. But this time, I wasn’t crying because of Héctor. I was crying because I loved my mother.
Crying because I felt lucky, that at least I still had a place to go back to, a mother who loved me, and a big world out there waiting to welcome me. The next morning, I woke up early, folded the pillow carefully, and put it in my suitcase. I told myself I would rent a smaller room, closer to my job. I would send more money to my mother, and I would live a life where I no longer had to tremble or wait for a cold message from anyone. I smiled at myself in the mirror. This woman with swollen eyes, from today on, would live for herself, for her aging mother back home, and for all the unfinished dreams of her youth. That marriage, that old pillow, that sneer…all of it was just the end of a sad chapter. As for my life, there were still many new pages waiting to be written by my own resilient hands and heart.