Fito said, “You know, my mom, she’s not suffering any-more.”
Marcos nodded as he tossed the ball. “No, she’s not. She’s resting.”
“Good,” Fito said. “She needed to rest.” Then he said, “I shouldn’t have left her. I should’ve gone back. It was my job to take care of her.”
Marcos looked sad when he heard Fito say that. “You’re wrong about that, Fito. It wasn’t your job to take care of your mother. It was her job to take care of you.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Man, you are really into beating up on yourself, aren’t you? We gotta get you a new hobby.”
Fito smiled. It was a sad smile. But it was still a smile.
Sam said, “Fito, are you hungry?”
“Yeah. Actually. Yeah. I’m starving.”
So we all went inside, and Lina started making tortillas, and Sam was giving Fito her spiel about the five stages. And she and Fito were Googling about the five stages in the living room. But me, I was at the kitchen table waiting for the first tortilla so I could slather it with butter. Dad and Marcos were talking. Marcos said he knew of a good counselor and it was probably a good idea for Fito to start seeing one.
“I’ll pay,” he said.
Dad looked at him. “You sure?”
He made a joke. “You know what they say about gay men, we have expendable incomes.”
That made Lina laugh. “Send some my way. I want to buy another of Vicente’s paintings, and he’s getting awfully pricey.” She looked at Marcos. “That’s very generous of you.”
“That kid needs a break. I know he just turned eighteen. He’s not a boy anymore. But that doesn’t mean he’s a man. And besides, I’ve been there.”
Lina and I were both studying him.
“My dad died hugging a bottle. He sure as hell never hugged me.” Marcos took my father’s hand. “I’ll talk to Fito about seeing a counselor.”
I wondered if Fito would go for that.
I reached for the butter and the first tortilla. It was so good, the tortilla. I thought of Mima, and I guess I thought I’d never taste one of her tortillas again. And I thought about what Marcos had said about Fito. He’s not a boy anymore. But that doesn’t mean he’s a man. And what about me? What made you a man? What exactly made you a man?
Faggot. That Word Again.
FITO’S MOM DIDN’T have any kind of religious service. I thought that was a little sad. I wondered if God showed up whether or not your funeral was religious. Mima would probably know the answer to that question. But I didn’t.
Fito’s mom had a brother who paid for a sort of service at the funeral home. A few people showed up, including Fito’s brothers, who acted as if they were high. Sam said they were way scary. Yeah, they were a little rough around the edges. For sure. The casket was at the front of the small chapel at the funeral home, and Fito just kept staring at it. My dad was sitting next to him when one of his brothers came up to Fito and said, “So now you got a sugar daddy or what?” He looked at my dad. “A bit old to be picking up little boys, don’t you think?”
It happened pretty fast. Like a bomb going off. Next thing I knew, Fito had his brother on the floor and was punching his lights out. And then his two other brothers jumped in, and hell, I don’t know, it was happening so fast—but next thing I knew, I’d joined the fight, and I was pulling one of Fito’s brothers off him and I was punching him in the stomach—then in the face, and when I was about to go for one of Fito’s other brothers, I felt some guys pulling me off and holding me back and then I saw Dad had Fito, and Fito’s face was bleeding. And then Sam was looking at me and she said softly, “Your lip is bleeding.”
I realized that the funeral directors were holding my arms, afraid that I wasn’t quite finished. I started relaxing and breathing, and they let go of me.
Sam grabbed my arm, whispering, “Let’s get out of here.”
Everything seemed so quiet.
I saw Dad walking in front of us, and I saw Fito leaning into him, holding his rib—or his arm.
Everything around me had sped up—and now everything was moving in slow motion.
As we walked out the door, I heard a voice yelling, “Fucking faggots!” The words echoed in my ears.
Nobody said a word as we drove off.
Not a word.
Fito sat next to me in the back with his hands covering his face. His fists were a little bloody. He was rocking himself back and forth as tears ran down his face. And I could tell he was in pain.
It was a cold night. Clear sky. I don’t know why I noticed that. Maybe a part of me wished that everything could be as clear and simple as the night sky.
Dad pulled into a parking lot, got out of the car, and lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking. He puffed on his cigarette until he was calmer. Then he got back into the car.
I knew my dad was thinking. He was very disciplined that way. He pulled in to the emergency room of the hospital. He looked over at Sam. “You wanna park this thing for me?” He opened the door to the back and gently helped Fito out of the car. He looked at me. “You hurt?”
“No,” I said. “Just a bloody lip.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, Dad. I’m good.” He gave me a look. It was strange. I couldn’t tell what was in his head.
I watched Dad and Fito as they walked into the ER, Fito leaning on my dad. I felt the car move as Sam made her way into the parking lot.
I sat in the back, immobile, paralyzed, my heart and head empty. I felt like a bird whose wings were broken but who was still struggling to fly.
I don’t know how long we were in the ER waiting room. They let Dad go in with Fito, and Sam and I sat there waiting. She went into the women’s room and came out with some wet paper towels and wiped the blood off my lip. “Your mouth is swollen,” she said.
“That’ll teach me,” I said.
“You were just trying to help a friend.”
I shook my head. “It’s not like that.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s not as if there was any thinking involved. I mean, it was all reflex. It’s not as if I said to myself, I gotta help Fito. I just jumped in. It just happened.”
“Maybe your reflexes are telling you something.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’d do anything to protect the people you love.” She nudged me. “But you know, you gotta find a better way to help them.”
“You’re sounding like Dad.”
“Am I? I’ll take it as a compliment.”
“Shit,” I said. “I’m screwing everything up.”
“Stop it,” Sam said. “Stop doing that. Maybe you’re beating up on yourself a little too much lately too. No bueno. That’s not who you are.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” she said firmly. “I know.”
I nodded.
“I wish I had a cigarette,” she said.
“You don’t smoke.”
“I used to—sometimes.”
“Solve any of your problems?”
Our laughter was soft and wounded.
I looked up and saw Marcos standing there. “So how’s the home team?”
“We took a beating.”
“So I hear.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “But you should see the other guys.”
That made Marcos smile. Sam stood up and hugged him. Then she leaned into him. “Why is the world so mean, Marcos?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I just don’t know.”
I looked up at Sam and Marcos. It seemed to me that Sam had learned how to deal. She hadn’t known how to deal with anything for such a long time, and she’d always leaned on me. And even though she gave Marcos a hard time, she’d already learned to be his friend.
I said to myself, No more, Salvador. No more. Though I wasn’t sure what no more meant. But it felt like I was taking a step. A step away from stasis.
Figure it out, Salvador. Figure it
out.
Aftermath
THE GOOD NEWS: Fito’s ribs weren’t broken. But his left hand, well, that was broken. He missed school for a few days—but he seemed okay. He kept staring at his arm in a sling, and I wondered what he was thinking.
On the outside, he was back to his old self. Only, I knew there was a wound living inside him, and that wound wasn’t going away anytime soon. There had always been something a little sad about Fito, and that made sense to me. He’d had a really sad life. But he’d always been so tough. And really determined. It wasn’t just that he had a broken arm now. Something else was broken too.
Fito moved into my room and slept on my bed. I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag. Fito had bad dreams one night; he was yelling and I had to wake him. “Hey,” I said, “it’s just a dream.”
“Yeah, I get them,” he said.
“Want some hot chocolate?”
“That sounds good,” he said.
So we walked into the kitchen and Maggie followed us. She’d sort of adopted Fito. That dog, I swear she was the most empathetic dog in the world. “You wanna talk?” I said.
“I guess. Only I don’t know what to say. I mean, it’s like, it’s just too sad, Sal. It’s just too fucking sad.”
“Sam says you have to grieve.”
“I lost my mom a long time ago. So this grief thing, hell, I don’t get it.”
“You loved her.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“That’s a beautiful thing, Fito.”
“Is it?”
“Absolutely.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Mima’s dying, and that’s something I have to deal with. She was the only real mother I’ve ever known. Only it was better because she was my grandmother. I love her, Fito. And she’ll be gone.”
Fito nodded. “Why the fuck does it have to hurt so much?”
“I don’t know. It just does. You’re asking the wrong guy.”
The first day Fito went back to school, Sam stayed home with a bad cold. Fito and I didn’t say much as we walked. Finally I said, “Fito, it’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”
He shrugged. “Maybe some people aren’t meant to have, you know, a great life. I guess that’s that way it rolls.”
“Don’t you ever talk that talk around me. You hear that, Fito? YOU. ARE. GOING. TO. HAVE. A. GREAT. LIFE.”
“Never had no friends like you,” he said. “Never had that.” And then he started bawling like a baby, fell to his knees and bowed his head, and just bawled. I picked him up gently, not wanting to hurt his broken hand. He leaned on my shoulder and after a while stopped crying.
“Hey,” I whispered, “people are gonna think I’m gay.”
He laughed. I’m glad he laughed.
Me. Dad.
DAD WAS SITTING across from me at the kitchen table reading the morning paper. He put it down and looked over at me. I knew what was coming. “About the incident in the funeral home—”
“Incident,” I said. “Yeah. Not my finest moment.”
“You’re good in a fight.”
I nodded.
“Do you need a lecture?”
I shook my head. “I’m no expert on what I need, Dad.”
“You know how I feel about solving things with your fists.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t think I jumped in because I was doing problem solving—” I looked at my father’s dark, soft eyes. “I don’t know, Dad. I have this reflex thing going on.”
“I think I understand what happened at the funeral home. You reacted to a situation that you had no control over. I’m not going to make excuses for the way Fito’s brothers behaved. I’m sorry he grew up in that family. None of us have any control over that. Look, I’m not going to beat you up about this. And I sure as hell hope you don’t beat yourself up over it, either. The real question is: Where do we move from here?”
I nodded. “You mean, where do I move from here?”
“Exactly. Can I ask you another question?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “How many fights have you gotten into this year?”
“A couple, three or so.”
He nodded. “‘A couple, three or so.’ There’s something going on inside you, son. And you need to figure it out. It’s not something I can do for you. I can ground you. I can punish you. I can give you a lecture. I don’t think that’s going to solve what’s going on with you.”
“I’m trying,” I said.
“Good.”
“It’s hard,” I said.
“Whoever said growing up was easy? But using your fists doesn’t make you a man. You already know that. I guess I just had to say it.”
“I know, Dad!” God, I was almost yelling. And I was shaking. “But I get so angry. I get really angry.”
“Anger isn’t a feeling,” Dad said.
“That’s crazy,” I said.
“Okay, maybe I can get this right. Anger is an emotion. But there’s always something behind anger. Something stronger. You know what that is?”
“Is that a trick question?”
“It comes from fear, son. That’s where it comes from. All you have to do is figure out what you’re afraid of.”
Oh, I thought. Is that all?
Dad and I went out into the cold morning and played catch. We didn’t talk for a long time. Then he said to me as I caught his throw, “When are you going to let me read your essay?”
“It’s not that great. Good thing not all the schools I’m applying to require one.”
We kept tossing the ball back and forth. “Still, I’d like to read it.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll get around to it.” I threw him a fastball.
Dad caught my fastball and threw back a fastball of his own. “‘I’ll get around to it’? Really?”
The cold wind was picking up. The weather was always changing. One minute almost warm and sunny, the next minute a cold wind numbing my face.
Fito. Sam. Me.
WE WERE ALL sitting at the dining room table doing our homework. Fito was reading his history text. He liked history. I had no idea why. Sam was looking up something on the Internet for her English essay on Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes was her new thing. Me, I was staring at a trig problem. Trig. What the hell was I thinking when I took that class?
Sam glanced at Fito and shut her laptop. “Talk, Fito.”
He stared at her. Then went back to the history book.
“Don’t play dumb.”
“I’m just needin’ some Fito space.”
“You’ve been living in Fito space all your life.”
“It’s got me through so far.”
“You wanna live in exile all your life?”
“Exile?”
“Give me another word, and I’ll go with it.”
“What do you want me to say? That I’m sad and shit?”
“That’s a start.”
“Well, I am sad.”
“I feel you,” she said. “I get sad too.” Then she pointed at me. “Even he gets sad. His Mima’s dying. She’s a beautiful lady. We all have something to be sad about. We’re not pigs, you know. We’re not supposed to live in our own shit.”
That made me and Fito laugh.
“Good,” she said. “Laughter is good. And we do a lot of it. And that’s brilliant. When we laugh together, that’s truly brilliant.”
“Whistling in the dark,” I said.
Fito shook his head. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”
“What was the plan before your mother died?”
“Get good grades. Finish high school. Go to college.”
“And your mother was gonna pay for all this?”
“Hell, no.”
“Then what’s changed?”
“She’s dead,” Fito said.
“Well, join the club. We all have dead mothers. How about that?”
“This isn’t a joke, Sam,” I said.
“You think I don’t know that?” br />
“It sucks,” I said.
“Yeah, it sucks.”
“Yeah,” Fito said. “I guess I was hoping that someday my mom would, well, just be a mom.”
Sam was relentless and fierce. “That ship sailed a long time ago, Fito. That was never gonna happen.”
“But I hoped. I had hope. Now it’s gone.”
“No,” Sam said. “It’s not.”
Then Sam got that I-know-all-kinds-of-shit look. “Look, Fito, your mother was an addict. She had a disease. Addiction is a disease. You do know that, don’t you?”
She saw me giving her a look. She sort of glared at me. “Look it up, dude. Don’t you know anything? In the age of information, we choose to live in ignorance.” Then she looked at Fito. “I don’t know if your mother was a good person or not. I do know that she lived stuck in disease and she died of that disease. Don’t judge her. And don’t judge yourself. Maybe she couldn’t love you, Fito. But maybe in her own way she did. She was sick. Just remember that.”
“So now you’re a drug counselor, are you?” I said.
She crossed her arms. “You are no help. No help at all. There are websites, you know.”
“And you know all of them,” I said.
Fito broke up our little conversation. “I didn’t hate my mother,” he said. “I thought I hated her, but I didn’t. I wanted to help her—but I didn’t know how. I just didn’t.”
Fito + Words = ?
SAM WAS LOOKING for a particular pair of shoes. “I must have left them back at home,” she said. “Home,” she said. “I guess it’s not home anymore.”
We took Maggie with us to Sam’s old house so she could visit Fito. But Fito wasn’t there. I texted him: Where r u?
Fito texted back: Working at the K
Me: We’re at Sam’s picking up shoes
Fito: Cool, cool, laters, customers
Sam went through her closet, but there was nothing there. She looked in the closet of the spare bedroom—and there they were. “Love these shoes,” she said.