Abuela on the Case Shrunken First Semester chapter 3 by maximally

“Buenos díaaas, sleepyhead!”

 

The voice hit the room like a marching band, rich and warm and loud enough to shake dust off the ceiling fan. A second later, the rest of Guadalupe Vasquez came barreling through the doorway, and Max’s tiny heart tried to escape through the top of his skull.

 

Abuela Lupe.

 

From down on the pillow, his step-grandmother wasn’t a person. She was a weather system. At 5’11” and 310 pounds, the sixty-four-year-old retired teacher filled the doorframe like a pink terrycloth sunrise, her threadbare housecoat straining around a body with no visible end in sight. Her F-cups hung like a pair of sandbags on the shelf of her belly. Her hips brushed both sides of the frame at once. Below the hem, two thick, dimpled calves the size of grain silos disappeared into fuzzy pink slippers, each one bigger than his entire bed had felt last night. A gold cross dangled deep in her cleavage like a climbing anchor. Her salt-and-pepper braid hung to her waist, and her lipstick was red enough to land a plane.

 

The smell got there before she did: rosewater, Café Bustelo, warm sugar, and the musky, slept-in funk of a housecoat that hadn’t seen a washing machine since Easter.

 

In her hands was a plate piled with conchas, pink and yellow and chocolate. From the pillow, each one looked big enough to swim in.

 

“Your Mamá called in the reinforcements for the big goodbye dinner,” Lupe announced, sweeping across the carpet without even glancing at the bed. Every slippered step sent a little tremor up through the mattress legs. “Six hours on the 5 with your abuelo’s Vicente Fernández CDs, mijo. Six hours. So you are getting up, you are eating Abuela’s pan dulce, and you are giving Abuela a big—”

 

Halfway through the sentence, a yawn ambushed her, so huge that Max could see every one of her molars from the pillow.

 

“Ay, excuse me,” she sighed, stretching her arms over her head until the housecoat strained. “Front row at seven a.m. Zumba, then six hours behind the wheel. Abuela needs to sit for one minute.”

 

With the heavy plate of conchas balanced in both hands and her back still to the pillow, Lupe pivoted and dropped her rear onto the mattress’s edge with a long, satisfied ahhh.

 

The world tipped sideways. The mattress dropped out from under him like a trapdoor as 310 pounds of abuela landed barely a foot from his pillow, and Max went tumbling down the slope of navy cotton, arms windmilling, straight toward the enormous pink cliff of her hip. He hit terrycloth face-first. A second later, the hem of the housecoat flopped over him like a circus tent, and the light went out.

 

“Mmmf! Abuela!”

 

It was hot under there. Hot and damp and dark, with the soft, heavy wall of her thigh pressed up against his back and the musk of a long night in the car pooling around him. He could hear her heartbeat. He could hear her stomach. Somewhere above him, through a mile of fabric, the chatter stopped.

 

“…Mijo?” Lupe twisted around toward the pillow. The bed shifted again, and her thigh rolled a little closer. “Where did you—why is your bed empty? And why is my housecoat talking?”

 

“I’m under it!” Max yelled into her leg. “Don’t move!”

 

“¡AY, DIOS MÍO!”

 

The plate wobbled in her lap. A pink concha slid off the top and hit the carpet with a soft whump, like a sandbag dropped off a truck. Lupe crossed herself so fast it was a blur.

 

“Max? Max! Oh, Dios, did I sit on him? Tell me I didn’t sit on him—”

 

“You didn’t sit on me!” Max yelled. “You’re just—really close to sitting on me!”

 

The housecoat hem flew up. Light poured in, and an enormous brown eye peered down at him, wide with panic. Then the panic melted, and something much more dangerous replaced it.

 

Delight.

 

“Ay, look at you,” Lupe breathed. “Look at my little Max.”

 

“Abuela, I’m naked—”

 

“Mijo, I changed your mamá’s diapers and Fanny’s. I’ve seen it all.” Two fingers the size of rolling pins pinched him gently around the middle and lifted him into the air. “And this,” she added, peering at him critically, “is much smaller than all of it.”

 

“ABUELA.”

 

“What? I’m a teacher. I’m just being thorough.” She plopped him down on the broad, soft plateau of her thigh, high up near the hip where the housecoat had fallen open. It was like being set down on a warm waterbed covered in velvet. “Now let Abuela look at you.”

 

She looked. She really looked. She turned him with one finger, poked his ribs, lifted one of his arms and let it drop, checked behind his ears. She even flipped him over to inspect his back, which left him spread-eagled across her thigh with his face buried in soft, sun-warmed skin that smelled like cocoa butter and car-seat sweat.

 

“No bruises,” she announced. “No broken bones. Heartbeat like a little hummingbird. And still turning red for Abuela, I see.”

 

Max’s whole body went the color of the pink concha. “I-I’m not—”

 

“Since the ninth grade, every hug, red like a tomato.” Lupe grinned, wide and wicked, and patted his butt with one fingertip. “You think I don’t notice? I notice everything, gordito.”

 

Before he could die of embarrassment, she frowned, sniffed the air, and narrowed her eyes.

 

“You smell like a frat house. Were you drinking?”

 

“I… maybe? I don’t really remember.”

 

“Mm-hm.” The teacher eyebrow went up. “We will come back to that.”

 

“Abuela, focus. I’m three inches tall!”

 

“I know, mijo. I can see.” She sighed, and the sigh rolled through her thigh underneath him like an earthquake through a waterbed. “Twenty-seven years of seventh graders, and nobody ever came to class this size. But you’re breathing, you’re yelling, you’re blushing. That’s enough for now.”

 

“That’s not enough! We have to figure out—”

 

“After breakfast,” she said, in the voice that had ended a thousand arguments with a thousand seventh graders. Then she reached over, grabbed the yellow concha off the plate, and tore off a chunk as big as a beanbag. “Ándale. Eat.”

 

She set it down on her thigh in front of him. It wobbled on the soft flesh like a boulder on a trampoline. The smell of warm butter and sugar hit him, and his stomach let out a pathetic little growl.

 

“See?” Lupe beamed. “Your body knows.”

 

So Max ate. He knelt on his step-grandmother’s enormous thigh, naked as the day he was born, tearing off armfuls of sweet bread while sugar crumbs rained down around him like snow. Every time he slowed down, a red fingernail the size of a cafeteria tray nudged the chunk closer.

 

“Eso. Good boy. More.”

 

“I’m full—”

 

“You are three inches, pequeño, you are not full, you are small. Eat. That’s part of earning your keep.”

 

Downstairs, a cabinet slammed, and Victoria’s muffled voice floated up through the floor.

 

“Are you gonna tell her?” Max asked, through a mouthful of bread.

 

Lupe snorted. “Your Mamá? Ay, no. I love that girl with my whole heart, but she would have you in a Tupperware with holes in the lid before lunch. And Isabella would have you on the TikTok by dinner.” She bent down over him, and her face blotted out the ceiling, her coffee breath ruffling his hair like a warm breeze. “No. Not until I know who did this to my grandson.”

 

Then she sat back, wiggled on the mattress to get comfortable, and her face went very, very thoughtful.

 

Max knew that face.

 

“Abuela,” he said slowly. “Abuela, no—”

 

“Six hours in the car, mijo,” she said serenely, already lifting one massive cheek off the mattress. “Abuela’s been holding this one since Bakersfield.”

 

 

It started low, like a truck downshifting on a mountain road, and then it just kept going. The mattress buzzed. The housecoat billowed. The thigh under Max’s knees shook so hard that he went sprawling face-first into his concha. Somewhere around the ten-second mark, it climbed into a wet, rattling trumpet note that rattled the blinds. By the time it sputtered to a stop, Max had stopped counting entirely.

 

Then the cloud came for him.

 

It rolled up out of the folds of the housecoat in a hot, invisible wave and swallowed him whole: refried beans, last night’s chile colorado, and a deep, ancient, eggy funk underneath, like a church potluck that had been left in a hot car in Bakersfield. His eyes slammed shut. His lungs locked up. He clawed his way up out of the concha, gasping, and only got a bigger mouthful.

 

“Hhhkkk—Abuela—I can’t—breathe—”

 

“Oh, ay.” Lupe fanned her hand vaguely in the air, about three feet away from where it would’ve done any good. “Excuse Abuela.”

 

She did not sound even a tiny bit sorry.

 

“That one had cumin in it,” she added, with something that sounded alarmingly like pride.

 

“I’m dying—”

 

“You’re not dying, you’re being dramatic. Just like your Mamá.” She scooped him up off her thigh, cupped him in both palms, and blew on him gently like he was a spoonful of hot soup. Her breath was all coffee and sugar, which, after that, smelled like heaven. “There. All better. Abuela’s farts never killed anybody. Except maybe your abuelo’s Buick.”

 

Max lay limp in her palms, wheezing, sticky with sugar and sweat and a few things he refused to identify. “You did that on purpose.”

 

“Of course I did it on purpose. In this family, we don’t hold anything in.” She winked. “Not your opinions, not your gas, and not your grandbabies.”

 

Before he could figure out what that meant, footsteps hit the stairs. Heavy ones. Getting closer.

 

“Mamá?” Victoria’s voice. “Is he up? Blue duffel or black? I’m leaving for Costco in ten minutes. And why does the whole upstairs smell like that?”

 

Lupe’s eyes went wide. Then they went to the door. Then to the plate of conchas, the bakery bag on the desk, the open neckline of her housecoat, and finally the bedroom window, where her ancient silver minivan sat in the driveway behind Victoria’s SUV.

 

Then they came back down to Max.

 

“Mijo,” she whispered. “Toda la verdad. Do you know who did this to you?”

 

“No,” Max whispered back. “I swear. I don’t remember anything.”

 

Lupe nodded once, firm as a gavel.

 

“Then we find out. Together.”