Beers in his hands, Weasel yelled from the kitchen doorway, You ever ask?
I hissed at them, Of course, and believed it for all of two seconds. Because, as I turned back to Tío Fito, whose face, in the glow of the TV screen, looked brighter and younger than it should, I scanned the last four months—the short phone conversation at the end of study week, the messages I’d left him, the brief goodbye on my mom’s building’s steps—for the moment where I actually said the words, Papi, can I have your address? Or even, This is my phone number here at school. I couldn’t find it—it wasn’t there—and I started to worry that Papi had a good reason to be mad at me.
—He’s still in Hialeah, Tío said in Spanish.
He kept his eyes on the screen while picking up his can and said, In the apartments by your old house, what are they called? The Villas, him and that Dominican guy from his job, they’re roommates.
The idea of my dad having a roommate almost made me laugh: all this time, the stories we could’ve told each other, maybe helped each other out. Then I thought about Jillian, now back in Cherry Hill, gearing up to celebrate not Noche Buena but just regular storybook Christmas Eve, sledding and drinking boozy eggnog and reading Dickens around a fire and hunting geese or whatever real white people did on Christmas. If my dad’s roommate was the Dominican guy I’d seen a few times who hung drywall, who’d lived in the U.S. maybe a couple years and who Papi met at a jobsite a few months before I left, then our experiences of having roommates probably didn’t have much in common.
—Apartamento dos, Tío said.
—No, Papi, el doce, Weasel said to him. He stepped across the tiny living room and tipped a can in my direction. He means unit twelve. He’s bad with numbers.
—Why do – wait, you know where my dad lives?
—You mean my uncle? Weasel said. He pulled the can away. Yeah I fucking know. You want to say something about it? You want to bitch about it like your mom?
Little Fito stepped between us and yelled, Chill bro! It’s like Christmas and shit!
He put his hand on Weasel’s chest.
—?Oye! Tío Fito yelled. He shushed us and pointed at the TV.
The most Latina thing I could’ve done then, I think, was smack Weasel and tell him there was more coming if he wanted to talk shit about my mom. But the slashes of his eyes, the aggressively cocked head, the fist choking the can of beer, the muscles around his jaw—all of it said, Get out. And I felt suddenly cold and scared of him. Had he always been so quick to get mad like that? Did me noticing it for the first time right then mean that I’d already been gone too long, that I was already used to nice, mostly quiet people like Jillian, who showed they were mad by folding their laundry extra sharply and clearing their throats while they did it?
—Number twelve, I said to Little Fito. In the Villas?
—Yeah, he said, letting his hand drop. He took the beer his brother had offered me. I stepped back toward the sliding glass door. Tell your dad we say wassup, he said, opening the door for me.
—Or don’t, Weasel said.
He stared me down hard, then disappeared down the apartment’s hallway, his words—in an annoying, high-pitched girl voice and in an accent I knew Leidy would have a word for—trailing behind him: Oh he’s drunk? It’s maybe too early for that!
Out by the railing, Little Fito said, Wease is a dick. Forget him.
He kissed me on the cheek and opened the gate for me—the bitter beer on his breath wafting across my face. I wanted to ask him what I was missing, but to need him to tell me was worse than not knowing. Asking questions would only show him that his brother was right to hate on me.
—Merry Christmas, he said, the gate still open. Hope things get better with Tío.
I said, Me too. I clicked the gate shut and hurried to my mom’s car, only getting it when I turned the key in the ignition, the car baking me inside even in December: he didn’t mean Tío Fito. He meant his tío. My dad. He meant that what came next could be worse than just a drunk uncle. That the person guilty of so much silence could be me. By the time I pulled out of the spot and passed their apartment, no one waited outside, new cigarettes in hand, to wave goodbye. The glass door was shut, and through it, the glow from the TV, the green of the baseball diamond on its screen, washed over my uncle, making him look like a memory of someone—a ghost I barely recognized—as I drove away.