She was calm.
Then Mima said to me, “We should make the corn bread.” Yeah, the corn bread. Mima’s stuffing was to die for. So I got the ingredients and made room for myself on the kitchen table. I took out a big mixing bowl. We always tripled the recipe. Making the corn bread with Mima was my thing. Our little tradition.
I watched her hands as they worked the batter over with a wooden spoon. I wanted to kiss them.
“Did we add the sugar?” Mima asked.
I nodded.
She winked at me.
Then my dad’s cell phone rang. He looked at his caller ID and answered. As he listened to the voice on the other end, he was wearing this really great smile and I knew it was Marcos. Mima was right. She said Dad was sad. No, he hadn’t been sad. He’d just been a little lonely—?she’d said that, too. He noticed that I was watching him, and I just smiled at him. Like I knew something. And he just smiled back—?like he knew that I knew something.
I wondered if Mima knew about Marcos. I wondered what she thought about all that. Maybe it just didn’t matter to her. She loved my dad. And all the other complicated stuff, well, maybe it just didn’t matter to Mima.
Sam. Talk. Fito. Talk. Me. Talk.
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN MAKING the corn bread and talking to my Uncle Julian, I started feeling a little worse. My muscles ached, and I kept trying to ignore what was going on in my body.
Then Uncle Mickey walked into the kitchen smelling like smoke—?not cigarette smoke, but smoke like he’d been camping. “Time to put the turkeys in,” he said. I knew what that meant, but Sam and Fito didn’t. So I dragged them to my uncle’s house, two blocks away. Uncle Mickey dug a big hole in his backyard every year, put all kinds of seasoning on two turkeys, wrapped them in foil, and then wrapped them in gunnysacks that he’d soaked in water for two hours. Then he dropped them into the hole, which was full of red-hot wood—?homemade charcoal.
I took Sam and Fito to Uncle Mickey’s, and they watched the whole ritual of wrapping the turkeys, dropping them into the hole, and covering it.
Fito was like, Wow! And Sam was like, Wow! And Uncle Mickey handed Fito and me and Sam each a beer. I noticed that Sam passed on the beer, which made me smile. I thought of the two bottles of wine we’d downed, and I sort of just shook my head. My Uncle Mickey talked about the whole cooking-in-the-ground thing. And Fito kept saying, “Man, I am totally a city kind of Mexican.”
Fito liked the beer thing, but I wasn’t into mine and I was beginning to feel not so great. Still, Thanksgiving had to go on.
Fito and Uncle Mickey were talking, well, hell, they were talking turkey. Seriously. “In the morning I’ll take those babies out, and it’s gonna be the best turkey you’ll ever taste.”
“You’re going to sleep with the boys?” My Aunt Evie had this look on her face.
“Sure I am. Sally and I have had slumber parties since forever.”
“Still calling him Sally, huh?”
“Yup. I’m gonna call him that till he grows up.”
Aunt Evie laughed. “And there’s no monkey business?”
“Monkey business?” That made Sam laugh. “With Sally? With Fito? Monkeys is right. Nope. Not into monkeys.”
Aunt Evie shook her head and smiled as she handed us some extra pillows.
Sam got the bed. Of course she did. She was wearing her stupid Chihuahuas T-shirt. Maggie jumped up on the bed with her. Of course she did. If Maggie had the choice between the bed and the floor, Maggie always took the bed.
Fito and I were on the floor.
Sam was looking for some music on her laptop.
Fito was reading a text.
I was lying there thinking about things. And feeling not so great. I was feeling like I wanted to cry. Maybe it was because I was feeling bad, and it made me feel like a vulnerable little boy, and I didn’t like that.
Then Fito said, “Wish that Angel would stop texting me.”
“He’s cute,” Sam said.
“Yeah, well, he acts like a girl.”
Sam shot him a look. “What’s wrong with that?”
Fito had this I-really-stepped-in-it look on his face. “He wants me to buy him stuff. He be like, What are you gonna buy me? What is that? It’s like I have to buy him stuff to prove that I like him.”
“That sucks,” I said.
Sam rolled her eyes. “Well, I used to do that too.”
“What’s that about?”
Sam was all Ms. Expert. “He’s just insecure. No matter what you buy him, he’s not going to believe you really like him. Get rid of him.”
“Yeah. I told him I didn’t have time for that crap. He said, ‘Oh, now you be all about your straight friends.’”
“That would be Sam and me?”
“Yup,” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know shit about love. And even though I’m gay, I don’t know shit about being gay.”
I laughed. “Well, I’m no expert on love either.”
“That’s for sure,” Sam said.
“Oh,” I said, “and how did all those bad boys work out for you?”
“At least I put myself out there. What about you, Sally?”
“I had a few girlfriends.”
“Not one date this year.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Whatever,” Sam said.
“Well, all the girls think I’m secretly in love with you.”
“Yeah, well girls can be such—”
“Don’t say the B word, Sammy. Just don’t say it.”
“Consider it said.”
“Dating sucks,” Fito said. “Sam, remember that guy Pablo you were hanging with last year?”
“Yeah? Nice tats.”
“Yeah, well, he’s gay.”
“He’s gay? For reals? You sure?”
“Yup. We got drunk one night. Man, that guy can kiss.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Wow,” Sam said. “So what happened?” She always wanted to know the sordid details. Sometimes I wanted to tell her to just use her imagination.
“Not much,” Fito said. “I mean, he goes, like, ‘Let’s have a couple of beers.’ I could tell he’d already had a few. He parked the car downtown, and we go walking around after we’d drunk our beers, and I thought the guy was gonna rip my clothes off and shit. We were, like, in some alley, and then he got this text and he said he had to take off. He gave me his number, and so the next day I call him on his cell, and he’s, like, pretending nothing happened. ‘I was just drunk and shit.’ That’s what he says. Yeah, right, I say. And he goes whatever. And then I just say, ‘Laters, dude.’ So that’s what went down.”
Sam said, “He’s a selfish asshole, anyway. Thank God this high school crap is almost over. When you’re older, Fito, do you ever want to get married?”
“I don’t know. I got a lot of things to think about. I just want to get myself into college and shit. Make something of myself. Screwing around with some guy? Don’t know about that.”