*
The trip to my dad’s apartment through my old neighborhood made me feel a little like those tourists on the buses that went through Little Havana—Look, there’s that high school I went to that those deans told me they’d read about!—but I couldn’t help that I felt hungry looking at everything, proud of myself for remembering what was on the next corner before actually seeing it. A stack of banged-up grocery carts humped each other in a metal orgy in the far corner of the new Sedano’s parking lot. On the next street down, a heavy woman wearing not enough of a bikini under a neon mesh cover-up screamed at a shirtless man holding a rooster to his chest. I laughed at how everything looked like something I was and wasn’t surprised to see. I fought off the urge to pass by my old house even though I could on my way to the Villas; I didn’t want the sight of it to muddy my original intentions any more than the fight with Weasel already had. I didn’t want my sadness about no longer living there bleeding into my anger. I didn’t want Papi getting a boost from a loss he’d caused.
The Villas were a city block of squat town houses alternatingly painted yellow or peach. A nine-foot-high concrete wall surrounded the whole development, but it wasn’t a gated community; you could move in and out of it freely, without someone writing down your license plate number for no real reason other than to say they wrote it down. The wall was more for keeping the run-down Villas hidden from the busy avenue running alongside them. The speed limit was forty-five on that street, and the base of the concrete on that side showcased a collage of plastic bags, paper food wrappers, cans, bottles, napkins smudged every color. Tall weeds poked out from the garbage, looking themselves like a kind of trash. The walls were tagged in only a couple places, but each wall was a quilt of different paint shades from where tag after tag had been covered week after week, a patchwork of primer and gray. I turned the air conditioner to high, pointed the vents at my suddenly-drenched and stinging armpits, and pulled into the neighborhood.
I slowed down to twenty miles per hour—the speed limit inside the walls—and what seemed like the same two town houses scrolled by on each side of the street. The Villas had a reputation for being trashy: leases were month to month, driveways were places to party and fight, and no one enforced rules about the number of saints you could prop up in the small squares of lawn. There were no sidewalks. There were no speed bumps. I’d never been inside the neighborhood, though I’d apparently spent the first months of my life there: my parents had moved to the Villas while saving for the house, which they managed to find and buy before I turned two. Number twelve came up quickly enough, in the section of the Villas where the town houses didn’t have their own parking spots. I couldn’t tell if any of the white work vans in the wide lot ringed by the units was my dad’s. I parked in one of the spots marked VISITOR, directed a final blast of cold air down each of my T-shirt sleeves, then turned off the car.
I sat there until the heat coming through the windshield started to rise again, until my cheeks pulsed with the sun beating down on me through the glass. Maybe I was trying to darken myself up before he saw me—maybe I was worried he wouldn’t recognize me. Maybe I was stealing some fire from the sun, something to fuel a rage I was certain I should unleash but that my time away had morphed into something more subdued—what Leidy would call more white. I shook my hands out and thought of Weasel’s flaring cigarette, then got out of the car.
My dad’s rental looked less lived-in than the others. The lawn was uniformly dry, with nothing on it to give away the religious leanings of its inhabitants. I walked up the concrete strip connecting the asphalt to the front door, stuck my fist between the bars guarding it, and knocked.
A man coughed from inside. I almost turned and bolted for my car—the fingers of my left hand all of a sudden went numb. But within a couple seconds a male voice I definitely didn’t recognize yelled, ?Ya voy!
The drywall man swung open the door, a gold cross dangling from his neck and resting on his dark chest. His shirt was draped over his shoulders, unbuttoned. ?Ay dios mío! he said when he saw me. I started to introduce myself but his fist went for the lock on his side of the bars, and he opened those, too, swinging them out so that I had to step away from the door to avoid getting hit. He smiled and said, ?Es la hija!
He hugged me like I belonged to him, said, Come in!