Since I didn’t have art in me or hadn’t found anything that resembled what my dad had, I headed for my room.
I texted Sam: U home?
Sam: Where else?
Me: Skool tomorrow
Sam: Yup broke up with Eddie
Me: ☺
Sam: Guys suk. No wonder ur dad doesn’t date
Me: Lol
Sam: Seriously
Me: Can’t blow all guys off the planet
Sam: Y not? Lol
Me: Can u live without me?
Sam: Conceited shit
Me: Lol. going to sleep
Sam: Sweet dreams
Me: Ditto
I plugged my phone into the charger and set the alarm for 6:30.
I took a deep breath and tried to remember if I’d brushed my teeth. Didn’t matter—if I hadn’t, it wasn’t going to happen. I petted Maggie as she lay next to me on the bed.
Before I nodded off, I thought about what my dad had said—that life wasn’t all nice and neat like a book, and life didn’t have a plot filled with characters who said intelligent and beautiful things. But he wasn’t right about that. See, my dad said intelligent and beautiful things. And he was real. He was the most real thing in the entire world. So why couldn’t I be like him?
I got an idea in my head, so I went on the Internet and started fishing around for information. I found a discussion: “Nature vs. Nurture in Psychology. This debate within psychology is concerned with the extent to which particular aspects of behavior are a product of either inherited (i.e., genetic) or acquired (i.e., learned) characteristics.”
I read some articles, and it seemed to me that nobody really knew the answer to that question. To my question: What mattered most? What was it that made my engine run—the genetic characteristics I got from my biological father or the characteristics I acquired from my father, the man who raised me?
Which of my fathers was going to have the big say on the man I would become?
Me (in the Dark)
I WOKE UP AT 3:14 in the morning. I’d had a dream about walking in the rain. In the dream, I was lost. I thought of the first day of school, when the rain had come down on me and I’d felt so alone. I stared at my cell phone. I couldn’t catch up with what was happening. Sam and her scare with that bastard Eddie. I did not want to go there. Sam and her mother. I did not want to go there. Me and my mom’s letter. I did not want to go there. Mima and cancer. I did not want to go there. Me and the changes I felt churning inside me. I did not want to go there. Me and college and the future and the stupid admissions essay I hadn’t even thought about writing. I did not want to go there.
So I started thinking about my family and all the good things I remembered about them: the time my Uncle Mickey whisked me up in his arms when a loose dog was heading straight for my throat; the morning Aunt Evie wound up in a hospital because she fell off a ladder putting up Christmas lights, and the string of cuss words that came out of her mouth as she lay on the ground; the afternoon Popo fell off the roof and just dusted himself off, laughing, Mima shaking her head and making the sign of the cross; the weekend Uncle Mickey spent in jail and missed my birthday party; the summer morning when I was throwing rocks at a wasps’ nest and wound up in the ER, my Aunt Lulu rubbing some kind of ointment on me for three days in a row; the summer I spent at Mima’s because my dad was teaching in Barcelona, and the barbecues we had at Mima’s, me counting all the beer cans and the money I got from the aluminum recycling place; and the time we built a human pyramid in our backyard on my fifteenth birthday and I got to be the top of the pyramid. It was as if all the scenes of my life were running through my brain like a pack of dogs running through the streets, dogs running and running, unable to stop even though they were tired.
I smiled to myself. A lot of people in the world had really shitty lives, and it wasn’t even their fault. Like Fito. Some people were just born into the wrong family or adopted by the wrong family, or they were born with something broken inside them. There wasn’t anything broken inside my dad, even though some people thought there was because he was gay. But those people were wrong. They didn’t know him.
Me. And My Fists.
I WALKED PAST THE guy I punched in the stomach for calling me a pinche gringo. And he gave me this look. Part of me wanted to say I’m sorry and I’m really not that guy. But, well. I was that guy. I was wondering if I shouldn’t confess that incident to my father, because I mostly told him what was going on with me. But I hadn’t really put anything into words yet. Sam always said, “If you can’t put it into words, then you just don’t know.”
I’m making a fist.
This is my fist.
I want to punch a wall and tell God to make Mima well. And after that, punch Him too.
I want to punch Eddie’s lights out and make him tell Sam he’s sorry.
I kept thinking I just might turn out like the guy whose genes live in me. And I kept hating that thought.
Sam
SAM CALLED ME after school. She had stayed home sick.
“Are you really sick?”
“Yup. Sick of Sylvia.”
“What happened?”
“We got into an argument.”
“Like that’s news.”
“Fuck you.” Sometimes, when Sam and her mother got into a catfight, Sam went into a funk. The other thing that told me she was in a super-bad space was that she had called me. We didn’t talk on the phone much. We mostly texted.
“Wanna talk about it?”
“Of course I wanna fucking talk about it. I called you, didn’t I?”
“I think you should come over,” I said.
“Okay.”
“I’ll make you something to eat.”
“I’m fucking starving.”
“Okay, okay, enough with the F word.”
“Am I offending you, Sally?”
“There are other words in your lexicon. Use your imagination.”
“Straight-edger.”
“Sewer for a mouth.”
“White boy.”
“Bad-boy lover.”
I walked into my dad’s studio. He was looking through old photographs. “Hi,” I said.
He smiled at me. “Hi.”
“Whatcha doin’?”
“I’m looking for a picture of Mima. One in particular.”
“How come?’
“I need it for a painting.”
I nodded.
“Your Aunt Evie and I and Mima are leaving for Scottsdale tomorrow afternoon.” We sort of studied each other for a moment. “I know you want to come—”
I interrupted him. “Dad, I’ll hold down the fort.”
He smiled—then laughed. “You remember?”
I nodded. “I remember.”
It’s what he told me to do the first time he left me alone in the house.
He looked at me. “I’m going to be honest with you.”
“You’ve always been honest with me, Dad.”
“As far as you know.”
I laughed. “As far as I know.”
“I’m a little scared. No, let me start this again. I’m a lot scared.”
“Mima?”
“Yeah. I have this feeling. You know what I’m trying to get at? You’ll have to be patient with me. It’s a little like learning how to speak a new language. It’s not something you master easily.”
Sam texted: Send Maggie outside to greet me.
I opened the front door and watched as Maggie ran toward Sam, her tail wagging. I watched the familiar lick on the face, Sam’s smile, and then the hug.
Sam and Maggie leaped up the front porch steps. Sam looked me over. “You know, you really should get a tattoo.”
“It’s not me.”
“You’re right. It isn’t you. I like you the way you are. More or less.”
“More or less?”
“Yeah. I like that you’re not like the other boys I like.”
“Yeah, I know.”
/> “You sound disappointed, Sally.”
“Well—”
“What?”
“Nothing . . . What if you discovered I was someone else? You know, someone who turned out to be not who you thought I was?”
“I know you, Sally.”
“Do you?”
“You’re not making sense. Come on. Let’s go in.”
Dad was making his famous tacos. Sam loved my dad’s tacos. Me too. Maggie three. Sam and I went into the living room, and I could smell the corn tortillas as my father shaped and fried the taco shells. God, I loved that smell. Sam kept crossing her arms and uncrossing them as she talked. “My mom is such a bitch.”
“Take it back,” I said.
“Once you say something, you can’t ever take it back.”
“Yes, you can.”
Sam could give looks that could stop you in midsentence. But I could give those kinds of looks too.
“I take it back.” She crossed her arms. “She’s mean. She can be really mean.”
I nodded.
“You know what she told me? She said, ‘If you don’t watch yourself, little girl, you’re going to wind up dancing around a pole, half naked, surrounded by salivating dirty old men. And you think you want to go to Stanford?’ She had no right to say something like that.”
“I have to admit that I don’t like your mother very much right now.”
Sam smiled. “Good.” She threw herself on the couch. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Have you ever liked my mother?”
“Well, I don’t really know her. She doesn’t seem that interested in being known. Not by me, anyway.”
“Yeah, guess that’s about right.”
“Do you ever want to be a mother, Sam?”
“I’ve never thought about it.”
“Never?”
“Not really. What about you, Sally? You want to be a dad someday?”
“Yup. I sure do. I want three kids.”
“Three?”
“Maybe four. That would be awesome.”
“Well, good luck trying to get a girl to marry you.”
That made me smile. But then I noticed she had a sad look on her face.
“You know, Sally,” she said, “I think I’d be afraid to be a mother. I don’t think I’d make a very good one.”
“Hey,” I said. “I think you’d make a great mother.”
“What makes you say that?”
I pointed to my heart and tapped on it. “Because you have a lot of this. That’s all it takes.”
“You’re like your dad, you know that? I mean, I know he’s not your real—”
“Yes, he is.”
She nodded. “Yeah, he is.”
And right then I wished with all my crooked heart that my dad had been the man who’d fathered me.
Then his voice echoed through the room. “Tacos, anyone?”
Maggie ate one taco. That’s all she was allowed. Dad ate three. Sam and I had five each.
I walked Sam home. The night was quiet, the weather almost too perfect. “Dad’s leaving tomorrow.”
“He taking your Mima to the Mayo Clinic?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t want to talk about it right now, do you?”
“No, guess not.”
“Do me a favor: Don’t bring up subjects you don’t want to talk about.”
“Okay, okay. Give me a break. I do and don’t want to talk about it.”
“I get it. Your Mima’s really sweet.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“Are you scared, Sally?”
“I never really lost anyone I loved. Well, that’s not true. I lost my Popo.”
“And you lost your mom.”
“Yeah, Sam, I did. But I don’t remember that. If you don’t remember something, it doesn’t hurt.”
“Wouldn’t it be great, Sally, if we could just push the delete button in our brains and forget the times somebody hurt us?”
“Would be nice. But maybe not. I mean, hurt’s a part of life, right?”
“Right,” Sam said. “Sometimes that really sucks.”
“I guess we can’t just pick the good things to remember, can we?”
I watched her walk into her house. I stood there a moment. She poked her head out the door, smiled at me. She waved. Real sweet-like. And I waved back.
Me and Dad
THE WIND AND THE RAIN pelting my window woke me up. Then the lightning started. And the thunder, as if the sky were trying to break itself in half.
I grabbed my pants and headed for the front porch, Maggie following me. I needed to watch the show—it was one of my hobbies. I wasn’t surprised to find my dad standing there, smoking a cigarette. Watching the lightning and the rain come down. I stood next to him. He put his arm around me. I leaned into him, watching the lightning and hearing the crack of the thunder and the rain coming down in sheets. I don’t know how long we stood there. Sometimes there were moments when time didn’t exist. Or maybe it did exist, but, well, it just didn’t matter.
We didn’t say a word. Dad was right. The world did have too many words. The sound of the rain was all we needed.
The storm was fierce. But I wasn’t afraid. I knew my father’s love was fiercer than any storm.
“Will you be okay?” he whispered.
“Yeah.”
“No wild parties?”
“Just Sam,” I said. “Guess that’s wild enough.”
He laughed. “I’ll call you every day.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“I don’t know.”
I nodded.
“Let’s get some sleep. I have to get up early.”
“No,” I said. “Let’s wait for the storm to end.”
Between Storms
THE AIR WAS CLEAN, the sky as deep a blue as I had ever seen.
I thought of what my father had told me one summer day. I’d fallen down, and my knee was all scraped up and bleeding. We sat on the back porch, and he cleaned my wound and put a Band-Aid on it. The sky had cleared after a summer storm. I’d been crying, and he tried to get me to smile. “Your eyes are the color of sky. Did you know that?” I don’t know why I remembered this. Maybe it was because I knew he was telling me he loved me.
Anyway, my eyes weren’t nearly as beautiful as the sky. Not even close.
I sat on the front steps and breathed in the air as Aunt Evie and Mima drove up in front of the house. Mima got out of the car and smiled as if there were nothing wrong with her. She was standing on the sidewalk, wearing a pastel blue dress that reminded me of a summer day. She looked the way she’d always looked: pretty and strong and happy. I bounded off the steps and hugged her. “Mijito de mi vida,” she said, “you look so handsome.”
“Looks aren’t so important.”
“That’s right.” She held my face in her hands as she’d done so many times before. “Everyone is beautiful,” she said.
“Not everyone,” I said.
“Yes. Everyone.”
I smiled at her. I wasn’t going to argue with her.
My dad came down the front steps carrying a suitcase. I watched as he and my aunt rearranged everything in the trunk.
Aunt Evie winked at me. “Hey, sweetie.” That was her thing. Everyone was sweetie.
“Hi,” I said.
“Are you gonna be a good boy?”
“I’m always a good boy, Aunt Evie.”
“Always?”
“Well, most of the time.”
“Well, that’s good enough for me.”
My dad opened the door for Mima. “Ready?”
She nodded, and something sad passed over her face.
She waved at me.
I waved back.
I hugged my dad.
He looked serious. “Take good care of Maggie.”
“I will.”
“Tell Sam I’m counting on her to keep you out of trouble.”
?
??I’ll tell her.”
Aunt Evie gave me a hug and jumped into the back seat. I watched as they drove away. I thought about last night’s storm. One had ended, and another one was beginning.
Me. Fito. Friends.
THAT NIGHT, DAD called just to tell me they were checking Mima into the Mayo Clinic. He’d left me an ATM card in case I needed anything. “Don’t go crazy with that card.” He was joking. I knew that. I was sitting on my dad’s leather chair, and Maggie was lying at my feet. When I finished talking to Dad, I looked around the house. I stared at the picture my dad had painted that hung on the wall. It was a large painting that almost took up the whole wall. It was a portrait of a bunch of kids around a piñata. The kids were his brothers and sisters. And it was my Uncle Mickey who was swinging at the piñata. And the kid who was my father was off to the side. I loved that painting. But as I looked at it, I felt alone again. I didn’t feel like being alone. I knew I’d start thinking about things. Shit.
As I poured myself a glass of cold milk, this thought entered my head: If I ran into my biological father, would we recognize each other because we looked alike? Would we know? He isn’t my dad, he isn’t my dad, he isn’t my dad.
I texted Sam: Lonely. Slumber party?
Sam: Aww. Can’t. School night. And Sylvia’s on the warpath
Me: What happened?
Sam: She b like upset about the Eddie thing and she’s holding up my college apps. She’s pissed. I’m pissed. Living in hell
Me: Sorry.
Sam: Gotta go. Sylvia just walked into room. She’s been writing something on my bathroom mirror TTYL
I decided to text Fito: Dad’s gone. Alone. Wanna come over?
Fito: It’s getting late
Me: Where r u?
Fito: Working at Cr. K. Not supposed to be texting
Me: That sux. U get off when?
Fito: 11
Me: My place when ur off?
Fito: K. Cool for a bit. Not like I have a curfew
Me: Cool cool. Can make sandwiches