But I won’t give up the tab. “You cover the cab ride back.”
The Dominican cabbie’s a trip, too, playing this corny bachata song and fishing for my moms’ marital status. “Ella está casá,” my sister snaps at the poor guy.
I say, “No, she’s not.” Of course, this clown isn’t for my moms, but I just want to give her the heads-up that if she wants to look for someone who will keep her happy, cool with me. Still, I have mad respect that Moms doesn’t hook up with every guy who tosses a smile her way in an effort to prove something to Rubio.
As we pass Nestor’s block, I imagine the huge pariseo going down at his crib and wonder how long before someone sets off drama over something ridiculous. One Thanksgiving Nestor’s father and his older brother Leo came to blows over the Turkey Bowl. When my family came back from my grandmother’s place, we found Nestor pitching a handball in our lobby. His people didn’t even realize he was missing until my moms called his apartment. Moms invited Nestor to stay at our place for the rest of the weekend. At first, Rubio was pissed about this, but eventually he took us all to the movies and Mickey D’s. That goes to prove that dude can be decent when he wants to be and not because he has no other choice.
And as if I conjured him, Moms tells the cabbie to turn onto Awilda’s block. I feel ambushed. “Why are we going there?”
“I’m just dropping your sister off so she can spend some time with your father and brother today.”
“Oh.” So long as she doesn’t expect me to stick around.
Mandy says, “Mami, come upstairs with me.”
“No, sweetie, I’m tired and stuffed.”
“But Awilda said to invite you.”
My mother can barely hide her contempt. “Tell her I said thank you.”
“Mami!”
I snap, “Mandy, stop whining.”
The cab pulls up in front of Awilda’s building, and not for nothing I’m glad I’m not paying for this ride. Mandy bounces out of the cab and runs to the gate. Meanwhile, when the driver thinks I’m not looking, he slips his card in my mother’s hand along with her change. I’d laugh if I weren’t upset about being here.
My mother and I wait by the curb as Mandy leans on the buzzer. “Enough, Amanda, that’s obnoxious.”
Finally, the gate buzzes, and my sister shoves it open. She stops to turn around and look at me. “Efrain, come on.”
“Nah, I have to go to Candace’s house.”
Moms says, “Just call me when you want me to come pick you up, honey.”
Mandy pouts, then disappears into the building. Without a word, Moms and I start to walk toward St. Ann’s Avenue. After a few paces, she says, “We really do have much to be grateful for, Efrain.”
“Yeah.” Even though my head knows this is true, my heart doesn’t feel the same way it did a half hour ago.
Moms and I reach the corner. She beckons for a hug. “Te quiero mucho, m’ijo.”
“I love you, too, Mami.”
As she holds me, she says, “No matter what happens, I’m always thankful for my family, especially you kids.” Then Moms pulls away, brushing her fingertips across my cheek. “Tell Candace and her family I said happy Thanksgiving, and that I hope to meet them very soon.”
“I will.”
Then my mother takes a left, and after wondering for a second if she truly wants to be alone today, I head to Candace’s.
Pathos (n.) an emotion of sympathy
After two heaping servings of vanilla ice cream and homemade pecan pie, Candace asks if I want to go for a walk. And true to the secret manual that must have been written for kid sisters worldwide, Nia insists on going with us. As we reach People’s Park, her sister races toward the swings while Candace and I sit on a bench and hold hands. She says, “You know, it’s not so cold out here today.”
“I hate to break this to you,” I laugh, “but you’re talking like a New Yorker.”
“For real?” Candace smiles at the thought. “Don’t think I don’t like New York, Efrain. Sometimes it’s tough, but this city’s been good to me.”
“It’s just not home.” I try to say it without resentment, but I don’t know if I succeed.
“For now it is, and it will be for a while.” Candace reaches inside her coat and pulls out the Katrina presentation I had asked to borrow only to leave it behind after our fight about college. I take the paper from her and tuck it into my inside pocket. Then Candace leans her head against my shoulder. “I wish we could spend more time together.”
“Me too.” We watch Nia make friends with some other kids and turn the playground into an obstacle course. “So, is everything okay with you? You know, with school, work … group.”
Candace flashes a grin at me. “Did you hear about your friend Dominic?”
I’m actually relieved to hear some gossip. As curious as I am about her therapy sessions, I’m not always sure I can handle it. “What did that fool Lefty do now?”
“I caught him selling weed to one of Chingy’s tutees in the stacks, and Mr. Sweren kicked him out of the tutoring program.”
“Word?” It makes me a hypocrite, but I say it. “They need to expel that moron.”
“Mr. Sweren said he would’ve called the police if he had caught him in the act, but that’s okay.” Candace raises her fist. “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, Candace Lamb is free at last!” I laugh, even though my intestines feel braided. I kiss Candace to make myself feel better, and it works. For the most part.
She suddenly pulls away, her eyes fixed on something past my shoulder. “Nia, get down from there. It’s not ladylike to climb the monkey bars in a dress. That girl, I swear—”
Then Candace gasps. “Oh my God, I didn’t invite your sister over for dessert, did I? She was totally welcome to come. Your mother, too. Efrain, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I say, squeezing her hand. “Moms could use some time to herself, and Mandy’s over at her father’s place.”
“Oh, I just assumed you two had the same dad.”
“We do, but…” Besides Chingy I have never spoken to anyone about Rubio. Even that was on some little-boy-lost feebleness that embarrasses me to this day. But I can only dodge Candace about this for so long. “Rubio and I don’t get along.”
“As in rube?”
“Yeah, exactly,” I laugh. But the truth is Rubio is far from naive or unsophisticated. Dude could stand to be a bit less slick. “Nah, I’m just playing with you. His real name is César. Rubio means ‘blond’ in Spanish.”
“So why don’t you get along?”
“He did some funky things to my moms and put me in the middle of it.” Candace waits me out. “My father’s a first-class womanizer, and around the time I turned ten, he started taking me along on his little escapades. He’d tell my mother we were going to play ball but end up at his so-called girlfriend’s place. Just drop me off in front of her television while they did their thing.”
“And one day you told your mom,” says Candace. The fact that she assumes I did the right thing makes me want to kiss her. The knowledge that I did no such thing makes me want to push her away. “Of course you didn’t. You were just a child, and no child wants to hurt his mother or have his father angry with him.”
On the drive from Yankee Stadium that particular night, I had been bouncing off the walls of the Civic, juiced on lemon ice and an Alfonso Soriano home run. Then Rubio made the detour where it finally clicks. As we drove home from his mistress’s apartment, Rubio tried to chat me up while I sat there, doing a calculus I was too young to understand and praying for my stillness to betray me. But he never asked why I was suddenly so quiet. Eventually, I blurted out, “What were you doing in Christina’s bedroom?”
“Tenía que arreglar algo.”
“You never have to fix anything in the kitchen or bathroom,” I said, recalling the previous detours. “It’s always the bedroom.”
Rubio finally confessed. “Janguiando con mi novia.”
“But Mami’s your girlfriend.”
“No, Mami’s my wife. That mean she my best girlfriend. My favorite one of all.”
“But you’re not supposed to have any girlfriends once you get a wife.” Said it just like that, closing myself to any more of his creative interpretations and insults to my intelligence. “That’s what God says.”
No wonder when Moms finally put him out, Rubio stopped paying my tuition at St. Gabe’s. At the time, though, he laughed. “And when God say that to you?” Then Rubio said, “As long as he take care of his wife and his children, it’s okay for a man to have a girlfriend, too. I take good care of you and your sister and Mami, ¿verdad?” I didn’t understand this then, but now I would say, You put me in a good school but don’t come to my spelling bees. You buy me toys, but you don’t play with me. You can’t take me to Yankee Stadium or the Bronx Zoo without stopping at a girlfriend’s house on the way home. “But a good man keep his girlfriends a secret from his wife so he no hurt her feelings. There are many good women but very few good men, so all the good women have to share. The women don’t like the truth, pero así son las cosas.” I broke his code, though. If I told my mother about Rubio’s girlfriends and stomp her heart over something she could do nothing to change, then I would be just as bad as he.
“I tried to call it out, Candace.” Child or not, I need her to understand that. These days my hands are so dirty that as deeply as they’re buried in my pockets is the overwhelming urge for her to know how pristine they once were. “I might’ve been a kid, but I knew he was doing something wrong, and I tried to check him from jump. Rubio spun it as if he told me the truth on some father-son bonding shit,” I say. “He thought he was going to play me like he did my mother, using me as his alibi, but I wouldn’t let him. Eventually, when he’d say, Frankie, you want to go see the Yankees? I’d be like, No. I want to go to Chingy’s house. Rubio finally got the hint and left me out of his charades. Long before they split, he made me choose between her and him. I chose her.” This is the most I’ve said to anyone about this in years, and I feel raw. Only quid pro quo can right the scales. “What about your father? You never talk about him either.”
Candace traces her fingertips along my sideburn. “He’s dead,” she says.
“My bad.”
“That’s okay. I didn’t really know him all that well. He left for Texas to work when I was really young, came back for a little while …” Candace laughs. “Long enough to plant my sister, I guess. Then he left again for another spell. A few years before Katrina hit, he came back with heart disease. My mom cared for him until he passed. I hate to admit it, but when he first came back from Texas, I avoided him.”
“Were you afraid to be around him, you know … because he was dying?”
“At first, I didn’t feel anything, Efrain, because he was a stranger to me. Then I felt so guilty, but I couldn’t stand that. It became much easier to be angry. I thought, All this time away from us and now you only come home to make us watch you die.”
I imagine how I might feel if Rubio was dying. My mother breaking the news to Mandy and me. Awilda trying to upstage my mother during his final days at Lincoln Hospital. Another woman and her child turning the funeral into a telenovela. The reading of the will and Rubio leaving my mother nothing but the six-figure hospital bill since they’re still legally married. Yeah, anger is mad easy.
“My mother snapped me out of it, though,” Candace laughs. “As hard as I tried to hide it, she sensed what was going on with me.”
“Moms just be like that.”
“I remember once yelling at her I don’t know that man. And my mother yelled back You don’t know ‘that man’ because he worked himself to death to buy this roof over your head and those clothes on your back. You don’t know ‘that man’ because he loves you. That’s all you need to know about ‘that man.’” Candace pretends to scout the playground for Nia, but I know that now she feels as raw as I did a few minutes ago. “That’s when I started bargaining with God for miracles, but he wasn’t interested in any of my offers. Still, he gave me one small consolation.”
“What was that?”
“Before he died, I got to tell my dad that I loved him, thank him for all he’d done for us, and say goodbye. I think he could’ve lived a hundred years, and I still never would’ve known him all that well. But we told each other all we needed to know.”
“Come here,” I say. Candace and I wrap ourselves around each other. We still feel raw, but at least we are raw together.
Veneer (n.) a superficial or deceptively attractive appearance, facade
There is so much business tonight, Nestor and I race back and forth between the building and the curb as if in an endless relay. In between sprints, he chats up nonsense. Nestor insists that all the scuttle about gang initiation rites—you know, flashing headlights and slashing ankles—is just propaganda to make people think that gang members prey on random White suburbanites, but to this day he still believes Tommy Hilfiger dissed minorities who wear his clothes on Oprah. I humor him, though, because stacking paper builds a man’s patience.
“Yo, Nes, don’t you think if that were true, it’d be all over YouTube?” I ask as I pocket the cash handed to me by my latest customer and then whistle for LeRon. “Yo, RonRon, introduce my man there to Judas.”
LeRon nods. “Done.”
“Claudia says she saw that episode herself,” says Nestor. “You know she be into all those talk shows. Says Oprah owned him, too, bro. Kicked his racist ass off her set and told everyone to boycott his brand. That’s why you’ll never catch me wearing that nigga’s shit. Never, son!”
Claudia’s a liar, but what do I care? “Yeah, okay.” I check my watch. “I’ma bounce.”
Nestor peeks at his cell phone. “You kidding me? The set is jumping, and it ain’t even ten yet!”
“More money for you, then,” I say. I made more tonight in three hours than I have made all week, and I’m ready to go. “I’ve got homework to finish and a test first thing in the morning, so I’m not trying to be up all night.” Plus, I want to get home so I can call Candace at a decent hour.
Nestor says, “Yo, E., when you go to college, you think you might join one of them fraternities?”
“I don’t know.” It crosses my mind sometimes. Apparently, the real benefits of joining a fraternity kick in once you graduate. For example, a fraternity brother might get me into a choice law school or give me a dope job. But then I remind myself that I’m not headed to a Morehouse or Howard. “I’m going to a college where I’ma be a minority, and to be real with you, kid, I don’t think I can let some rich White boy haze me, ordering me around and smacking me up and all that.” I had enough of that mess at IS 162 before Nestor told the bullies to fall back. I’m not the one anymore.
“Yeah, that couldn’t be me either, bro,” says Nestor. “But if you go to the Library of Congress down there in D.C., they got a whole file on that stuff.” I suck my teeth at him. “For real, E.! Back in the fifties when that cat McCafferty was running around accusing everybody of being a communist—”
“McCarthy, kid, McCarthy.”
“Whatever, yo, listen to me! Back then the government made all the frats and sororities give up their secrets to prove that they weren’t commies, and it’s all documented in the Library of Congress. But check it… there’s still mad info missing.”
I sneer and say, “I bet.”
“You think somebody like J. Edgar Hoover or the head of the CIA or even the president himself is gonna expose their boys? No way, man! You know they’re gonna use their influence to keep their most secret rituals out of that file.”
I start to ask with all those exceptions, how Nestor can be so sure that such a catalog even exists when I see Lefty Saldaña across the street. I pull my hood over my head and inch closer to Nestor, letting him ramble on to the next topic on his list of favorite urban legends while stealing glances across Hunts Point Avenue. Is Lefty looking for me? No, can’t
be. Least of all around these parts. Chingy may know I’m slinging now, he may be angry with me about it, and he may like to parlay with Leti and the other chismosas, but no way would he put my secret out on front street.
Still, I keep my eye on Lefty while pretending to listen to Nestor yammer about some talk show psychic who predicted one of the campus massacres. With a huge grin on his face, Lefty approaches that Latino guy in Hinckley’s crew who convinced Julian to accept Nestor’s money and back off me. They hug like long-lost relatives and kick it for a minute in front of La Floridita. A few minutes later, Julian turns the corner, and his boy calls him over. The way Julian and Lefty nod as he speaks, and then exchange pounds, I gather that he just introduced them. But then they burst out laughing and slapping five as if they’ve known each other forever.
“Damn, I hate when you do that, E.!” yells Nestor. “I be talking to you, and you be zoning me out. What you staring at, man?” He rides my gaze across the street and cackles at the sight of Lefty. “Oh, that’s the AC Super Senior!” Then Nestor spits on the ground. “He used to be down with us, but then he got too hungry, so Snipes told him to kick rocks.”
I don’t confirm or deny out of fear of drawing attention to ourselves. It makes no difference because suddenly Julian looks across the street and busts Nestor and me eyeballing him. I quickly look away, and Nestor put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t do that, bro. Don’t look away.” And yet Nestor sidesteps in front of me, blocking Julian and me from one another’s sight. He whispers, “It’s okay to get shook out here sometimes, but you can never show it, you feel me?”
I shrug his hand off my shoulder. “I’m not shook.” And to prove it, I jam my quivering hands into my pockets, bop over to a parked car, and lean against it with my back to Julian. Hopefully, this move lets me have my cake and it eat it, too. It avoids the staring contest I can’t win and yet signals to Julian I’m not afraid to turn my back on you.
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