“Take your pick, Sammy.”
“Sometimes I don’t get you.”
“There’s not much to get,” I said. “And besides, you’re the one who needs to know—not me.”
“I don’t need to know,” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
“Sure,” she said.
Later that evening Sam texted me the word for the day—another one of our games: Wftd = bigotry.
Me: Good one. Use word in sentence
Sam: Mr. Cisneros is a party to bigotry
Me: Harsh
Sam: Being kind. Btw, u kno Infante means infant
Me: Yup
Sam: Yup yup yup
Fito
“MAN, THAT ENRIQUE INFANTE. I mean to tell you, Sal, you made an enemy for life.”
“You hang out with that guy?”
“Nope. He’s always trying to sell me cigarettes. He’s always talkin’ shit. Bad news.”
“It’s not as if I plan on having a long-term relationship with him. He’s not exactly best-friend material.”
That made Fito laugh. “That’s for sure. World’s full of guys like that. Today, he’s sellin’ cigarettes; tomorrow he’ll graduate to sellin’ dope.” Then he shot me a smile. “Didn’t know you liked to pull out your fists and shit. Guy like you, I mean, you got it made in the shade, and you’re pullin’ shit like that.”
“What d’ya mean by that?”
“Dude, you got this great thing goin’, you and your dad. I mean, I know you’re adopted and shit, but you know, you got a good thing.”
“I know. And it’s not as if I’ve ever really felt adopted.”
“That’s cool. Me, I mean, most of the time I feel like I was taken in from the streets because someone had thrown me fuckin’ away. For reals. I mean, that’s how it feels around my house.”
“That sucks,” I said.
“Well, at my house, everything sucks. I mean, my dad’s kinda cool. He wanted to take me with him. That would’ve been the bomb. But he didn’t have a place of his own and shit and he couldn’t find a job and he finally gave up on this place and moved to California to live with his brother. Hell, at least he said goodbye and shit, and he was all broken up about not being able to take me with him and shit. At least I knew he cared. He did. And that’s somethin’.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it is something. It’s more than something.” I felt bad for Fito. And one thing about him, he didn’t go around feeling sorry for himself. I wondered how he turned out to be such a good guy. How did that happen? There didn’t seem to be any logic behind who we turned out to be. None at all.
WFTD = Origin
I RESPECTED FITO, but Sam didn’t like him all that much. She said it was because of his walk. “He doesn’t walk. He slinks. And why does he have to add and shit to the end of every other sentence? What’s that about?” This from the girl who was having a fling with the F word.
I’d read some of the essays Fito had written for school, and he sounded like an intellectual. I mean it. That guy was smart. But he didn’t like parading that fact. Maybe Fito talked like that because of the words people tossed around in his house—and because he was always wandering the streets. Not because he was looking for trouble, but because he wanted to get the hell out of his house.
I had a theory that everyone has a relationship with words—whether they know it or not. It’s just that everybody’s relationship with words is different. Dad told me once that we have to be very careful with words. “They can hurt people,” he said. “And they can heal people.” If anyone was careful with words, it was my dad.
But I owe my real awareness of words to Sam. It began when she was in the spelling bee. I was her coach. She had thousands of words on these index cards, and I’d read and pronounce the words and she would spell them. We spent hours and hours and hours getting her ready. We lived and breathed it. She was so focused and fierce. Some days she would break down and cry. She wore herself out. And I was worn out right along with her.
She didn’t win.
And man oh man, was she pissed. “The moron who won didn’t even know the meanings of the words he was spelling,” she said.
I tried to comfort her, but she refused to be comforted.
“Don’t you know the word inconsolable?”
“You can try again next year.”
“Hell, no,” she said. “Fuck words.”
But I knew she’d already fallen in love with words, and she dragged me into that love affair.
That’s when we started the word-for-the-day thing. Wftd.
Yeah. Words. Fito and words. Me and words. Sam and words. As I was thinking about that, the doorbell rang. And there was Sam.
“I was just thinking about you,” I said.
“Anything nice?”
“About how pissed you were when you lost the spelling bee.”
“I’m over it.”
“Sure you are.”
“I didn’t come over to talk about a stupid spelling bee.”
“So what’s up?”
“My mom and I just got into it.”
“Like that’s news.”
“Look, not everybody has conversations like you and your dad. I mean, you guys are so not normal. Fathers and sons do not talk. They do not talk. I mean, sometimes you talk like you’re friends or something.”
“Wrong,” I said. “My father doesn’t pretend to be my friend. Not even close. He’s my father. It’s just that we happen to like each other. I think that’s awesome. Really awesome.”
“Fucking awesome.”
“Why do you like to cuss?”
“Everybody likes to cuss.”
“I don’t.”
“They don’t call you Mr. Excitement for nothing.”
“Who’s they?”
“Me.”
“Me is they?”
“Yes.”
“See, there, you’ve managed to interrupt me. You’re always doing that.”
“Look, you’re always interrupting yourself, vato.”
I liked when she called me vato. It was way better than “dude.” And it meant she respected me. “What was I talking about?” I said.
“You were waxing eloquent about your dad.”
“You’re starting to talk like the last book you read.”
“So fucking what. At least I know how to read.”
“Stop cussing.”
“Stop judging and get on with whatever you were going to say about your dad.”
“I’m not judging.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Okay. Okay. My dad? See, my theory is that most people love their parents. Not all, but most. But sometimes some parents aren’t very likable, so their kids don’t like them. That’s only logical. Or sometimes it’s the kids who aren’t likable. It’s damned hard to talk to someone if you don’t like them—even if that someone is your father or your mother.”
“I totally get that.”
Sometimes Sam really did get what I was saying. And sometimes I knew exactly what she was going to say next.
“I don’t like Sylvia at all. She is the most unlikable mother on the planet.” Sam called her mother by her first name. But only behind her back. Hmm.
“No,” I said. “Fito’s mother is the most unlikable mother on planet Earth.”
“Really? And you know this because?”
“I met her once. She’s a meth head.”
“So she has a problem. No bueno. But—”
I interrupted her. “There’s always a but when you’re losing an argument.”
“I was about to say that comparisons are odious.”
“Yeah, yeah, odious. A spelling bee word. A word you got from the new book you’re reading.”
“Shut up. And I do have a horrible mother.”
I really felt bad for Sam. Maybe someday something would happen and Sam and Sylvia would have what Dad and I had. Maybe. I hoped so.
Fights. Fists. Shoes.
&nb
sp; ON THE THIRD day of school I punched another guy. I mean, it just happened. Sam always said, Nothing just happens. I tried to keep her voice out of my head. See, I was walking toward the Circle K before school to buy me a Coke. I was in the mood for one. So this guy in the parking lot gives me this shit-eating grin and calls me a pinche gringo.
“Don’t call me that again,” I said. And then he did it: he called me that again.
So I punched him. No thinking involved, just a reflex. Punched him right in the stomach—and there was that rush of adrenaline running through my veins all the way to my heart.
I watched him as he bent over in pain. Part of me wanted to say I was sorry. But deep down I knew I wasn’t sorry.
I stood there. Numb.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Fito pulling me away. I kept staring at my fist, as if it belonged to someone else. “What’s up with you, Sal? When did you start beating up on people? One day you’re this really nice guy, and—well, I never took you for that kind of guy.”
“What kind of guy?”
“Peace out, Sal.”
I didn’t say anything. I felt nothing.
And I was shaking.
And then this thought entered my head. Maybe the kind of guy I was, well, maybe I was like someone I didn’t know. You know, the guy I’d never met whose genes I had.
I walked over to pick up Sam. She was at the door waiting for me. “You’re late.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re never late.”
“I am today.”
She gave me one of her suspicious looks. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Which means you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
She gave me one of her I’m-going-to-let-you-off-the-hook smiles. It meant she was going to change the subject. Not that she wouldn’t come back to it at a later date. Sam wasn’t the kind of girl to let things go. At best she gave you a reprieve. I was glad she was in a reprieve sort of mood. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” Then she pointed down. “How do you like my shoes?”
“Love them.”
“Liar.”
“They’re very pink.”
“Snark.”
“Why do you have so many shoes?”
“A girl can’t have too many pairs of shoes.”
“A girl? Or just you?”
“It’s a gender thing. Don’t you get that?”
“Gender, gender,” I said. I don’t know, but she must have heard something in my voice.
“Something’s going on with you.”
“Shoes,” I said.
“Shoes, my ass,” she said.
Mima
SAM AND I, we’re always telling each other stories, stories of what happened to us, stories about other people, stories about my dad and her mom. Maybe that’s how we explained things to each other—or to ourselves.
Mima. She was the best storyteller ever. Her stories were about real things—not like the crap stories I heard in the hallways of El Paso High. Some stories, well, they were closer to lies.
But Mima’s stories were as real as anything, as real as the leaves on her mulberry tree. I hear her voice all the time, telling me her stories: “When I was a girl, I used to pick cotton. I worked alongside my mother and my brothers and sisters. At the end of the day I was so tired I would just fall into bed. My skin was burned. My hands were scratched. And my back felt as though it was going to break.”
She told me about how the world used to be, about the world she grew up in, a world that was almost gone. “The world has changed,” she said. There was a lot of sadness in her voice when she told me that.
Once, Mima drove me out to a farm. I must have been about seven. She taught me how to pick tomatoes and jalapeños. She pointed to the onion fields. “Now, that’s work.” She knew a lot about that word. I don’t think I knew anything about work. It wasn’t a word I’d met yet.
That day, when we were picking tomatoes, she told me the story about her shoes: “When I was in the sixth grade, I left my shoes on the bank of the ditch so I could go swimming with my friends. And then they were just gone. Someone had stolen them. I cried. Oh, I really cried. It was my only pair of shoes.”
“You only had one pair of shoes, Mima?”
“Only one pair. That’s all I had. So I went to school barefoot for a week. I had to wait until my mother gathered enough money to buy me a new pair.”
“You went to school barefoot? That’s cool, Mima.”
“No, that wasn’t so cool,” she said. “It just meant that there were a lot of poor people.”
Mima says we are what we remember.
She told me about the day my dad was born. “Your father was very small. He almost fit in a shoebox.”
“Is that really true, Mima?”
“Yes. And just after he came into the world, I was holding him in my arms and it started raining outside. We were in the middle of a drought, and it hadn’t rained for months and months and months. And that’s when I knew that your father was like the rain. He was a miracle.”
I love what she remembers.
I thought about telling Sam the story of Mima’s shoes. I decided against it. She would say something like You’re only telling me that story to make me feel guilty. And she would probably be right.
The Story of Me (Me Trying to Explain Things to Me)
MIMA SAYS YOU should never forget where you came from. I get what she’s saying—but that’s a little complicated when you’re adopted. Just because I don’t feel adopted doesn’t mean that I’m not adopted. Most people think they know something important about you if they know where your story began, though.
Fito says it doesn’t really matter where you come from. “I know exactly where I come from. So what? See, some people have famous parents. So what? Being born to talented people doesn’t make you talented. Charlie Moreno’s father is the mayor. But look at Charlie Moreno. He’s an asshole. Everybody in my family’s an addict. But, see, it’s not where I come from that matters—it’s where I’m going.” I couldn’t argue with that one.
I thought that wanting to know where it all began is part of human nature. Yup. Not that I know much about human nature. Sam said I wasn’t good at judging other people: “You think everybody wants to be good.”
I have pictures of my mother holding me. Lots and lots of pictures. But looking at photographs of your dead mother isn’t the same as remembering.
She died when I was three.
That’s when I came to live with my dad.
Maybe another guy would be sad that he didn’t have a mother. But I didn’t feel sad, not really. I loved my dad. And I had uncles and aunts who loved me. I mean, they really loved me. And I had Mima. I don’t think anybody loved me as much as Mima loved me. Not even my dad.
It’s not as if my life was like Fito’s. Fito had the most screwed-up family on planet Earth. And look at Sam. I really wouldn’t have wanted Mrs. Diaz to be my mother. No, thanks. No bueno.
I had this sociology teacher who was always droning on and on about family dynamics. You know, me and my dad and Maggie constituted a family. I liked our family. But maybe there isn’t a logic behind the word family. The truth is, it isn’t always such a good word.
I wondered why I didn’t have any memories of my mother. Maybe not remembering was worse than misremembering. Or maybe it was better. But here I was, asking myself questions about her and about the guy whose genes mixed with hers to make me.
I was starting to ask myself a lot of questions that I never used to ask. I used to be okay with everything, and now I was going around hitting people. I heard Sam’s voice in my head: Nothing just happens.
Photographs
I HAD A PICTURE of my dad teaching me how to tie a tie, taken the morning before my First Communion. Dad was smiling, and I was smiling. We were both so
happy. And I had a picture of Mima holding me in her arms when I was four. She had all this love in her eyes, and I swear I could drown in that love.
The pictures of my mom and me are different. See, the pictures with Mima and Dad, well, I remembered those things. Those pictures made me feel something. But the pictures with my mom? I didn’t feel anything. Sam told me that I didn’t remember because I didn’t want to. She said it would make me feel sad.
Sam liked to look at my photos. But she said it was too weird to see all the happiness in them. “It’s just not real.”
“Really?”
“Well, it is real, but it’s kind of creepy.”
“Happiness is creepy?”
“Okay, it’s nice. But most people don’t do nice. I mean, no one in the entire universe is as nice as your Mima. And your dad, I have to admit: he’s the bomb. True that. He’s actually a super-great guy. But there’s only about ten of those kind of guys walking around this town, so if you’re thinking that your sweet little family is a mirror for the rest of the world, I’ve got a news flash for you.”
If the word cynical hadn’t been invented, Sam would have invented it. And she would go around introducing everybody to that word. But she didn’t fool me. There was a lot of kindness in her. A lot. But she had her bad moments. I’d known her since kindergarten. She used to cry at the end of the day when I said goodbye. Ever since then, I’d always listened to what Sam thought—even when I should have known better. Sam was emotionally confused and confusing. It had to do with her family dynamics. Yeah, what the hell did I know? She was really mad at me once. I told her she needed to calm down. And she told me I was an “emotional anorexic.” I don’t think she meant it as a compliment. Sometimes I wondered why I’d picked her to be my best friend.
Mima said that God gave Sam to me.
It was a beautiful thing to say. And she also said that God gave me to her. And to my dad.
I guess God did a lot of giving. But He did a lot of taking, too. Exhibit A: He took my mom. But if He hadn’t taken my mom, I wouldn’t have Dad. And I wouldn’t have Mima.