Excerpt from What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Well! The first fully funded chance I got for Promising Minority Students (first-generation or otherwise), I ran away from home, too. Spent most of college making excuses not to come back for Christmas. Not because I did not love my family or was ashamed, but because it hurt too much to see up close what had happened to us over the years. And sometimes, during those rare holiday visits, the gravity of our situation was so strong it felt like being pulled into a black hole. Summers, I avoided seeing Mom by staying on campus upstate to work as a research assistant for one of my biology professors. And sometimes when Jess called, I didn't pick up, because I worried that if I did, she would provide some urgent reason for me to find the next bus ticket home. I didn't go back to New York, not even when Jess had the baby.

Mostly, this strategy worked.

Until I graduated, and Jessica put her foot down. "Cut the shit out, Nina. It's your turn to take care of Ma now."

Jessica had done it for years.

Driven Ma to appointments.

Made sure she was taking whatever necessary meds.

Four times a week she went to Ma's house for dinner, helped her clean the dishes afterwards, and then drove back to her boyfriend's to sleep…but now she had little baby Julie and a full-time job at the hospital and only five hours to close her eyes at night. "And that's if I'm lucky," she said. "I need your help."

Which was something Jess rarely ever admitted.

"All right, I got you."

After graduation, I flew back to New York, and at the airport, when the three of us met at baggage claim, for a split second we didn't recognize each other. I hadn't seen Jessica or Mom in almost two years. Jessica's cheeks had grown chipmunkish. Her arms and shoulders had rounded so that she looked like a football player, and dark wrinkles had formed around her neck like a noose. Still, she was prettier than me. Even after a kid. Her eyeliner and mascara crumbled around the lids, reminding me of the teenage Jessica who a decade of boys had worshipped and loved, year after year. An arc of rhinestones dotted her collar, and I could tell that she'd dressed up to meet me at the airport, because her long black hair was still wet.

Mom had changed, too. She'd lost weight since I last saw her, sophomore year, and the flesh on her arms had deflated. And you could tell she was in good spirits because of her makeup; it had that sharp Rocío Jurado eyeliner and dark lid, circa 1972.

"She was sleeping a lot last month, but she's doing better now. She doesn't do Catholic church anymore because she says they're a bunch of fucking phonies. But she's got a new job at the Pentecostal church teaching parenting classes," Jessica had told me over the phone as I packed up my dorm room, throwing out old folders and notes. "When you get here, you gotta get her out of that bed. Keep her moving around."

At the airport Ma was full of energy, though. "Mamita, look how beautiful you are," she said. She kept on hugging me, then pulling away to smile and hold my chin up for inspection, then hugging me again.

But in the bathroom mirror at LaGuardia I'd already seen how my thick black curls had frizzed and shrunk in the airless compartment of the plane, how the brown skin on my face had yellowed and turned greenish underneath the eyes: too much caffeine, too much staying up all night, finishing finals, giving birth to ugly research papers, the shape of whose declining arguments reflected that night's consumption of seventy-five-cent vending machine candy and cigarettes.

Here in the terminal, I felt too aware of the body I had forgotten about while studying late at night. My arms and thighs had grown awkwardly over the last few years from being hunched in front of a computer. And when Jess came in for a hug, I wondered if she could feel the soft slope I'd developed between my shoulders from bending over my textbooks at all hours.

Excerpted from What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez. Copyright © 2023 by Claire Jimenez. Excerpted by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.