She kissed my cheek and hugged me again, the rosary beads rolling over my back and clinking together a second time. The circle around us was almost intact once more except for her spot, the place through which I would leave it. And just outside of it was Dante in his stroller and Leidy, standing stone still until I stepped toward her.
As she charged away, the circle back to praying and safely behind us, Leidy said, What the fuck was that, Lizet?
—I don’t know. You’re right that she’s weird.
Despite the heat, my arms and legs were freezing. And I couldn’t walk fast enough. Neither could Leidy. For a step or two I was right next to her, and the sun shined off the tears on her face as they slipped from under her sunglasses, just before she swiped them away.
—Oh my god, are you crying? I said. Why the hell are you crying?
Instead of stopping to answer me, she wrapped her fists tighter around the handles of Dante’s stroller and seemingly shifted into a higher gear. Her silver earrings rocked back and forth like angry kids on swings.
—You know how many times I came down here to ask her something and she acts like she can’t hear me? Like I’m not even there?
I was walking so fast to keep up that it would’ve been easier to just jog. I managed to huff out, Leidy, she sees you all the time.
—Whatever, she said. It’s not like you got her to come home. A lot of good you did, gracing us with your presence. All the way from New York.
—What the hell, I said to her back. I halted in the street. I said, You’re jealous that she stopped for me and not you? Is that really so shocking?
My armpits were drenched, and my sweat-soaked shirt nudged itself cold against the insides of my arms. She kept walking, the stroller’s wheels scuffing ahead of her. She got smaller and smaller until a car honked beside me; I was blocking a driveway.
By the time I locked the apartment door, she was in the shower with Dante—the stroller and her sunglasses and her clothes and his clothes and his wet diaper all in a trail from the front door to the bathroom. She came out over an hour later, all wrinkled and with her hair in a towel, had stayed locked in there long enough to make it weird for me to bring up what had happened. She spent the evening wandering around the apartment, playing with Dante and then feeding him and then hanging out in our room with him, leaving me with nothing to do but watch TV in the living room, though what I was really doing was willing the phone to ring, willing my dad to call and say he’d changed his mind and would help. Or willing Omar to call and just talk to me. I kept almost hearing it—the shrill bell about to make me jump—but I knew my dad wouldn’t call, that Omar wouldn’t call. Omar couldn’t, not after the way he’d driven off, and I didn’t even really want him to—what would I say to him? I just wanted the distraction, the chance to whisper with someone the way Leidy did to Dante, to feel less lonely for a few minutes. I turned up the TV’s volume, pretending not to be listening for the phone or for Leidy’s hushed voice spitting my name at her son.
*
Mami came home maybe an hour before the sun went down. Leidy had put Dante to bed, and she volunteered The baby’s sleeping once it was clear Mami wasn’t going to ask about him. Mami nodded at her and grabbed my wrist, tugging me up from the couch into the kitchen.
—I don’t have a lot of time, she said. I don’t feel right not being there if I can be there.
I let her keep her hand clasped around my wrist.
—But I’m visiting, I said. Can’t you tell them I’m visiting? I’m never here.
—It’s not them, it’s my feeling.
She raised my hand with hers, made it look like we were both pointing at her chest.
—You don’t know what it’s been like, she said. This is so important.
A wrinkle formed between her eyes, like she was concentrating or trying to beam a thought into my head. She looked like me for a second, like the face in the mirror the night I’d practiced in front of it, almost a year earlier, after sending in my paperwork to Rawlings, saying to what seemed like a serious, determined reflection, There’s something I need to tell you guys. It’s about my future. Though in the end, I hadn’t said any of that, only: I’m going to college in New York and it’s too late to stop me, starting the whole thing off even more wrong than it already was. Mami’s tired face shined at the nose and forehead in the white light of the kitchen. She was trying to seem greater than herself, mustering up what little energy she had left to convince me of something.
—It’s okay, I said. I understand.
She let out a breath I was scared to see she’d been holding. She said, So you’ll come back with me?
—What?
—I just think, it must be a sign that you’re here. Come back with me for the vigil.
Leidy, now steps closer and behind my mom’s left shoulder, scowled at us like we were high school bitches in a hallway talking shit: You hear she’s pregnant? Yeah, you hear he’s not gonna marry her? She waved her hands in the air, a huge No.
—I just got here, I said to my mom.