Close to my ear, someone yelled Cari! and lifted a bangle-clad wrist in greeting. So I understood before I even saw her that my mom’s new face was for Caridaylis, the uncle’s daughter who’d been assigned, more or less by default, to fill the role of Ariel’s mother.
I’d never seen her in person either, but when I took in her pretty round face, her tan shoulders under the straps of a white tank top, I had to look away—up at Ariel, then into the sky, at the dark shadows bellying from the clouds. Because I almost recognized her. Because she was, to me—and I hate that I still haven’t thought of a better yet equally accurate way to put it—painfully generic, the quintessential girl from Miami, a girl who could’ve gone to my high school and blended in so seamlessly I would’ve flipped past her picture in the yearbook without really registering it: with her small hoop earrings, the gold chain from all the photos still around her neck, her thick, straightened hair and her long bangs skirting her face, her arms reaching up behind her uncle to take Ariel from his shoulders and carry him herself. Her regularness struck me as tragic, because to the people surrounding me she’d never be regular again. Ariel made her special; everyone around me saw it that way. But I must’ve been broken somehow, because as Ariel climbed onto her, wrapping his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck and tucking his head into her shoulder, he lost whatever specialness I’d seen on him. He was now some kid being held by some girl from Miami. I listened harder to the crowd as they yelled We love you and said they were praying and lighting candles, but I couldn’t get it back, couldn’t see Ariel the way I had seconds before, because I couldn’t give that feeling to her.
Caridaylis sent a little wave—four fingers folding down to meet her palm in a curl, three or four times—right at me, and my face felt hot. She’d caught me somehow, sensed that I saw through to her secret that she was a regular person, but my mom’s hand flicked ahead of me, waving back. Caridaylis was waving to my mom—she even mouthed, Hi Lourdes, which killed my hope that maybe I was wrong about the wave—bequeathing for a second her specialness to my mother by singling her out. She knew my mother’s name. How could that be true? I wanted to launch over the fence and shake her, ask her why: Why on earth do you know my mother’s name? She rested the hand she’d waved on Ariel’s head.
Mami finally remembered me then, grabbed my hand and pulled me to her, making me step on the toes of people crowding the short distance between us. She clenched the meat of my upper arm and said, Did you see that? There’s something so special in her. God bless her, she is trying so hard.
She looked back at Caridaylis, probably hoping for another wave, but my hands balled into fists. My mom knew I was the first student from Hialeah Lakes to go to Rawlings even though she never acknowledged it. In the grand scheme of human achievement, I recognize this is not a big deal, but still, when I eventually showed Mami the acceptance letter and pointed out the handwritten note near the bottom stating I was the first, she’d said, Maybe you’re just the first one who ever applied? And I wrote it off as exhaustion because she was, at that point, the new grandmother of a sleepless two-month-old baby, a woman whose husband had just left her.
—Mom, I said. It’s not the first time someone’s taken care of a kid. I mean, I get it, but it’s not like what she’s doing is actually that hard. She’s – she’s a glorified babysitter.
She released my arm, almost threw it back at me. Her now-shut mouth, the way she rolled her shoulders to push out her chest, the ugly flash of a tendon in her neck: I knew then this was the wrong thing to say. I didn’t even really believe it, but I needed to say it to her. I was trying hard. What I was doing was fucking hard. My mom stared at me so long that her eyes seemed to shake in her head.
—What? I said. It’s the truth.
—I’m waiting for you, she said, to take that back.
What Caridaylis was doing was hard, too, of course it was, but I couldn’t understand that. What woman who I knew from home wasn’t taking care of a kid?
—Why does that girl even know who you are? I said.
—Because I’ve been here from the beginning, Mami said. She’s my friend.
—No she’s not, I said. She’s not your friend.
She grabbed my face, hard, squeezing her nails into my cheeks.
—You know what? she said. I look at you now and I don’t even recognize you.
She let go of my face, said, You’re a bad person.
I took a step away, knocked into the side of Myra. Mami dropped her arms and turned her face up again, back to the house, to Caridaylis.
—No I’m not.
I shook my head and snorted out half a laugh to show how little I cared, but it stung to breathe. If there’d been a way out, I would’ve charged down it away from her, but people blocked me in on all sides. I’m not a bad person, I said again.
For a few seconds I thought she hadn’t heard me. But then she faced me finally, her face tight like she was going to cry.
—Only a bad person could say that about her.