Somewhere Between Bitter and Sweet

by Laekan Zea Kemp

  I stare at my shoes, speckled with grease from the restaurant. “I know he might not want to see me.”

  “And you’re prepared for that?”

  I nod again. Even though I’m not sure. Time has dulled the memory of him walking out that door, the years that have passed fueling the questions instead. That’s the fire that needs putting out first, even if it ignites something else.

  She slides a business card to me. “When they have the funds, I refer a lot of my clients to a private investigator I know. He’s honest, thorough. If you’re serious about finding your father, give him a call.”

  I tuck the card in my pocket. “I will.”

  When I reach the door, she stops me. “What was your name again?”

  I look back. “Xander.”

  “Ah.” She nods. “Alejandro.”

  I shake my head. “Just Xander.”

  She smiles. “Well, good luck, Xander.”

  As I step out of the office my phone rings. Nacho’s. It’s my first day off since I started, but when Angel asks me to come in for a few hours, I’m actually relieved. I don’t want to go home, for my abuelo to ask where I’ve been.

  A few weeks after I came to live with him, I finally mustered up the courage to ask about my father. His son. He was quiet for a long time, staring into his cup of coffee. Then he got up from the kitchen table and walked away. He stayed in his room the rest of the day and I stayed at the table, afraid of moving, of making a sound. I didn’t want him to leave me too, so I never spoke of my father again.

  He didn’t either. But he knew I still had questions. And yet, every time one of my father’s photographs went missing from the photo album he kept at the bottom of his closet, he never said a word. He never tried to stop me. But that was probably only because he thought the photographs were all I wanted. Or all I’d be able to find. What I’m doing now isn’t quite as harmless. Which is why, despite what Officer Solis thinks, I just can’t bring myself to tell him.

  When I get to the restaurant I find Lucas and a few others in the back alley, all climbing into Angel’s truck.

  “Another catering?” I ask.

  “Not exactly,” Lucas says. “In my experience, when Angel takes us on these little excursions outside the restaurant, it’s never good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Struggles pushes past us, climbing into the back seat. “He means that if it was anything worth doing, Angel wouldn’t be keeping it a secret.”

  We pull up to a tall residential building just off the highway. A girl steps out from behind a box truck. Pen.

  “Oh, hell no!” Lucas groans. “She better live on the first fucking floor.”

  “Shut the hell up,” Angel snaps. “You’re all getting paid for this shit so just suck it up and do it.”

  Chloe heaves a couple of boxes into Lucas’s arms and then she hangs her head back, staring up at the building.

  “She doesn’t live on the first floor, does she?” he asks.

  Angel reaches for a box, sighing. “Try the sixth.”

  Pen is already directing the others and telling them which boxes contain breakables and which ones we aren’t allowed to touch.

  I take my place in line, Pen handing me a box of cookbooks. “Trying to get in good with the manager?”

  “According to the others, I was tricked.”

  She loads another box on top of the one I’m holding. “That’s probably true.”

  Pen stares at me and I stare back. When my arms start burning I realize I’ve been standing there too long.

  She realizes it too. “Well?” She puts her hands on her hips and I remember that there are five floors between me and her new apartment.

  I turn to follow the others, relieved when I spot the elevator. Struggles is still huffing and puffing by the time we reach the sixth floor. He drops the box marked CLOTHES in front of Pen’s door and I kick it the rest of the way inside before setting down my own.

  “Can you believe Pen’s moving into this place?” Lucas leans over the sink, funneling water into his mouth. He wipes his face with his forearm. “It’s like a concrete box.”

  I step around the room, but I don’t see four concrete walls. I see space. I don’t have very much of it living with my abuelo. When I first moved in, the house was already full of memories: trinkets and old mismatched furniture, Western figurines, vintage beer bottles, and his giant coin collection. There wasn’t much room for anything new, especially not me, and I felt it every year I grew an inch taller, that small house pressing in on me.

  It takes six trips to get all of Pen’s stuff into her new apartment. After carrying in her mattress we all collapse on the floor, the cold concrete suddenly a welcome amenity.

  Pen flops down too, she and Chloe back-to-back as they try to hold themselves up. Sweat trickles from under her bandana, one drop making it all the way down the slope of her neck and beneath her shirt.

  “Jesus, Pen, you better be making us some dinner after all this.”

  She shoots Angel a look, then smiles. “Fair.” She slides a few box cutters across the floor. “But only after you guys help me unpack.”

  Lucas stabs one of the boxes, splitting the tape. “Then there better be cake too.”

  “Ask Angel,” Pen says, “he’s the one paying.”

  Angel kicks one of the empty boxes. “Me? What do you mean I’m paying?”

  “After seventy dollars for the moving truck and another two hundred for the deposit, I have enough for exactly one month’s rent.”

  Lucas falls onto his back. “Shit. You mean we’re gonna be moving all this stuff again in a month?”

  “No.” Pen looks down. “I’m not going back. I’ll figure it out.…” She makes doe eyes at Angel. “But today—”

  “Today I’ll pay for groceries.” Angel sighs. “Just tell us where you want everything before you go.”

  Pen kicks a few boxes over to Struggles. “These four go in the dresser against the wall.”

  He unfolds the flaps on the box in front of him, jumps back. “What the hell? I’m not touching these.”

  Pen rolls her eyes. “It’s underwear. And you’re on the clock.”

  “It’s your underwear.”

  “Yeah, Struggles.” Lucas plucks something black and lacy from the box and yanks it down over Struggles’s head. “It’s just Pen’s underwear.”

  Struggles swats at it like he’s walked straight into a spiderweb. Lucas shoots another in his direction and Struggles fires one back, both of them aiming lace and thongs like arrows.

  One lands against my knee, a pair of plain cotton panties, and I freeze. Before I can even move, Pen stomps by and scoops them up.

  She grips them in her fist. “If you shoot one more I will break your fucking fingers and make you eat cake with your feet.”

  They shudder.

  “Now, put together this furniture while Chloe and I run to the supermarket.”

  They both nod, getting to work as she disappears out the door.

  I’m on bookshelf duty and after I finally get it to stand up straight, I start ripping into the boxes at my feet. The first one is the cookbooks I carried. They smell like sugar and garlic, and I line them up on a middle shelf, using a jewelry box as a bookend.

  I feel like a kid again, snooping through my grandfather’s keepsakes, trying to make the puzzle pieces fit. Pen’s a puzzle too. There are photo collages of her and Chloe from when they were younger, and small plastic trophies from soccer tournaments and track meets. There are framed photos of family vacations, wooden scraps covered in doodles, a mannequin head draped with tangled necklaces.

  I wind up an old carousel, paint-chipped horses slowly moving in a circle, and I wonder what kinds of things I’d put on my own bookshelf, what proof of my existence I’ve collected over the years. The clothes I brought with me, I’ve outgrown. There aren’t any baby pictures of me, no Christmas cards or favorite toys. No memories in three-dimension. No proof that I’m even here or th
at I belong to something bigger. A family.

  That’s what I see when I look at Pen’s past, what I feel when I hold it in my hands. The kind of love that anchors. That binds. And even though Pen and her father are fighting, I can see in Pen’s memories that this is a family that belongs to one another. Always.

  My gaze drifts down to a small mirror on one of the shelves, and my reflection catches me like a snare. Buried deep in my eyes, folded in the scrunch of my brow, I see my abuelo. I see the parts of him he passed down to my father, the parts of my father that were passed down to me. Right there. In three-dimension. They aren’t my memories, but maybe they’re still proof. That even though I don’t have a bookshelf full of mementos, I am still here. I am still rooted in something.

  By the time Pen and Chloe are back from the market and getting started on dinner, the rest of her stuff already unpacked, I’m still standing in front of the bookcase holding a ceramic lizard and trying to decide where to put it. I finally slide the lizard next to the mannequin head, and when I step back to admire my collage, I bump right into Pen.

  My face warms as she takes a step toward one of the shelves, reaching for a small wooden flute. “I forgot about this.” She presses it to her lips, a laugh coming through faint and high-pitched. “My dad made it for me. I played it every day that summer and drove everyone crazy. I was pretty terrible.” Her eyes float up to the rest of the shelves. “Jesus, I haven’t seen some of this stuff in so long. It must have been trapped in the back of my closet somewhere.”

  “I got a little carried away,” I admit.

  She shakes her head. “It’s perfect.” She puts the flute back on the shelf. “Thank you.”

  “Uh, Pen, I think something’s burning.” Chloe stands over the open oven door, fanning the smoke with a rag.

  “Oh shit!” Pen slips on an oven mitt and yanks out the pan. The cake is charred. “Who the hell knocked my timer onto the floor?” She scrapes at the top layer, the one underneath still golden. “Thank God.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Nothing a little icing won’t fix.”

  After letting the cake cool, Pen pulls the icing from the fridge and slathers it on in long strokes, her eyes inches from the surface as she switches to a spoon and carves little waves. She rinses a handful of raspberries before lining them up like tiny houses, their curved edges fitting perfectly within each scallop. She tosses one into her mouth before reaching for the sifter, powdered sugar falling onto the raspberry houses like fresh snow. She blows at the spots that are too heavy, the snow windswept and glittering.

  Lucas’s stomach growls, everyone watching Pen impatiently.

  She glares at him, reaching for a few mint leaves and tying the stem into a tiny knot. She perches it in the center, completing her winter scene. As she dims the burners and pulls the other dishes from the oven, she doctors them with the same care—stirring and scooping and tasting and shaping. She steps away from her masterpiece, smile cutting into her flaming cheeks as she wipes her brow with a small hand towel. Then it’s time to eat.

  We circle up, using empty boxes as a makeshift table while we eat arroz con pollo and Pen’s raspberry cake off Styrofoam plates. Struggles belches something fierce after his second piece and Chloe throws a roll of socks at his face.

  Angel shakes his head, laughs. “Not again.”

  “Not another underwear fight?” Lucas says. “Or not another Sock Hop 2019?”

  Angel rolls onto his back. “Shit, I forgot about that.”

  “Yeah,” Lucas says, “your dad used to be so into those team-building exercises. Remember when he made us do that Cake Walk of Death and everyone who lost had to jump off that platform blindfolded?”

  Pen scoffs. “You mean that two-foot ledge into the neighborhood swimming pool?”

  “Hey, that shit was scary,” Lucas argues. “No one knew how high up we were until Struggles jumped and we heard the splash.”

  Struggles glares at him. “You mean until I was pushed.”

  Angel pats him on the back. “Hey, you came out on top once. Remember, when you won that hard-boiled-egg-eating contest?”

  Struggles loads his plate with two more slices of cake.

  Lucas raises an eyebrow. “You know you’re not actually competing in a contest right now, right?”

  “Can you blame him? That cake is a Penelope Prado original.” Pen smiles. “Almost as good as my famous coconut cake.” She licks the back of her fork. “But not quite.”

  “Yeah.” Lucas stabs his fork into the raspberry filling. “It sucks that they’re taking it off the menu.…”

  Angel shoots daggers at Lucas.

  Pen looks from Lucas to Angel. “What’s he talking about?”

  Angel fiddles with his fork. “Dad and I discussed it.…”

  “Screw you.” Pen shakes her head. “You know you can’t take it off the menu.”

  “Actually,” he lowers his voice, avoiding Pen’s eyes, “we already did.”

  Pen grows still. “We?” Her cheeks redden and she looks like she’s about to say something else. But then her eyes sweep across the room, registering the rest of us, and she stops herself.

  Angel and Pen both stare at the floor. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that whatever relationship they have with their father is strained. He fired his own daughter from the family restaurant, after all, and he seems to be on Angel’s case any chance he gets.

  Still, after all the years I’ve spent looking for my own father, waiting for him to look for me too, I would take strained silence over nothing any day.

  Angel stands. “We should probably head back to the restaurant.” He musses Pen’s hair on his way to grab a set of keys off the counter. “I’ll drop off the box truck on the way back.”

  Angel heads into the hall and we file out after him. Chloe rushes out too, stopping Angel just before he reaches the elevator, talking to him in a voice that I recognize from the other night. She seems to be good at calming him down, and I wonder how long she’s been doing it. I wonder if he’ll ever notice.

  “Shit, I left the box cutters.” Lucas nudges me. “Can you run back in and grab them for me?”

  I stare back down at Pen’s door. “Me?”

  He lowers his voice. “You saw her. She’s emotional, and emotional Pen is scary Pen.”

  I roll my eyes at Lucas before heading back toward her apartment. When I reach the door, it’s still slightly ajar. I push it open and spot her sitting on the floor.

  “Pen?”

  She stands, her back to me. She rubs at her eyes, hands coming back stained with mascara.

  “Did you forget something?” Her voice is clipped, a warning to stay away.

  But I’m already another step closer. “Are you okay?”

  She takes a deep breath, holds on to it for a long time. I step into her line of sight, her tears stalled as she tries to hold on to them too.

  “I’m fine.” She hides her face, stepping to the window.

  “You know… you don’t have to be.”

  She glances at me, confused. Then she presses the heels of her hands to her eyes again. “He could have just fired me.” She shakes her head. “He didn’t have to erase me.”

  There’s a faint tremble in her voice, and it feels like whatever threads have been holding her together are ready to snap. She senses it too, which is why she’s trying so hard to not let me see, to not let anyone see.

  The creak of the door pulls my gaze. Pen looks up too, tears drying on command.

  “Did you find those box cutters?” Chloe asks. “They’re all waiting downstairs.”

  I grab the box cutters off the floor and then I find Pen’s reflection in the window one more time.

  I want to tell her that I understand. What it’s like to feel invisible, to feel like all you’re good for is forgetting. But I don’t say a word. She seeks my eyes within the glass and I’m silent. And then, even though leaving is the last thing I want to do, I turn and go.

  8

>   Pen

  I TWIST THE KNOB on the slow-moving carousel, bells tinkling, and it unlocks something in me. Memories, warm and then cold, until I’m crying so hard I can barely make out the photographs or Chloe’s face as she comes to stand next to me.

  She leads me to the bed, and then says, gently, “Scoot over.”

  I crawl under the blankets, still examining my life in fragments, the tears warping everything until it looks like one of those abstract paintings that people call genius even though it’s just a bunch of lines and dots. Is that all my life is? Starts and stops and scribbles? Mistake after mistake?

  “He hates me,” I finally croak out.

  Chloe strokes my hair, brushing it away from my face. “That’s not true.”

  “Then what is?”

  Chloe tilts my chin, leading my gaze back to the bookshelf. “You tell me.…”

  No matter where I look, I find something my father has touched. Soccer trophies from every summer between first and eighth grade line one of the shelves. The restaurant sponsored our neighborhood team and supplied everything from the jerseys to the equipment. My father would never cheer when I scored a goal, but on my way back up the field, he’d wait for me to look and then he’d wink.

  On the shelf below that, jars filled with seashells from our yearly trip to the Gulf Coast. I remember how we used to sit in the shallows, his hand over mine as he slid it across the sand, teaching me how to search for sand dollars. It was then that I learned how to interpret my father’s love not by his words but by his actions.

  I try to interpret them now, but all I can remember is how angry he was, how he looked at me like I was a stranger.

  “I don’t understand why I’m not good enough.” I squeeze my eyes shut. “I don’t understand why I’ll never be good enough.”

  Chloe reaches for a photograph of me and my father at the beach, holding it up. “Is that really what you see?”

  I blink, trying to examine his expression past the tears. At first, it’s stoic, his face as empty as it always is. But then I see the way the left side of his mouth turns up slightly. I see his hand as wide as a baseball mitt as he rests it on top of my wet hair. I see our matching suntanned skin. The way I’m hugging his knee like it’s rooting me to the spot. My body just a branch, a permanent piece of him.