Dad didn’t much care for cold weather. He said my romance with snow existed only because I didn’t live in a place like Minnesota.
I don’t know exactly why I was standing in front of my house looking at the lights. I could see the Christmas tree twinkling in the living room. When I was a boy, Mima would hold my hand and take me outside, and we’d look at the lights. Mima always had lights all around her house, and we always sang a Christmas carol. She really liked “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” but she sang it in Latin because that’s how she’d learned it.
Dad said Latin was a dead language. I wondered about that. Why did some languages die? Sam had a theory that languages didn’t actually die. She said we killed them. “Do you know how many languages we’ve killed off in the history of the world? You kill a language off, and you kill off an entire people.” Sam, that Sam.
I decided then and there that Sam and I would print out the words in Latin and sing it to Mima this Christmas. That’s exactly what we’d do. I was almost finished with the photo book I was making. I was going to give it to her for Christmas. We could look at it together. That would be the best part.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and called her. My Aunt Evie answered the phone. “It’s good to hear your voice,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s just a regular voice from a regular guy.”
“Regular.” She laughed. “Smart-ass. You want to talk to your Mima?”
“Yeah.”
When Mima got on the phone, she sounded tired but she sounded happy, and she told me that Uncle Julian was coming for Christmas even though he’d come for Thanksgiving, and she was really happy about that. I was happy too, and happy that she was talking so much, because that was her normal self. Then she asked me what I was doing.
“I’m standing in front of my house and looking at the lights and thinking of you. That’s what I’m doing.”
I wanted to say so many things to her. I wanted to ask her about my mother, because she’d known her, and ever since Sam’s mom died, I’d begun thinking more about my own mother. It wasn’t just the letter; it was this whole thing about mothers that Sam and Fito and I had going on, and maybe that’s what we had in common, this thing with mothers who were impossible to talk to. I wanted to talk to Mima about this, but I could hear the tired in her voice. She seemed almost as far away as my dead mother, and there was nothing I could do to bring her closer. Nothing at all.
I texted Sam: Come outside with me.
Sam: It’s cold out there
Me: Please
So a few minutes later Sam was standing right beside me and we looked at the lights together. “What’s so important?” she said.
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Yeah, you’ve been doing a lot of that lately.”
“Were you mad at your mother?”
“We just had this conversation, didn’t we?”
“No. That’s not what I mean. Were you mad at her because she died?”
Sam was quiet. Then she took my hand and held it. “Yes,” she whispered. “I was fucking furious with her for dying.”
“Are you still?”
“It’s going away. But yeah, I’m still mad.”
“You know something? I think I don’t remember loving my mother because I got mad at her. For dying. I got mad at her. I think so.”
“You were three, Sally.”
“Yeah, I was three.”
She squeezed my hand. It started to snow, big flakes that fell silently to the ground.
I wondered if that’s what death sounded like. Like a snowflake falling on the ground.
Fito. Eighteen. Marcos. Adult?
“YOU GOT ME a present? Really. I mean, like a real present?” Fito said.
“What?” I was just looking at Fito. “It’s your birthday, vato. That’s, like, what people do.”
“Not in my house,” he said, wearing a shy, crooked smile. “The last time I got a present, I was, like, about five.” He just kept staring at the box.
“It’s from all of us.”
Sam pushed it across the kitchen table. “You can open it, you know.”
Fito kept looking at his present. “Nice wrapping.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That would be my handiwork. Sam doesn’t wrap. She just buys those gift bags. Me, I like to unwrap stuff.”
“How do you even know what I like? I mean, how did you—?I mean—” Fito was stumbling all over the place, tripping over his own words.
“You’ll like it,” Sam said. “I promise.”
He just kept nodding and staring at the wrapped box.
Sam did the cross-her-arms thing. “If you don’t open it, I’m gonna pop you one. I mean it.”
So finally he reached for the box. He opened it really slowly, and then he stared at it. He didn’t say anything. He just stared. He looked up at Sam and me. “You got me an iPhone? An iPhone? Wow! Wow! Man, oh man.” Then he got real quiet. “Look, guys . . . Man, I can’t take this. Man, this is just way too nice. I can’t take this. I mean, I can’t.”
Sam gave him one of those looks. “Yeah, you can.”
“See, I can’t because, you know, it’s like—”
“Just take it,” I said. “You need a phone.”
I looked up and noticed that my father had been watching us.
“Yeah, but I was gonna get one at Walmart for sixty bucks. You know, like the one that died.” Then Fito kept shaking his head. “Look, I’m really sorry. I just can’t take this. It’s not right.”
My dad took a seat at the table. He took the iPhone out of its fancy white box. He held it in his hand. “These things are really light these days,” he said. “You like baseball, Fito?”
“Yeah, I love baseball.”
“You know, Fito, some people believe from the start that things belong to them. My father used to say, ‘Some people are born on third base, and they go through life thinking they hit a triple.’”
Fito laughed. “I like that.”
My dad nodded. “Yeah. Fito, you’re not one of those people. A guy like you was born in the locker room, no one ever pointed you in the direction of the baseball diamond, and somehow you managed to get yourself into the dugout. And something in you just doesn’t believe he belongs in the game. But you do, you do belong in the game. One of these days you’re going to be up at bat. And you’re going to hit it out of the ballpark. Anyway, that’s what I think. I’m gonna go outside and have a cigarette.”
The three of us sat there. Fito pushed the phone away, and it sat in the middle of the table. “Your dad is really cool, you know. Super cool. He’s nice. But—”
Sam stopped him dead in his tracks. “Oh, you think he thinks these things about you because he’s a nice guy. Maybe you’re a nice guy too. Maybe you deserve more than the shit you’ve been given most of your life.”
“Yeah,” I said, “don’t you get that, Fito?”
He was biting his lip, and then he sort of pulled at his hair.
“Fito,” I said. “This is a present we got you for your fucking birthday. And if you don’t take it, I’m gonna kick your ass. I mean it. I’m gonna lay you out flat.”
Fito nodded. He slowly reached for the phone, took it in his hand, and stared at it. “I never know what to do when people are nice to me.”
“All you gotta do, Fito, is say thank you.”
“Thank you,” he whispered.