“I thought you were out there, every day, playing, part of the team. But what have you been doing instead? Drugs? Drinking?”
“No!”
“How can I know?”
“I’m not, Papi.”
“This whole time!” he screamed, and he lunged toward me, squeezing my shoulders between his hands like a vise, lifting me to my feet.
His nostrils flared and he looked me right in the eyes. “Goddamn it, Mayor!” He dug his fingertips into my skin like he was trying to carve his way down to my bone.
I didn’t want to cry, but I could feel my eyes burning.
My dad brought his face close to mine, close enough so that the tips of our noses almost touched. “You’re done,” he said.
CHRISTMAS THAT YEAR was both the best and the worst we’d had in a while. There was this kind of pall over everything, heavy and sticky like a film we couldn’t get out from under. It hadn’t taken long to deduce that “You’re done” meant I was grounded until further notice. No Maribel, no William, no allowance, no nothing but school and home until my dad decided otherwise. And on top of that, my dad announced the next night, no Christmas presents this year, either. “Wait until you see the pile of gifts we’re getting Enrique,” my dad said. “A mountain of gifts! That will teach you not to lie to me again.” My mom argued that my dad was being hard on me, but he didn’t want to hear it. Which meant that what to do with me became just one more source of tension between them.
On Christmas Eve, the three of us took a bus to the Wilmington train station to meet Enrique, who was coming home for a few days for the holidays. My mom had begged him to stay longer, but he claimed he needed to be back on campus for some obscure reason he never disclosed. Even so, a few days was better than nothing—I needed any buffer I could get—and my mom was busting at the seams in anticipation of seeing her baby boy again, as she kept saying.
“He’s a grown man now,” my dad told her.
“He’s still my baby,” my mom insisted.
When Enrique came down the steps into the train vestibule, he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt that said MARYLAND across the front and black athletic pants. He was unshaven, carrying a duffel bag in his hand. Honestly, he looked homeless.
“Kiko!” my mom shouted, running to him, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“Hey, Ma,” I heard him say.
When my mom and Enrique walked over to us, my dad took my brother’s bag out of his hands and patted him on the back. “Here he is!” my dad said. “My good son.”
I shrank a little. My mom looked at me with pity.
“How was the train?” my dad asked.
“Decent,” Enrique said, then punched me in the shoulder.
“Hey,” I said.
“What’s up, kid?”
We caught the bus back home, and when we arrived, my mom started preparations for Enrique’s favorite meal, which was pork tamales. She reminded him that we were going to church that night, but he begged off, saying he was tired and needed to catch up on sleep. I couldn’t believe it when my dad didn’t put up a fight. Instead, he just said, “Is the coach working you hard up there?”
“Yeah, Pop,” Enrique said.
You could count on my mom, though. “But it’s Christmas,” she argued. “One time a year, God would like to see your face. One time!”
“He doesn’t see it every day?” Enrique asked.
“In church,” my mom clarified. “He would like to see your face in church. And so would I.”
Enrique looked at my dad like, She can’t be serious, can she?
“He’s tired, Celia,” my dad said.
“He can be tired later.”
Enrique looked at my dad again, but this time my dad seemed resigned to the fact that there was no way he and Enrique would win this battle; my mom would wear them down eventually. “I tried,” he said halfheartedly.
Later, as I was getting dressed for Mass, Enrique knocked on my door.
“Why are you getting ready so early?” he asked when he saw me.
I didn’t tell him it was because I was eager to see Maribel, who I knew would be there. I had a feeling she wouldn’t measure up to my brother’s standards. I mean, if all he did was look at her, she would have made the grade, no problem. But if he knew the whole story …
“Nothing better to do,” I said.
He laughed. “Yeah. I heard about that. What did you do anyway? How did the angel child get grounded?”
My lip had pretty much healed by then—there was just a faint, kind of purplish line where the split had been—but I pointed it out to him anyway.
“I got in a fight.”
Enrique’s eyes widened. “You mean by accident?”
“Nope. I started it. I punched someone.”
“Man,” Enrique said. “You turned into a tough guy while I was gone.”
He sat on my bed and looked around like he was trying to figure out if anything had changed since the summer, which was the last time he’d been home.
“There’s no way I could live here again,” he said. “This place is so depressing. Every time I come back, it seems shittier.”
“It’s not that bad.”
Enrique chuckled. “That’s just because you don’t know any better.”
I got my clip-on tie out of the drawer and started to hook it to my collar.
“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Enrique said. “All these rules. Like God cares whether or not you’re wearing a tie.”
“You used to wear a tie to church, too,” I said.
“Exactly. Used to. But I wouldn’t be caught dead in that thing now.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
My brother shook his head. “One day you’ll get out of here and you’ll see.”
I tried to imagine it, going off to college in a few years, walking into a life that was all my own, one where I didn’t have to wear a tie to church, one where I didn’t even have to go to church, where no one could ground me, and where I could do whatever I wanted.
I pulled the tie off and tossed it on the bed. “Fuck that,” I said, a little too loudly.
Enrique laughed. “That’s what I’m talking about!”
We rode the bus to midnight Mass with the Riveras, although Enrique sat all the way in the back, plugged in to his iPod, so it was basically like he wasn’t even there. The bus driver tuned the radio to the all-Christmas-music station, and when “Feliz Navidad” came on, I guess since we were the only people on the bus, he raised the volume and shouted back at us, “Here you go! A little piece of home for you!”
Under his breath, my dad said, “Every year the same thing. If it’s in Spanish, it’s a piece of home. Well, I never heard this song until I came to the United States.”
“And every year, you complain,” my mom said.
“You like this song?”
“No.”
“It’s like how everyone thinks I like tacos. We don’t even eat tacos in Panamá!” my dad said.
“That’s right. We eat chicken and rice,” my mom said.
“And seafood. Corvina as fresh as God makes it.”
“Yes.”
This was one of the few things that could unite my parents, the thread that mended them: their conviction that no one else here understood Panamá the way they did.
I was sitting in front of them with my feet up on the seat, my dress socks pulled halfway up my calves. I had my coat zipped to my chin so that my mom wouldn’t see that I wasn’t wearing my tie. The Riveras were across the aisle from us.
“I like tacos,” I offered.
My mom sighed. “Why would you say such a thing?”
“What about you, Maribel?” I asked. “Do you like tacos?”
When she didn’t answer, I repeated the question, louder.