31
SHE ONLY CAME HOME TO SHOWER and to shit. She’ll pee there, Leidy told me, but our mom drew the line at shitting in Ariel’s house. It’s disrespectful: that was Mami’s answer when Leidy—in the gentle tone she’d learned to use with Mami over the last few weeks, as if coaxing a cat out from under a car—asked our mom What’ve you been up to and Where’ve you been sleeping. The day I’d seen our mother on national news was one of the last nights she’d slept in her own bed. She stayed up nights for the vigil, or slept at the houses of her fellow Madres or at the house across the street from Ariel’s, which was made available to my mom and her crew after the home’s owner watched them, from his front window, pray all evening through a rainstorm. His wife had joined the group after that, and now his house was host to a perpetual sleepover, with women snoring on his couch or underneath his dining room table at all times. He’d rented a tent, too, and it stood in his front yard, protecting protestors from the sun and rain and cameras in helicopters.
Leidy told me all this when she got back from her half day at the salon, Dante in her arms, marker all over his hands and cheeks. She’d already paid for the week of daycare—was paying a little less overall now that he’d turned one—so she turned down my offer to watch him after our fight. I was secretly grateful for the chance to shower and then sleep through the late morning, though falling asleep had been an accident. I’d only meant to lie down for a few minutes before figuring out what to do next, but my body demanded the rest. I hadn’t slept well in Rafael’s bed.
All afternoon, Leidy punctuated what she told me with I just didn’t want you worrying, and the bags under her eyes and the grayish tint to her skin made me finally believe her. While wiping off Dante’s face and then feeding him and then wiping him off again, she told me in one avalanche all the things I thought I’d have to pry from her. She just gave it all over, relieved to have someone to talk to, and I stoked the small fire of what remained of my anger with that thought: I could be anyone. She’s so lonely, I could be anyone.
Leidy told me that in the days after what was my spring break, Mami’s supervisor at the city left messages on the machine giving first and second warnings about missed shifts, and a few more days passed before Leidy caught our mom in the apartment and played these messages for her, asking—gentle again but blocking the front door—if everything was going fine at work. I told Leidy we should call Mom’s supervisor, but Leidy sighed that she’d done that already, a week earlier. I got up from the couch and feigned wanting some water to mask how ugly it looked that I hadn’t asked if she’d called but said we should do it, as if the idea couldn’t possibly come to her on her own. From the sink I asked what he’d said, and she told me the only reason Mami still had the job at all was because her supervisor was Cuban, too, was in fact a Pedro Pan kid, sent alone by his family to the United States back when Castro first came to power. Of course he wasn’t happy about her missing so much work, but he told Leidy that Mom was calling in, using the sick days and vacation days she’d stored up for years. I sipped my water, my heart stinging from the new fact that she hadn’t used these days on me over winter break, but I tried to hide this from Leidy, who was spending almost half her paycheck on daycare and so had to deal with that kind of hurt every day. The supervisor told Leidy that he was relieved when Mami asked to switch to part-time—something Leidy didn’t know until he’d told her, but she played along like she knew, to keep him talking—and that he so admired her work with Madres Para Justicia and what he’d seen her say on the news that he’d only hired a temp to replace her, had told Mami that when everything was resolved, she could have her old hours back. That’s good news, I said, and Leidy said again: That’s why I didn’t say anything, no reason to worry you. It’s all gonna be fine, she said. But we both knew that me showing up meant everything was more serious than she wanted to admit.
—I want to see Mom, I said.
—They did an Easter egg hunt today at the daycare, she said. I’m thinking I should try to get a part-time there.
The apartment looked the same as it always had, but when I’d poked into the fridge before showering, there was almost nothing in it. A carton of leftover white rice. Some jars of Publix-brand baby food—just the sweet ones, banana, peaches—and some Tupperwares filled with a couple different colors of mush. Half a two-liter bottle of RC Cola, which had gone flat. An almost-empty tin of Café Bustelo ground coffee.
—I have money from my job too, I said. Up at school. It pays okay, if we need it.
She nodded.
I said, Don’t worry, okay?