I didn’t tell anyone how dire shit had become.
Yeah, maybe my old man could slip a few bucks in an envelope, mail it to my Brooklyn apartment (where it might get carried off by a pack of gangster rats), but he had his own worries. He was saving up for my little sis’s summer camp. And our dog, Peanut—probably the most flea-bitten, bucktoothed crossbreed you could ever imagine—had just required an emergency dental extraction. I know, right? The dog with the busted grill has dental needs. Okay. But according to my sis, the procedure cost over three hundred bones, and they had to put my old man on some kind of payment plan.
It’s fine.
I’d just go hungry this holiday season.
Nothing to see here.
“Mijo,” he told me over the phone on my first full day of cat sitting. “Everything is good up at your college?”
I stuck Mike’s acoustic guitar back on its stand. “It’s all good, Pop.”
“That’s good,” he said.
This word good, I thought. How many times did he and I throw that shit around these days? My old man because he didn’t trust his English, me because I didn’t want him to think I was showing off.
“Next year we’ll get you a ticket so you could fly home for Christmas,” he said. “And me, you, and Sofe will be together as a family. How we belong.”
“Sounds good, Pop.”
He didn’t know it yet, but by next Christmas I planned to be living near home again, in southeast San Diego, taking classes at the local community college. Everyone seemed to think I had it made out here in New York—and on paper maybe I did. Full academic scholarship to NYU. Professors that blew my mind every time I sat in one of their lecture halls. But to understand why I planned to drop out after my freshman year you’d have to read the e-mails my sis had been sending. Some nights my pop—the toughest man I’ve ever known—cried himself to sleep. She could hear him through her bedroom wall. He wouldn’t eat dinner unless my sis physically dragged him to the table and sat him down in front of a plate of food. Point is, back home real-life shit was happening. Genuine mourning. And here I was, clear across the country, having the time of my life.
It would be impossible to describe the weight of that guilt.
There was a long, awkward pause between me and my old man—we’d yet to master the art of talking on the phone—before he cleared his throat and told me: “Okay, mijo. You will be safe from that storm. The news says it’s very, very bad.”
“I will, Pop,” I said. “Tell Sofe to stay away from dudes.”
We said our good-byes and hung up.
I slipped my cell back in my pocket and went to Mike’s cupboards for the two hundredth time. One multigrain hot dog bun and a few stray packets of catsup. That was it. The stainless steel fridge wasn’t any better. An unopened dark chocolate bar, a half-full bag of baby carrots, two plain yogurts, and a bottle of high-end vodka. How could such a beautiful apartment contain so little food? My stomach grumbled as I stared at the beautiful yogurt cartons. But I had to conserve. It was still three days before Christmas, and I wouldn’t see a dime until the day after that.
My manager at the campus bookstore, Mike, and his wife, Janice, were paying me to cat sit at their brand-new apartment—which was about three hundred times nicer than the broken-down room I rented in Bushwick—but Mike forgot to hit the ATM before he left and asked if he could pay me when they got back from Florida.
No problem, I lied.
To make matters worse, a few hours after they left, a record-setting blizzard sucker punched New York City, blanketing Mike’s Park Slope neighborhood in thirteen inches of angry-ass snow. Translation: even if I wanted to dust off the survival skills I’d picked up back home (how to mug somebody), I couldn’t. Everyone was waiting shit out in the warmth of their cozy apartments.
I closed the fridge and went into the living room and stared out the front window, next to the cat—Olive, I think Mike said her name was. My empty stomach clenched and twisted and slowly let go, then clenched again. The few remaining cars parked along the street were buried under snow, and it was still falling. The trees that framed my view all sagged under the weight of the stuff.
I turned to Mike’s cat, said, “I promise not to eat you.”
She looked at me, unimpressed, then hopped down onto the hardwood and sauntered off toward the kitchen, where a heaping bowl of salmon-flavored dry food awaited her.
Faulty Plumbing
I was a quarter of the way through one of Mike’s precious yogurts when there was a knock at the door. I froze, my spoon halfway between my mouth and the plastic carton. Who could that be? You could only enter the building if you got buzzed in, and Mike told me I was the only one in the entire seven-story complex who hadn’t traveled anywhere for Christmas.
More knocking.
Louder this time.
I stashed the yogurt back in the fridge, went to the door, and looked through the peephole. A pretty white girl was standing on the other side—long sandy-blond hair and porcelain skin and light brown eyes. I was still getting used to being around people like this. The kind you see in movies and commercials and sitcoms. Back home everyone you passed on the street was just regular-old Mexican, like me.
I undid the chain and pulled open the door and tried to play it cool. “Can I help you?”
“Oh,” she said with a look of disappointment. “You’re not Mike.”
“Yeah, we work together at—”
“And you’re definitely not Janice.” She looked past me, into the apartment.
“Mike’s my boss,” I said a little too quickly—definitely not cool. “I’m cat sitting while he and Janice are in Florida visiting friends. He totally knows I’m here.” My heart picked up its pace. I didn’t need this sitcom girl thinking she’d stumbled into an active crime scene. I pointed into the apartment, but Mike’s cat—my lone alibi—was nowhere to be found. “I’d be happy to pass along a message. They’ll be back the day after Christmas.”
“Do you know anything about pipes?” she asked.
“Pipes?”
“Pipes.” She paused, waiting for a look of recognition from me that never came. “Like, sinks and showers and … you know, pipes.”
“Oh, plumbing.” I didn’t know the first thing about plumbing, but that didn’t stop me from nodding. When it comes to attractive females my policy has always been to nod first and ask questions later. “Sure. Why, what seems to be the problem?”
The cat strolled out from its hiding place and rubbed itself against my leg. “Awww,” the girl cooed, kneeling down to scratch behind its ear. “She likes you.”