Over his shoulder, I could see the rectangular living room with a small kitchen on the left, the sparse, mismatched furniture—a trunk acting as a coffee table, a beige faux-leather love seat I remembered from our house, a black vinyl recliner I’d never seen before—all arranged around a huge projection television that was on but with the sound muted.
He let go of me and said in Spanish, You’re Ricky’s youngest one. Lizet, right?
—Uh, yeah, I stuttered. And you’re …
He pointed his broad hands at his own chest. Hunks of gold the size of class rings sat like extra knuckles on each of his middle fingers. He said, Rafael!
I smiled, then raised my palms between us as if offering an invisible tray of food, my shoulders inching toward my ears.
—?Pasa, pasa! he said, waving me in and closing the bars behind me.
The room smelled like my own armpits and bleach and cigarettes. I wondered if my dad had started smoking, then noticed the pack in Rafael’s front shirt pocket, hovering near his purplish nipple. He wore white jeans, which made him look darker, and the hair that trailed down his stomach disappeared higher up. He leapt over to the love seat and held out his hand, told me to sit.
He said in English now, I hear so much of you! From Ricky!
He dropped into the vinyl recliner, grinning and grabbing his knees, his feet tapping against the tile.
—What? I said. Really?
—Ha ha! Rafael almost yelled. You home from the college – is cold there.
He rubbed his thumb against his other fingers and said, ?Cuesta mucho dinero, eh!
A wall-mounted air conditioner kicked on, filling the room with a low buzz. I scooted to the edge of the cushion and spotted, down the hallway, the shut bedroom doors.
—Is my dad here? I said.
—No no no. He is work – trabajando todavía.
I felt the heat rush from my face as the noisy AC pushed new cold onto me. I took a big breath of its moldy, wet air, pointed down the hall and said, Just tell me if he’s here, okay?
He looked at the doors—said, Oh! See, I show you—then darted the few feet to them, opened each to display the made beds they hid. On his little jog back—Rafael crackled with energy—he laughed and said, You are the smart one, I understand now, ha ha! He sat again and reached across the trunk posing as a table, wrapped his hand under my chin, turned my face from side to side. I’d never spoken to this man before in my life. I should’ve been a little more polite, but as he held my face in his hands, I felt paralyzed by how he seemed to think he knew me well enough to inspect my face like an artifact he’d spent years tracking down, so I blurted through squashed lips, Wait, how do you know that? About my college being expensive?
—Tu papá, Rafael said. He tell me.
He let go and leapt from his chair, a finger in the air, and rushed away to the kitchen, yelling over his shoulder, Wait! I show you!
He dug around in a drawer and then scrambled back with a stiff magazine in his hand, something dark blue that, when he landed back in the seat, he held out to me across the trunk. I recognized it right away: the Rawlings viewbook—the familiar, well-worn glossy pages I’d stashed under my mattress like my own dorky porn.
—This is you, no? he said, thumbing through it. The diverse pallet of co-ed faces in various poses of concentration and fulfillment flipped by.
—That’s where I go, yeah.
—He show me. He so proud of you! Rafael said with a smile that hid his teeth.
I wanted him to say it again, so I could really believe it. He slid the viewbook onto the trunk, and my eyes watered: I looked up at the ceiling to make the stinging of it stop. A brown stain, like a ring, clung to the corner back by the front door, where water had seeped in and ruined the already-shitty popcorn ceiling. My dad would’ve noticed something like that, would’ve probably gone up to fix it himself rather than wait for a landlord, then argued with the landlord later, after he’d taken the cost of repairs out of his portion of the rent, his labor rate exactly what it should be. I tried to convince myself that the presence of that stain meant something, maybe that my dad didn’t spend very much time here, in that living room.
—Que te pasa, mamita, Rafael said. You okay?
I pointed at the viewbook and said, I didn’t know he had this.
I tugged it onto my lap, asked its cover: Why does he have this?
Rafael started to say something, but I shook my head and said, Listen, does my dad talk about my mom or my sister?
His hands went for the cigarette pack in his shirt pocket. He slipped it out and opened it but then shut it again right away.
—Maybe we call him? Rafael said. I call him.
He lunged to his left for the phone.
—No! No, don’t.
—You come for him, no me!
—Right, but – I think maybe I need to go.