When I hear pounding on the front door early in the morning, I'm praying it's not a traveling Bible salesman. Worse, it's my fucking mother.
She's still pretty young, pushing the edges of forty, but hard living's been catching up to her lately— blame it on the years of stress, the drug abuse, hell, her lousy personality in general, but the wrinkles worn into her face are like tire tracks in the snow. "Listen, I need some money," she says with no preamble, and like she never anticipated me telling her no. "Not a whole lot, but—"
"You know what I love the most about you, Ma?" I drawl. "How you never beat around the bush. You need some money, okay, and what about this—" I gesture at my porch roof, and at a shingle that's a stiff breeze away from crashing onto her head— "makes you think I got any to spare?"
From her shocked and offended expression, it's the fact that I'm her eldest son, and I've been coming in clutch to pay her bills since I was thirteen. "I'm your mother." And that's her launching pad into her usual guilt trip— I'm half-Irish, half-Mexican, and a hundred percent Catholic, I should've developed an immunity to them by now. "I was in labor with you for thirty hours when I was seventeen, do you have any idea what I went through, bringin' you into this world?" She gestures at her stomach for emphasis, making slashing motions like she's holding a scalpel; she never shuts up about it, so I'd say I have a pretty good idea. "And now I guess you're fine with lettin' me rot on the streets. Sharper than a serpent's fuckin' tooth is a thankless child."
"I'm not sure if you forgot," I start in my deliberately calm, no, Neni, Daddy's shirt ain't for chewing voice, "but I got my own family now. Unlike you, I think about keepin' my kid fed."
"You're your daddy's son, ain't you, through and through," she says, and that actually gets to me— scrapping with Ed, who doesn't have enough brains to fill a teacup, is nothing compared to Ma at her worst, the progenitor of Curly's tendency to hit below the belt. "The only person you ever think about is me, me, me— it's no surprise that Curly's the only one of y'all who turned out halfway decent, he doesn't have that same—"
"Then why ain't you at your little golden boy's door, huh?" I dig my nails into my forearms, try to steady myself with the familiar burst of pain; I feel all of five years old in her presence again, accusing her of liking Curly best, and her not even trying to deny it. "Trust me, he's got more than enough cash to spare these days."
I'm still not tempted by his offer, even now that I've had time to think about it. Whoever pays your bills owns your ass; once I started covering Ma's, she could never tell me what to do again without me holding the light bill over her head, and when I took money from Luis, he could manipulate me in the same way. I'm not interested in being led around on a leash ever again, even a diamond-encrusted one.
"He needs that money for his wife and baby," I can't even make this shit up, "and you think I want to deal with Luis a second longer than I have to? No, sir."
"Ed's ass finally manage to fuse to the recliner, then?"
She glares at me. "Your stepdaddy is focusin' on his sobriety right now," the same way he has been since I was thirteen, "and I don't want anything distracting him from that."
I'm not sure how much I want anything distracting him from that, either, considering how much easier his fists start swinging when he's on the hooch. And gun to my head, I don't want her out on the street, either— or worse, trying to wheedle herself a spot on my couch. "I can maybe float you twenty, by Friday," I say through gritted teeth, if I can cover somebody else's shift this week. "Any more than that, you're on your own."
"I just don't know what I'd do without my boys," she says, becoming sweet as banana pie now that she's gotten what she came for— I wish I could smash one right in her face. "Reckon you should come round for supper tonight, I ain't seen enough of my grandbabies lately." Lord, and how the fuck is this woman a grandmother twice over?
"You know what, I'm almost tempted," I say slowly. "Because I got something even worse comin' down the pike tonight than supper with you and Ed."
Her good humor's got the shelf life of a bottle of milk. "And just what might that be?"
"Dinner with my in-laws."
He calls me in the afternoon, as I'm trying to get a shred of sleep while the baby's down, and what does the phone's ring do but wake her up with a piercing shriek. I'm already not in the best mood when I pick up. "Hello?" I try not to outright snap as I jostle her on my hip, though I can't make any promises if this is a sales pitch for a new vacuum.
"Hey, manita." He draws the vowels out so long and lazy, I know he's drunk; hearing his voice still strikes a well of longing inside of me, one that's deeper than I expected. The line crackles; someone stirs behind him, and there's a clink of glass and muffled cuss words in the background. I wonder if he's at Buck's, or somewhere even rougher. Four hours into his parole and he's already associating with known felons. "Is Tim home?"
"He's at work." I pull off some of the dry skin around my thumbnail, hard enough to draw blood; biting back a cuss of my own, I stick it in my mouth to suck on. "Ain't you supposed to be in a halfway house right now? Not runnin' around all over creation?"
"Overcrowding." I can practically hear the shrug in his voice. "I was fixin' to be transferred to another one, but… reckon they lost track of me in the shuffle."
I try not to groan out loud. Tim was in a halfway house for three months after he got out of Big Mac, and he was only inside for a year; Diego's going to be wandering around the outside world like he just got released from Plato's cave, after four. "Where are you even gonna stay?"
"Friends."
Trying to talk to Diego about anything practical, since he got on the drugs, is like grappling with a bar of soap in the shower— he just keeps slipping through my fingers. Neni makes another loud gurgle, and he notices, somehow, through all the din at Buck's. "That my baby girl?"
"Uh-huh— Neni, no, ma'am," I say as I fish a chunk of my loose hair out of her mouth— she's in a real insistent chewing phase lately, I think she might be ready to start teething, according to Dr. Spock's book.
"Figured y'all were gonna name her Guadalupe. After Mamá."
"I considered it," I say with a grimace, "I just couldn't go through with it." I spent a little too much time thinking about her teachers mangling it at the start of every school year, or her spelling the whole thing out at the DMV, and there went all my sentimentality— besides, I want my daughter to be her own person, not a living memorial to a grandmother she'll never meet. Still, the reproval in his voice stings, like he has any say in what Tim and I name our own child. Remembering Tim stings even more. "What are you askin' after my husband for?"
"That's men's business, jefa, mind your own," he says, which reminds me of why I didn't try harder to keep contact with my brother from slowing to a trickle— beyond the whirlwind of Tim getting out of jail, our wedding, trying for a baby, almost dying having a baby... I hate that phrase. "You know what time he'll be home, then, I can stop by—"
"You won't, Diego," I say with a firmness I'm unaccustomed to with him. Everything else aside, I'm not having anyone drunk as a skunk around my daughter. "Tim just got off probation, you can't be serious about mixin' him back up with—"
Some older brothers are protective over their sisters, when they start dating; I guess he figured Papi already had the market cornered, and was all too happy to see the back of Tenoch, because I swear Diego likes Tim more than he ever liked me. It's why he took a shine to him in the first place that makes the back of my neck prickle. Neni starts to grizzle again.
"Heard he just got out of Ramirez, too, whole place been itchin' to tell me that—"
"He's out of the life, period—"
"Are you on the rag or somethin'?" It's so crude, my mouth snaps shut. Now I definitely know he's loaded. "I want to hear it from him, okay?"
I sigh and stroke the top of my daughter's head with my fingertips, her fine hair unbearably soft to the touch. There's no point continuing this, and it's not like he'll hear anything different from the horse's mouth. "Have you even told Papi— hello? Diego?"
He hung up on me.
When Gabi and I roll up to her daddy's place that night, he pulls her right into his arms; I swear if he thought he could get her past the foyer and then slam the door in my face, he'd do it with a smile. I'm not even sure why he bothers inviting me at all, maybe for the pleasure of getting to verbally slap me around, maybe just because he knows she wouldn't show up without me. "You look dizzy, mija, did you remember your medication? You can still afford your medication, right?" He holds her out at arms' length, then cuts his eyes at me, like I'm a pizza delivery guy who's outstayed his welcome. "Are you ever going to cut your hair? Is this why you cannot get a decent job?"
"Papi, it's the seventies— everyone's growin' their hair out now, it's the fashion," Gabi tries to come to my defense, as he hangs her coat up on the hook. We were already growing it out in the sixties, but that's beside the point; I self-consciously touch the back of my neck all the same. Shit, the way he goes on, you'd think I was walking around with a mustache and beard set like George Harrison on the cover of All Things Must Pass. (Swear those Beatles are doing better records apart than they ever did together.)
This man, he doesn't have so much more money than me, and he doesn't live in a much better neighborhood. Luis took one look at his baby girl and thought she wasn't good enough for me just because she can make a pencil stay put in her hair. But he has fully-stocked bookshelves in his living room— Wuthering Heights, Mrs. Dalloway, Vanity Fair, with pages annotated in three different colors of ink. Nobody in America puts a lot of stock in a degree in English from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, sure, but he sees my family, where my stepdad's our intellectual heavyweight with his GED, and he sees nothing but trash all the way down.
Ximena gives me an encouraging smile as I come sit down at the table— I pull Gabi's chair out so pointedly, I hope it sticks in her daddy's eye, like the tip of Vinny Hamilton's pencil into Duane Kelley's cornea during juvie study hall once— and ladles me a bowl of soup. I try my hardest not to grimace at the prospect of having to eat her cooking, though God knows I've had plenty of practice at choking down my mama's, but it's actually pretty decent ajiaco this time. Hell, she might just end up with a 'ring by spring' after all, like her daddy's hoping. "Did you get that raise yet?" Mr. Lopez grills me before he can even lift his spoon to his mouth, his upper lip already curled in a U of disdain.
The degree aside, he obviously resents having to speak English in his own house, with his own kids, because of me— it's embarrassing, but I can barely keep up with their speed and the Colombian vernacular they use even if I give it my full concentration. I want to tell him that my stepdad used to pull his belt off whenever he heard us 'talking Mexican', thinking that we were making fun of him in a way he couldn't understand (he was right, a lot of the time, but still). Or that Curly's teachers told Ma he couldn't grasp reading by the third grade because his head was too full of Spanish. I don't, though. I've already got this man's contempt, the last thing I need is his pity.
"Foreman says he can't afford it right now after all." The actual story is that his probation supervision fees have gone up and he's taking the difference out on us, but since we get paid under the table, it's not like we've got a ton of recourse. I'm not proud of this, but I send back a volley of my own. "Y'all heard from Diego yet?" I ask, angling for the kind of innocent expression I've seen mirrored so many times on Curly's face. "Is he comin' around to dinner, should I get him a place setting?"
If this was a movie, the old man's glass would've shattered in his hand, the way his grip tightens around it. Gabi kicks me under the table, and not real gently, either. I only start to feel a little bad when my baby girl starts wailing in her high chair, sensitive to the disturbed vibrations in this room like she's a healing crystal, but neither of us can get to her before Mr. Lopez has her scooped up. "Shush, shush now, tranquillo, Neni," he says, as he dips her pacifier into his iced tea and then puts it back into her mouth; she settles in his lap as she suckles it, her whimpers soothed. It's shit like this that makes it hard for me to hate him.
"I've been lookin' into a job," Gabi says with overeager brightness like she's Superman swooping in to save Lois Lane, and then there's nothing I can do to stop this car crash once it's already started. "Maybe when Neni's a little older, you know… my friend Eileen's cleanin' houses on the West side now, a couple of days a week, some of those ladies are real good tippers. And they let her bring her youngest."
Mr. Lopez smiles at me in a way that does nothing but stretch his face out, and looks at me like he wants to strangle me until my eyes bug out of my head, like a chew toy's. "Hijita, go help your sister with the dishes," he says, even though we just sat down to eat; I should bristle at him giving her orders, even in his own house, but I'm too far up shit's creek to care. "Tim and I are going to have a talk."
Like I'm about to get a whooping in the principal's office, and yet I follow him into his 'study' anyway. It's got wall-to-wall bookshelves and a desk at the center, covered in spread-out papers; he has a photo of Gabi's mother framed, her smile warm even from behind the glass, like weak sunlight coming out from cloud cover. The smile is not infectious.
"I have tolerated so much from you," he says as he sits down, really playing up the school principal routine as he enunciates every syllable. "Allowed my daughter to live in a rundown house, in a dangerous neighborhood, with a barely-reformed criminal— but I will be damned if she has to work with a seven-month-old baby." He rummages around in his desk drawer, and I realize he's pulling out his checkbook, vibrating with rage when he looks back up at me. "My daughter, scrubbing some white woman's floor on her hands and knees. Is this what I brought her to America for? Do you have no shame?"
I don't disagree with him half as much as he assumed going into this, but the same dangerous impulse that always makes me talk back— even when I'd get my face smashed in by police or a fist wrapped around my throat by my stepdaddy— cocks inside of me like a gun. "It's a new decade, ain't it? Whole new era for women's lib, according to Betty Friedan. Hell, maybe she wants to be the breadwinner."
He mutters some cuss words under his breath that I can't quite make out, but trust me, you can tell that they're cuss words. "My dearest hope in this life," he says slowly, "is that one day, maybe twenty years from now, you will be in my place. That you will have a son-in-law who only speaks to you with sneering disrespect, even when you are offering him free money." He rips one of the checks out of the book, holds his pen up above it like a sword. "How much do you need, one hundred dollars? Two hundred? How much will it take for you to start acting like a man?"
I don't know if it's because Mr. Lopez still hasn't gotten contractions down yet, or just because he hates me, but he sounds like he took his rhetorical tips from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. "I don't need your charity," I say just as slowly, to make sure the message really sinks in. "I don't need a single cent from you, and I've never asked for one. We're managin', I got the bills covered—"
"With what? The money you earn… roofing houses? With other convicted felons?" I'm not sure I love all the contempt he's fit into those sentences, like someone didn't have to build the roof he's got over his head right this second, or like his own son isn't just as much of an ain't-shit criminal as me. "I swear you would be better off selling la droga again. At least that was profitable."
Every conversation with this man makes me contemplate suicide that much more seriously. "You made your point yet, you gotten your pound of flesh out of me?" I drag my hand through my long, long hippie hair, fucking it up even more. "I am bustin' my ass, every single day—"
"I think that Gabriela should come live with me again."
If Muhammad Ali had swung his massive fist into the side of my head just then, he wouldn't have done a better job of dizzying me. "Yeah?" I say, stupidly. "You reckon?"
"Her and the baby," he says, like 'the baby' isn't composed of fifty percent of my DNA. Like he's just making a reasonable business proposition. "I can certainly provide for them, if that is beyond your capabilities. I think this little adventure of hers has gone on for long enough."
… Lord, he really shouldn't have said that to me. I'm not a good man, more like a half-domesticated panther who still has to be reminded how to act in polite society, but I manage to stop myself from tearing his throat out all the same. Instead I snatch up the half-scrawled check from his hand and tear it up, let the pieces fall onto his desk like volcanic ash, a harbringer of what's to come if he keeps pushing this. It's more than a little melodramatic, and I'm sure sinking his opinion of me to an all time low, but hell, what can I say. I'm my mama's son, too.
I start fussing at Tim the second we're out the door. "Why can't you and my daddy have one meal together without it turnin' into a brawl?" The worst thing is, they fight like two cats trapped in a barrel together because they're so similar, but they'd both keel over dead if I ever said as much. "I heard raised voices, from the study—" I wouldn't be surprised if they actually did brawl, one of these days, and I can't even place a bet on which one would throw the first punch.
I expect him to fuss right back at me, but instead he just stares at me, raw and hungry and disturbed, the same way he stared at me when he was eighteen. He presses me up against the back wall of the house, rubs the chain of my aquamarine necklace between his fingers, the one I still wear. "Who do you belong to, nena?"
Gloria Steinem would have me by the throat for this one, but any feminist lecture dies in my mouth at his haunted expression. It's like he's looking for genuine reassurance, and he seeks it so rarely that I give it to him. "You. Why would you even ask me that?"
He kisses me hard, and I gasp into his open mouth; he tangles a hand up in my hair and cups my ass with the other, draws me closer to him, and for the first time in a long time I feel like his girl again, not just Mama. He lets go too quick, though. "You wanna stay with me?" he asks hesitantly, right into my ear. "You don't want to go nowhere?"
"Of course I don't." I'm equal parts confused and concerned, I have no idea where the question's even coming from. Like he's convinced I've got my suitcase packed and waiting by the door. "Why—"
"I love you," he says, and I'm arrested by the unexpectedness. It's not like I don't know it, he's just not the best at saying it out loud. "Always will. Let's just go home, yeah?"