Josefina and I argued the same way. Sometimes it was loud nonsense. Sometimes it was real. Then we were best friends again. Take, for example, the fight on top of the pyramid. The next day it’d been like nothing had ever happened.
“It’s amazing how fast they put up the beams.” I tried to spark a conversation. A ball of masa might’ve answered more readily. I shrugged, left the room and headed for Colonel Franco’s. There was too much other stuff to worry about, like Belinda.
I’d spent all night turning the Belinda thing around in my head. The truth was that I was feeling jealous. The more I thought about it, the more I knew Josefina was on to something about the way Felix had shooed us away. I couldn’t help wondering if Belinda was more than Felix’s college friend.
I returned home after a few hours to find my mom locked in my parents’ bedroom. There was no hot dinner. I finished my chores and ate a bologna sandwich. No one nagged me to eat a vegetable or anything nutritious. I squirted ketchup on my sandwich just in case. I wished it were a real dinner to comfort me, like carne asada with baked potatoes. We hadn’t tasted steak in a long time on account of the cost of meat. Most of our groceries came from bartering with the Nowaks, and we ate a lot of recycled bread.
My dad walked into the room and sat down at the table across from me. He fixed his gaze on the wall. The bedroom door opened, and my mom walked out. “Your mother is going away,” my dad said.
“I’m going to go stay with your grandparents for a while,” my mom said.
“Is everything okay? I mean, are they okay?” I asked.
“They’re both fine. It’s more of a vacation,” my mom said.
I shook my head. “A vacation? We can’t afford a vacation.”
“I’m the only one going.”
“What?”
“It’s not a vacation. She just needs some time to herself,” my dad said.
“It doesn’t make sense for you to leave now. You’re leaving like everyone else,” I said. Was this seriously happening? I didn’t see how she could go from being so worried about the bakery to just up and leaving.
My mom got up and headed back to the bedroom without another word. Maybe it was a practical joke. She was going to yell “Got ya” any second. I followed her and stood in front of the bedroom door. I stared at the suitcase sitting on the edge of the bed. She was serious. She grabbed face cream and deodorant from the dresser and threw them into the bag.
She looked tired, rundown.
I stomped into my room and threw myself on my bed. My mom was unhappy. It was nothing new. She complained about money an awful lot. My dad worried about money too. But she was obsessed. I lay there and wished she would just get over it, and they would work it out.
Chapter 18
Nothing changed overnight. There was no negotiation, not even a good-bye between my parents. After all that silence, it occurred to me that my parents didn’t have much to say to each other without the arguing. The last conversation I heard between them went like this:
“Did you order the flour and sugar?”
“Yes, fifty pounds of each.”
“Did you confirm delivery?”
“Yes, for Monday.”
My mom picked up her suitcase. She crossed the room toward the door. Her body doubled over from the weight. My dad didn’t move to help. Neither did I. I wasn’t going to help her leave.
I straggled along behind her to the train stop. I thought if she saw me she might still change her mind. “You could take me with you,” I said.
“Don’t you think I thought about it?”
“So why don’t you?”
“I know this may be your last summer with your friends. It wouldn’t be fair to you,” she sighed. I shook my head. “I love you and your dad very much.”
“Then stay. Or just wait a few days and think about it.”
“It’s not that simple. The sooner I leave, the sooner I can figure things out.”
I tried hard to understand why it wasn’t so simple. I wanted to demand that she explain. Was it really that she needed some time away from all of this and us, like my dad said? She hugged me goodbye. I pressed my head to her shoulder and curled my fingers tight around her back.
“Everything will be alright. You’ll see,” she said. I wished her arms could still convince me of anything.
My dad had once told me that the morning my mom first stepped foot in the bakery he met fate. My fresh-faced mom was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. “I’m going to grow old with Patricia Quintana,” he’d said. She anchored him to Pig Park. Too bad it didn’t work the other way. We couldn’t hold my mom in place any more than we could hold on to the present. Or maybe we just weren’t enough anymore. I thought about what she’d told me in the basement that day we looked through that old picture album. “Life happened.” I wasn’t any closer to understanding what that meant. You couldn’t plan things? Life had a mind of its own?
My mom pulled away, picked up her suitcase, and boarded the train. The doors folded and squeezed shut. The train pushed forward. She was gone.
I pictured her on one of those faded runaway posters taped at the entrance of the train stop. The idea of my mom running away was as out there as the idea of a pyramid.
Mama birds didn’t abandon their nests. But the population of stray cats proved other creatures abandoned their children easy enough. I was an orphan kitten.
I walked to Colonel Franco’s. I sat at his desk typing up a letter for him. I concentrated on the keyboard. My two index fingers moved above the keys.
“My mom saw you and your mom walking outside with a suitcase,” Casey said. Loretta Sanchez, Casey’s mom and my mom’s friend, spent all day on her stoop. Sooner or later, she knew everything.
“She left to go visit my grandparents. She hasn’t seen them in a long time.”
“I would’ve gone with her,” Josefina said.
“They’re getting on in their years. She wants to spend as much time with them as possible. Old people stuff. Not my thing.” I didn’t let on about the real situation with my mom to anyone, not even Josefina. She didn’t need any more ideas about the merits of leaving.
The more I lied, the more I wished it were true.
I poured myself into a lie. My dad poured himself into the bakery. He rearranged all of the supplies and reorganized the bread in the display cases according to color while I was out.
“Dad?” I said. “Won’t some of those be different colors with each batch depending on how long they stay in the oven?”
He didn’t answer. I walked up to where he sat on mom’s stool and waved my hand in front of his face. He was as absent as my mom. I could’ve put on a pig suit and walked through the house yelling: “Oink, oink.” There was no talking to him. He was gone.
I finished my chores. I pulled the blinds and locked the door.
I poured two bowls of cereal. Dinner with my dad was like dinner with a cardboard box. Except the box was more interesting to read. I shoveled spoonfuls into my mouth. My dad’s bowl sat untouched.
Chapter 19
The phone rang. I stood up and put the receiver to my right ear. There was a sound like rustling paper and tapping. “Let me talk to your dad, mijita,” my grandmother said.
“He’s in the bathroom.” I wondered what my grandmother wanted. My mom hadn’t called since leaving. “Let me talk to my mom,” I said.
“Your mom is resting right now, mija. Well, I suppose I should just tell you. She fainted this afternoon.”
“What?”
“She says she’s just tired from the trip and refuses to call your father. It could be dehydration. She chugged a whole gallon of water when she got here. I thought she was going to swim away. She didn’t want to worry you.”
“I should get my dad.”
“No, no. It’s late. We’ll see in the morning.”
“Okay. Bye.” My shoulders slumped.
“Who was that?” my dad asked from the doorway. “It was my grandmo
ther. She wanted me to tell you my mom’s not feeling well. She’ll call you tomorrow.”
My dad didn’t ask for more details, but he hovered near the phone for the rest of the night. His palm curled around the receiver a few times and then let go.
I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. My mom probably hadn’t drunk water all day. Those cross-country bus bathrooms were the worst. I hated all public bathrooms. Sometimes I didn’t drink water at school for hours so that I wouldn’t have to go into the girls’ restroom.
Maybe the whole situation with my dad was just making my mom sick.
It occurred to me that if my mom really were sick, she’d have to come back. We didn’t have some fancy health insurance plan to pay for treatment just anywhere. She’d have to come back to see a doctor at the community clinic. It’s not that I hoped she was sick. But she would be forced to come back.
The phone didn’t ring again until the following afternoon. My dad dove for the phone. “Yes…Yes,” he uttered. His brow scrunched up. “I see…I see.” He shook his head from side to side and hung up.
“Your grandmother took your mom to get checked out. Her blood sugar is high. Patricia has diabetes,” he said. He spoke into the wind, as if I were in a different room.
“Diabetes?” I asked.
“She was fine when she left,” he grumbled. He pulled off his apron and stormed outside. He slumped down on the front stoop.
The air squeezed out of me. Maybe I was being punished for my thoughts about my mom having to come back.
I took the phone and dialed my grandparents’ number.
“Mom?”
“Masi? I’m fine,” my mom said. “I’m fine. The Texas Tech doctors are very capable. Your grandmother has a friend there and got me in at a reduced rate. Blood sugar problems are as common as a cold these days. Your grandmother shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Is that all you have to say?” I waited for her to announce that she was on her way back. But she didn’t talk about returning. She babbled on about the weather as if nothing had happened.
I twirled the cord around my fingers. “Okay, I have to go.” It was just one more thing I didn’t know what to make of.
I looked out the front door. I walked outside and sat down beside my dad. He dragged his nails against the concrete. “I’m going down there first thing tomorrow morning,” he said.
“Down where? The basement?”
“Texas.”
“What about the bread?”
“It can wait. We don’t have any customers anyway. You can stay with the Nowaks while I’m gone.”
“Okay.”
“Now go to bed.”
I walked to my room. I lay on my bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I listened to the radio. I read a magazine. I counted the miles to Texas and the distance to my mom’s heart. I counted and counted and counted.
Chapter 20
I glanced at the pad with my grandmother’s telephone number and dialed. “Grandma?…No, I don’t need to talk to Mom. I just want to tell you that my dad boarded the first express bus out this morning. He’ll be there tomorrow afternoon.”
“Why’d he do that?”
“He wanted to.”
“Your poor father.”
“I know.”
“Your mother doesn’t want to go back yet.”
“I guess. But she should at least listen to him. It wouldn’t hurt her to come see a doctor back here.”
“She’s seen a doctor.”
“Well, she can see another one. If not, she can tell my dad to his face when she sees him,” I said and hung up. I picked up the phone and hung up a second time for good measure. My grandmother wasn’t helping any. Of course, her loyalty was to the daughter she’d raised, not to the son-in-law or the grandkid she only saw every few years. She was on my mom’s side all the way.
I still just wanted my mom to get on a bus home.
It didn’t make any sense for her not to. I couldn’t help being annoyed. I was sure she was lying about how okay it was. My dad had followed her across the country. This thing with her had to be more serious than she was letting on. There was something they weren’t telling me.
I pushed the power button on the laptop. I typed the word D-I-A-B-E-T-E-S. Over one hundred and eighty million results popped up.
I deleted the letters one by one and typed F-E-L-I-X. Maybe I could get to the bottom of who Belinda was to him. I racked my brain for his last name, like pulling a splinter without tweezers. I highlighted the name and deleted. It was just as well. I didn’t need something else to obsess over, as tempting as it was.
I typed D-I-A-B-E-T-E-S again. I scanned the first half a dozen sites. I clicked on one of the links. There were pictures of people with amputated limbs, people with livers that looked like my grandfather’s famous Texas brisket.
A million terrible thoughts raced through my head. My eyes felt like they might pop out.
According to the website, treating diabetes was all about a healthy diet and regular exercise. I ran upstairs and scavenged through all the cupboards in the house. I grabbed a bag of Cheetos from my dad’s stash and a new bottle of hot sauce. There wasn’t much else. I moved on to the refrigerator. I grabbed a sealed box of Velveeta Cheese and a three-liter bottle of orange soda. I put all of it into a paper shopping bag and set it beside the door.
I walked downstairs with the bag in hand and sat at the counter. The thing was, we ate a lot of bread. There was no way around it. I couldn’t go into the bakery’s pantry and clean it out too. That would be as good as throwing away money.
Maybe the bread wasn’t that bad. My dad had cut out the lard from all the recipes as a matter of principle. We used vegetable shortening and butter. Nowak’s grocery didn’t stock American Lard products anymore either. American Lard had taken their business elsewhere and so had we.
Bang.
Click, clack.
I turned around at the rumble behind me. I walked into the kitchen and flipped the light switch on. The oven was on its last leg. It made those sounds sometimes. I put my hand over the oven door. I pressed down. The metal felt cold against my palm.
I was losing my mind.
I dug my hands into my scalp. I was ready to tear my hair out. Each thought that followed was worse, as if being alone were a magnifying glass of bad feelings. I didn’t want to cry, but what if my mom’s liver turned to brisket? Maybe she would never come back.
Chapter 21
I pulled on my backpack and grabbed the shopping bag. I stepped out and locked the door. Clouds hovered and swallowed up the sky.
I ran the block and a half to the Nowaks’ in the ominous dark. It was too early for streetlights. My shoulders shook. The clouds sprayed their fury—each raindrop heavier than the last—and hot tears gushed down my face. I gulped down the warm damp air. I pushed through the side door of the grocery store and climbed the stairs to Josefina’s room.
Josefina turned off the TV.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. She pulled up her desk chair.
“My mom left. They’re not even talking to each other. I think they broke up. We found out she was sick. My dad followed her.” It spilled out like soup left to boil over.
“Grownups don’t break up. What do you mean she’s sick?”
I wiped at my face and told Josefina all about the blowout at home and the diabetes. “I don’t understand why this is happening now, as if everything else wasn’t bad enough.”
“Your mom will be okay. They’ll figure it out.” Josefina handed me a towel. I dried off and changed into my pajamas. I hung my damp clothes on her desk chair. “Everything will work out, you’ll see,” she said.
“What’s going on here?” Marcos asked from the doorway.
“Go back to your room,” Josefina said. “Get out of here.”
I smiled a little. Their family seemed so normal next to mine: brothers and sisters fighting, parents who lived together. I wouldn’t have minded permanently moving in with the N
owaks.
Josefina turned the television back on. Marcos walked in and sat on the floor. “What are we watching?” he asked.
“Go away,” Josefina repeated.
“I don’t mind if he stays,” I said. I looked for comfort in the familiarity of Marcos. I pulled out the bag of Cheetos I’d brought with me and tossed it and the orange soda his way. Marcos drank the soda straight from the bottle.
“Look, Masi,” he said. He stuffed his face with two fistfuls of the crunchy chips so that his cheeks puffed out. I laughed a little.
“You’re the spitting image of that squirrel that hangs out outside my window at night.”
“I turn into a squirrel when you’re not looking,” he smiled. Like I said, sometimes he was nice.
“Marcos!” Mrs. Nowak yelled from the other room.
“Fun’s over,” Marcos said and left.
Josefina grabbed me by the arm and led me downstairs to the store. “We’re gonna help your mom get better,” she said. She put a basket in my hands and walked past the deli section. She threw in a can of non-fat cooking spray, Splenda, canola oil, yogurt, unsweetened applesauce, and various vegetables. She bagged the groceries and we walked back upstairs.
“Felix told my parents he was going to the bakery tomorrow. You should go tell him your dad is gone,” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“It’ll help you get your mind off things. I’ll go with you.”
“Maybe you’re right. But you were all weird about him last time.”
“Just because I’m not interested anymore, doesn’t mean you can’t be. I’ll be nice. I promise.”
“I don’t remember his last name.”
“Diaz, I believe.”
“Diaz.” I repeated, as if to engrave it on my mind.
“I looked him up,” she said. “A million hits, none of them Felix. Weird, but better than finding out he’s a murderer.”
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