“Me.”
“Me is they?”
“Yes.”
“See, there, you’ve managed to interrupt me. You’re always doing that.”
“Look, you’re always interrupting yourself, vato.”
I liked when she called me vato. It was way better than “dude.” And it meant she respected me. “What was I talking about?” I said.
“You were waxing eloquent about your dad.”
“You’re starting to talk like the last book you read.”
“So fucking what. At least I know how to read.”
“Stop cussing.”
“Stop judging and get on with whatever you were going to say about your dad.”
“I’m not judging.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Okay. Okay. My dad? See, my theory is that most people love their parents. Not all, but most. But sometimes some parents aren’t very likable, so their kids don’t like them. That’s only logical. Or sometimes it’s the kids who aren’t likable. It’s damned hard to talk to someone if you don’t like them—?even if that someone is your father or your mother.”
“I totally get that.”
Sometimes Sam really did get what I was saying. And sometimes I knew exactly what she was going to say next.
“I don’t like Sylvia at all. She is the most unlikable mother on the planet.” Sam called her mother by her first name. But only behind her back. Hmm.
“No,” I said. “Fito’s mother is the most unlikable mother on planet Earth.”
“Really? And you know this because?”
“I met her once. She’s a meth head.”
“So she has a problem. No bueno. But—”
I interrupted her. “There’s always a but when you’re losing an argument.”
“I was about to say that comparisons are odious.”
“Yeah, yeah, odious. A spelling bee word. A word you got from the new book you’re reading.”
“Shut up. And I do have a horrible mother.”
I really felt bad for Sam. Maybe someday something would happen and Sam and Sylvia would have what Dad and I had. Maybe. I hoped so.
Fights. Fists. Shoes.
ON THE THIRD day of school I punched another guy. I mean, it just happened. Sam always said, Nothing just happens. I tried to keep her voice out of my head. See, I was walking toward the Circle K before school to buy me a Coke. I was in the mood for one. So this guy in the parking lot gives me this shit-eating grin and calls me a pinche gringo.
“Don’t call me that again,” I said. And then he did it: he called me that again.
So I punched him. No thinking involved, just a reflex. Punched him right in the stomach—?and there was that rush of adrenaline running through my veins all the way to my heart.
I watched him as he bent over in pain. Part of me wanted to say I was sorry. But deep down I knew I wasn’t sorry.
I stood there. Numb.
Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Fito pulling me away. I kept staring at my fist, as if it belonged to someone else. “What’s up with you, Sal? When did you start beating up on people? One day you’re this really nice guy, and—?well, I never took you for that kind of guy.”
“What kind of guy?”
“Peace out, Sal.”
I didn’t say anything. I felt nothing.
And I was shaking.
And then this thought entered my head. Maybe the kind of guy I was, well, maybe I was like someone I didn’t know. You know, the guy I’d never met whose genes I had.
I walked over to pick up Sam. She was at the door waiting for me. “You’re late.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re never late.”
“I am today.”
She gave me one of her suspicious looks. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Which means you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
She gave me one of her I’m-going-to-let-you-off-the-hook smiles. It meant she was going to change the subject. Not that she wouldn’t come back to it at a later date. Sam wasn’t the kind of girl to let things go. At best she gave you a reprieve. I was glad she was in a reprieve sort of mood. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” Then she pointed down. “How do you like my shoes?”
“Love them.”
“Liar.”
“They’re very pink.”
“Snark.”
“Why do you have so many shoes?”
“A girl can’t have too many pairs of shoes.”
“A girl? Or just you?”
“It’s a gender thing. Don’t you get that?”
“Gender, gender,” I said. I don’t know, but she must have heard something in my voice.
“Something’s going on with you.”
“Shoes,” I said.
“Shoes, my ass,” she said.
Mima
SAM AND I, we’re always telling each other stories, stories of what happened to us, stories about other people, stories about my dad and her mom. Maybe that’s how we explained things to each other—?or to ourselves.
Mima. She was the best storyteller ever. Her stories were about real things—?not like the crap stories I heard in the hallways of El Paso High. Some stories, well, they were closer to lies.
But Mima’s stories were as real as anything, as real as the leaves on her mulberry tree. I hear her voice all the time, telling me her stories: “When I was a girl, I used to pick cotton. I worked alongside my mother and my brothers and sisters. At the end of the day I was so tired I would just fall into bed. My skin was burned. My hands were scratched. And my back felt as though it was going to break.”
She told me about how the world used to be, about the world she grew up in, a world that was almost gone. “The world has changed,” she said. There was a lot of sadness in her voice when she told me that.
Once, Mima drove me out to a farm. I must have been about seven. She taught me how to pick tomatoes and jalape?os. She pointed to the onion fields. “Now, that’s work.” She knew a lot about that word. I don’t think I knew anything about work. It wasn’t a word I’d met yet.
That day, when we were picking tomatoes, she told me the story about her shoes: “When I was in the sixth grade, I left my shoes on the bank of the ditch so I could go swimming with my friends. And then they were just gone. Someone had stolen them. I cried. Oh, I really cried. It was my only pair of shoes.”
“You only had one pair of shoes, Mima?”
“Only one pair. That’s all I had. So I went to school barefoot for a week. I had to wait until my mother gathered enough money to buy me a new pair.”
“You went to school barefoot? That’s cool, Mima.”
“No, that wasn’t so cool,” she said. “It just meant that there were a lot of poor people.”
Mima says we are what we remember.
She told me about the day my dad was born. “Your father was very small. He almost fit in a shoebox.”
“Is that really true, Mima?”
“Yes. And just after he came into the world, I was holding him in my arms and it started raining outside. We were in the middle of a drought, and it hadn’t rained for months and months and months. And that’s when I knew that your father was like the rain. He was a miracle.”
I love what she remembers.
I thought about telling Sam the story of Mima’s shoes. I decided against it. She would say something like You’re only telling me that story to make me feel guilty.?And she would probably be right.