by Michael Nava
15.
WHEN I ENTERED THE HOUSE, I heard voices and then a familiar laugh coming from out on the deck. Elena and Angel were sitting at the table eating lunch in the shade of the canvas umbrella I had purchased the previous summer but never got around to putting up. They had a guest—John—and it was his laughter I had heard. He was talking to Elena, but when I stepped outside, he lifted his head and our eyes met. I felt as if a light had been switched on inside of me. He unfolded his slow, private smile. I looked from him to my sister, in whom, apparently, a different light had just gone on.
“Hey, Henry,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind me dropping in. I was going to take you and Angel to lunch, but then your sister explained you had some business so we just picked up some food from the deli.”
“You know you’re always welcome,” I said.
“Sit down, Henry,” Elena said. “Eat something.”
I sat down, untied my tie and draped my coat over the chair. Famished, I served myself from a platter of sandwiches and salads. It was pleasant to sit beneath the umbrella, and a small herb-scented breeze rustled up from the canyon. I chewed my turkey sandwich and listened to Angel and John debate the relative merits of National League pitchers, a subject, I was mildly surprised to discover, on which my sister also had some emphatic opinions. For a moment I forgot about the horror I had left behind at the hospital and thought, So this is what it’s like to have a family.
Elena had dropped out of the baseball conversation, and in a low voice asked, “Henry, how was she?”
“Not well,” I replied. “Did you tell him?”
“No, I was going to, but then John showed up and, well, he seems very fond of John.”
“Yes, so am I.”
“I gathered,” she replied dryly.
John said, “What are you two whispering about?”
I put the sandwich down. “I have some bad news about Angel’s other grandmother.”
Angel looked at me. “What?”
“Someone broke into her house and attacked her. She’s in the hospital.” I glanced at my sister. “In very bad shape.”
John squeezed the boy’s shoulder sympathetically. Angel looked down at the remains of his lunch, then raised his head and asked, “Does that mean I can live with you while my mom is in jail?”
Shocked, Elena exclaimed, “Angel!”
He glanced at her, but addressed me. “You said my mom wanted me to live with my grandma Jesusita, but I can’t live with her if she’s sick.”
Elena replied, “You have two grandmothers, Angel.”
Still looking at me, he said, “If I live with Grandma Elena in Oakland, I won’t be able to see my mom.”
“Henry works,” Elena replied, matching his deliberate tone. “He can’t look after you. I’m on summer break.”
Angel squared his shoulders and said to me, “You don’t have to take care of me all the time. I can take care of myself.”
“Angel,” Elena snapped, “I’m speaking to you.”
He threw her a furious look. “I don’t want to live with you. I hate you.” He looked at me. “Don’t make me go with her, Uncle Henry. I want to stay with you.” Then he ran from the table, sobbing.
For a moment, no one said anything. I tossed my napkin on the table. “I guess I should talk to him.” I looked at my sister. “I’ll try to make him understand why it would be better if he lives with you.”
She looked back at me. “Would it? Do you want him here?”
“Yes,” I said. “I want him to live with me. I know it won’t be easy, but we’ll manage.”
She folded her napkin and set it on the table. “All right,” she said. “Let me go tell him.”
“You know he doesn’t really hate you.”
She got up from the table. “Actually, Henry, he probably does just now, because he thinks I want to take him away from you. That’s why I want to tell him he can stay. Excuse me, John.”
A headache began to gather in the center of my forehead. I shut my eyes and rubbed the spot. I heard John get up and then his hands clamped down on my shoulders and his thick fingers began to knead me.
“Man, you’re tight,” he said. “Relax.”
“I couldn’t get my niece out on bail, Angel’s other grandma’s been beaten into a coma, my sister feels rejected and Angel’s in hysterics. Is this what it’s like to have a family? Ouch!”
“Let go, okay? Stop fighting me.” He worked my neck. “Those things aren’t your fault, man.”
“They’re my responsibility,” I said. He dug deep into my muscles and my headache began to fade. “That feels great. You’re really good at this.”
“I’ve been getting massages since I played ball. I picked up the basics over the years. I like your sister. She’s sharp, like you.”
“Sharp as in smart or sharp as in smart-ass?”
“Both. Like you. Like all you Rioses. You’re all a little too smart for your own good.”
“How was dinner with Deanna?”
The massage became a ruminative rub, as if he was composing his thoughts.
“Was it bad?” I prodded.
“She apologized,” he replied. “You know, for the things she said. She told me she’d been doing a lot of thinking and she figured she made a mistake with me.”
“What kind of mistake?”
His hands slipped off my shoulders. “Turning me down when I asked her to marry me. She said she didn’t know how much she loved me until she thought about losing me.”
After a moment, I said, “I can understand that.”
“She wants me to give her another chance.”
I felt a pain in my chest that I knew was not angina. “Are you?”
He laid his hands on my shoulders again, but this touch was tentative, uncertain. “I want to ask you something, but you gotta think about it before you answer.”
“Okay.”
“Do you think we could have a future together? I mean, we’ve had a lot of fun, but you know we’re different. You’re a lawyer, I put in bathrooms in rich people’s houses—”
“They’re good bathrooms.”
He squeezed my shoulder. “I’m serious. You’re a smart man, Henry, you have a lot of class. I’m a dumb baseball player. I never went to college. I work with my hands…” His voice trailed off.
“You can’t mean that you don’t think you’re good enough for me.”
“Am I?” he asked in a quiet, uncertain voice I had never heard from him before.
“Are you sure it’s not that you’re worried about bringing a boyfriend home to your family instead of a wife?”
“I’ve thought about that, too,” he replied in the same soft voice.
“And?”
“I could do it if I knew we were in it for the long haul.”
“I figure after the heart attack that’s the only haul I got left in me,” I said. “As for being too good for you, John, we come from the same world.”
“Yeah, Rico,” he said, “but we ended up in different ones.”
“You’re my honey,” I replied. “It is like we grew up together and then found each other again years later. I know you feel the same way. Don’t tell me you don’t.”
“I do,” he said. “I liked you the first time I saw you. More than liked you.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
He folded his arms around my chest. “I have to think things through. About you and me. About me and Deanna. I have a history with her.”
“I know you do. And we both know two guys together is a lot harder in this world than a man and a woman. All I’m asking is if you decide you don’t want to be with me, don’t blame it on your not being good enough. I could accept any other reason but that one.”
“We finished the job down the street,” he said. “I’m going away for a few days with my dad.”
“Where?”
“Every year he takes one of his boys to a father-son retreat up at a monastery in Santa Barbara,” he s
aid, releasing me. He sat down. “This year it’s my turn.”
“A religious retreat? What do you do? Pray? Chat about Jesus?”
“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “We do all that, but then after dinner we make popcorn and play poker with the Franciscans that run the place. I’m telling you, Henry, you got to watch those frailes like a hawk. Bunch of cardsharks.” He kissed the crown of my head. “I’ll pray for us.”
“You know, John, I don’t really go in for religion.”
“One year I didn’t want to go and I told my dad, ‘I don’t believe in God.’ You know what he said?”
“No.”
“He said, ‘You think God cares, m’ijo? Get your ass in the car.’” He stood up and kissed me again. “I gotta go. Talk to you soon, okay? I love you.”
“I love you, too, John.”
After he left, I sat there and imagined John in a smoke-filled room dealing cards to a couple of brown-robed monks. I opened my mouth to laugh, but a sob came out instead.
Elena found me in the kitchen stacking dishes in the dishwasher.
“You don’t rinse them first?” she asked.
“Then what would be the point of having a dishwasher? You were in there with Angel for a long time.”
“We had a lot to talk about,” she replied. “Did John leave?”
“Yeah. What are you looking for?”
“Plastic wrap to cover this potato salad.”
“In the drawer to the right of the sink.” I pushed the rack into the dishwasher, poured some soap in and turned it on. “You were really shocked that Angel’s first reaction to hearing about Jesusita was for himself, weren’t you?”
She nodded. “It seemed incredibly selfish.”
“Remember when Edith called him an invulnerable? I’ve figured out that what that means isn’t that things don’t hurt him, but that they don’t stop him. His dad’s dead, his mom’s in jail, and he feels alone and scared. He’s trying to cut the best deal for himself that he can. He doesn’t know how to be graceful about it because it must seem to him his whole life is riding on making the right choice.”
She put the salad in the refrigerator, then started wrapping the leftover sandwiches. “You have him reading Homer.”
“Not exactly Homer,” I said. “It’s a kid’s translation.”
“I remember that book from when you were a child,” she said. “It’s odd, Henry. You love him because he reminds you of yourself at that age, and for the same reason my feelings about him are—I don’t know. More complicated.”
“How?”
“Until you were about Angel’s age, you would still come to me for comfort when things got bad with Mom and Dad, but then you stopped. It was as if you had made a decision that you were on your own. I felt as if I’d failed you but I also resented the implied judgment you had made about me. I felt the same way when Angel said he didn’t want to live with me.”
“Funny how family members seem to know instinctively how to push the ancient buttons.”
“Well, for what it’s worth, I do think Angel’s had enough mothering. It’s better that he stays here with you. He needs a man now and he adores you.”
“I never thought I’d be dad material.”
“You’re probably the first adult man he can imagine wanting to be like when he grows up. I mean, besides Nomar Garciaparra. That must be very powerful for a boy.”
“What about Pete?”
“I don’t think Pete was around enough for Angel to have felt that close to him, and when he was, he was usually on drugs. Angel really seems to have hated that.”
“I know. He told me. Do you think he’ll feel the same way about me when he understands homosexuality?”
She smiled. “What makes you think he doesn’t understand it now? He loves John. So do you, don’t you?”
“You don’t miss much.”
“He’d make a splendid brother-in-law.”
“Well, then keep your fingers crossed,” I said. “I could use a cup of coffee. Shall we make some?”
We busied ourselves with making coffee and she volunteered to find a school for Angel.
“From up there?” I asked. “How?”
“The internet, of course,” she said. “I thought we might even be able to get him into summer school. He’s extremely bright, but I don’t think Vicky was very consistent about his education. He’s going to have some catching up to do.”
“I didn’t get to ask you how your visit with her went.”
“The usual. Stilted, difficult. My leaving her twice will always lie between us. I have to win her trust back inch by inch. By the way, if Angel’s going to stay here, you have to take him to Reverend Ortega’s church. Vicky was emphatically clear about that.”
“Oh, come on, Elena.”
“She’s still his mother, Henry. You can’t completely ignore what she wants for him because she’s in jail.”
“What about what he wants?”
“He seemed to like Ortega,” she said. “Anyway, he can decide for himself when he’s older what he wants to do about religion, but for now you need to do as Vicky asks. All right?”
Sounding to myself like a sullen teenager, I said, “All right. You know the guy probably preaches that gays burn in hell.”
“Angel loves you, he’ll work out the rest for himself,” she said. “Listen, he needs some clothes, so I thought we could shop before my plane leaves.”
“Yeah, and I should get him some more books to read and some toys or something to keep him occupied while I am working. What do you think he likes?”
“We’ll ask him, Henry.”
“Oh,” I said.
Later, after Elena had left and Angel was in bed, I went through the boxes that Socorro Cerda had given me looking for a red sweatshirt that Angel wanted. At the bottom of one box I found some of Pete’s papers. Parole documents. Letters that Vicky had written him in prison. An envelope with the return address of the San Francisco branch of the Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA? I opened it. Inside was a letter rejecting Pete’s application to become an informant. I looked at the date. He would have received it just before he had been released from prison. Why had Pete Trujillo wanted to become a snitch, I wondered. And why had he been rejected? I found the name of his parole officer on his parole papers and made a note to phone her.
The parole officer, a tough-sounding woman named Cahill, returned my call the morning of Vicky’s prelim as I was rushing to get Angel up, dressed, fed and out the door. Between yelling at him to get ready, I tried to explain to her that I was not representing Pete Trujillo on a new criminal charge.
“Your message said you were a lawyer,” she said accusingly.
“I am a lawyer but I’m not representing him—”
“Do you know who is?”
“Pete Trujillo’s dead,” I said. “His funeral’s tomorrow, if you want to send flowers. That’s not why I’m calling you. Angel, are you dressed yet?”
“What?”
“I’m talking to my nephew, Pete’s son.”
“I thought you said you were a lawyer. Is he really dead?”
“Yes. His wife shot him. I’m representing her.”
“I’ll need the death certificate to close my file,” she said officiously.
“Fine. I’ll make sure you get a copy if you’ll just answer a couple of questions for me. Angel…”
“Listen, mister, I’m not your Angel.”
“My nephew’s name is Angel. Why did Pete want to snitch for the DEA?”
“Because he was good at it,” she said.
“At being a snitch?”
“That’s how he got that sweet deal when he should’ve gone down as a three-striker. The DEA didn’t think he was going to be able to keep his hands out of the cookie jar, so they passed. Where was he killed?”
“Here in L.A.,” I said. Angel emerged from his bedroom, his hair a tangle of knots and wearing a soiled T-shirt and his pajama bottoms. “You can’t go to court like t
hat.”
“You talking to your nephew again?” she asked, caustic but no longer hostile.
“Yeah, sorry. Who did he snitch oh to get the Three Strikes deal?”
“His gangbanger buddies,” she said. “I don’t remember the details and I don’t have his file with me but you could call his P.D.”
“You know her name?”
“Morgan something. Lee or Yee. Chinese. I’ve got to go. You send me that death certificate, okay?”
Angel wandered into the kitchen and listlessly poured himself a bowl of cereal.
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for your time.”
“You know,” she said. “Pete wasn’t the worst bum on my list.”
“I’ll make sure to put that in his eulogy,” I said and hung up. I went into the kitchen, where Angel was lethargically spooning cereal. I touched his forehead, he was burning up. “Hey, Angelito, are you all right, sweetie?”
He cocked his head and gushed vomit.
A few hours later, I was sitting in lockup with Vicky. Angel was home with my neighbor, Sharon Kwan. I had rushed to the emergency room, phoning the court from my car and pleading for a postponement of the prelim. At the hospital, a harried ER doctor had diagnosed a “bug” and told me to take him home and give him acetaminophen. I was explaining all this to Vicky, who seemed much less worried than I had thought she’d be.
“He gets like that when he’s upset,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Sick like that,” she said. “He’ll be okay, Uncle Henry. Probably it was because of his grandma Jesusita. He keeps his feelings all bottled up.”
“These feelings ended up all over my suit.”
She laughed. I had never heard her laugh before. It was a girl’s giggle. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not funny.”
“It is funny. Now. I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to figure out what to do while he’s calmly puking. Then I took him to, the emergency room and the doctor’s looking at me like, he’s just got a little temperature, why are you bothering me?”
