Make Your Home Among Strangers (22 page)

The minute the café—in its small Styrofoam cup—and the mug filled with steamed milk arrived, I felt more at ease. The task of pouring the froth-topped espresso into the milk, of stirring in several heaping spoonfuls of sugar, of making the whole thing the right shade of creamy brown before tasting it and then adding more café—these small maneuvers consumed my attention. To anyone watching, I was a woman preparing her morning coffee, not a girl made jittery by the clang of silverware and chairs and plates around her, not one surveying the surrounding patrons in an effort to decide if she looked like she belonged there. I was doing something I'd done hundreds of times before, but I was suddenly aware of my
performance
of making café con leche, of trying to pass for what I thought I already was. I shook loose my shoulders, then watched the milk's spin die down. I poked the spoon's tip into it and lifted off the skin that formed on the surface, flicked it onto my waiting napkin. I was
camera ready
, a total pro.

My father's van pulled into a spot in the parking lot just as that first sip scorched my top lip, the roof of my mouth, my tongue. My eyes watered immediately and I tried not to cough too loudly, but the damage was done: a different waitress altogether hustled to my table and slid me a glass of water. I hadn't asked for it, and no one around me seemed to have one.

My dad was ten minutes early and no doubt banking on my own tendency to be late, so he was surprised to see me there already, table obtained, café procured and prepared, glass of water pushed to his side, a still-wrapped straw waiting beside it. I waved as he swung through the restaurant's door, a bell jingling overhead, even though he'd seen me from the parking lot; I wanted him to understand that I didn't expect him to recognize me—this young woman with better posture than he remembered who could sit alone at a restaurant and order her coffee and take care of her business.

He looked mostly the same. He wore his work clothes—a white V-neck T-shirt, stonewash jeans splattered with ancient paint—but also his gold chain and wristwatch, which meant he'd dressed up to meet me. I stopped breathing for an instant at the sight of his chin and upper lip: he'd shaved the goatee he'd sported almost every day of my life so far. The only other time I'd seen his face bare (one of my earliest memories), I clung to my mom's shirt, crying,
That's not Papi!
over and over again, cords of spit and tears soaking my mom's blouse until sections of it turned sheer. Despite years of work in the sun, he only had a few wrinkles around his eyes and only a smattering of gray hair at the temples. He looked much younger than a man with two grown daughters should look.

—I got you a water, I said when he was still a few feet away.

I pointed at it, focusing on the cup's bumpy plastic so I wouldn't have to watch him as I decided whether or not to risk looking stupid and stand to greet him. For all my earlier anger, and then my confusion at what Rafael did and didn't tell me, I had no idea how to feel now, how I should act toward my father at this moment—had no clue what I expected either of us to do. On the way to his apartment the day before, I'd hissed some challenge into the rearview mirror at every red light: So what, you're too
busy
to give us your home number? Or: You didn't have the balls to tell Mom to her
face
you were selling the house so you send some
bitch
from the
bank
—real fucking brave of you, huh? But watching Rafael's broad hands flip through the pages of the viewbook I'd hidden from everyone, out of which I'd torn an application I mailed off in secret—it mattered now, that Papi had kept it, had even moved it to his new home. When Papi's feet stopped just by my chair, I couldn't help but look up.

He stood at the edge of the table, his shirt stretched a little tight over his belly, faint yellow stains nestled near his armpits, his arms spread out wide to hug me.

—Come on, he said. And as I got up, deciding not to think and just reaching to him, my chair scratching the floor, he whispered as he squeezed me harder than he ever had, You look like
shit
.

I stayed tucked under his arm, smelling the mix of sweat and deodorant.

He clapped me on the back, squeezed me again, and then just as abruptly dropped me. As he pulled away his eyes were locked on the table, and I wondered how shitty I really looked; it seemed hard for him to face me. He scooted his chair in and pointed to my seat, as if he'd been the one here early holding this spot for us.

—Sit already! he said. When I did, he said, So what's going on? You a doctor yet?

—Ha ha, I said. Not yet.

Like any good first-generation college student, I planned to follow up my biology degree with a stint at med school, followed by whatever came after med school, followed by me opening my very own clinic back home, where I'd see everyone for free and give kids shots without making them cry. It was a good plan, one I believed in even after I heard it come from the mouth of almost every other student at the Diversity Affairs orientation meeting.

My dad's leg hopped under the table, making the water in his glass shimmy.

—Listen, he said. I know you're busy up there doing your studies and whatnot. But me too, with work. It's crazy how much I'm working these days. I mean, really crazy.

He ran his hands through his hair three times and said, I'm at five or six different jobsites in one week sometimes, so, you know, I'm not around, like …

He looked up at the lights sprouting from the bottom of a fan overhead. He shrugged. I thought of Weasel a day earlier, saying into his father's refrigerator,
You don't know where he lives?
as his brother tried to make excuses for both of us.

—I know, I said. People get busy. I'm the same. It's okay.

I smiled and he nodded and said, Good.

He picked up his menu like something was finally settled for him, and with that action, he was, somehow and suddenly, the easier parent for me to understand. A waitress with a head covered in tight curls came over and took our full order: a second café con leche, two orders of buttered Cuban toast, two plates of scrambled eggs with thin slices of fried ham chopped up and mixed in.

—¿Revuelto? she asked after I said the number of the special I wanted. She raised a painted-on eyebrow at me, like I didn't know what the word meant. It's the only way I'd ever ordered it. Sí, claro, I said.

She hustled away and within seconds, the waitress who'd brought over my café con leche swept by with a matching set of beverage-assembling supplies for my father. He mumbled a gracias to her back.

—So you get straight A's or what?

He poured the café into the milk, then streamed a line of sugar into it right from the dispenser, skipping the act of measuring it out into his spoon. In my hesitation, he looked up from the glittery trail tumbling into his cup and said, Oh no, did you
get a B
in something? He put the sugar down and laughed.

It wasn't hard to do as well as I had at my high school. Our teachers ranged from the passionate (our saviors: those who'd started off as Teach For America recruits and stuck around long past their obligatory two years) to the supernaturally lazy (those who depended on movies to kill time: for instance, our Honors World History teacher, who over the course of one nine-week grading period, between classes devoted to “silent reading” from textbooks we couldn't take home, showed us
The Ten Commandments
,
Cleopatra
, the entire Roots miniseries starring—as the teacher put it—“the guy from
Reading Rainbow
,”
Schindler's List
,
Good Morning, Vietnam
starring “the guy who was the genie in
Aladdin
,” and, for some reason,
The Fifth Element
followed immediately by
Stargate
, which was the one he'd “
meant
to show us” when he accidentally brought in
The Fifth Element
. But if you passed an AP exam with a score of three or higher (a rare occurrence at our school but something I'd done, to my own shock, for the first time in tenth grade), or if a guardian managed to show up for parent-teacher night, those were ways you could end up on the list of “good kids” I imagined the teachers circulating. I don't know when it happened, but my teachers knew me as a good student even before I'd decided to be one. It probably had to do with Leidy being a so-so presence in their classrooms, the teacher logic being that, when you have two sisters so close in age, they can't both be disappointments.

—I don't know my
official
grades yet. They get mailed out soon, I said, as if waiting for them wasn't an ordeal. But it's way harder to do good there, I said. Way, way harder.

He finished a sip of coffee and said, Oh yeah?

I didn't let much spill out. To give him the entirety of what I'd been through academically would require me to back up way too much, to admit how far I now was from his idea of me when it came to school. To tell him everything, to let so many feelings just plop onto the table, would make him so uncomfortable that I wouldn't be surprised if he left his coffee behind and walked out to his van. He'd done much worse before.

—It's really intense, I finally said. The professors – our teachers? They're like obsessed people about their subjects. They are
crazy
.

—Sounds like people here with the Ariel Hernandez bullshit, he said. Sounds like your mother.

He sipped his coffee, twisted his napkin with his free hand. I waited for a laugh, for some indication he was joking. He put the cup down and said instead, Are you in any clubs like before you went over there?

His changing the subject almost worked, as the question got me thinking about how the high school version of me had been a member or officer of almost every club our school had to offer—even, for one very misguided summer, the JV cheerleading team (I liked the exercise and the stunts but hated the idea of actually
cheering
for something; I quit after the first game of the regular season). I'd forgotten how that version of me spent most lunch periods not eating at Taco Bell with Omar, but in front of a classroom counting raised hands voting on where to go for our senior trip or on the various theme days for spirit week.
That
Lizet stayed after school every day but Friday, making banners to hang in the building's central plaza, bossing other girls around and complaining later to Omar about how nobody cared about anything, coming home with marker-smudged hands and glitter speckling my knees. I'd almost forgotten that girl. And as I tried to answer my dad, I realized I had no idea what clubs, outside of sports like Jillian's intramural softball, existed at Rawlings. There were so many flyers on the bulletin boards around campus that to me they blurred into one huge flyer advertising colored paper.

—No, I said. That's how hard it is there, that I don't even do any clubs.

He was about to ask me something else when I said, But wait, what do you mean about Mom and Ariel Hernandez?

He drank more coffee as an answer. A new waitress stopped to toss two plastic baskets filled with parchment-wrapped slabs of squashed Cuban bread on our table, her arms piled with maybe six more baskets headed for other customers. As he tried ignoring my question by ripping a hunk of tostada from his basket and shoving it into his mouth, I said, Have you – I didn't know you'd talked to her.

—I haven't, he said, chewing.

He wrapped his hands around his mug, laced his fingers together around it, each finger coming to rest in the nest of black hair on the backs of his hands. A couple of his fingernails were splitting from his habit of biting them down so severely, and lodged in the swirls of the calluses on his fingertips were smudges of what I figured was tar: when we'd hugged, I'd smelled Irish Spring soap, so the black stains filling those creases couldn't be dirt—dirt would've washed off. He swallowed the bite of tostada and said, Do you get any news up there? At your school? Like on TV?

I barely ever stopped to watch the TV in the dorm's lounge on my way in from classes—I didn't have time—but I said, Yeah.

—But do you get Univision or Telemundo up there?

His leg started to rattle under the table again.

—I don't know. Maybe? I haven't really checked.

He slid the mug close to his body. He looked at another one of the ceiling fans and said, I've seen her on some of those reports, the stuff they tape right at Ariel's house.

He shook his head at the fan and then looked back at me, right at my face.

—I've seen her on there a bunch of times, he said.

—So what? I said, though I couldn't match his stare. So she's making the best of our new neighborhood. How is that
her
fault?

I sipped my own coffee as he had, giving him space to defend himself. But he didn't hear it—the blame. He pushed flakes of bread around on the table with his pointer finger.

—That's one way to put it, he said to his plate. Forget I said anything, fine.

Him even bringing it up meant he was very, very worried about whatever he'd seen, and that made
me
worried, but I couldn't help that my instinct was to defend her: he was the reason she even lived in Little Havana now, whether I could make myself say that or not.

—Just tell her, he said. Look, just tell her to relax, okay? She needs to relax.

He ripped off another piece of bread and plunged it into his coffee. I did the same. I let the piece dissolve in my mouth, swallowed the sweet mush.

—Listen, he said, pointing a shard of bread at me, I know it's hard for her to hear what people are saying and what he's going through.
I
can barely listen to it, okay? And I was
fourteen
when I came here, so I remember more than her. She was only twelve, thirteen.