Make Your Home Among Strangers (23 page)

He leaned back and lifted his hands as if being held up at gunpoint, one fist still gripping the bread.

—But listen, the way she talks about it? She has to admit she's not, whatever, that he's not her kid. That's not her life. Besides, she's
got
two kids, and she's got Dante now too, so that's plenty.

—Me and Leidy aren't really –

—You know what I mean, he barked. He shoved more bread in his mouth and said, crumbs flying out with his words, And you know how she gets. So tell her to relax about it.

I choked my fork in my hand to keep from saying
No duh
the way Jillian would. Another waitress came by and slid two identical plates of scrambled eggs on the table, the pink flecks of ham scattered atop each heap like wet confetti. We both looked down and sat up straight, away from our plates, neither of us seemingly very hungry at all.

—I don't have to tell her anything, I said.

—¿Todo bien? the waitress asked, and we said yes without looking at each other.

He unwrapped his silverware, tossing the little paper band off to his side. Digging into the eggs, mixing them even though they were already very much mixed, he said, You know what? Do whatever you want.

—She's just volunteering, I said. But I couldn't even convince myself: my mom would say exactly that in her own defense. I pushed my eggs around my plate.

—Volunteering. Sure she is. If that's what she calls what she's doing.

He waved one hand like a blade across his throat and shut his mouth, started over.

—Like I said, do whatever you want. It's not my problem.

I shrugged and said, Fine, not mine either then.

He didn't speak again until his eggs were gone, though that was only maybe a few minutes. About halfway through them, with me still on my fifth or sixth bite, I faked a mean laugh and said, Hungry much? But the only response was the clank of his fork on the plate.

When nothing but specks of egg were left, he grabbed his napkin and pulled it to his face. He wiped around his mouth in a wide arc, and from that move, I knew he'd shaved recently; he was still used to a goatee, to a big food-catching swath of hair clinging to his face. The empty feeling was still new to him.

—So the party's at Zoila's house again?

I had a freak flash of panic—he was planning on coming and making a scene. My dad had missed Noche Buena only a couple times before: one time because of a fight with Mami, after which he went instead to Fito's apartment and hung out there; and one time because his grandmother was dying and he wanted to spend it with her, since she'd pretty much raised him. I imagined him making his last stand in Zoila's driveway, but then he leaned back in his chair and let out a puff of air—a muted burp.

—Yeah, I said.

As he rubbed his belly through his shirt, I searched for what to say next: What are
you
doing for Noche Buena? Are you sad you aren't coming with us? Where did you even go before you came to Mom's family's party? Do you feel bad now that you aren't invited? As bad as we felt when you decided to make us homeless?

—I have something, he said.

He sat up in his seat. A present, I thought, and something shot through my hands, the pinkie and ring fingers going numb. I hadn't gotten him anything—hadn't expected anything from him. I hadn't gotten gifts for anyone, not even Dante. I'd planned to explain that I was going to shop the day after Christmas—
I was so busy up at school!
—but I'd forgotten to give this explanation to anyone.

—Papi, you didn't need –

—It's nothing, he said.

He lifted himself from the seat a bit and reached his hand behind him. In his fist, when the hand returned, was his wallet. He flipped it open.

—No, really Dad.

He shushed me. From the gap where money went, he tugged out three bill-sized crumpled envelopes. Two were blank, but scribbled on the third was the word
Dante
.

—It's not a lot, so listen, just take it. There's one for Leidy and one for the kid. You give it to them for me, okay?

He held the envelopes out across the table, the three of them fanned out and trembling a little. Please, he said. It's fine, just take it.

The one marked Dante was on top. The name was written in all caps, with the
D
written over and over again, like the pen had stopped working. Almost every Christmas before this, he'd sneak off in the days leading up to the holiday and buy Leidy and me something that he hadn't discussed with my mom: when I was nine, it was a Nintendo; the year before Leidy got pregnant, he bought both of us a really nice Seiko watch. The next year, with Leidy three months away from having Dante and Roly still staying away, it was nothing. Later, I understood that his not getting us something on his own was a sign he was planning on leaving, even before I made it easier for him by confessing what I'd done. And later, his choice to forgo gifts would be vindicated when I showed him the acceptance packet to a school he didn't know I'd applied to, that he didn't even know existed. But now, with these envelopes, a new possibility opened up: he'd been too disappointed in Leidy, by her and Roly's choices—too angry at how little control he had over anything—to pick something out.

He placed the envelopes, still in their fan, down on the tabletop. The corner of one poked a small puddle left by the glass of water. Darkness rushed into the paper, the envelope's corner absorbing the water faster than he could slide them away and mutter, Shit.

—Papi, I said. You should do it.

He was putting his wallet back in his pocket. Do what?

—Give them to Leidy and Dante yourself.

—Oh
please
, he said. He searched the dining room for any waitress willing to make eye contact with him. I'm not interested in the drama, Lizet.

My knuckles were white, wrapped around the handle of my mug. Maybe I was going to throw it across the table. Maybe I was ready to be explicit—to bring up the woman from the bank, the drama of
that
act. Maybe I just wanted more coffee and was waiting for any of those waitresses to see me.

—Are you kidding me? I said. Yes you are.

His eyes darted from a waitress to me, then moved away again just as fast. He mumbled
whatever
and I let go of the mug.

—All I'm saying is you should come see them. You should give them this yourself.

He looked down at the dregs of his café, the bottom of his mug home to clumps of bread and undissolved sugar, same as in my cup.

—I can't, he said. He stopped his search and said, You know I can't.

I shrugged. Do whatever you want, I said.

He didn't answer, just placed four fingers on the envelopes and pushed them even closer to my side of the table.

—Listen, you're not gonna steal this, right?

I blocked them from coming any closer. You know what, Dad?

—I'm joking! he said. Jesus! I'm asking because maybe you need money for stuff up there at that school.

I did. I always did. But I said, I don't.

He tapped the envelopes and said, Just tell me if you do, okay?

His fingers left them then and touched my wrist. My hand clenched the mug's handle and then just as suddenly released it, and his hand encircled my wrist completely. He squeezed it too hard, not a comfort but a warning—a parent seizing an arm to wrench a child from an intersection, from the path of oncoming danger. Then he let go, and as he pulled his hand away, I felt the traces of his grip on my wrist, like small rounds of sandpaper taking something with them, leaving only the idea of softness behind.

—Okay, I said. I will.

—Good, he said. Because you can. You can tell me. But you know that, because you're the smart one.

I didn't really mean it then but I felt I had to say it: Papi, Leidy is smart, too.

A waitress dropped a small plastic tray with our bill between us. My dad took the same four fingers from before and pulled it to him. He lifted the slip, examined the numbers.

—Sure she is, he said, glaring at the receipt.

*   *   *

The envelopes were in my back pocket. In the restaurant's parking lot, where we said a goodbye that felt more like a see-you-later, my dad warned me against putting the money in so unsafe a place, but I wasn't worried about losing it: I was worried about how I would explain the money at all when I'd supposedly spent the last hour eating toast and eggs with Omar. I turned the wrong way out of the lot automatically, heading home out of habit, and I figured maybe that was a sign—maybe seeing the old house would give me the answer.
The house will tell me what to do
, I thought: I'd learned about magical realism in my writing seminar, when the TA had made weirdly consistent eye contact with me during the two class meetings where he was in charge and where we discussed it. He held his palm out to me at the end of every point he made and kept saying,
Right?—
his assumption being, I guess, that I knew what he was talking about because pronouncing my last name required the rolling of an
R
. At one point he referred to magical realism as my
literary tradition
and asked me to explain that concept to my classmates. He held
both
his hands out to me then, like I was supposed to drop my genetically allotted portion of magical realism into them, pass it between us like an imaginary ball at a rave.

I tried my best. I said, I don't know if we have any traditions like that, sir. My parents don't really … read.

He gave a short laugh like I'd just offended him, and, after blinking hard, grinned through closed lips. And I knew from that tightrope smile, from the slow way he talked me through what he presumed I meant to say, that he thought I was an idiot.

And so now, as I navigated the city's asphalt grid toward my old house, I fantasized that it would happen: that a parrot or an iguana would drop out of a tree and trudge over to me, talk in Spanish about my destiny and tell me what to do. Or maybe some palm fronds from the trees lining the street would reach down and cradle me, then ferry me to an old spirit woman who'd call me by some ancient name and inscribe the answers to my problems on the back of a tiger/dragon/shark. Better yet, maybe she would become my temporary mom, since Ariel was borrowing mine. I had high hopes for my old house as
metaphor
, my old house as
fantastical plot element to be taken literally
, my old house as
lens via which I could examine the narrative of our familial strife
. I was ready for what I'd been taught about myself, about what it meant to be
like me
, to kick in.

But when I got there, the squat palm trees that had lived in a clump in our front yard had been cut down. I looked down the avenue, thinking I must be at the wrong place, but of course I wasn't: Leidy had tried to warn me about this at Thanksgiving. The bars on the windows and door weren't white anymore but had been painted black, which somehow made them
less
noticeable. The fence around the house—that was gone, replaced by a stronger-looking low wall that seemed not so much a gate but more a bunch of cinder blocks stacked in a row along the sidewalk. There wasn't a carport anymore either, and the mango tree that had always dropped its fruit on that carport had been ripped out, a concrete slab covering the patch of grass in which it had grown. The sun bounced off these new cement surfaces, making the house look like it was burning. The stucco exterior was still painted bright green, but with the sun pounding on it like that—with no grass to absorb the glare—it seemed more like the irritating yellow of a glow stick swirling in a club's darkness. There wasn't a parrot or a fucking iguana for miles.

I pulled off the street, the nose of the car inching past the cement wall. It felt like an accident, is the only way I can think to say it, like a bad copy of my house, or like a voice I was supposed to recognize but couldn't place. I was of course alone in the car, but I said,
Oh my god, look what they did! What should we do?
to the empty passenger seat. My hands trembled on the steering wheel; out of nowhere I felt like I had to pee. I wanted to pretend I wasn't alone. I tried one more time:
Help me know what to do
.

The yard stood solid and still. No part of that concrete was going to speak to me. If I indulged this sorry excuse for magic and kept talking to imaginary people about imaginary choices, I worried I'd never go back to my mom's apartment, or to the freezing dorm room a thousand miles away, or to anywhere I didn't belong. I couldn't let my imagination give me other options; it was too painful to admit they weren't real. I shifted my eyes to the dashboard, refusing to look into the house's windows or at the front door, and watched my hand as it forced the car into reverse.

*   *   *

Once I'd parked in the lot behind my mom's building, I rested my head on the steering wheel before turning off the car. I'd wanted to see the house and be calmed by it, feel somehow like it was still mine, not realizing that the mere act of observing it in that way, like a particle under a microscope, meant it had changed. I shifted in my seat just like my dad had at the restaurant, lifting a hip to pull the envelopes out of my back pocket. They weren't there. They weren't there! I almost yelped with happiness—the spirit of my old house had taken them, relieved me of their burden; the TA was right and
this is more than a metaphor!—
until my hand slid toward the other pocket, almost as an afterthought, undoing the magic.

 

19

LEIDY NOTICED THE ENVELOPES IMMEDIATELY,
said, What are those? as she tried to tug them from my grip seconds after I found her in our room, changing Dante on the bed.

—No
wait
! I said, pulling them away and holding them behind my back. I have to tell you something.