*
The sound of him on the phone again, but hearing it from Rafael’s room: my dad told the office of the contractor he worked for that he’d be late that morning. He had a family emergency concerning one of his daughters and could he please make up the hours that afternoon or Saturday, and no, he wasn’t fishing for overtime, he just needed to get his daughter to her mother and he just wanted that one hour of pay back. I don’t know what the person on the other end decided; my dad didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask.
He drove me to my mom’s apartment as promised. The only thing he asked during the drive—the Miami sun blaring through his van’s windshield, his tools and ladders rattling behind us, filling in the silence—was if I ever gave Leidy and Dante the money from Christmas. He’d asked me that before: when I called him in January from school to say I’d made it back safely and pretended I’d forgotten about the fifty he claimed to owe me.
I said, Yes I gave them the money. I said, You asked me that already.
He didn’t respond, and I understood he wasn’t really asking. He’d meant it to remind me he was a good person, a good father. Neither of us spoke the rest of the ride.
It was only eight thirty when he rolled away, leaving me and my suitcase on the sidewalk after saying through the van’s open window, Be careful, but there were already people standing down the street outside of Ariel’s house. Two blocks away, a long oval of women all in black pressed up against his fence. I went upstairs hoping to see my mom before she left for the day—unlike my dad, her job with the city meant she got Good Friday off—but it was Leidy who got the door, who looked surprised to find me behind it and then suddenly not at all surprised, who told me, a glob of wet cereal on her collarbone and Dante crying behind her, that Mami had left before the sun was even up—hours ago.
I pushed past her and hoped my suitcase would roll over her painted toenails, chipping the polish and screwing up one of the few perks she got from working at the salon. All I said as I wheeled toward her feet was, You must be happy to see me.
Leidy and I then fought the old way, the big way, the way that felt, after the night before with my dad, less like a fight and more like a script I was following. We knew what to do and where it would end: I called her a liar and accused her of pushing me out of our family. She called me a snob and said I didn’t care about anyone but myself. I told her I’d stayed at Papi’s the night before and she called me a traitor, and I said she’d been listening to Mami too much and told her if she really wanted to see a traitor she should look in the mirror. There was a lot of yelling and stomping around and picking up of a crying Dante and Don’t you dare pick up my kid! threats. There was aggressive unzipping of suitcases and fierce proclamations of You’re not sleeping in my room and rebuttals of This is our room, and She’s our mom and What gives you the right, et cetera, et cetera. Until it wound down and flared up and wound down again, until the crap in Dante’s diaper found our noses and made us gag through our stern mouths, the room eventually smelling so bad we had to step out into the living room, where the curtains were open and from where we watched the crowd down the block grow and grow, the line of people headed to join it passing like a parade.
Later I would see that I was wrong about Leidy, wrong to think I wouldn’t need her and that being a mom herself hadn’t changed her in a way that would help us deal with Mami. I was wrong to believe the stories we’d been told about ourselves: that I was the only one bright enough and aware enough to have some kind of plan. But in the quiet of the apartment—feeling loud in its own way for coming after the riot of our fight—Leidy said, I am happy to see you, you stupid hoe. You’re the hoe, I said back, and there we were, two hoes staring out a window, one thinking the worst of the fighting was over, the other glad to have the opening act out of her way.