*
Over the course of the night, assorted relatives in various stages of drunkenness told me that I: looked skinnier, looked fatter, looked pale, looked sick, looked sad. One volunteered a cure for the faint bands of acne that had recently colonized my cheeks—egg whites mixed with vinegar. One asked if Omar and I were engaged yet (I’d slurred, Not yet!). One old uncle asked if I was jealous of Leidy for getting all the attention because of Dante—this after the baby made the rounds and charmed everyone just as Omar had the year before; another kept calling me Leidy but didn’t call Leidy Lizet—Lizet just didn’t exist. Neyda asked me if I was going to get back with Omar in a voice that made me think she would ask for his number if I said no. An hour or so before we sat down to eat, the new boyfriend of one of my older cousins showed up in his tricked-out Mustang, and after introducing himself as Joey to some, Joe to others, we all had to go out to the driveway and listen to the new tube speaker he’d installed in his trunk because my cousin had helped pay for it. The bass rattled the car so much that I swear the bumper vibrated, but when I pointed out the buzzing to a somewhat-drunk Leidy, she said I was seeing things and rightfully noted I was pretty buzzed myself, ha ha. She handed Dante to me and asked if I thought my cousin’s new boyfriend was cute. I told her no just to be safe, and she stayed put, eventually taking Dante back into her arms.
The boyfriend had a seat assigned to him at the kids’ table with us (the oldest person at the kids’ table was twenty-six that year). I assumed he’d take Omar’s spot—Zoila hounded our mothers about our breakups and new romances starting in November, gossip hiding behind the pretext of head counts and place settings—but when I passed the table later on my way back from the bathroom, the little card with his name on it (it read, for some reason, Joey/Joe) sat next to a card with another name: Omar. I picked it up with two fingers, balancing myself against the wall as I stared at it. It was the same card from the year before (the ink was blue, the same color as most of the family’s cards, which Zoila kept and reused year after year) and it had an oil stain on the corner from where he’d dripped mojito on it while spooning oil-slicked onions from the plastic tub onto his own plate.
I scanned the back windows of the house for my mom outside. Hadn’t she told Zoila that Omar wouldn’t be here this year? Did she just assume that our morning breakfast (which hadn’t actually happened, of course, but which she didn’t bother to ask me about after getting back from Ariel’s) hadn’t ended in the breakup I’d said was inevitable, that I’d hinted at over a month earlier? I spotted her sitting on a cooler, waving away an uncle who was threatening to reach between her legs to grab a beer. She clamped on to the cooler’s side handles and screamed so hard she almost fell off of it. I checked the area around my mom’s seat for a place setting for my dad: there wasn’t one. I checked each of the fifty or so spots. None of them were for him. So my mom and Zoila had talked at some point; my mom had told Zoila my father wouldn’t be coming, but she hadn’t said a word about Omar. Or maybe she had, and what she’d said was, Leave it there.
I crushed the card with Omar’s name in my hand and rushed through the open glass door, almost tripping over the metal guide rail on the floor. My mom had moved off the cooler and was now sitting on Zoila’s lap. Zoila was pretending my mom was a baby, bouncing Mami on her thighs and trying to force my mom’s head down to her chest.
—You think I’m a joke? Mami yelled.
—Mom, can I talk to you? I said.
—Come, come let me feed you like you’re Ariel, Zoila said.
My mom wrestled her head away from Zoila’s hands and jumped off her lap.
—That is not what I’m doing, she yelled to Zoila. We’re right to be worried. What I don’t understand is how you’re not.
The week before I came home for Christmas, the lawyers for Ariel’s Miami family officially requested that Ariel be granted political asylum, and from what I could tell, most of Miami was pretty certain—or was pretending to be certain—that he’d get it. He was, after all, Cuban, and he had, after all, reached land. People like Zoila saw it that plainly; they didn’t think about the complications—that he hadn’t made it to land unassisted, that he was a minor with a father back in Cuba who was now asking the UN to step in and get his kid back for him. My mom, along with dozens of others who saw themselves as close to the Hernandez family, saw all those complications and allowed them to keep her up at night.
—Ay chica please, Zoila said, flicking her wrist and splaying her fingers in the air. Stop your preaching already.
My mom growled, Maybe you need to be paying more attention.