Jaency Flores had to make a decision.
The single mom could leave her son with friends and spend two weeks’ salary flying to Colombia to see her dying father. Or she could save the money for his funeral and say good-bye on the phone.
“How, I wonder, how do you choose?” says the 43-year-old Denver nanny I came to know when she cared for my eldest son.
Flores saw her dad only twice in the 17 years since emigrating from Cali. She had grown weary of sewing in a sweatshop and moonlighting as a seamstress, only to earn enough for rent and groceries. And so she moved, partly to make a better life in Colorado and partly to help her father, an ironing board salesman, as he grew too tired to sell his wares.
Like so many people straddling two countries, Flores paid a price for immigrating that can’t be measured in dollars. Father and daughter never discussed how much her move really cost.
She wired home at least $200 every month and dutifully phoned each week to brag about the kids she cares for or her son’s progress in reading.
But mostly, she says, he just wanted to know when his next check would come.
By 2003, Flores had saved enough to fly home for the first time, introducing Luis Antonio, then 6, to the grandfather she named him after.
Fearful of immigration problems despite her legal status, she postponed her second trip until she memorized all 13 original colonies, passed her citizenship test and took the oath as an American last year.
She returned at Christmas to find her dad aged beyond his 75 years. She spent her 10 days there scrubbing his rented room and flew back to Denver sick for a home she no longer had.
Then came word this fall that he was dying of lung cancer. She wired money to pay for medicine and a nurse, and remembered her father’s shame that he could not afford to bury his own father. She decided to pay for his funeral, not her own plane fare.
All autumn, she stocked up on calling cards so she could phone every day. On Nov. 28, her sister put the receiver to his ear.
“Daddy. I love you. Daddy. Daddy, it’s Jaency. Papa, it’s me, Jaency,” Flores told him.
After minutes of silence, she finally heard something on the other end. Her father moaned and then took two deep breaths that Flores’ sister said were his last.
“In the movie in my head, it’s like I alone now. There is a hole in my heart,” Flores says.
Luis Acevedo never made it to America.
He never saw the way his daughter delights the babies she cares for with rattles she makes of dried beans and used water bottles. He never tasted the chicken soup with cilantro she prepares for them, or heard her humming the lullabies her own mom sang before dying when Flores was 4.
He didn’t see the way she cheers Luis Antonio on the soccer field and hugs him tightly after each game.
And he couldn’t know what it meant, the day she became a citizen, when she posed for photos in her new tweed skirt, her son beside her and the mountains behind her. She held a small American flag and smiled, deeply.
I realize now those pictures were for her father. She was smiling at him, trying through our cameras to draw him into a country he would never visit and toward a daughter he would never really know.
Susan Greene’s column appears twice a week. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
