My mom thrilled her kids with stories of life in Cuba

She was No. 4. We knew this because it was part of her stories. The stories about her real life, not the ones she told us at night when we were small, snuggled under the covers, the room semi-dark.

She could pluck princesses and witches and fairies from her head and weave them into enchantments meant to lull us to sleep. Dolphins and flying fish in sparkling blue seas — were they real or from her imagination? We didn’t know. But often, our bedtime stories ended with her voice trailing off: “ . . . and then . . . and then . . . .”

“And then what, Mommy?” would come our chorus of little voices, the voices of her four children. And then . . . loud snores from our beautiful mommy, our loving mommy, our so very smart mommy. After a long day of teaching Spanish at a local college and supporting her family in a hundred other ways, she couldn’t resist sleep.

The stories of No. 4 and her cohort that I remember with infinite delight were told years later when we were teens, and then at family brunches when we had our own families — and even up until the end. Four was her assigned number at Colegio Teresiano de Camagüey, the Catholic boarding school she attended in central Cuba. There, she wore uniform No. 4, earned good grades, and learned proper etiquette.

No. 4 was always well behaved, but she relished the pranks and eccentricities of her classmates. The one who sleepwalked while No. 4 and friends followed to keep her safe when she headed for the swings. The daring one who so badly wanted to know if a young nun had hair under her wimple that she hid under the nun’s bed until nighttime, when the headdress would finally be removed. The one who put sugar in the salt shaker and added salt to the sugar bowl, with hilarious results.

Inevitably, decades and a world away from the high-ceilinged, echoing hallways of her school, my mother would start laughing while we all sat around the dining room table hoping that in this telling, some new detail would emerge. She’d laugh so uncontrollably she’d cry, unable to finish her tale, and soon we were laughing and crying too. Maybe she was remembering her friends’ giggles or their twinkling eyes as they waited to see if a prank would work, and would anyone get in trouble?

No. 4 went on to earn a philosophy degree at the University of Havana. Soon after, she met a handsome American midshipman, a college student in the reserve officers training program, who conducted her and her friends on a civilian tour of a US Navy destroyer docked in Cuba a few days. Their first date was to the Tropicana, with her mother along as chaperone. After an 18-month courtship, they married in Havana. The newlyweds moved to a small apartment in Boston that winter, then to Newport, Rhode Island. The island girl gave birth to their first child while her husband was at sea.

Some of her stories were scary. In her college days, my mother and her friends supported Fidel Castro’s revolution to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s dictator. By the time it became clear Castro was just going to be a different kind of dictator, my mother was married and living in the United States. My abuelos fled to be with her, their only child. It will just be a year or two, everyone said, before Fidel is overthrown. They’d go back — we’d all go, spend summers in Cuba, maybe my father would get a teaching job there. That didn’t happen.

But at our big family brunches, my mother, Onyria Herrera McElroy, mostly wanted to hear from her four children and their spouses, the grandkids, the great-grandkids. Until someone would plead, Tell us the stories from when you were a little girl. And she’d hold us under her spell yet again.

She’s been gone from us six months now. And I’m left wondering, And then what, Mommy?

Lisa Button is a contributing editor at Globe Magazine. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

TELL YOUR STORY. Email your 650-word unpublished essay on a relationship to connections@globe.com. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won’t pursue, and we do not accept essays written with the help of artificial intelligence.