He sipped his coffee, twisted his napkin with his free hand. I waited for a laugh, for some indication he was joking. He put the cup down and said instead, Are you in any clubs like before you went over there?
His changing the subject almost worked, as the question got me thinking about how the high school version of me had been a member or officer of almost every club our school had to offer—even, for one very misguided summer, the JV cheerleading team (I liked the exercise and the stunts but hated the idea of actually cheering for something; I quit after the first game of the regular season). I’d forgotten how that version of me spent most lunch periods not eating at Taco Bell with Omar, but in front of a classroom counting raised hands voting on where to go for our senior trip or on the various theme days for spirit week. That Lizet stayed after school every day but Friday, making banners to hang in the building’s central plaza, bossing other girls around and complaining later to Omar about how nobody cared about anything, coming home with marker-smudged hands and glitter speckling my knees. I’d almost forgotten that girl. And as I tried to answer my dad, I realized I had no idea what clubs, outside of sports like Jillian’s intramural softball, existed at Rawlings. There were so many flyers on the bulletin boards around campus that to me they blurred into one huge flyer advertising colored paper.
—No, I said. That’s how hard it is there, that I don’t even do any clubs.
He was about to ask me something else when I said, But wait, what do you mean about Mom and Ariel Hernandez?
He drank more coffee as an answer. A new waitress stopped to toss two plastic baskets filled with parchment-wrapped slabs of squashed Cuban bread on our table, her arms piled with maybe six more baskets headed for other customers. As he tried ignoring my question by ripping a hunk of tostada from his basket and shoving it into his mouth, I said, Have you – I didn’t know you’d talked to her.
—I haven’t, he said, chewing.
He wrapped his hands around his mug, laced his fingers together around it, each finger coming to rest in the nest of black hair on the backs of his hands. A couple of his fingernails were splitting from his habit of biting them down so severely, and lodged in the swirls of the calluses on his fingertips were smudges of what I figured was tar: when we’d hugged, I’d smelled Irish Spring soap, so the black stains filling those creases couldn’t be dirt—dirt would’ve washed off. He swallowed the bite of tostada and said, Do you get any news up there? At your school? Like on TV?
I barely ever stopped to watch the TV in the dorm’s lounge on my way in from classes—I didn’t have time—but I said, Yeah.
—But do you get Univision or Telemundo up there?
His leg started to rattle under the table again.
—I don’t know. Maybe? I haven’t really checked.
He slid the mug close to his body. He looked at another one of the ceiling fans and said, I’ve seen her on some of those reports, the stuff they tape right at Ariel’s house.
He shook his head at the fan and then looked back at me, right at my face.
—I’ve seen her on there a bunch of times, he said.
—So what? I said, though I couldn’t match his stare. So she’s making the best of our new neighborhood. How is that her fault?
I sipped my own coffee as he had, giving him space to defend himself. But he didn’t hear it—the blame. He pushed flakes of bread around on the table with his pointer finger.
—That’s one way to put it, he said to his plate. Forget I said anything, fine.
Him even bringing it up meant he was very, very worried about whatever he’d seen, and that made me worried, but I couldn’t help that my instinct was to defend her: he was the reason she even lived in Little Havana now, whether I could make myself say that or not.
—Just tell her, he said. Look, just tell her to relax, okay? She needs to relax.
He ripped off another piece of bread and plunged it into his coffee. I did the same. I let the piece dissolve in my mouth, swallowed the sweet mush.
—Listen, he said, pointing a shard of bread at me, I know it’s hard for her to hear what people are saying and what he’s going through. I can barely listen to it, okay? And I was fourteen when I came here, so I remember more than her. She was only twelve, thirteen.
He leaned back and lifted his hands as if being held up at gunpoint, one fist still gripping the bread.
—But listen, the way she talks about it? She has to admit she’s not, whatever, that he’s not her kid. That’s not her life. Besides, she’s got two kids, and she’s got Dante now too, so that’s plenty.
—Me and Leidy aren’t really –