I knew he was smiling. He knew I was smiling too. He just kept working. And then he asked me something he’d never asked before. “Do you ever wonder about your real father, Salvie?” He didn’t stop painting, and I couldn’t see his face.
As I sat down on his old leather chair, I heard myself say, “You’re my real father—?and yes, I wonder about you all the time.”
The light in the room made his messy salt-and-pepper hair look like it was on fire. He stopped painting for just a moment, and I wondered about the look he was wearing right then. I knew that what I’d just said made him happy. Then he just continued painting in silence. I let him be. Sometimes you have to let people have their own space—?even when you are in the same room with them. He taught me that, my dad. He taught me almost everything I know.
I didn’t remember a time when my dad wasn’t around. And there was a reason for that: He had always been around. He was there when I was born. He was with my mom in the hospital. He was her coach. He witnessed me coming into the world. That’s the word he uses. He says, “I was there to witness the whole beautiful thing.”
So he was there from the very beginning.
This is the thing. The truth is, I did sometimes wonder about my real father, especially lately for some reason. And I felt like a traitor. I’d lied to Dad just then. Suppose it was half a lie. Call it a half-truth. If something was half a lie, it was just a lie. Period.
Mima and Sam
MIMA REALLY LIKED Sam. And Sam really liked Mima.
When we were little, sometimes Mima would spend the weekend and take care of us when Dad was away at one of his out-of-town art shows. She was great with Sam. I had always liked to watch the two of them together.
I was on the phone with Mima. It made her feel good when I called. It made me feel good too. What did we talk about? Anything. Didn’t matter. She asked me about Sam.
“She likes shoes,” I said.
“She’s a girl,” Mima said. “Some girls are like that. But she’s a good girl.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but she likes bad boys, Mima.”
“Well, your Popo was a bad boy when he was young.”
“And you still married him?”
“Yes. He was beautiful. I knew he was a good man even though a lot of other people didn’t think so. I knew what I saw in him. He settled down.”
My memories of my grandfather didn’t include the phrase settled down. “I just worry about Sam sometimes,” I said.
“If you’re so worried, why aren’t you her boyfriend?”
“It’s not like that, Mima. She’s my best friend.”
“Isn’t your best friend supposed to be a boy?”
“Well, Mima,” I said, “I don’t think it really matters if your best friend is a boy or a girl. As long as you have a best friend. And anyway, girls are nicer than boys.”
Somehow I could tell Mima was smiling.
The Letter
SATURDAY. I WAS all about Saturdays.
My dad walked into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. He didn’t look at the newspaper—?which was weird. My dad was a creature of habit. He had his daily rituals. Coffee and the morning newspaper. He didn’t read newspapers online. He was old-school. He wore Chuck Taylors, black high-tops. He wore 501s and khakis—?pleated with cuffs. And he wore thin ties. Always. Old-school all the way. On Sundays he read the New York Times—?that was definitely one of his things. But on this day Dad didn’t even look at the paper. He was petting Maggie, but he didn’t seem to be in the room. He had a very serious look on his face. Serious, not in a bad way.
Finally Dad nodded. I knew he’d been having a conversation with himself and he’d settled some kind of debate. He got up from the table, leaving his coffee behind. Maggie followed him. A few minutes later, Maggie and Dad appeared back in the room. He was holding an envelope in his hand. “Here,” he said. “I think it’s time I gave you this.”
I took the envelope. My name was written on the front in neat and deliberate handwriting. It wasn’t Dad’s handwriting. Dad scrawled. I stared at my name. “What’s this?”
“It’s a letter from your mother.”
“A letter from my mother?”
“She wrote it to you just before she died. She said she wanted me to give it to you when I felt it was the right time.” He had that I-think-I’ll-have-a-cigarette look on his face. He smoked sometimes. Not very much. He kept his cigarettes in the freezer so they wouldn’t go stale. “I think this is the right time,” he said.
I kept staring at my mother’s handwriting. I didn’t say anything.
My dad took his cigarettes out of the freezer, removed one, and fished his lighter out of the drawer where he kept it. “Let’s have a cig,” he said. Not that he’d ever let me smoke. It was just an invitation for me to sit on the back steps with him.
Maggie followed us outside. Maggie was like me—?she didn’t like feeling left out. I watched Dad light his cigarette. “You can read it when you’re ready,” he said. “It’s up to you now, Salvie.”
He leaned toward me and nudged me with his shoulder as we sat there.
“This is freaking me out,” I said. “I mean, a letter from your dead mother would freak anyone out.”
“Well, your mother—” He stopped. “She didn’t write it to freak you out, son.”
“I know,” I said.
“You don’t have to read it right away.”
“So, if I don’t have to read it right away, why give it to me now?”
“Should I have waited till you were in college? Till you were thirty? When is the right time for anything? Who knows? Living is an art, not a science. Besides, I promised your mother I’d give it to you.”
“You made a lot of promises to her, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did, Salvie.”
“And you’ve kept your promises, haven’t you?”
“Every damn one of them.” He took a drag from his cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose.
“Were they hard to keep? All those promises?”
“Some of them.”
“You want to tell me about them?”
“Someday.”
That wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for. I looked at my dad. He was grinning. “Well, there is one promise that was easy to keep.”
“Which one was that?”
“I promised her I’d love you. I promised her I’d keep you safe. That was the easy one.”
“Sometimes I’m a lot of trouble.”
“No,” he said. “You were never trouble. Not ever.”
“Well, I did almost break Enrique Infante’s nose. And there was that rock I threw and broke Mrs. Castro’s window. And then there was that phase when I loved killing lizards.” I wasn’t going to tell him that I broke Mrs. Castro’s window on purpose. She was mean.
Dad laughed. “Yeah, the killing-lizards thing. You were just a boy.”
“But I liked killing them. Remember when you caught me and we had a little funeral for the poor dead lizard?”
“Yeah.”
“Your way of telling me to knock it off.”