Warning upfront here: there's been a lot of simmering racism/anti-blackness building up, it comes to a head towards the end of the chapter, including some pretty insulting stuff about mixed-race children. Hopefully it's clear that these aren't my views, but unfortunately, not uncommon for the period... :(

I drive by Gabi's house after I haven't heard from her in a few days; I'm not sure if exposure to my mama was enough to make her rethink us, or if she's just died from delayed-onset embarrassment, but either way, I'm concerned enough to want to check in. However, knocking on her door and attracting the attention of her enraged daddy isn't something I'm looking forward to— which is why I park on the other side of the street, pick a pebble up from the ground, and pelt it at the window with the pink lace curtains. You could put me on the set of some cheesy teen movie and I'd fit right in.

She leans out the window a few seconds later, her face shiny with cold cream and her hair wrapped up in a scarf, though she must be going to bed. "Tim, what are you doin' here?" she mouths at me as she shoves the curtains to one side. "I can't go out, I'm grounded until I'm married, and it's definitely not allowed to be to you."

Something goes off in my stomach when she says 'married', like I just swallowed a firecracker. I straddle their fence and almost manage to impale myself. "We can't talk a little?" I get the idea of 'grounded' in theory, but not really in practice, God knows neither my mama, daddy, or stepdaddy would've ever had the patience to enforce that. "Was worried you might've found another guy, y'know, without a mother who's batshit insane and a kid brother who thinks he's Don Juan's second coming."

She hides a giggle behind her hand. "I wasn't allowed on the phone, I'm sorry—"

"Gabi, who's out— is that Tim?"

There's another girl pushing her head into the frame, who I can guess is Ximena— Gabi shoves her away from the window so fast, she's a blur of pink nightgown and braids flat across her scalp, and I'm surprised she doesn't fall right on her ass. "Get out of here— no, you know what, go distract Papi for twenty minutes. Tell him Diego just got arrested again or something, I don't care, just keep him busy."

"What's in it for me?"

"Me not telling him what I caught you doin' in the girls' bathroom last week, how 'bout it?"

I can't see too clearly from my vantage point on the ground, but she looks like she's pulling a face— she darts out of the frame, though, which is when Gabi swings her legs over the ledge and climbs down their trellis ladder. "Quick, she's not going to be able to keep him occupied half that long," she groans as I lead her over to my passenger seat. "Nothing Diego's done can compare to me right now. The whore of Babylon."

"Ma actually called him—" I can't believe I'm missing her depressive episodes. At least when she's in those, she stays the hell out of my way.

"He didn't believe all of it," she says, closing the door behind her with a thump, "she was a little..." I don't have to hear the end of the sentence to figure out that she's trying to avoid the phrase 'completely sloshed'. "Tipsy? But either way, he got the gist of it." She buries her face in her hands. "Your mama... I can't ever look her in the eye again. She must think that I'm so easy."

"It's me she thinks is easy," I hurry to reassure her, "and trust me, she's got no room to judge nobody in that department."

"I figured it was your mama, the one who was Mexican, too, I wasn't trying to offend her," she adds miserably. Like it should've offended her in the first place. "I mean, how is your name Tim Shepard when she's white, how does that make any sense?"

Boy, is that always a fun one to explain. "She wasn't... married to my daddy, when she had us," I say, and I'm surprised that I'm embarrassed— hell, that I have to say mine instead of ours, because turns out Curly's is a whole separate guy. That's not exactly something special, to announce on the East side, but it feels different here, in a neighborhood where people don't board their windows shut. "She didn't put him on the birth certificates, we just went down as illegitimate... she thought it'd be easier for us that way, not walking around with Ramirez as a last name."

She crinkles her brow, trying to sort out the twisted branches of my family tree. "Didn't that bother him? Did he never want to get married?"

I'm not irritated, by the pushiness of the rapid-fire questions, I just can't bring myself to answer her in a way that she'd understand. Doll, let's start with this— I can't get a straight answer out of anybody, but I'm pretty damn sure there was already a Mrs. Ramirez, and one he probably didn't see any reason to bother divorcing. I crank my key into the ignition, make the truck whir and rev to life again. "You want to drive around the block?" I ask instead of even attempting to. "You think your sister can hold your daddy off for that long?"

It's not easy, even after all this time, for me to think about my old man. Probably because I was his favorite.

"Come out onto the porch."

I'm too old to be playing with matchbox cars, and I feel every second of my ten years as Papá opens the door into the kitchen, a still-smoldering cigarette between his fingers— the paper curls and burns, and either he doesn't notice or care about the toys I've jammed behind my back as he watches me. I don't know how to describe the way he did it, with his slightly-bulging eyes, his always-turning head. Like he could see right through me, and more than anything, I didn't want to have any shameful secrets for him to discover.

He shuts the door firmly behind us. It's getting to be the beginning of winter, dead leaves crunching under my feet, and I shiver— he bought me and Curly new coats when he got out of the slammer, and I want to go back inside and put mine on— but before I can dart away, there's a gun in my hands.

"Don't tell your ma," he says, and back before she got her second Miltown prescription, that was a halfway valid concern. "Growin' up, ain't you." Whenever he spoke English to me, Papá spoke it in short, clipped sentences, like he was trying to get to the point as fast as he could. "Grip it more firmly— there's the trigger." He readjusts my fingers along the handle; it feels impossibly heavy to me, though it's a Glock .42, designed to be light. "It's yours, yeah? Feliz cumple."

My birthday was a month ago, but I don't correct him, I'm thankful all the same. My uncle Luis, who's nineteen and thinks he knows everything, got me the cars; my mama forgot altogether. "Thanks," I say, and I want to hug him, but I doubt he'd take that real well.

He gestures at a line of beer cans he put up along the porch railing. "Go ahead, try to hit one."

The last gun I ever shot was a BB gun I stole from Frankie Reyes next door, and I wasn't great with that either. Being under my daddy's watchful eye isn't helping much more, my hand shakes, I forget how to work a trigger. When I pull it, I almost bite my tongue off from the strength of the recoil, and I haven't hit anywhere close to a can. I'm lucky I didn't shoot one of the flower pots right off Mrs. Reyes's porch.

I expect him to be angry, though I haven't had enough practice to be any good at it— Papá didn't like excuses. I'm angry at myself, more, that I've already failed him, but he just surveys me with an impassive expression, lights another cigarette. "'S all right," he says with more kindness than I would've expected from him, "at least you didn't drop it." He waves the cigarette at me, has to stomp out some of the sparks that fall by his feet. Making him happy is like standing on quicksand, I never know what will. "Do it again."

I shoot until I empty the clip, and by some miracle, because it definitely ain't my marksmanship, I manage to knock one of the cans onto our dead grass yard. "Did you see that?" I holler. "Did you see—"

"Yeah, lil' man." His face breaks into a rare grin— I'll hold the memory of his cold smiles up to my chest later, warm them up. "You might be as good a shot as me— or at least second-best."

I'm embarrassed, in retrospect, of how willing I was to throw my brother under the bus. "It's better than what Curly could've done. Curly probably couldn't even get one."

Curly was six years old at the time, but in the war between us for whatever scraps of love people wanted to give, I had to get my blows in where I could. "You're right," he readily agrees, "he's just a kid— he's too young to know about what I do, about the life. So now you tell me somethin'." He crouches down low, to my level, and beckons me closer with one hand. I clutch the lapel of his jacket and he lets me. "Somethin' you've never told anybody before, it'll just be between you and me, yeah? You trust me?"

When I hear my secret spilling from Curly's lips the very next day, delighted that for once he has some decent material on me, I don't even bother to get angry. I know the lesson he was trying to teach, and know that it's one I should've learned a long time ago, if I want to make it in my daddy's world.

Christmas is coming up soon enough, and I'm starting to think about making things official with Gabi. Which means desperately begging my cousin Cisco for cash.

"Más?" he asks incredulously. His arms are gut-deep inside his truck— when he pulls them out and wipes the sweat off his forehead, he leaves a smear of grease behind. Another accessory he uses to try to pretend he ain't got more money than God. "Pussy must be out of this world, if you're askin' for this much. Ain't you slingin' sheetrock around on the side lately, anyway? Where'd all that go to?"

I can't believe I'm swallowing my pride like this, but I don't want to give Gabi some vending machine necklace that'll turn her skin green, neither. "Had to get the kids some shit to unwrap, you think Ma remembers what a magical time of year it is?" The only thing Curly deserves is a lump of coal and a switch in his stocking, if this holiday is supposed to be based off good behavior, but I still got him a Stones record— with the loving note, so you quit scratching up mine, dipshit. Angela's charm bracelet damn near wiped out the rest of that fund. "Look, my new girl's... she's not grease-adjacent, you catch my drift? I can't exactly buy her a knockoff Yves Saint Laurent bag from Woodward Park."

"Your new girl this, your new girl that— you've gone so long without showin' her off to us, I'm startin' to think that's what you nicknamed your right hand." My fist shoots out on reflex to get him in the bicep. "When are we gonna get to meet her, huh?"

If I had my way, never— the best-case scenario here is these clowns salivating over her like dogs on raw meat— but that's not either an acceptable or realistic answer. "Might bring her around Luis's Christmas party," I say, that's about the best way I can get the two of them acquainted. Those always put him in a good mood, and if I'm lucky, he'll be too falling-down drunk from the eggnog to take a good look at her.

All the levity drains right out of the cramped garage after I say that, and I don't even know why until Cisco breaks the tense silence. "Ma wants you to come with us, for Christmas." He sounds like he rehearsed this a dozen times in the mirror before now. "She was askin' me, to ask you."

I don't know why, but I play much dumber than I am. "I'm booked, sorry, don't think I'm gonna be able to get out of Mass this time—"

"You're not retarded, Tim, cut the shit." I don't say anything, just fiddle with the wrench he left on the hood. "To Santi's grave. To pray."

I declared myself an atheist at fifteen to piss off my mother— she'd long since lost the ability to belt me and make it count, but she tried her damndest to beat the fear of God back into me that time. It didn't work. Santi doesn't need my prayers now, anyway. "Your ma told me she wished the bullet went in my head," I say flatly, just in case he forgot. "That's fine an' all, she's got the right to her own opinion, but I'm not so sure we should be spendin' the holidays together."

I don't really blame her, for saying it while she was crying, vomiting, and looking at what remained of her son's face. I wish it had, too. I just think she maybe shouldn't have said it while I was crying, vomiting, and covered in his blood.

"She didn't mean it, you know she didn't..." The worst part is that I do know, Tía Mercedes isn't some psychopath. Just a mother, and a better mother than mine. "She asks about you all the time, it's been a while... Dios, it'd mean a lot to her. She's barely seen you since. You can ask me for twenty bucks, but you can't come down to the cemetery for the five year anniversary?"

"I don't need your money that bad, asshole, I said I'd pay you back once I—"

"You're livin' in denial, and you need to cut it out." Cisco trying to play the older brother is annoying enough when he's handing out girl advice or telling me what oil to put in my car, much less now. "No one hates you or doesn't want you around, you're the one who's been avoiding us like the plague for years. You ever even been there since the funeral?"

"I'm tryna just move on with my life, man," I say and immediately regret how callous that sounds, even for me. I can't begin to imagine losing a brother, the pain of that; Curly annoys the shit out of me every day, and I'm going to go gray by thirty with everything he puts me through, but that's just what kid brothers do. The thought of having to bury him is one I can't keep in my head for longer than ten seconds, hell, I'd climb into the grave myself before they poured the dirt on top. And I can't fill that void for Cisco, and that's why I feel like, at best, an awkward intruder on their family's grief. Mine is an emptiness where theirs is real memory, and my presence is just a reminder of his violent death, a reminder that one of us made it out and it wasn't the guy who anyone would miss.

What I feel for Santi isn't grief, anyway. It's not anything like that. It's more like they buried me with him, but somehow I got up after the funeral and kept walking around.

He dangles the money in front of my nose like he's playing with a kitten, expects me to jump up and bat at it. "Listen, I'll give you forty, if you come and don't just stand there scowling and slouching the whole time."

I want to be furious that he's bribing me like this, a rich boy like him— forty is a month's worth of groceries for my entire family, including Ed's lazy ass, and something he can afford to give away on a whim. But I'm not proud enough to look this big a gift horse in the mouth, and besides, a larger part of me wants to prove him wrong. I snatch it with a little more force than necessary.

I'm not real sentimental about this kind of thing, but Gabi and I have been steady for coming on two months now, give or take— I haven't been looking for any other broads, and I'm pretty sure she's not playing the field either, without bothering to verify. Maybe I'm less sure if I love her yet, but I like her a hell of a lot, she's smart and she's funny and she's got a good head on her shoulders, and you don't see too much of that stuff on the East side— and for some inexplicable reason, she seems to like me too. I already think of her as my girl in my head and say it often enough, I might as well start to put a label on it.

So I don't know why I'm bringing her around my boys like it's an acid test. A less charitable interpretation would be self-sabotage.

"How many cousins did you say you have again?" she asks me as she fumbles with one of her earrings, standing in the back of the bar with a glass of wine— Luis likes to class things up for the annual holiday party, like he's a C-suite executive thanking us all for a great quarter of drug sales. "I'm not sure if I remember their names—"

"A lot," I start to say, but before I can clarify that we're not all biologically related by a long shot, two of these geniuses almost knock her into the punch bowl trying to knock each other's blocks off. "Those are Temo and Beto," I say as I pull her away from the broken glass. "Usually they've got better manners than this, but not by much."

Luis elbows his way onto the scene fast enough he's sloshing his eggnog, Alberto hot on his heels as usual. "Can y'all at least save this shit for later in the night, before we all get kicked out— oh. So this is Timmy's mystery broad."

They both hear the subarctic chill in his voice, directed at someone who isn't them, and get up and bolt before Luis's attention refocuses. My stomach clenches like it's been squeezed by a giant fist; to be honest, I wasn't assuming there would be that much worse of a blowup than he had when Bonnie and I got serious, some snide comments directed my way whenever he got a little too ornery. He turns to Alberto. "You said she was a Salvi."

Alberto just shrugs, he's already so trashed, I don't know how he's still standing upright. "I took my best guess? What'd you want me to do, start feelin' up her skull for the right bumps?"

And what does she do but still stick her hand out for him to shake. Luis looks at her like she just handed him a squashed cockroach. "It's nice to meet you, sir," she says, like he deserves any honorific from her; she's trying to smile, but I can see that she's biting down on the inside of her cheek as she does it. "I'm—"

"I know who you are, your brother's Kinging," he says, and he doesn't say it all that nicely. "You two went to high school together?"

"We were in biology class—"

Luis holds up a hand, and in spite of myself, I snap my mouth shut— just on instinct, after having spent years navigating his moods. "Will Rogers is a segregated school— you really must've pulled a fast one there, huh?" He takes a strand of her hair between his fingers and rubs it; I wonder for half a second if he's being a pervert right in front of me, but he's not staring at her like that, he's pulling it out to its full length. "Prieta, you sure you wouldn't rather be dating some guy from Greenwood? You lookin' to marry up or what?"

"Don't call her nothin', what the fuck is wrong with you?"

Alberto's scratching the side of his freshly-shaven head, he's never exactly been the sharpest crayon in the box. "What are you gettin' at, she pulled a fast one?"

"She's black, genio. Mixed with it, at least, she flat-irons her hair. Are the two of you blind or what?"

... So there's the big secret revealed. To be honest, I just assumed she had an Indian relative somewhere down the line, like the Curtises and a lot of people around these parts— hell, Meemaw swears that her daddy was Shawnee, though Ma's denying that to her grave. Then again, plenty of people around these parts also use 'Indian' as code for—

"My grandma was," she says, with her chin tilted up, and I have to admire the way that she's still got her pride despite Luis's best efforts at stripping it from her, how she won't back down from him. "What did you expect me to do, deny it? Apologize for bein' in your presence?" She gets her bag off the chair she put it on, starts buttoning her thick woollen coat up to her throat. "You'll be waiting a long time."

I should go after her once she's pushed open the door, letting a wave of snowflakes in, but instead I shove Luis with both palms, hard to enough to make him stumble a couple steps back; he just laughs at me, which only makes me angrier. Like this is all some big fucking joke to him. "She ain't good enough for the likes of us." I gesture in the general direction of Beto and Temo's wreckage. "She's diggin' for gold."

"I just don't think it's a good idea for you to be gettin' serious with no affiliated King girl, makes us look a little overeager with an alliance I'm tryna take slow," he says smoothly. "Wouldn't be surprised if Joe himself put her up to this, you want me to be honest, and if things go south between you two? I don't need him showing up at my door with a pistol."

"Bull fucking shit, this is about your fucking alliances. You know exactly what your problem is with her, it's what you said to her face."

I mean, I knew he wouldn't take this real great, even Curly tried to warn me— but for fuck's sake, this is the same guy who cussed out a white lady in the grocery store for telling him to speak English in Oklahoma? Sounding like he's a member of the Citizens' Council?

"Look, I'm not trying to keep Romeo and Juliet apart here, I heard Dr. King talk about how he had a dream on TV," he says like he's the rational one and I'm throwing a tantrum. "Timmy, you wanna run around with this girl, okay, you go ahead and have fun. I won't stop you. But she's not wife material, and you better figure that out fast. Think about your kids."

My chest tightens. "Go ahead. What about my kids?"

"What do you want me to say, when you already know it? You don't belong on the East side with your white mama and stepdaddy, and you don't belong here with us, neither." He says it almost kindly, which is worse than if he'd spat it out with hate. "You don't belong anywhere at all. And that's exactly what'll happen, if y'all have kids, and you make your daddy's mistakes."

He's right, I've known it my whole life— he didn't exactly have to spell it out, why I've always been kept on the periphery of their operations, running my own offshoot crew. But hearing from my uncle that he never exactly considered me one of them, it stings worse than I expected it to. And I can't stay in this room for a second longer.

Beto and his girl Donna are going at it in the parking lot now, their voices loud and drunk and carrying, as I head after her. He's saying that if he ever catches her looking in another guy's direction again, much less Temo's, he'll put her in the hospital. She yells right back that at least if he's in the cooler for assault and battery, he won't be looking at other broads. Christ on a bike, at least I'm doing better than those two, though not by much.

"Gabi, wait," I holler— she hasn't gotten far, and I realize it's because she was eavesdropping at the door and is now trying to sprint away like she wasn't. "I'm so fucking sorry, I didn't think he'd—"

"What, you think I haven't heard it before?" The bitter resignation in her voice, when she spins around to face me, is worse than shock or anger would be. "Prieta, morena, negrita— I don't need to get it from your family, trust me, my own's bad enough. My aunt Salomé gave me skin bleach cream for Christmas when I was eleven and told me if I ever wanted a husband, I better get real good in the kitchen. Ximena's the 'pretty one'. Hey—" and now she's getting louder, though Beto and Donna are still drowning us out— "is Luis on the market, by any chance? I think they'd get along real well."

"Gabi—"

"Is that why you brought me here?" She has her hands on her hips now, and she might look halfway intimidating if there weren't tears pooling in her eyes, threatening to fall onto her cheeks. "You didn't want to end things yourself, so you got your uncle to do it for you? Why else wouldn't you tell me what they were like?"

I should've. It was my own cowardice keeping me from it, and more than that, my own shame. I've got a drunk mama who says she's already picking out a rosary for my funeral. Cousins who bust each other's heads open just for something to do at a party. An uncle who thinks he owns my ass. But I couldn't keep them hidden forever, no matter how much I wanted to.

"I was gonna give you a Christmas present, actually," I say as she stares at me, breathing staggered. "I mean, if you still want it."

"... Oh." Her cheeks and the tip of her nose are flushed, and I know it's not just because of the frost and lightly-falling snow. "I'm sorry, Tim. I just— you didn't deserve all that."

"Nah, I did." More, to be honest, than she's dishing out right now. "But I didn't... I'm not trying to end anything, I promise. I'm not blind, it just doesn't matter to me. I'm never going to fit in with them either, I never did."

I'm not sure if that's the right thing to say as I keep stumbling over clumsy sentences, that it doesn't matter, like I'm magnanimously choosing to ignore who she is— but no one's ever accused me of being great with my words. And being half-white, that's not the same as being even a quarter black, maybe I shouldn't even make the comparison. But I see her, I always have.

She's looking at me like she's waiting for me to make the next move, so I pull out the box from my coat pocket, the ribbon a little flattened but otherwise unscathed. I'm not in high school anymore, I'm not about to give her a stolen class ring on a chain to wear around her neck— I went to a real department store and everything, even asked the chick behind the counter for advice. "Your birthday's in March, right? That's aquamarine?"

Thank God it wasn't April, or else I really would've been shaking Cisco down for everything he's worth.

"Tim, you shouldn't have..." She's blushing even more as she pulls the sleeves of her coat further over her hands, and now I'm blushing too, which is something I haven't done ever since my voice first started cracking when I was thirteen. "This must've been so much money, I really don't need—"

"I can always return it, if you want, I kept the receipt," and she rolls her eyes and sweeps the hair off the nape of her neck anyway, lets me fasten the clasp. "I mean, hell, you like it, right? Maybe I should've asked what stone—"

Instead of saying anything, she twists back around into my arms and kisses me hard. And I know she gets what I meant, by it, the question there. Gets me.