20
WE DIDN’T SEE MY MOM’S whole family often—mostly just at Noche Buena, weddings and births, funerals—but we acted like we did. That half of my family was big and messy, sprawled around the city and good at pretending we cared very much about lives we knew little about. As we drove over to Tía Zoila’s house, after watching my mom fling on the same gold shirt and pants she’d worn to pick me up at the airport (ignoring Leidy’s pleas that she wear something less reffy-looking), I realized I wasn’t sure if everyone in my mom’s family knew about my parents splitting up for good—or, if they knew about it, whether anyone would mention it to one of us. And thanks to my cousins on my dad’s side, I was almost certain no one really understood that I was away at college, that I was getting a college degree and not just my AA or some certificate. Still, we ignored most facts and thought of ourselves as close, as sufficiently up in everyone else’s business, and we always were on Noche Buena.
As my mom walked ahead of us into Zoila’s house with a Tupperware full of tostones she’d fried at our apartment (the cooking making our clothes reek of oil and food hours before we even got anywhere near the pig roasting in our tía’s backyard), we heard Zoila scream, Look at that fucking skank! Baby, look who’s here!
She came running from outside, spotting us through the glass door as she prepared a vat of sangria with her second husband, Tony. She was already drunk from tasting it to get the flavor right; her recipe for sangria included, among other things, an entire bottle of Bacardi 151. Even with all the fruit, the first sip always tasted like straight-up poison.
—Who you calling a skank, you puta? my mom laughed back. She handed me the Tupperware and then let her cousin body-slam her into a hug.
Zoila and my mom liked to say they were more like sisters than cousins. This wasn’t true—even when you considered the fact that my mom had lived with Zoila and Zoila’s mother when she came from Cuba up until getting pregnant and married—but they really, really believed it. Yelling obscenities at each other was something they thought sisters did.
—You are so fucking skinny, you slutty chicken, Zoila said into my mom’s hair. And look at this one! she said to Dante, scooping him out of Leidy’s grip. ?Mi gordito!
She rolled the R for way longer than she needed to. She started to pretend-bite his arms. Dante, who should’ve been used to noise, sat on her hip, stunned.
—This one I’m gonna eat instead of lechón, Zoila said.
She fake-chewed the fat she fake-bit from Dante’s arms. Then she greeted me and Leidy, calling us various combinations of the words slut, whore, bitch, skank, and chicken—that last word being her new one this year. The cursing was also connected to Tony; he was, at twenty-eight, twelve years younger than her, and she used moisturizer and profanity the same way since meeting him, hoping to seem younger than she was.
Tony came inside, his fingers stained red. The more he tested the sangria, the more acceptable it seemed to him to stir it with his hand instead of a long spoon after each adjustment.
—Hey Lizet, Leidy, he said, kissing each of us on the cheek as he said our names.
He’d grown a stubby ponytail since his wedding to Zoila, but he still had the same creepy facial hair—a thin, too-many-cornered beard outlining his jaw—that every other guy in Miami between the ages of twenty and thirty had in 1999. Tony looked at Leidy’s chest and said, Being a mom is making you more beautiful than ever, sweetie!