Page 2 of A Christmas Adventure

"Okay, and you? Are you okay?"

"No, of course not, your father has left," her mother spits out.

As she speaks, she seems different. Now she's not crying, she just feels rage, infinite rage.

"What do you mean he left? Did he go to buy supplies?" her daughter tries to understand.

"No, he didn't go to buy anything. He's gone, Violet, he's gone with another woman."

Violet's ears suddenly block, and her eyebrows arch on their own. She tries to process the information her mother has just provided, to imagine the situation, but it's impossible.

"What do you mean?" she asks stupidly.

"Just that, Violet, he's left with another woman."

Violet needs to sit down to process the shocking news. She walks clumsily to her chair and sits down, resting her elbows on her knees while squeezing the bridge of her nose.

"That can't be, Mom."

"It can't be?!" her mother yells in a fit of hysteria.

Her mother's indignant shout makes her pull the phone away from her ear, frightened. Teresa looks at her and asks quietly if everything is okay. Violet makes a definitive gesture of negation with her head; of course, nothing is okay.

"Okay, he's gone," Violet accepts, dismayed. "With whom? Where?"

"With Carmen. A woman we hired a little over a month ago. We had her in the summer too, and your father and she got along well, but I don't know, I didn't see anything strange."

"You mean he's been cheating on you since summer?" Violet asks, increasingly shocked.

"I don't know, honey."

Her mother breaks down crying again, this time it's a more controlled cry, painful and desperate.

"And where have they gone, Mom?"

"To a village in Almería."

Violet's throat dries up, and her body shudders with an uncomfortable chill. She sees Hernán, her direct boss, pass by and straightens up to pretend she's talking to a client until she loses sight of him.

"What do you mean a village in Almería? And what's he doing there? Is he visiting?" Violet asks like a machine gun, feeling that what her mother is telling her makes less and less sense.

"No, honey..." Maite answers in a pitiful tone, "he's gone to live there. This morning he packed a suitcase and told me he was leaving me, that he had fallen in lovewith Carmen, and that since he didn't want to be the talk of the town, they had both decided to go to her village. Apparently, she has a house there."

"He can't do this to you," Violet rages, "he's a pig. What about all the years you've been married? And your plans to retire in a few years? And the bakery? Has he left you stranded now when there's the most work?"

Violet is beside herself and launches one question after another with the same urgency they crowd in her head. Her mother has no answer for any of them. Her mind, troubled and tired, is only capable of recalling her husband's words telling her he was abandoning her with eyes filled with tears. She has seen the sorrow and pain it caused him to leave her, but not even that was enough to stop him. Maite has immediately understood that the love he feels for Carmen is much stronger than the affection he has left for her, and there's no fighting against that.

"He's not a pig," Maite stammers, "he's just a man in love."

"Don't defend him now, Mom."

It breaks Violet's soul to notice the pain in her mother's voice; right now, she wishes she were there to hug and comfort her, but five hundred kilometers and the three weeks left until she takes her Christmas vacation separate them.

"Mom, I'll ask for a few personal days and come to you. I'll call Dad, and we'll fix this. I'm sure it's just a silly whim, you know how men are."

When she realizes what she's said, she feels so disgusted with herself that she would be banging her head against the wall for the rest of the day. She can't believe she's come to the defense of someone capable of abandoning his wife for another, no matter how much he's her father and she adores him.

"Forget that," she says, taking a deep breath, "I'll come see you, Mom. It'll be okay."