—Distracting myself? You don’t get to talk to me like that! You don’t know shit about sacrifice. You don’t know shit about shit!
—Zoila’s right, you only care about Ariel because what else do you have going on?
She shoved me again and the room spun, the sangria sloshing in me, and I lunged forward to keep her in one spot, reaching for her shoulders, but she took a wide step away from me—she was letting me fall. So I reached back instead and caught myself, slid my hands against the sandpaper of the wall, pressed my spine against it and sank to the ground, my butt hitting the floor too fast and too hard.
—You can go to whatever college for as long as you want, but about some things, you’ll always be fucking stupid, she said.
She tossed the paper at me on the floor and said, You think you have problems? You, your sister, your idiot tía out there? You made your problems.
She turned her back to me and walked out of the room, screaming as she left, Nobody has any idea what Ariel and Caridaylis are going through right this second, but I do. I know what it means to lose so much. None of you know shit because you haven’t sacrificed shit for anyone. Selfish pigs, that’s what you and your sister are.
—Mami, I yelled after her, but she exploded from the house, slamming the front door behind her.
The room’s walls swirled around me along with her words—how could we be the selfish ones when she was the one spending all her free time away from us, fooling herself into believing she belonged somewhere else? I was making my own problems—with Omar, with school, too, in her mind—but she wasn’t? I worried maybe the sangria was coming back for me, that I would throw it up right there on Zoila’s floor. I sat still until the spinning stopped, then looked over to a wispy pile of dust and hair in the corner. The crumpled name card floated on top of it. The years that my dad hadn’t shown up to Noche Buena, someone—Zoila or her first husband or even Leidy assigned to do it by some other tía—was quick to get rid of his place setting, to make the paper plate and the plastic fork and knife and napkin disappear, the rest of the seats shifting to absorb and erase his space. From my spot on the floor, I looked at Omar’s seat, the foldout chair squatting in the same spot he’d sat last year, next to me. He’d been a smash hit: spoke the best Spanish he could muster to every old person, drank a ton and didn’t show it, called every man papo or papito and sold it as sincere. He’d only made me cringe once, when he’d told one of my cousins that the rum he was pouring for him from my aunt’s bar was one-hundred-percent proof. My cousin had said, Sweet, and taken two shots with him, but I still logged it as something that would help me make the decision to leave for college if I got in anywhere far enough away. This year, Omar’s seat was still there, even though my dad’s place at the table was gone; in Miami, coverage of Ariel’s first Noche Buena in the United States—footage of his first lechón, him dancing, him meeting a big Cuban Santa Claus—trumped all things Y2K; I sat on the floor of my aunt’s house, there because my mom was mad for too many reasons, the sangria thick in my throat, and I thought of the excuse Leidy had used for Roly the year before, how I could recycle it—Omar just couldn’t get off of work—and I promised myself I’d tell everyone at the table that Omar was really sorry he couldn’t make it. He’s real sorry, but next year? I’d say, Next year will be different. I didn’t understand what my mom had accused me of, but I thought I knew how to undo it, how to backslide into something more recognizable.
While we ate, Mami sat as far from us as she could. Omar couldn’t get off work, I kept slurring, even after Leidy kicked and kicked my shin under the table each time I forced out the excuse. Dante crawled around on the floor next to her, moving from cousin to cousin, begging to be lifted. I kicked Leidy back and said it anyway—Next year, you’ll see—to Neyda, to people who’d been whispering about my mom’s outburst, her door-slamming and her curses to her cousins: Watch, next year, I promised them, my mouth and fingers shiny with the grease of familiar food.
21
I CALLED OMAR THAT NIGHT. I waited until my head was clear, until Leidy and my mom were asleep. I used the kitchen phone, my back against the wall and my butt on the floor again, this time in my mom’s apartment. I was ready to hear it from him too now, for him to chew me out for being a baby and a bitch and a bad girlfriend.