“There’s nowhere to go,” I said.
“Well, if you hadn’t gone to that rally, we would’ve left on time.”
That I’d returned from the Boulevard hours earlier, that I’d spent the entire afternoon listening to her assessment of my sister’s chances of finding a husband in law school, didn’t seem to matter. I had left her, briefly, and now our whole weekend was thrown.
“What time is your flight tomorrow to San Francisco?”
She always treated Berkeley and Oakland as neighborhoods in San Francisco, and I’d stopped correcting her a long time ago.
“Not until noon,” I said. “But I should get there by ten, so, leave here at nine?”
“Why did you make it so early? Couldn’t you have spent the day here, one more day?”
“I just bought the cheapest flight,” I said.
“Twenty dollars cheaper,” she scoffed, almost to herself. “It’s not the money, and you know it. Don’t lie to me. You just don’t want to be here with us. You’d rather be in San Francisco.”
This wasn’t untrue. But she was implying I didn’t love her enough, or something more insidious. Maybe she could sense I wasn’t my real self around her, whatever that is, and that I could fake it for only so long without bursting at the seams. I decided to say nothing.
“When I visited home a few years after I’d moved here,” she said, “everybody told me I changed. I was talking different, they said, walking different, taking my coffee different. I didn’t think so, but that’s what everybody back home told me.”
I said, “The traffic’s starting to move, so that’s good.”
“I’ve been watching the way you are,” she continued. “Now I understand what they meant. They meant I had become an American. And now I can say you’ve changed, too. You have become a different kind of boy.”
“And what kind of boy is that?” I asked, feigning boredom. I spent most of the important moments in my life feigning boredom.
“I guess you can’t help becoming the places you go,” she said. “I think of you now as a San Francisco boy.”
* * *
Teresa and my mother hugged like long-lost sisters, one apologizing into the other’s hair for being so late.
“This traffic is unbelievable!”
“I thought I told you not to make anything,” Teresa said, taking the boreg and placing it on a little side table, a safe distance from the dining area, where I could smell the homemade tamales waiting for us.
We followed our noses to the table, where Watts’s father, Seth, had already taken a seat. “Welcome,” he said in his jowly, graveled voice. He didn’t stand. He was an enormous man with thick brown sideburns, which he stroked and tugged at in an anxious display of impatience. Clearly he was ready for everyone to sit down and eat; when he twisted open a two-liter bottle of Coke, he released its hiss like a starting gun.
“Lena,” Teresa said to my mom once we’d all taken a seat, “I’m sorry again your husband couldn’t join us.”
“Me, too, Teresa,” said my mom. Because of their accents, they pronounced each other’s names better than Americans could, and therefore did so as often as possible. Lay-na, not Lee-na. Teh-reh-sa, not Tuh-reesa. “I’m disappointed, too, Teresa, and so is he.”
“I’m not,” said Seth, scooping beans onto his plate. “More for us, right?”
Teresa asked everybody to hold hands while she said grace. As a nonbeliever, I always dreaded these exhibitions of group prayer—I feared my disbelief was palpable. Seth, who had to put down the tortillas he’d just peeled from the basket, was the only other person who didn’t seem eager to join hands. But we did: I was sitting between my mother and Watts, and held on to them while Teresa spoke. We bowed our heads and closed our eyes.
“Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
“Amen,” came the chorus. Even from me.
I reached for a tortilla, but Teresa said, “Daniel, would you like to—?”
Then Watts repeated the prayer in Spanish—I knew this only when he got to the cognate for “Christ.” I caught Seth rolling his eyes. We chorused again, and this time I paid special attention to the big man, the only one of us not to say “Amen.” He started to eat.
I, too, reached for the food, but my mother asked if it wouldn’t be too much if she said a prayer in her native tongue, as well. Teresa said, “That would be great,” and we chained our hands together a third time. This time I let out a little laugh-groan, and Seth gave me a wink.
When we finally released hands, Teresa said, “I hate to say it, but Seth has some work to deal with tonight, too, so he’ll be leaving us early. It’ll just be the mothers and sons.”
“I’ve got employees coming in and out,” Seth explained, grabbing two tamales at once with his bare hand. “We got a lot of paperwork to do with them. When you’re in the landscaping business, you’ve got to deal with a lot of forged documents. Some of these guys, it’s my fourth or fifth time checking their information, because the government’s been cracking down, and you can’t be too careful. See, back in the day, when people like my grandparents were coming in from Wales, when Teresa’s parents brought her up here as a kid, when Lena here was coming in from—where was it, again? Romania?—people got in line and waited their turn. Not anymore. People think it’s a racial thing, but it’s really not. It’s generational.”
Teresa sneezed thunderously, startling everyone. After blessing her, my mom took the opportunity to change the conversation by asking Watts how he felt to have his old friend back in town.
“It’s cool,” Watts said. “I’m just glad he came back even though he’s kind of outgrown this place.”
“You say that like it’s a compliment,” Seth said between chews. “But look at it this way. That truck of yours, Danner, was given to you when I got too big to fit inside. I upgraded to a bigger truck, and on paper, that looks like I’m doing pretty well for myself. But really what it means is, I’m obese and on the freaking verge of death.” He laughed, wiping his mouth. Teresa clicked her tongue, and Seth put his hands up in mock surrender. “I’m going, I’m going,” he said. Then he stood, shoving back his chair to make room. He apologized for dominating the conversation. “Hate to leave you guys,” he said, “but yo tengo mucho trabajo.” The accent was so awful, I thought he was playing it up.
“The food is so delicious,” my mom said once he was gone. “You know, Mexican food is so different from Armenian cuisine. Everything in Armenian cuisine—even the heavy stuff—is just lighter.”
“Well,” Teresa said, “flavor does tend to make things heavier.…”
While they debated, Watts leaned over to me and said, “How’s it been, being back?”
“Fine,” I said. “Didn’t do much this trip. I went to that rally on the Boulevard today, and that’s about all.”
“The American Popularity Party,” Watts said. Apparently, his dad was a member. “What did I miss?”
“Well,” I said, “I saw Roxanne.”
Teresa dinged her glass with a knife. “Boys. Lena and I want to make a toast.”
The two women filled their glasses with wine and gave us—underage, as we were—a tiny splash each. “It’s a special occasion,” Teresa reasoned. “And it’s bad luck,” my mom added, “to make a toast with an empty glass.”
The four of us raised our wine.
“To you boys,” Teresa said.
“And to your long, great friendship,” added my mom.
“We’re so proud of you both. In only one generation, look at our great boys in this country.”
“And we can’t wait to see what your futures hold. What your own sons and daughters, who won’t be the children of immigrants, will be able to do.”
“And also to Robert—”
“Who we all wish could be here with us tonight, but he’s making us safer.”
“And we’re praying for him, to keep him safe, too
.”
“And for all of you boys. We’re so proud.”
“Salud.”
“Abrés.”
We clinked glasses to loyalty and sacrifice, though nobody said so, exactly. Karinger’s name had been breathed into the room, though, like grace in another language, and I regretted avoiding his sister at the rally. She had always been kind to me. If I earned her trust again, I thought, I could eventually regain her brother’s. I’d see her again. Next time, I thought, I’d catch her eye and walk over to her—
“What?” I said. Watts had been saying something to me.
“Was she with a guy?”
“Roxanne? No. She was with Linda.”
Watts pondered this. He knew I had nothing to gain by telling him of my sighting. But he also knew why I’d done it: I was from here, a place where gossip—not ambition—served as the driving force of stories.
“She looked good,” I said.
“Of course,” he said, hanging his head so his curls covered his face. “Of course she did.”
Just as my mom called off a second glass of wine, telling Teresa we ought to be going, Watts flipped his hair back and punched me lightly in the thigh. “You owe me a favor.”
“Oh, God,” I said.
“Stay here tonight.”
“What?”
“Just don’t go home.”
Our mothers were hugging. They made plans to see each other again, soon, just the two of them.
“Shit,” I whispered. “It’s my last night in town. You know I promised my mom I’d stay with her.”
“Look, I’ll take you back to the airport tomorrow, free of charge. But you have to help me tonight.”
“Daniel,” my mom said, coming over to hug him. “So good to see you.” Then, to me: “Ready?”
I rubbed my thigh where Watts had hit me. He’d been kind to pick me up from the airport, and generous to offer another ride in the morning. But that’s not why I owed him my loyalty. I owed him because he was still here. I owed him my loyalty because he’d given the Antelope Valley—and me—his.
“Actually,” I told my mom, “I thought I’d stay the night with Watts—with Dan—if that’s all right with you? And with Teresa, of course. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”
“But you leave tomorrow,” my mom said, maintaining her smile. “Don’t you think you should come home tonight, get a good night’s rest?” She put her hand on Teresa’s back. “They’ve got workers coming in and out, too, remember, so it’s better if you’re not in the way.”
“Oh,” Teresa said. “We can handle one more boy, no problem.”
“And we were going to have hatz banir tonight.” She fiddled with the Band-Aid on her thumb. “And I made all that boreg for you.”
“I’ll have some of the boreg we brought here,” I said.
“But who will eat all the ones we have at home?”
I didn’t have to answer that—my mom knew she was beginning to sound desperate. To cover this up, she offered a little laugh to our host and said, “I guess it’s already been decided.”
When we hugged, my mom said she could call off work again tomorrow, if I wanted, to spend another hour or so together before she drove me to the airport. But I told her I already had a ride, and plus, she couldn’t keep doing that, calling in sick. What I meant was she couldn’t afford to, but speaking of money always embarrassed her. So I made a joke instead. “Stop pretending to be sick,” I said, “or karma’s gonna catch up with you, and you’ll get sick for real.”
I arranged to swing by the house later to pick up my bag and say good-bye. Any pain I felt for choosing Watts over her was swept aside by the conviction that my mother and I had decades more to spend together. For another fifty years or so—an impossible amount of time to imagine—I would sit in traffic with her, run errands with her, taste-test her cooking. And eventually, once the drought ended and the town exploded into a true city around us, we would huddle together in the crammed aisle of a bullet train and reveal to each other the various occasions on which we’d sacrificed for each other in the name of loyalty. All the times we’d survived more than a cut.
* * *
The truck his father had outgrown started on the second try. It was just after midnight. In the hours since dinner, the only idea Watts had come up with was to head over to Roxanne’s house.
“To do what?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Karinger would’ve had a plan. Even you might have something in mind. But my motto’s always been, ‘Just be there,’ and usually whatever needs to happen will happen.”
At this time of night, the roads were unlit and empty. The Antelope Valley seemed to revert back to the town I knew as a kid, and the drive toward the Karinger house seemed less like a distance to traverse than a stretch of time.
We arrived at a streetlight that had been switched to a flashing red, and Watts came to a complete, unnecessary stop. Nobody else was around. The rosary hanging between us reflected the red light, on and off, in perfect time. Watts didn’t move the car. Instead, he started to talk.
“It sucks being here without you guys,” he said.
I wanted to tell him that the word “here” was unnecessary, that I felt the same way in an entirely different place. But the truth was, leaving and being left produced two distinct species of nostalgia, and I could speak to only one. So I said, “Go on. I’m listening.”
He checked the mirrors constantly while he spoke, making sure we were alone on the road. “I lied the other day,” he said. “I know why Roxanne stopped talking to me.”
“I knew it,” I said. “It’s because of me. She hates me and doesn’t want you keeping in touch with me.”
Watts laughed. “Dude, not everything’s about you. Roxanne likes you a lot, actually. She thinks her brother was an asshole to you. She’s always trying to get him to apologize. No, this is about me, for a change.”
“For a change?” I asked, though—considering how badly I wanted to ask for more information about Roxanne helping me and Karinger be friends again—I knew he had a point.
“I don’t know if you can get how hard it is growing up in a place where all your friends look alike except for you. Like, nobody’s blatantly mean or anything, but there were a lot of times with you and Karinger where I felt kind of invisible. I don’t know if you knew that about me, but there it is.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“What I mean is, I’m trying to figure out how to tell you this story. I guess the best way is to just come out with what I did, which is I ratted out one of the workers at my parents’ company. For months I heard this guy—our age, maybe a little older—talking shit about my dad to another worker. He must’ve thought I couldn’t understand Spanish or something. My dad can be a prick, but he’s a good guy. He treats his employees fair, is what I mean. So I was pissed at this worker, who kept saying petty things about my dad—making fun of his weight, for example. Then one day I heard him mention to another worker that he was undocumented, and I sort of filed it away. I told myself, the next time he makes a joke about my dad, I’m going to—and, the next time he did, I went straight into my parents’ office and ratted him out.”
He paused. Then he said, “He’s always called me Danner, you know.”
“What?”
“My dad. He calls me Danner.”
We laughed, sort of.
“When I fucked up in school or something, he’d say, ‘Danner, you got that from your mother’s side of the family.’ He’s always wanted me to be more—”
“White?” I said. “So you told your dad about the undocumented worker because you wanted him to know you weren’t just your mother’s son, but his, too? You wanted to make your dad proud, and you didn’t care if you hurt someone along the way.”
“I don’t think so,” Watts said. He turned to look at me, and the already cramped cab of the truck seemed to shrink. I rolled down my window to breathe.
“Like I said,�
�� he went on, “I think it was more about me, for a change. I think I wanted to feel that kind of power, the power of having somebody’s life in my hands. I also think I wanted the worker to know I wasn’t invisible. That I’d been there when he was talking, that I’d heard what he’d been saying and understood him. That I was like him, in a way, and also not. That I had something he didn’t have, which is that I could be two things at once. I think that’s why I had him deported.”
I wanted to punch him in a friendly way, let him know I was still listening, still someone he could talk to. But I feared Watts would understand my hitting him as an indictment of what he’d done, and I knew he deserved much more than a punch. The haloed headlights of an oncoming car grew ahead of us. I asked Watts how this had anything to do with Roxanne.
“The whole time my dad was on the phone with the immigration officer, he kept saying that his son, Danner, was the hero. I’m not going to lie, Kush. I felt proud. For a few weeks, I felt like a fucking patriot. Only later did I start feeling sick. I fucked up a man’s life—and his family’s, too—because he called my dad fat. Jesus. I was really sick with guilt, man. I started going to church more and more, tried to atone, but I couldn’t tell some stranger what I had done. God, I wish you or Karinger were around, because I was crying like a fucking idiot and ashamed and I needed someone to talk to. In person, I mean. So I went to Roxanne. I picked her up and we drove to the aqueduct, and I told her everything. After a while, she just stared at me, like she’d never seen me before. Then she told me to take her home. We haven’t talked since.”
The oncoming car passed, flooding us momentarily in white light.
“She’s the only reason I still love being here,” Watts said. Then he said it again. “I really love her, Kush. I really do. And I need her. I need to fix this. I don’t know how, but I need to fix this.”
I looked at my friend beside me, the one who stayed, and I knew what I had to do. I wanted to believe good men could do despicable things and remain good men. I wanted to believe this place was better for having him.
“I can fix it,” I said.
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