She felt herself blush, but luckily was, by now, in front of her house, where her niece was sitting on the stoop, surrounded by two dozen splits of champagne and a Michael’s bag bursting open with turquoise tulle.
“Matteo, let me call you later.”
FAVORS
“？Ay, querida! What have you gotten into over here?” Olga asked.
“Olga!” Her niece bounded down the steps, and the turquoise fabric, somehow stuck on her shorts, transformed into a tail. She threw her skinny arms around Olga’s waist and hugged her tight. “Papi said you were coming this weekend.” She released her embrace, as if she’d just remembered something. “Where’ve you been all summer?”
“Working, mija,” Olga replied, ready to own her crime. Lourdes had grown so much that summer, the sight of her made Olga melancholy for all she’d missed. “But, you’re right, I let the whole summer go without us doing anything fun. I’m sorry. Tell me, what’s all this?”
“Lourdes!” Mabel had popped her head out the window of the top floor. “I hope you’re making those bows even!” She looked at Olga. “Oh, hey.”
Olga looked up. “Hey, prima!” Mabel had been living in the rental apartment ever since she met Julio, her fiancé. She claimed she wanted the apartment to help Prieto with Lourdes, but all the cousins knew that what she needed was a fuck-pad, since up until then, despite being in their thirties, both she and Julio had lived at their respective parents’ homes. As soon as Olga saw her cousin, she realized that her niece, along with the rest of her family, had likely been enlisted in Mabel’s crafting army and that the house would be ground zero for preparing tacky takeaways for her upcoming nuptials. Celebrations in her family were more than a day of gathering. The planning, preparation, and postmortem chisme sessions were both how and why Olga’s family marked any major occasion. She hadn’t factored wedding prep into her visit, but should she dare to seem less than enthusiastic about helping, the whole day would devolve into war with Mabel, and Olga didn’t want to sour everyone’s mood.
“Oye,” she said, “I just figured you could use some extra hands!”
“Oh yeah?” Mabel called down, suspiciously. “Well, I guess better late than never. Come in. I’ll show you what to do.”
Lourdes poked her and mimed a secret, which Olga bent down to hear. “I was gonna play with Camille today, but Mabel says no one plays until all the favors are done.”
The favors, Olga soon discovered, were quite the production, involving at least five aisles of the crafting store. The garden level of the house was a sizable space, with a front sitting room that opened into the dining room, and the kitchen in the back. Each and every corner was occupied by a relative tending to some aspect of customization and assemblage of the takeaway gifts for the end of the night. At the dining table, two of her cousins were covering the champagne bottle labels with stickers that had Mabel and Julio’s photo with the wedding date underneath. Next to them, Tía ChaCha, always very good with detail, sat with a pair of tweezers, her readers sliding down her nose, affixing rhinestones in artistic clusters around the bottle. These then would be boxed up and taken to the porch where, Olga now realized, Lourdes was put in charge of dressing the bottle necks with tulle ribbon bows. Once dressed, the bottles were taken to the living room, where Tío JoJo and one of Mabel’s nephews were placing them in clear gift boxes together with a single champagne flute, which, Olga realized upon closer examination, were also etched with Mabel and Julio’s names and wedding date.
Mabel had made her way downstairs, her wet hair dripping onto her Marc Anthony concert T-shirt. Like a general, she surveyed everyone’s work.
“Ricky,” she barked at one of their cousins, “that label don’t look straight to me.” She turned to Olga. “Let’s get you set up in the kitchen. You can help decorate the gift boxes.”
“Wait,” Olga said, laughing. “You’re adding something else to this?”
“Ya!” ChaCha interjected. “The box can’t be plain, Olga! What’s wrong with you?”
Mabel, ever eager to be persecuted and judged by her cousin, opined, “Well, Tía, maybe Olga’s rich vanilla brides like things more, you know, refined.”
“？Qué?” ChaCha called out, a bedazzled champagne bottle in her hand. “These bottles have hand-placed crystals on them! Who wouldn’t find that elegant?”