—I’m not weirding her out. I barely said anything to her on the drive here.
I rolled the balloon to try to right the bear inside: it flopped over too far, landed facedown in the shredded plastic. So I rolled it the other way.
—Well whatever it is, she’ll get over it. Just ask her about Ariel or Caridaylis. That’ll make her talk.
It was late afternoon, the time of day when I usually fell asleep at my desk, my face in a book, an unofficial nap. I was so exhausted. I felt like I might cry. Instead I said, I saw her picture outside. Is she his new spokesperson?
Leidy laughed then said, Not really. I think Mami’s still auditioning for that part.
She plopped down beside me and Dante’s hand immediately went to the balloon, which he rubbed and which made a fart-like noise. He yanked his hand away and examined it for traces of the sound. I should’ve asked Leidy what she meant, but instead, I just swirled the bear and mumbled, Yeah.
—Don’t worry, she said in a fake-cheerful voice. She’ll get over it. She has to. You’re here for like three freaking weeks!
Mami still hadn’t come out of her room. Part of me was proud of myself for having such good intuition—I knew something was wrong—until I realized that my mom’s reaction meant she, like me, must not have liked what she saw coming toward her at the airport.
—And plus? Leidy said. You got enough days here this visit to maybe go sit in the sun for a while. You look worse than last time, she said. You look so freaking white.
Dante went for the balloon a second time, pulling his hand away and inspecting it when once again the rubbery noise came out from under it. He kept at this until Leidy finally stopped him.
16
MY DAD CALLED THE APARTMENT only once: the night I got in from Rawlings, to make sure my flight had landed and that I’d been on it. But since he sensed my mom standing nearby—She’s right next to you, isn’t she?—he didn’t ask anything else or arrange to see me, said only that he’d call back. Three days later, by the morning before Noche Buena and the rowdy family party that came with it, I still hadn’t heard from him, and because I wanted to remind him of what he’d be missing—he had less family in the United States than my mother did, had celebrated Noche Buena with her side since he was seventeen—and because my campus-wide-scream-induced decision to finally confront him about the house still hung over me, I decided to set off to my tío Fito’s apartment, starting my search with the brother who took him in right after he left my mom. I came to this plan after asking myself, What is the most Latina thing I could do right now? I’d thought about my choices in these terms since my first night back, when during dinner I described the new coral paint job on the house across the street as sufficiently tropical and Leidy laughed back that I should quit talking like a white girl. I decided the most Latina thing I could do was this: drive to my dad’s brother’s apartment, demand whoever was there to tell me where my dad lived now, then drive to that place and yell as many fuck-as-adjective expressions at Papi as I could generate while standing in the street in my flip-flops. It would be a lot like the fights between him and my mom, and therefore definitely not white.
I got to Fito’s Hialeah apartment half dreading that my dad’s van would be in the visitor’s spot, but it wasn’t, which meant I would get a practice run at yelling at someone in addition to the lame sassing of the rearview mirror I’d done at red lights on the drive there. Two of Fito’s sons, cousins a little older than me, stood talking and smoking in front of the apartment’s sliding glass doors, which led out to a railing-surrounded patch of concrete just off the complex’s parking lot. I locked the car and walked up to the railing into the open arms of my cousins, who were, as they put it, chilliando (not a word, but I kept that to myself, since identifying something as not a word was a Leidy-certified white-girl thing to do). We hugged and they held their cigarettes way out from our kiss-on-the-cheek greeting. I stood still for a second, the railing against my hip bone as my hand worked the gate’s latch, and waited for them to say welcome home or something, but the blank faces watching me from behind swirls of cigarette smoke just said, So wassup, prima?
—I just got back from New York, I said, knowing they’d think I meant the city.
—You went on vacation? the older one said.
I only knew him as Weasel—most of us just called him Wease—and wasn’t positive on his or his younger brother’s actual names even though we all counted each other as cousins: they always called me and any other girl cousin prima—primita if we were little. The younger one we all just called Little Fito, after his dad.
—No, college, bro. I was away at college. I just got back from like four months away.