Chapter 1

Lydia Hernandez pursed her lips to even out her lipstick. She hated lipstick, especially red lipstick; any shade of red made her look like a tiny Chicana tart. Pale red muted that only a little. Lydia was headed off to a job interview and everything she'd ever heard about what a proper businesswoman looked like was that she wore lipstick. She wanted to make a good impression, so she wore lipstick.

In her bedroom mirror the person looking back at her was too short, too thin and too smart for her own good. At least that's what she'd heard too often, and not just in the old neighborhood, but from some of her family as well.

She ran her fingers lovingly over her beautiful black dress; carefully smoothing wrinkles only she could see. The dress was very chic, very fashionable. Expensively chic and fashionable. It was the most expensive dress she'd ever owned. The dress was basic black, with a dusting of embroidered flowers in yellow and blue, gold and red, across the bodice. It was the prettiest dress she'd ever owned. She wanted to cry, looking at her image in the mirror.

She had loved the dress the instant she'd seen it three weeks before at Goldwater's. The price would have left her aghast before, but it didn't make any difference any more, did it? So she'd bought it. Afterwards, Lydia felt horribly guilty about her extravagance and hadn't worn the dress at all.

"Lydia Hernandez," she whispered to herself, "it's about time to make up your mind once and for all. Are you going to do this? Really?"

When in doubt about what to do next, get out the hairbrush!

When she was little and growing up, Momma had told her how beautiful her hair was and how important it was that she should take care of it. Taking care of her hair had consisted of getting out a brush and stroking it fifty or a hundred times mornings and nights. Never, ever, did taking care of her hair entail getting it cut.

She'd gone through eight years of grammar school, four years of high school and six plus years of college before she realized what taking care of her hair really meant. Momma had always been there to help brush the lustrous black wave, to help braid it. After a while, Lydia's twin sisters, five years younger than she was, had practiced on each other -- and Lydia. With four people taking care of the rain of black silk that fell lower than some hemlines, she'd never realized what a commitment it was.

Now she had to do deal with it alone; there was just her. Hair as long as hers required care every day. Washing her hair was a major project; combing it afterwards was an ordeal. At least if you were doing it yourself for almost the first time in your life. Twice in the last five months she'd thought about having it cut, but there were some ties to the past she wasn't ready to sever. How was she going to handle it if she had to work?

On top of the guilt trip about contemplating getting her hair cut, she was wondering what it was going to be like to go every day to a job, if this interview turned out as she wanted. Or how she thought she wanted it to turn out. That made her feel even worse.

All Lydia's life she could remember Poppa waking up in the morning and getting ready for work. There was no reason to be ashamed of having to work for a living! Certainly she had every expectation that someday she'd be doing that herself. Then five months and seven days and four hours and ten minutes ago her comfortable world had crashed. Momma and Poppa had both been killed in a car accident when Momma was taking Poppa to work, as she did any day she wanted to use the family car. March 9th, 1982 had been the turning point of Lydia's life, of the lives of her brothers and sisters.

Like the rest of her family, Lydia had grieved for weeks over the death of her parents. But, in the middle of the first week, even before the funeral, she found out that Poppa had left them something to remember him by. He'd been insured for a truly monumental sum.

Monumental sum. The words, heard often at first, made her ill even now, five months later. Her father would never have said that they were poor, but their family was far from rich. Poppa had made it clear that he expected them all to do better than he had. Lydia had never thought about it; school and a profession was what she wanted for herself as well. Poppa had been proud of her, so very proud. She knew how hard he worked to provide her college money and she wanted to make him proud of how well she did.

But, after they were dead, she learned that he'd paid extra, out of pocket, for additional life insurance -- a million dollars on himself and the same on Momma. The million dollars had been a shock; the million dollars on Momma had been another shock. The lawyer for the city employees union explained about the double indemnity provision -- if either was killed in an accident, the face amount was doubled -- two million. She had been stunned, beyond reason, beyond speech. And then the lawyer explained the double double indemnity clause -- if they both died in the same accident, the sum was doubled again. A Las Vegas jackpot gone wild, at a cost so awful as to be beyond imagination.

If she hadn't felt responsible for her brothers and sisters, she was sure she'd have refused the money. She'd have given it to charity or something -- anything but keep it. But that kind of money is a duty, in and of itself. She had no right to throw away the patrimony of her brothers and sisters, even if she thought it was going to destroy them.

It had been only a few months and she could already see that her fears about what the money was going to do to them wasn't idle; it had already begun to destroy their family. Up until her parents death, they had at least paid lip service to being close-knit. Now the family had fissioned.

Her older brother, Rodrigo, had moved away from home two years before the accident. Poppa had left him the house in trust for his younger brothers and sisters. Rod had moved back in and, charitably, the example he was setting was not a good one. Lydia decided she had to get the little ones away from that environment, and she had.

She bought a rambling ranch-style tri-level house out on the edge of the suburbs. It cost over forty-five thousand dollars, but that was small change compared to what Poppa had left her. But at least they had gotten out of the old house; escaped the old neighborhood.

Her twin seventeen-year-old sisters had stayed behind. They both said they wanted to finish high school at their old school. They only had another year left and they said that they didn't want to leave their friends.

Friends? Every male in school, every male within four or five miles, knew if he could convince either of her twin sisters to uncross her legs, even once, he would have to do the "right" thing and marry her. Of course, the fact that on their eighteenth birthday each of her twin sisters would inherit more than two thirds of a million dollars did not bear on their thinking in the least bit. Sure -- and the grass is blue and the sky is green.

Poppa hadn't been blind or stupid. He'd divided the money up between his children. Nearly half went to Lydia and a twelfth to each of the others, except Rodrigo, who got only two hundred thousand. He'd left instructions that made it clear that she was to use the extra money to take care of any of her brothers and sisters who got into trouble, a last resort.

Lydia was sure Poppa never figured that they would ever collect, but he liked to play blackjack in Las Vegas and always bought insurance when the dealer had an ace.

Lydia had been half a semester away from completing her thesis for her doctorate in computer science at Arizona State. After the accident she pled personal problems and her mentor/thesis advisor said that he understood and had done the things needed to cover her at the university. But that had been three months ago, after she'd struggled to finish the classes for the semester that she absolutely had to. Her apologies were wearing a little thin, because she hadn't reapplied for the fall semester.

Now she'd had time to think.

When she was a little girl growing up, she learned to read leaning over Poppa's shoulder as he read to Rodrigo. She'd been allowed to sit with them, although the consensus was that she was too young to read. In fact, she had learned to read before Rodrigo, even though he was nearly two years older than she was.

Through grade school and high school Lydia hardly had to study. She finished number two in her high school graduating class, right behind her best, and only, friend, Sarah Fong. Where Lydia was smart, Sarah was brilliant. Where Lydia hardly had to study, her friend crammed morning, noon and night.

Lydia had been carried away for the first few years of her friendship with Sarah. She wanted so much to be just like Sarah! Almost from the start, things hadn't quite worked out like Lydia expected. Lydia studied, but not the hours Sarah did -- there was too much work to do for a family as big as Lydia's. Sarah had a burning ambition to go to a big league school and major in mathematics. Lydia didn't have any real ambition at all.

Poppa never pressured her to become an engineer, but she knew that it would please him if she did. It wasn't what Lydia wanted, but then, what did she want? She wasn't even smart enough to ask herself the question! She didn't love math the way Sarah did, but Lydia did like hard courses -- they were fun. All of the advisors and most of her teachers told Lydia how hard it was in Engineering and how much harder it was for women. And, for those women who made the grade, it was harder still to stay. So, in the end, Lydia had signed up as an engineering major when she started at Arizona State, as much to spite the "you can't do it" reasoning as anything else.

She stayed an electrical engineering major through her first year, but even before she finished the year she realized that engineering wasn't her cup of tea. The courses were challenging, but there wasn't any spark.

She came to like the professor who taught the Engineering Problems class. He was on loan from the math department and was very different from her other teachers. The class was as much an introduction to computer programming as about engineering problems and she found she liked computers and programming, both. The professor was impressed with her work and was looking for a bright pupil who would reflect well on him. Lydia signed up as his graduate assistant even before she finished her BS. She'd gone on to get her Masters and she was nearly finished with her doctoral thesis.

Lydia realized that she'd been drifting, letting other people decide what she should do. She enjoyed computers and programming, but she wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her life. Reflecting on what she liked the most, Lydia realized that it was when there was a problem to solve that she perked up. Finding an obscure bug made her day, the more obscure the better.

She stared at herself one last time in the mirror. She'd tried to keep everything from affecting her. She'd tried to lie to herself and say that she had succeeded. What a joke! Even this lovely dress! It was shorter than Lydia liked, coming just below her knees. "It's unfashionably long, so it's on sale," the clerk had told her, apologetically.

That was her. Unfashionable. Unfashionable, if short. A person who believed that a dress that came six inches below her knees was risquè. She pulled and tugged to smooth out a few more wrinkles. Everybody told her that she was too skinny, but she'd never felt that -- although she wouldn't have minded being gifted with something in the bosom department.

She sighed, picked up her purse and went out into the main part of the house.

It was summer time; the kids were out of school on vacation, although school was due to start within a week. Diego at sixteen was a good, solid kid; already turning into a man.

Even Rico, fourteen, had his head screwed on right, although he did want to play football. Of all of the kids, Rico had been happiest to move out to the suburbs. He was sure that he was a shoe-in to make the varsity at his new school. At their old school, he wasn't even being considered. The two boys didn't mind staying home to watch their two younger sisters, although they did take turns. Both of her younger brothers were fiercely protective of their little sisters.

Elizabeth was twelve and Juanita was ten. Their parents had been good Catholics -- up to a point. That point had been Juanita.

Diego saw her and whistled. "Hey, Lydia! Terrific!" How many sixteen-year-olds spend their summers studying books on electronics? Diego would have been the apple of Poppa's eye! He was going to be a good electronics engineer some day!

Rico looked up from his own book and smiled. He was even quieter than Lydia had been at his age. Rico's fondness for contact sports aside, his grades were every bit as good as hers or Diego's. Of course, he was reading some sci-fi thriller, not a textbook. But it wasn't as if it was affecting his schooling! It was summer, vacation time!

How could two nice people like Momma and Poppa produce a terror like Rodrigo? Or two girls as empty-headed as Emelita and Rosa?

The rest of them seemed okay, but she worried about the younger ones, especially the two girls. Lydia had their inheritance in long term, federally insured CDs. Three years at eighteen and a half percent interest. If the interest rates held, their money would nearly double before they were eighteen -- not that anyone thought the rates of 1982 would last. It made her dizzy to think about it. And yet, she had to -- she was in charge of their money.

"I'm going to lunch with Jason Fong; he's Sarah's second cousin," she told them. "He's sweet on her. She thinks he wants some hints." It was true enough and neither of them would understand job hunting. Both of her brothers laughed.

It was so nice to hear good, honest laughter.

In the last year at the old place, there hadn't been much, even before the accident. There was too much fear.

People were dying on their streets.

Not often, not at first, but it crept up gradually. It was only after they moved away that Lydia fully realized what they'd left behind. Now, she wouldn't let the kids go back, even to visit. If Rodrigo, Emelita and Rosa wanted, they could come and see them. If she had her way, none of them would ever go back there. It was disloyal, turning her back on the old house; she'd heard all of that already from Rodrigo, from her grandparents, both sets of them. Except here the kids could go out and play in the evening and you didn't have to worry about them being hurt.

She went out and got into her van -- also something new in her life. Before moving to the suburbs she'd either ridden with Poppa or Rodrigo or taken the bus. Poppa had taught her how to drive and insisted that a couple of times a month she drive them someplace, so she could keep her hand in. Lydia humored him, but had never needed a car going to college. Still, she found she needed a car to live in the suburbs. Picking one had been a nightmare.

Rodrigo heard she was looking for a car and dragged her off to look at cars that were not only expensive, but also impractical. Hispanic women do not suffer from machismo. Her impulse had been to get something inexpensive, like a VW, maybe even a Japanese car. Poppa would have been upset at the latter, but they were inexpensive to operate as well as to buy.

Lydia test-drove three or four compacts and, while she liked their price, the size wasn't adequate. The used car salesman had quizzed her, then, about what she wanted. The next thing he showed her was a full-sized van. She balked. "It's too big!" she told him. "I'll never be able to handle it!"

She had never met a used car salesman before; the urban apocrypha she'd heard seemed to be wrong. He'd been consistently polite, pleasant and not at all pushy. He simply said, "Well, why don't you get in, and if you want to, we can go for a test drive. Please, what can it hurt, just getting in?"

She considered the number of times they had already driven around the block and felt sorry for him. What would it hurt?

Lydia climbed into the driver's seat. A "captain's chair" the salesman called it. Lydia could see why -- it was more comfortable than Poppa's chair in their old house. While she sat well above ground and the steering wheel was large, it felt comfortable in her grasp. And, amazingly, her feet had no trouble reaching the pedals. In some of the compacts she had to scoot the driver's seat all the way forward and still had to stretch to reach the gas pedal.

She'd never driven a vehicle with power steering or brakes before; it was wonderful. The steering wheel turned easily and the brakes were responsive. Lydia drove it around the block and found that she liked it very much. The salesman looked pleased; so she drove it around the block again. She knew she wanted it. So now she drove a full size van. Rodrigo hated it, so she knew she'd made a good choice!

The last time she'd talked to Sarah, Sarah had been very sympathetic. Of course, Lydia had called at two in the morning, feeling depressed. They had talked for more than an hour and towards the end Sarah mentioned Jason. She usually did.

Jason Fong was Sarah's second cousin on her father's side of the family. He was older than they were; he was an accountant, a CPA. At twenty-five he'd made partner in one of the Big Ten accounting firms, and a year later he quit to take a job with an up-and-coming Phoenix company. He was also madly in love with Sarah.

Jason was patient, more patient than any other male in Lydia's acquaintance.

Sarah was single mindedly driving towards her goal of a doctorate in Mathematics from UCLA. She had been on track to go to one of the top tier of technical schools, but those dreams died with her father, two years before she graduated from high school. UCLA, while not her first choice, wasn't a bad consolation prize.

Sarah hadn't wanted to be distracted by getting married, or for that matter, having any kind of steady relationship as an undergraduate. Sarah was usually pretty close-mouthed about her specific plans, but now that she was a year or so away from her degree, she'd been out with Jason a couple of times.