Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  “I told you, Mami,” Lourdes said.

  “Why he died, then?” Jessica asked accusingly.

  “Mami! I told you.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “I loved him, but he hurt me a lot,” Lourdes said as though her throat were bruised.

  The children drifted back. Jessica started her usual primping and grooming. She styled the twins’ hair, using her fingers as a comb. She picked lint from their clothes. She noticed a plastic price-tag thread on Serena’s shoe and bit it off. She braided Serena’s hair. She described the kind of nightlife they would share when she got out. If she continued to do well in DAP, she would be home by Christmas. “They gonna think we sisters. We gonna dye our hair blond. We don’t have to ask anybody. I be like, ‘C’mon, Serena, get dressed! We going to a club!’ ”

  “Ai,” Lourdes cautioned.

  “You just jealous,” Jessica said. When Jessica had been a teenager and taken her mother dancing, she’d made Lourdes pretend they were sisters. Now, though, the ruse could never work. Lourdes had aged. She lumbered instead of scurried. She looked matronly. The anger that had animated her eyes had been replaced by resignation. She wore smocks and turtlenecks instead of tank tops and leggings; Hush Puppies instead of strappy sandals with heels.

  Serena flapped her knees distractedly.

  “Mami, your legs! Keep your legs closed!” Lourdes said sharply. Serena rolled her eyes. “He beat me up,” Lourdes murmured.

  “Why you stay with him then?” Jessica asked, her tone wet with disgust.

  Lourdes’s indignation barely stirred. She mumbled, “You have to be sure you want to leave when you leave. You can’t come back. You be towed around like a dog.”

  Jessica then came at her mother again: “I want to get a job, any job. I will do anything. I want to support myself.” Lourdes didn’t retaliate, and Jessica backed down, adding, “Mommy, I gave your address to the parole. They’ll be calling you. They need to come to the apartment to look to make sure everything’s okay.” The Troy Housing Authority had already rejected Jessica’s application to live with Milagros; they did not accept felons. Jessica hadn’t heard back from Elaine, and she’d never taken Coco’s offer seriously. Lourdes’s cramped one-bedroom was her only choice.

  “You going to live with me? My baby’s coming home!” Lourdes exclaimed. She sidled onto Jessica’s lap. “I am so happy, Mami! I knew you were coming to me!” She kicked her feet a little, but the enthusiasm felt fraudulent.

  “Your man,” Jessica said gravely. Lourdes slipped back into her seat and cast her eyes down. Jessica bent forward and placed her elbows on her knees. “Your boyfriend,” she repeated, staring up at her mother, making sure Lourdes heard all that could not be said. The silence lasted only seconds, but it contained decades of their history. Jessica then relieved her: “If you start messing up, I’m gonna be behind you on that.” The threat hung between them hollowly, before it gave way to levity.

  Jessica leaned back. She breathed in the uplifting sight of a young boy, who stood beside another boy peering at the selection in the vending machines. They were visiting their mothers. One was the son of one of Jessica’s friends. “Serena, come on, look how cute that boy is!” she said.

  “You so bad,” Serena said.

  “Come on! Come on, Mami! You so pretty! Look how cute he is!” She pulled Serena’s hand and clasped her shoulders and positioned her in line. Serena waited and bought candy like a soldier, all the while with her eyes down. When she was through, she pressed into Jessica’s belly, happy and relieved.

  “You so bad, you so bad,” Serena repeated.

  Jessica smiled.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Coco survived another winter, but she was run down by the demands of school and the days and nights of Baby Motrin, steaming showers for Pearl’s asthma, and the endless sippy cups of apple juice. She struggled to finish her schoolwork, but during class she found it nearly impossible to concentrate: she would start wondering if the girls had made it home safely from school, if Frankie’s friends were in the apartment, and if they’d devoured her daughters’ snacks. One morning, she snuck back to check up on Frankie and caught him bagging crack in the kitchen. She dropped out of school to keep watch over him. He balked at her policing, and one fight got physical. Mercedes ran to a nearby hospital, where there was a telephone. She called her uncle Hector and begged him to hurry over and help.

  Coco’s affection for Nikki’s father, Kodak, had ended that day he hit her years before. Cesar had never laid a violent hand on her. Coco threw Frankie out. To make ends meet without his assistance, she took in baby-sitting, adding three children to her bedraggled four. At the end of the week, for five days of child care from 6 A.M. until 3:40 P.M., she was paid a total of $40. Added runs to the church pantries didn’t make the food last. By the weekend, Coco felt as though she was going crazy. It was spring, and the girls needed air, but the backyard was a slide of mud.

  Coco sometimes walked down the hill to Fallon, the garden apartments where Iris lived. Iris was making progress toward the realization of a lifelong dream—she wanted to own a funeral home. “At least dead people are quiet,” she said. The local community college had a mortuary-science program Iris hoped to take; she had nearly completed her GED. Her husband, Armando, toiled at Garden Way, a nearby factory. Iris worked part-time at a hobby shop; she got discounts on the supplies for ceramic lamps and statues, which she liked to sand down and paint in her spare time. She also taught ceramics at the community center at Fallon, where she’d received an award from the tenants’ association for her good works. Mercedes had enjoyed attending her classes for a while.

  Hector and his wife and son also visited Iris’s. One afternoon, Hector got into a shouting match with the drug dealer who lived next door; the drug dealer made an allusion to Coco’s affair with Wishman, Hector told him to shut up, and things deteriorated from there. Next thing you know, the dealer’s brother pulled a gun. In the past, Iris had asked this neighbor to lower the loud music, but she was careful to control her temper; Hector didn’t know how. Later Iris’s husband, Armando, said, “We been here three years without trouble, and look, here it is, when your family comes.”

  Without Frankie to baby-sit, Coco’s situation stagnated. “I’m dying,” she said. “I can’t go nowhere. I can’t go shopping. I’m just pinned.” Summer provided some relief, although, unfortunately, the sloping backyard that the girls had longed to play in for months was spiked with dangerous junk and infested with fleas. But Coco adamantly stuck to the positive things. She might have had to drop out of school, but Iris had graduated and made a beautiful speech. She had spoken from her heart in front of everyone: she had told the audience how she was nervous, and that she’d moved to Troy to get a better life; that she’d left school at fifteen because she was pregnant, and that the years had passed, and she didn’t feel like going back. But when her kids asked what she was going to be when she grew up, and she didn’t know what to tell them, she realized it was time.

  Foxy had traveled up for the graduation; it always pleased Coco when her children got to spend time with their grandmother, and she was also relieved to see that Foxy didn’t seem to be partying so much—she was fat. The public swimming pool that was within walking distance of the apartment buoyed Coco’s girls through the dog days of summer heat. Pearl loved the water; Nikki loved her shimmery bikini; Nautica mastered the cannonball.

  But Mercedes tested her mother’s patience with comments like “I’m gonna get a tattoo and get me a man” and “I want a boyfriend.”

  “Wait till you father hears you want a boyfriend, Mercy,” Coco warned.

  “How old do I have to be to have a boyfriend?” Mercedes persisted.

  Coco shouted, “You don’t even know what a boyfriend is!”

  To Coco’s relief, Mercedes spent two blessed weeks with her grandmother when Foxy went back down to the Bronx.

  Since Coco had kicked him out of the apartment, Franki
e had been living with one of Coco’s cousins, Leo, who’d moved to Troy from the Bronx. One August afternoon, Frankie rode his bicycle down River Street, past mangy dogs and pit bulls trotting along the busted sidewalks, half-breeds and rottweilers and skulking mutts. He was headed to a block party at Fallon sponsored by the tenants’ association, in which Iris was involved.

  Frankie dodged potholes. His tires crunched the shattered forties glass. His tank top billowed in the breeze. He emerged from the shade of the overpass and cycled onto the sidewalk that trailed the Hudson. He coasted off the sidewalk back onto the street. He passed the furniture warehouse that was too expensive and did not deliver, the Napoli bakery, where the lady behind the counter still snubbed you, no matter how many loaves of Italian bread you bought. By the dreary Happy Lunch luncheonette, the old tavern, the rows of empty tenements. A thin white guy with long, feathered hair kicked a box toward a U-Haul. Moving vans were a familiar sight along River Street. The bored women watched Frankie pass.

  Fat women, scrawny women, women on broken steps drinking diet no-name soda out of promotional cups from Burger King. Two middle-aged ladies sat on the sidewalk in bucket seats salvaged from a car. Frankie turned left at the intersection of River and 101st. He looped around the back road that led to Fallon and glided to a stop.

  Frankie was trim from no home cooking and tan from afternoons at the community swimming pool. He wore sunglasses, which Foxy had given to Mercedes and Mercedes had given to him. The lenses were a cool light blue. The hard sun glinted on his newly shaven head. Coco spotted him instantly.

  She had been hearing rumors since their latest split: at the pool, Frankie had tossed a girl in the water, then jumped in after her. Serena knew the girl, who was a friend of Kevin’s girlfriend’s. The girl had met Frankie while visiting her aunt, who lived in the apartment above Frankie’s basement room. The aunt had a crush on Coco’s cousin and sent the girl downstairs with plates of food. Coco reasoned, “What man isn’t going to want a hot little ass walking into your door delivering a plate of homemade food?” The aunt also had real dishes and pretty cups and silverware that didn’t bend.

  During one of Frankie’s sojourns to the Bronx, Coco searched his room in the cellar apartment and unearthed a photograph. She said she also found a poem that began, Roses are red, violets are blue. “Come on,” Coco snorted, “my girls could do better than that.” And if she, Coco, were going to send a man a picture, she’d send a sexy one: this stupid girl had sent Frankie a regular picture of herself looking regular, on a couch. Coco conceded that the girl had pretty, fat lips. “But when she talk to you, she look all ugly cuz she have a mouth full of yellow teeth,” she added. When Coco confronted the girl, her lack of sophistication was evident even in her denial that she’d messed around with Frankie at all: “She said, ‘You know I have a man, cuz I have hickeys all the time’ ”

  But the girl’s age disturbed Coco most. Frankie was twenty-seven; the girl, fourteen. “Fourteen. That’s a child. Come on, that’s a child,” Coco repeated softly, as though she were still trying to absorb it. Coco confronted Frankie about the girl at the party. He denied that they were involved; when Coco persisted with her accusations, he said, “But, Coco, you ain’t got no proof.” Coco reasoned that if he was attracted to such a young girl then her own daughters were vulnerable. He said, “Coco, if you don’t know me now, talk to my mother. You know I ain’t like that.” Still, the possibility unnerved her. Said Coco, “I want him to go, then when he leaves I cry.” As a precaution, she instructed her daughters to wear shorts under their nightgowns whenever Frankie visited.

  That same summer, Kevin’s girlfriend came out pregnant. The girlfriend’s cousin approached Milagros with the sobering news on the Number 80 bus. Milagros was furious. Kevin’s girlfriend had just turned fourteen. “How you gonna support a child when you can’t pay for a haircut?” Milagros asked.

  “Welfare,” Kevin said. How, Milagros wondered, could he choose a life whose hardship lay right before his eyes? In fact, Kevin had walked through Corliss Park carrying the positive tab from the home pregnancy test like a miniature banner. But the pregnancy was only one car in the pileup: the girlfriend’s mother was in and out of prison; the girlfriend shuttled between her grandmother and an aunt; the aunt’s fast lifestyle was hectic. On weekends, Milagros took Kevin’s girlfriend in.

  The girl’s name was Donna. She was a white girl—skinny, with brown hair, a tendency toward quietness, and a habit of keeping her fingers in her mouth. She and Kevin broke up by her third month, but Serena and Donna became quick best friends. Milagros hoped at least Serena would learn from Donna’s mistake since she could see, firsthand, the day-by-day discomfort of a belly. But Coco suspected the opposite could happen; Donna looked prettier the bigger her belly grew. Maybe it was the baby, maybe it was all the attention, or the confidence of sex. Coco knew that love and babies didn’t operate on logic. And Serena was thirteen.

  “You better keep an eye on Serena now,” Coco warned. Guys certainly had their eyes on her. Mercedes had recounted to her mother what boys said to Serena out of the earshot of adults. The harassment reminded Coco of the way she’d been taunted when she was a virgin, but these boys sounded nastier than the boys of her memory. Comments like When I’m gonna get that? and When can I slap on that? were common. Serena acted oblivious to the comments; Coco remembered hollering back at the boys who used to harass her on Andrews Avenue when she was Serena’s age, walking home from school; a few times, Coco had broken down and cried. Foxy had told her to stop walking home by Andrews, but Wishman had defended her on the street. “Stop disrespecting the girl,” he’d say.

  Serena denied ever having kissed a boy, but Coco knew otherwise. Kevin had caught Serena in the woods kissing one of his friends. It was less than a year before Jessica’s release date. “Serena had a I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. She knows her mother’s coming out,” Coco said.

  Soon the threats posed by and to the various teenaged girls in Coco’s life were muted by a larger, more immediate crisis. For months, Coco’s landlord had ignored her pleas to fumigate the apartment, which was flea-infested. By fall 1998, the girls scratched so much that the skin around their ankles looked like thick pink socks. The school sent them home with lice. Milagros suggested that Coco call the Department of Health, and Coco did. Requesting help from agencies was always risky, but Coco was desperate. She didn’t want her girls to be ashamed of something that wasn’t their fault. Instead of sending an exterminator, however, the Department of Health dispatched a housing inspector, who condemned the place. Con Ed shut off the electricity, then sent her a $900 bill. Coco drew an extension cord to the refrigerator from the apartment next door and rushed the girls through their baths at night. The lady told Coco to feel free to use the shower during the day while she was at work, but Coco didn’t feel safe with the lady’s boyfriend in the house. She also hated to be a burden. She then received a notice that if she didn’t move off the premises within seventy-two hours, the Department of Health would report her to the Bureau of Child Welfare for neglect. She was homeless again, for the second time in a year.

  Frankie was also about to get kicked out of Coco’s cousin Leo’s for not paying his share of the rent. But Frankie looked to Coco to resolve the situation; he was making no effort to find them all a new place to live. When Jessica heard about Coco’s troubles, instead of the sympathy Coco expected, Jessica lobbed back a hard note of advice: “Stop giving, start getting. How can you say they love you and not help you? Say he love you if he ain’t doing? If he ain’t doing, get rid of him.”

  Coco criticized herself: “I been through so much in my life, if I can’t pass through this, something is wrong with me.” She drew strength from remembering Lourdes: the distance between them had grown, but she still felt a connection. “All the times Lourdes been in trouble, owed rent. How the hell she get out of her mess?” Coco asked herself. Lourdes had a block on her telephone line, so Coco couldn’t call collect, and Coco did
n’t have enough money for a telephone card. But if she had, she would have dialed Lourdes up and asked her, as she had when she was a teenage girl, “What you did?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  At forty-eight, Lourdes continued to cobble together an existence, as she always had. She’d joined up with Emilio, the six-foot-three army veteran who’d lived with Maria, the neighbor with cancer who had taken Lourdes in. After Maria’s death, Lourdes had briefly inherited custody of Maria’s children and the apartment, until the authorities decided otherwise. The eight-year-old reported Lourdes to BCW, claiming that Lourdes wouldn’t feed her and her brother, and that she locked them out in the hall. Lourdes claimed she fed them, but refused to let them eat her pantry clean—how, she asked the caseworker, could they be hungry and so overweight? Social Services placed the children in foster care; shortly afterward, Lourdes and Emilio came home to find a padlock on the door and all of their belongings piled in the hall.

  Emilio’s veteran’s status qualified him for rent subsidies, and they found an apartment on a leafy residential street at the end of one of the Bronx subway lines. Lourdes believed that she’d left Mount Hope for good. She called her new neighborhood “civilized.” She regularly complained of chest pains and shortness of breath, and the proximity to doctors and a decent hospital reassured her.

  She earned extra money baby-sitting Justine, Roxanne and Cesar’s daughter, and Justine’s half sister. Roxanne, who was pregnant again, dropped them off on her way to the Laundromat, where she worked long hours folding clothes. Lourdes also rented the couch to Angel, her soon-to-be-ex-son-in-law. Elaine had left him and the Bronx for Yonkers, where she lived with her two sons in a working-class neighborhood. Lourdes did Angel’s laundry and cooked him dinner. He worked at a law firm in Manhattan as a mail-room clerk.