Page 19 of A Christmas Adventure

"Now don't touch it. Come on, wash your hands and help me prepare the food."

Maite puts a tray of cannelloni in the oven and, while she prepares a salad, Violeta cuts some slices of bread.

"You really don't mind that I invited Olga?" her mother insists again, "she's alone and it seems like the right thing to do."

"I don't mind, Mom," Violeta replies. "How come she moved here?" she asks, increasingly interested in her neighbor's life.

"I think I already told you that she inherited the house," her mother begins to speak distractedly as she cuts the tomatoes. "Don't say a peep about this in front of her, if she wants to tell you someday, let her tell you, otherwise, you don't know anything."

"I won't say anything," Violeta assures, increasingly intrigued.

"Olga divorced her husband a couple of years ago. A normal divorce, it's not like she has problems with him, but they had a flat jointly owned that there was no way to sell, and the mortgage had to be paid, the usual. The thing is that even being rented, it didn't reach them to cover theexpenses and the poor woman was suffocating because she also had to pay the one she had rented to live in."

"And why didn't she stay in hers?"

"Because the mortgage was too high for her to take on alone. If I say that buying jointly is the worst thing there is, never do it, daughter," her mother says suddenly.

Violeta is not surprised by this fact, because the house where her mother lives is her own, inherited from her parents, and at least in that aspect, she won't have to worry when she divorces her father.

"Anyway, they just sold it very recently and it coincided with the inheritance of this house, I think I told you."

"Yes, you mentioned something to me."

"Well, Olga was tired of everything, she had reached that point in life where one needs to cut everything off and start from scratch somewhere else, and since nothing tied her down in her town, she came to an agreement with her sister, bought her part of the house and moved here. She's brave, she decided everything in a matter of days, I don't know if I would be capable, I guess it's a youth thing."

"Well, she's not that young," Violeta comments.

Her mother fixes her gaze on her and laughs heartily.

"You say that now, that in your early thirties, those in their forties already seem old to you, but when you reach her age, you'll see how you think differently."

Maite can't stop laughing and her daughter looks at her amused. She knows her mother is right, besides, she doesn't consider Olga old, just mature, but she doesn't know how to talk about her in front of her mother withoutrevealing that attraction she feels for her neighbor and friend.

"I don't consider her old, it's just that..."

Violeta falls silent, she doesn't know what to say and it's better not to put her foot in it.

"Did you know that besides men, she also likes women?"

The bread basket slips from Violeta's hands from the impression, luckily it doesn't go very far and falls on the table. She feels a current running through her whole body and looks at her mother trying to act normally.

"She told you?"

"Of course, silly," her mother laughs again at her daughter's attitude. "Who do you want to tell me?"

"Well, I don't know, it's just that it's weird."

"Weird, why? We're friends."

"And how did she tell you?"

Violeta feels a tingling in her fingertips, something she had never experienced before and begins to wonder if blood is not reaching everywhere.

"Hey, don't say anything about this to her, okay?" her mother asks again.

Her daughter shakes her head negatively, her eyes wide open and the air held in her lungs. If her neighbor already intrigues her on her own, knowing these kinds of details about her life has her on edge.

"One afternoon we were here chatting and we got a little carried away with the wine. I told her how I met your father, she told me how she met her husband, and that gaveme the opportunity to ask her why they had broken up. Then she explained to me that she had long felt attraction to women and that one day, at a work dinner, she ended up sleeping with one."