Mamá Ana

Mamá Ana is Rita's excitable, gregarious grandmother, with whom she spends the summer. Warm, short, and plump, with a passion for soap operas, Rita finds her attention suffocating. When Rita tries some deep breathing exercises, Mamá Ana interprets them as asthmatic wheezing and clucks over Rita's "condition" throughout the story. Initially Rita finds her grandmother smothering and invasive, but over time she comes to see her as having a way with people and "this talent for turning every day into a sort of party."

Maribel Hernández Jones

Maribel Hernández Jones is Angela's glamorous mother, a famous actress in toothpaste advertisements. She is wealthy from a previous marriage and lives in a pink house that Rita finds ridiculous, but she cares for her daughter enough to take her condition seriously. She calls in Papá Juan to cure Angela, and heeds...