It was a rare night in the Gómez household, if only because so many of them were home at the same time. Nuria was back for the summer, in between studying for her masters in something or other that her relatives never fully understood. Her older sister, Irma had moved back home as well, after what had started as an argument and ended up a particularly bitter divorce. She kept saying she and her daughter were only there for a bit, until she got her feet back under her. She had been home almost two years now.

Guadalupe, her mother, had never left home, not even when she’d gotten married. She and Emilio had just settled in there with her parents, living on the bottom floor in the room next to the kitchen, and they’d stayed there since. Emilio was gone now, had been for nearly fifteen years, but she’d stayed put. Catarina, her mother, was still around too, but only because of pitching a fit of such tremendous proportions as soon as they’d moved her to a nursing home that the caretakers had asked for her to move back. She’d been gone for less than six months. And so they all found themselves together, in a dimly lit kitchen, (lightbulbs kept burning out but nobody felt any responsibility in changing them) drinking stale coffee. The only ones not drinking coffee were Lupe, whose doctor had firmly exiled it from her diet, and Juanita, Irma’s kid, who’d been put to bed a couple of hours before. Caterina, putting down her own mug of coffee (which had also been explicitly banned from her diet, but which she continued to both drink and make religiously, much to the chagrin of her long-suffering daughter), was the first to break the silence.

“I want your opinion on something.”

Nobody spoke at first. The words seemed to collect dust as they hung in the evening air, mulled over by those sitting around the table. Catarina rarely asked for anyone’s opinion. She valued her own too much. Being the oldest in the household, she was well entitled to it. After all, as she was fond of saying, and the others tired of hearing, más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo.

“I was doing one of my crosswords the other day, and I got stumped on one of the questions. Of course, I eventually figured it out, but I wanted to see what you thought about it.”

She reached into her perfectly iron pants’ pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. Glossy, like it had come from a magazine or something. Catarina was subscribed to pretty much every paper, journal, and magazine that would reach their house. She unfolded it carefully, hands trembling because of her age, even with her constant denial that it affected her in any way.

Clearing her throat, she looked around the room to make sure everyone was paying attention. They were, so she continued.

“What kills some and gives others life? What starts the most wars, and ends the most fights? And what is worth absolutely nothing to tennists?”