by Sara Alva
“Yeah. But we split, me and Seb. That’s why I’m trying to find my mom.”
“Yeah, I dunno.” José eyed Seb, who was standing perfectly still in the doorway, right where I’d left him. “Like I said, I haven’t seen her.”
“You think we could crash here tonight?” I asked hopefully, even though there was barely a square inch of free space in the porcelain hell, and I was sure I’d wake up with fleas. “Till I get an idea where she might be at?”
“Damn, man. I would, but you know how my mom is. She’s been on this crazy religious kick lately, ’cause she thinks I’m hanging out with the wrong crowd or some shit.” He gestured to a cabinet full of baby Jesus figurines. “And you know she always hated you.”
“Yeah.” Fuck. When would I catch a fucking break?
A fly buzzed past and José swatted it, sending it whirling into a roll of flypaper that hung from the ceiling. “And, well, she’s gonna be home soon.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, I might be going to this party Blanca’s gonna have on Friday. If you’re still in town, you should check it out.”
My lips twisted into a bitter smile. “Nah, man. Can’t really do that.”
In the silence that followed, it suddenly occurred to me that our friendship was over. Maybe it had never been that deep to start with—maybe because I never really let myself get close to anyone. But now that we didn’t go to the same school or the same parties or hang out around the same people…we had absolutely nothing in common.
Seb was my only friend.
“Well, we’re gonna get outta here. I gotta find some place for us to stay. Anyways, if anyone comes around asking about us…”
“Don’t worry, man. I never saw you.”
I rose from the table and headed toward Seb. “Cool. See ya, man.”
“See ya,” he responded, one hand already poised to close the door. “And good luck with shit.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
I didn’t really have a plan when we left José’s apartment. I just started walking, with Seb calmly following by my side, and somehow my feet took me straight to my own street. I pulled up in front of my house and stared at the dull beige exterior like I was studying the portal to another world. My life had taken so many strange turns since I’d last slept within those walls…it didn’t really feel like home anymore.
And as hard as I tried, I couldn’t quite bring to mind the memory of the last happy moments I’d spent there with my mother—not with any detail, anyhow. It was just a general blur of bleached blond hair and polished nails and smiles.
I was looking at the house, but not really seeing. So I didn’t notice the shadow moving behind the cheap white blinds until Seb tapped me on my shoulder and pointed.
“Shit, Seb!” I smacked his arm. “There’s someone home!” A flying leap took me over the fence, and I raced to the door to pound on it steadily. “Hello? Mamá? You home?”
But the stout woman in the greasy apron who answered was definitely not my mother.
“Jes?”
“Oh.” I stumbled back a step, colliding with Seb. “Oh, I was looking…I’m here waiting for my mom, ’cause this is my house…well, it was my house, and I was waiting here to see if she—”
The lady shook her head. “I sorry. My English no so good.”
“Oh.” My shoulders slumped in defeat. “Well, that sucks… ’cause… uh…mi español…no es tan bueno tampoco.”
She smiled. “What you…need?”
I kicked at some dirt by my foot, staring down at my once-white sneakers. They were a definite gray, now. “Um…my mom lived here. Mi mamá…vivía aquí.”
“Ah.” She moved forward to peer into my face. “Ah, sí, sí. El niño de las fotos!”
The boy from the photographs. What photographs?
“Pasen, pasen.” She eagerly waved Seb and me in.
“Oh, um, okay. Gracias.”
As soon as we were inside, my mouth fell open and shock clamped down on my muscles, leaving me paralyzed.
What the fuck had happened to my house?
Some of the ugly bits of broken wall had been patched and repainted, leaving no scars behind of the vicious blows that had caused them. The floor was still the same old chipped linoleum, but it was practically spotless. The table was the same, too, except it was covered with a lace tablecloth and several lace doilies. A large recliner had joined our old couch, and both were wrapped in white sheets with tiny green leaves, so that no one could see the rips and tears beneath.
And right by the front door, where my head had once banged pieces of drywall away, hung a painting of Jesus.
“Um…” I gulped in some warm air, tasting the meat and spices that were cooking on the stove. “My mom…have you…”
“Vienen por sus cosas?” She asked over her shoulder as she hurried to the kitchen and lowered the heat on the pan.
“No, I don’t want any of the things…estoy buscando a mi mamá.”
She turned to me and wiped her hands on her apron. “No sabes donde está tu mamá?”
“No. I don’t know where she is. We lived here…in this house…”
My voice trembled as I spoke, and I cut myself off mid-sentence to avoid further humiliation. There was no denying now that our journey to Watts had been completely pointless. My mother didn’t live here anymore. She was long gone.
The woman came around the table to look at me, her eyes narrowed and her brows tightly knit as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She was a good five inches shorter than me, and her skin was darker than mine. Grayed hairs twisted in and around thick black ones in a loose bun at the back of her head.
“Se fue sin decirte dónde?”
“Yeah.” I rubbed at my eyes, like that might suddenly make this alternate reality of my home fade away and leave the old one in its wake. “They just didn’t say where they were gonna go.”
“Bueno…lo siento. Es que estamos rentando, y no me dijeron nada sobre la gente que vivía aquí antes.”
Still rattled, it took me a few seconds to process that she was basically telling me she was just a renter and knew nothing.
“Oh. Yeah. Okay. We’ll…we’ll get out of your way, then.”
She stopped me with a gentle hand on my forearm. “Tienen hambre? You have…hungry?”
Food was the last thing on my mind, but I glanced over at Seb and wondered if one Pop-Tart was enough of a meal for him to last the day on.
“Porque tengo tamales que ya están hechos,” she continued. “You like? Tamales?”
Once, a very, very long time ago, my mother had made tamales. If I closed my eyes I could almost picture the afternoon—Mimi and I laughing and hovering around her hips, bits of gooey masa stuck to our hands and clothing. But it had only been that once, because after that she’d decided it was way too much trouble to go through when you could just buy them from the lady who sold them on the corner.
I wondered if Mimi ever made tamales with Star. Probably not.
“Um, yeah.” I sighed. “We could eat, right Seb?”
No answer.
The lady smiled and pointed to the chairs at the table. Seb and I waited in silence as she pulled a couple of tamales out of the fridge and popped them in the microwave.
“Mami, estamos aquí!” A little boy’s voice rang out. A few seconds later, a chubby kid wearing the navy pants and white polo uniform of the local elementary school stomped into the house, followed by a thinner girl with waist-length straight black hair.
“Tienen hambre, mis amores?” the woman asked her children as each one came and gave her a hug.
The girl peeked at me nervously, grabbing her hair and twisting it into a knot. She was dark, like her mother—a lot darker than Star—but she had the same kind of straight nose, strong cheekbones and full lashes that Star did. I wondered if Star would look like her when she got a little older.
She was much more timid than Star, though, because she pulled on her mother’s apron unti
l the woman bent over and listened to her whispering. When she was done, she ran off down the hallway, and I didn’t think she had any plans to come back.
The little boy, on the other hand, was completely undisturbed and immediately joined us at the table.
Another tamale was added to the microwave.
“Mami, quiénes son?” From his seat beside me, he peered up at his mother, waiting for an explanation as to why two strange people were in his house.
“Uh, hi,” I answered before she had a chance. “I’m Alex, and this is Seb. I used to live here in this house.”
“Oh.” The boy nodded. “You lived in here when we wasn’t.”
“Yeah. I came back looking for my mom…but I guess no one knows where she is.”
“Qué dijo?” The woman asked, and the boy translated what I had said for her. She shook her head, her forehead creasing into deep, dark lines, like she was angry.
But she wasn’t angry at me, apparently, because the tamales were soon placed in front of us. I split mine in half, encouraging Seb to do the same so it would cool off.
“My mom makes very good tamales,” the boy said, his plump stomach folding onto his lap as he scooted toward his plate.
“Yeah, I bet.” I chuckled.
One bite later, I was forced to agree. The tamales were warm and fresh, and the shredded chicken inside was perfectly spiced. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d tasted anything so good. The meatloaf at Ms. Loretta’s maybe—but that was a totally different dish, and it was hard to compare.
“These are delicious. Gracias,” I added, acknowledging the lady who was still leaning over the stove.
“El dice que los tamales son deliciosos, y gracias,” the boy translated again.
I rolled my eyes.
“De nada.” She set some glasses of juice in front of our plates, right on the doilies. Then she pointed to Seb. “El es muy tímido, no? Como mi hija.”
“Shy? No…he’s not shy. It’s just that he can’t talk…es que no puede hablar.”
“Ah.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Bueno, voy a traer las fotos.” Wiping her hands on her apron again, she headed down the hallway and into my mother’s room.
Or into her room.
A moment later, she returned with a stack of photographs. She passed them to me, pointing to a skinny boy at the top of a slide with his arms thrown in the air and a wide smile on his face.
“It is you, no?”
The hand I’d felt at Mimi’s—the one that seemed to think I shouldn’t be breathing—squeezed down on my chest again. It was me in the pictures, me and Mimi and my mother. We’d gone to a park with a disposable camera when I was in the third grade and snapped pictures until the whole roll of film was finished, for no reason other than the fact that we’d had the time and the camera on our hands.
These were the photographs I’d kept in my dresser.
Mimi was posing in most of them, on the balance beam, or just leaning against a tree—she was a show-off like that. At fourteen, she was fully developed and you could tell she was proud by the way she stuck out her chest in each picture. She didn’t wear too much makeup back then, and her hair was loose and wild and untamed by gels and she looked absolutely beautiful.
There were only two pictures with my mother, since she’d been handling the camera most of the time. Her hair was already blond, and she was probably too made-up for an afternoon at the park with her kids. But she was beautiful, too, resting on the park bench and draping her arms around me. Beautiful and young and happy.
I didn’t even look at myself in the pictures. I didn’t want to think about the boy I’d been. Of what hopes I’d had for the future or what faith I’d had in my family. I didn’t want to relive the disappointment.
“Uh…” I struggled to draw in a breath. “Was this it? Was there any more?”
“Quiere saber si hay otras,” the boy told his mother.
“No.” She shook her head slowly. “No creo…”
“Yeah,” I interrupted. “In my mom’s nightstand. The nightstand in the bigger room at the end of the hallway. There were pictures in there. That’s where my mom kept them.”
The boy translated, but she continued to shake her head. “Sí había una mesita de noche y unas cositas adentro, pero ningunas fotos.”
“She say there was a mesita and some things in there but no—” the boy began.
“I got it,” I cut in. “No photos.”
Seb had finished his tamale. I pushed the remainder of mine in front of him and he made quick work of that one, too. He must’ve been hungry.
“Dime,” the lady said, finally taking a seat in front of us. “Cómo es que no sabes dónde está tu mamá? Dónde estás viviendo ahora? Con tu papá? O tu abuela?”
“She say how you not know where your mamá is, and do you live with your daddy or your abuela…ehh…your granny,” the boy rattled off. Apparently, he was used to being his mom’s interpreter.
I shook my head. “No. I don’t live with…” I just barely stopped myself before blabbing out anything stupid. What was I even doing here? “Look, uh, thanks for everything, but we gotta go.” I stood and yanked back Seb’s chair.
The lady came around the table and clasped one of my hands, smiling warmly. “Gloria. Me llamo Gloria.”
“Oh, right. Well, gracias por todo, Gloria. We really gotta go.”
Grabbing Seb’s t-shirt on the way, I darted past her and out of the house.
I sank down to the curb right in front of the fence. My hands went numb and the pictures slipped from my fingers, falling into a pile of wet leaves and fast food wrappers. “I’m sorry, Seb. It was stupid to come here.”
He squatted beside me and plucked up the photographs, stopping at one of me on the swings. Then he ran his finger over the glossy surface and smiled.
Did he know how much those rare smiles of his did to improve my mood?
I pulled off his hat and wig combo and checked to make sure the streets were empty before nudging a sweaty lock of hair from his forehead. “Hard to believe, huh.” I reluctantly glanced down at the young me. “I was such a scrawny fucker.”
Seb turned to study me, like he was counting the differences.
Suddenly self-conscious under his gaze, I flushed. “Seb…I keep making all these mistakes. Even if you could understand me…even if you were…I dunno why you’d want to b—”
The rickety screen door of the house burst open, and the little boy’s voice interrupted me. “My mom say do you wanna stay for dinner?”
For some strange reason, Seb was still smiling. Maybe he’d liked the warm, inviting atmosphere Gloria had magically created in my home. It gave me a sort of dizzying, this-does-not-belong feeling…but keeping Seb happy was my number one priority at the moment.
“Sure. Why not.”
Chapter 19: The Job of Family
Frederico—the little boy—snatched a book from a neat stack under the coffee table and climbed up on the couch beside me. He motioned for his sister Luz to join him, but she hung back shyly in the kitchen, helping her mother clean up the remains of our taco dinner.
As adorable as Star had been, I sort of wished she’d been more like that—more like the kind of girl who hid from boys.
“I gotta read for my homework,” Frederico told me, his double chin wobbling as he nodded in agreement to his own declaration.
I didn’t really know why I was still there, now that our meal was finished. There was just nowhere else to go. And Seb was relaxed, pinching bits of the sheet that covered the couch and rolling it between his fingers. So I stayed, trapped in limbo—unable to move forward, and with nothing to go back to.
“Okay.” I lowered the volume on the TV. “Go ahead.”
The TV was new, too. Well, not new, but it wasn’t ours. So wherever my mom and Hector had gone, they hadn’t needed a couch or a table or my dresser, but they’d needed a TV.
“Can…N…a…n…Nan…see…the…bu…g… bug. Can Nan see the bug!�
�
Frederico pointed to the page he was on and looked up at me triumphantly. “It say, can Nan see the bug!”
I had a really strange, split-personality reaction, where half of me wanted to roll my eyes and turn the TV back up—the kind of thing I would have done with Andrew or Ryan at Ms. Loretta’s. But so soon after my time spent with Star, a different instinct won out.
“Wow, that’s really good. How old are you that you already know how to read so good?”
He stuck out six fingers proudly. “I have this many. It was just my happy birthday.”
“You in kindergarten?”
“Yeah, but next year I have to go to first grade with my friends if I keep reading.”
Kindergarten and he was already beginning to read. I wondered if Star knew how to read at all…if she even knew the alphabet…and then recalled I hadn’t come across a single book in that apartment.
Would she catch up, when she eventually got to school? Or would she always be a struggling student, the way Mimi had been? Would she find other things to occupy her time, the way Mimi had? Would she be the third generation of unwed teenage mothers in our family?
I knew it wasn’t Gloria’s lovingly-made-from-scratch cooking that was making me nauseous. To distract myself, I pointed at Frederico’s book.
“You read it good, but you see that squiggly thing at the end of the sentence?”
“Uh huh.” He nodded. “But I forget it.”
“It’s a question mark. That means you gotta read it like a question. Like this: Can Nan see the bug?”
“Oh, yeah.” Frederico pulled the book away from my finger and placed his own on the words again. “My teacher say me that…Can Nan see the bug?”
I patted him on the head and looked up to see Gloria standing in front of the kitchen. She smiled and mouthed gracias—I guess because she thought I was helping him with his homework.
And that didn’t seem like such an awful payment for dinner. It was better than breaking into our limited cash supply, after all.
