—She’s only nineteen. Think about taking that on, being a mom to him when he’s gone through so much. I bet you can’t even imagine it.
The girl had coppery hair and dark eyebrows. In the picture, she’s smiling widely and looking behind her, at Ariel. She has a too-thick gold chain around her neck, and I imagined it as on loan from a boyfriend, having belonged to him first. She looked less like a mom and more like a big sister to the boy hanging on her back, but I kept this to myself.
I shrugged. Leidy’s twenty and she’s a mom, I said.
—Your sister’s different. She went looking for trouble.
She didn’t say anything else, but it seemed important for me to try: Yeah, but Dante’s still a baby, I mumbled. And I’m sure that girl Cari has help.
If my mom heard me, she pretended not to.
As we pulled into the complex’s parking lot, Leidy swung through the building’s door, keeping it open with her hip. Dante sat perched on the other. She grabbed his chunky arm and made him wave to us, staying put on the tiled entrance because she was barefoot. She looked tired in a way that suddenly made me incredibly sad—her hair greasy after a day of washing dozens of other heads. As she and Dante waved, the baby looked at the car, at my mother and me opening and shutting its doors.
Mami tugged my suitcase out from the trunk before I could get to it—I was waving back to Dante and yelling, Hey, Big Guy!—and slammed the trunk closed before I could make it back there to help. She rolled the suitcase up to the front entrance and left it there, then squeezed through the doorway past Leidy after an automatic hello kiss that caught more air than cheek. Dante reached for his grandmother’s hair but missed.
Leidy bounced him on her hip and he started grunting Bah! Bah! Bah! She looked down and traced the grout surrounding a square of tile with her big toe as I came up from the parking lot. When I reached her, she hugged me hard with her free arm and kissed me on the cheek—real and sloppy—and that’s when I admitted something big had been off about Mami’s welcome.
We followed my mom’s voice as it ricocheted off the concrete stairwell. She was talking, talking, talking, talking: This person moved out, this apartment has a parakeet even though it’s no pets allowed, did you see they painted this wall to cover up some graffiti? I lugged my bag up the stairs and wished she would keep her voice down. She seemed excited to have people close by to spy on and talk about. The wheels of my suitcase slammed again and again against the steps, the echo like an audience clapping.
The apartment was clean, the carpet in the living room section of the main room vacuumed so recently that I could still see the lines from it and Leidy’s latest footsteps. It smelled like laundry, like a spray-can version of fresh sheets. In every electrical outlet, there was some kind of deodorizing thing plugged in, and immediately I imagined Dante ingesting the chemical goop heated inside each of them. There were some papers stacked neatly on the dining table, flyers with slogans and a poor-quality photo of Ariel on them. There was only one poster, which took up the bottom half of the window facing the street and which said, ARIEL ***IS*** HOME—that middle word underlined several times and written in a different color than the other two. I was happy the sign wasn’t in Spanish; it meant my mother wasn’t blending into the neighborhood as easily as she thought she was.
Mami stood next to the television and opened her arms wide, her bracelets sliding toward her elbows. She yelled, Welcome back! and then gestured to the coffee table at a plant, a mix of jagged-edged leaves and tiny flowers clustered together like a colorful brain. A stick topped with a small Mylar balloon, the words CONGRATS, GRAD! on it, was shoved in its dirt. And on the couch behind the coffee table was a large, clear balloon dotted with white stars and topped with coils of red bow—and inside the balloon, a blond teddy bear with a similar red bow around its neck, holding a fabric heart. The bear sat on a pile of shredded green plastic ribbon meant to look like grass, the same stuff that padded our Easter baskets when we were little girls. I stepped forward to read the writing on the heart. I LOVE YOU, it said, and I feigned delight.
—You guys, I squealed. I hugged Leidy again and Dante let out a half-burp. When I turned to hug my mom, she’d disappeared.
—Where’d she go? I said.
I stroked Dante’s arm with one finger, then placed his open hand on his mother’s shoulder. We heard Mami’s bedroom door shut.
—She’s being weird, Leidy said. I think you’re weirding her out.
I pulled my sweatshirt off over my head. Dante started to cry, but Leidy stared past him at me, looking almost sorry for me. I left my bag by the door and stepped over to the bear on the couch. I yelled, Mami?
Through her bedroom door, I heard a muffled, ?Ya voy!
I sat down and put the balloon on my lap. The bear inside shifted and fell against the balloon’s back side, reclining.