It was Lupe who first figured it out. She’d been a tennist in her youth, after all.

“Love, Mamá. The answer is love.”

“I don’t get it,” said Irma, bluntly. She raised her hand towards her younger sister, not even turning to look at her, but knowing her well enough to know that she would interrupt. “I mean the last part. The tennis thing.”

“Oh,” said Nuria, closing her mouth. “I didn’t get that part either.

Lupe smiled at her daughters. There were still moments, moments like this one, when they said something and they looked like little girls again. Babies. Her babies. How strange to think that one had a baby of her own now. Babies having babies. So goes the world, or so it feels to mothers.

“You say love in tennis when you mean someone has a score of zero. Like when the game first starts. It’s love-love.”
“Oh!” said Nuria, eyes lighting up like they always did when she learned something new. Some days she looked like she’d stuck her finger in an electric light socket. “But, abue, what did you want our opinion on? An answer to the riddle isn’t an opinion, not really.”

“Ay, mija, no seas mensa,” Catarina said, rolling her eyes at her youngest granddaughter. “On that, of course. Love. What else?”

“Love, mamá?”

Lupe seemed more resigned than confused at the sudden question. Then again, she had been dealing with her mother the longest.

“Love, love, yes, love. We’re all grown here. I thought it was high time we talked about it.”

“Ay, mamá, ¿qué quieres que diga? What do I know about that anymore?” Emilio was long gone, after all. He’d died young, when their youngest, Nuria, was barely nine years old.

“You had him for 18 years, didn’t you? Even if you did ignore him for the first three or so…” Catarina smiled at the memory of her daughter back then, all long hair and steely pride. “What was that like?”

“Emilio was… love was partnership, you know? Another set of hands around the house. Some which might even bring some flowers every so often, even if it was usually when he’d messed up. Emilio… he was a good man. A good husband. A great father. He was always around to help, until he wasn’t. That’s what love is, or was, for me.”

“Oh, mom, that’s not what love is,” said Irma, sighing into her cold coffee. “At least, that’s not what mine was like. It’s not what someone else does for you, it’s what you would do for someone. When I… When I was in love… Love is just knowing that, if the person you loved was being chased by a bear in the woods, you wouldn’t play dead like you’re supposed to. You’d chase it, like an idiot, even though you’ve never gotten higher than a C in any P.E. class in your life, and then you’d die, and that, that is love.”

“You’re right.”

Everyone stopped and stared. That was not a phrase commonly used in the Gómez household.

“… In a way.”

Nuria breathed in deep, ready to spread information around, as she usually did whenever anyone let her talk for long enough. “Love is chemicals,” she said. Nuria was studying to be a chemist. “You’re right in how you feel, or how you act, but really it’s just serotonin and dopamine and biology messing around inside your head. Hormone soup.”
She stopped suddenly, stared off into the distance, then pulled a tiny notebook and chewed up pencil from her jacket. Her family waited as she scribbled, drinking slow sips of coffee that had long ago gone cold, and was more sugar and water than anything else, really. “Good band name,” she said, snapping the notebook shut. Her family nodded. They were used to how Nuria talked, like she was in thirteen different places at once, and holding individual conversations in each of them.

“But yeah, that’s all that love is. A remnant of evolution that society has romanticized into having a deeper meaning. Like tail bones. Only we write movies and songs about it.”

She stopped to take a drink of her own congealing coffee.