Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (62 page)

By dusk, Lourdes’s
pasteles
covered the counters and table. She counted them aloud like a child newly confident with numbers—sixty-seven altogether—and said contentedly, “I’m gonna smoke me a cigarette.” Her fingers were stained from the
achiote.
One of her favorite songs, “Suave,” came on the radio. She took two
pasteles
and held them elegantly in her swollen hands, as though she were releasing little birds. “When I danced, there was always a circle around me,” she recalled wistfully. Now she lacked the optimism for dancing: “Why did God take away from me the one thing that I loved the most?”

A male voice beckoned to her from outside. Lourdes popped her head between the curtains. A workingman stood beneath her window, wearing coveralls.
“Esa comida que huele tan rica, es para vender?”
he asked politely. Was the good food he was smelling for sale? She answered, “The food is for my childrens.” His wife had no talent for
pasteles,
he explained—she was Panamanian—would Lourdes teach his wife some afternoon? After he left, Lourdes smiled pityingly. Her food was unique, her creation, like a baby—specifically hers to give. “That’s what I’m proud of,” Lourdes said. “Whoever tasted my food always come back for more. What
you
have made, not what anybody
else
have made.”

Another Christmas was approaching. Cesar had been transferred to a facility only ninety miles away. She sensed the potential of the move, even if Cesar hadn’t yet; he was closer to home, one step nearer family. “God does the right thing, in his own time,” Lourdes said. Giselle had promised to bring him some of Lourdes’s
pasteles
on their next trailer. And Jessica would be home in time for the holidays.

It would be hard to keep the
pasteles
safe once the word got out. Lourdes neatly stacked them in the freezer. Her delicacies filled it up.

Following her evacuation from the flea-infested house on the hill, Coco reapplied for Section 8 certification and also for public housing. (Part of the application asked her to write an essay, “Why I Want to Live in Public Housing.” “Because I’m homeless,” Coco wrote.) She and the girls shuttled between Hector’s and Iris’s to give each host a break.

Coco felt bad about imposing: the timing seemed especially bad. Hector had just started working. He was also housing Iris’s mother, who had been moving house to house in the years since her release from prison; Iris’s sister and toddler; Platinum and her son; and Hector had the new baby on the way. His two-bedroom apartment didn’t have much furniture yet—only two beds, which people used in shifts. Coco was sensitive to the strained language of worn-out welcomes—exasperation with
the naturally unruly ways of children, observations about the shrinking food (“I just
bought
soda”), the way Hector spoke of his new van as if it were a human being (“It needs a rest”). Luckily, Hector Jr., who was four, qualified for SSI. He was hyperactive, which worried his parents, but the first SSI check—which included retroactive payments for all the months it had taken for processing—had paid for the secondhand van. The van made it possible for Hector to take a job packing fruit at night. Troy’s limited bus service often made evening jobs prohibitive. Soon, Hector got Frankie hired, and the two rode together to work.

Coco’s sister’s apartment was uncomfortable in a different way. Iris had just started college and was struggling to keep up with her course work along with her household obligations; Armando had agreed to let her enroll only as long as their home life remained unaffected. She was dog-tired, Armando could be impatient and humorless, and Coco’s presence meant five more mouths to feed. Iris and Armando’s six-year-old daughter, Brandi, loved Nikki, which made Mercedes jealous. Nautica regularly balked when it was time for the tub, but the battle seemed louder in Iris’s house. There was never music on. The TV was, and Armando wanted the children to hush so he could hear it, and he regularly ordered them upstairs to play. Iris’s children had two sets of identical toys—one for display, one to play with—and Iris noticed if the display set had been touched. Pearl fussed at night and gasped and puked during the daytime; Coco had run out of her medicine. Armando made Coco take every diaper to the trash outdoors because he hated the smell. Coco said nothing, but she felt unwelcome.

Galvanized, Coco applied for several jobs and got hired by the deli at Price Chopper, slicing meat. At times of crisis, there was no denying that her family could not carry her, much as they tried to help. She’d moved to Thorpe House after Cesar’s arrest, while pregnant; she’d relocated to Troy in the middle of the upheaval with Pearl; now, homeless again, she rallied herself to work. Dire need cut through the chaos, much as the anticipation of a lover heightened an otherwise boring afternoon on the street. The greater challenge was surviving the daily grind.

Price Chopper paid $5.14 an hour. Coco spent the evening before her very first shift cradling Pearl in the emergency room. The night cracked open into day. In the mornings, Troy’s streets could seem almost unbearably bleak. It may have been the abandoned tenements, or the forties bottles emptied of beer and filled with pee, or the boarded-up doors, or the cars whirring by. Coco hadn’t slept, and the world filtered in around the edges of her exhaustion. She quietly dressed her girls in the morning dark
of Iris’s house. She walked them around the corner, to River Street, and stood at the bus stop in front of a Laundromat. She was shorter than some of the kids.

Coco had witnessed gunfire on the same block a year earlier. She and Mercedes and Frankie had been waiting for the bus home after Sunday dinner at Iris’s. Two white boys robbed a Spanish man at the River Street Store and were firing as they ran out; Frankie had been in the store when the shooting started, but somehow he was suddenly next to Coco and Mercedes, covering them and flagging down a car and ushering them into the backseat. The driver recognized Frankie from the neighborhood and delivered them to the relative safety of Corliss Park. This morning, though, the block was tranquil, and amid the sounds of the mundane world, the future presented itself through a cloud of bus exhaust. Coco spotted a sign in a broken window of a first-floor tenement across the street—
Apartment for Rent.

The intersection of River and 101st Streets was at the heart of Troy’s growing ghetto, the place where the migrants from the big city and the stalwart residents of the now-poor part of the small city mixed. Hip-hop clashed with the heavy metal that wafted from the windows of the cars idling at the traffic light. Row houses that had once belonged to white working-class families had been hacked up into rentals, drywalled, and painted in ugly colors for the working and unemployed poor, who were white, Puerto Rican, and black.

Milagros urged Coco to keep looking in other neighborhoods. River Street was no place for growing girls. It was a known drug spot. “It’s not as if I have a choice,” Coco huffed. What were her options, exactly? Other people’s floors? Homelessness made her private business public; everyone had opinions about how she raised her kids, whether or not they spoke them. And what kind of mother would she be if her girls were homeless for the holidays? Having no apartment made any apartment look good. Coco said, “The store is right across the street. The bus stop is there. The rent is three-fifty, so all I think about is that.”

The glass in the bay window, shattered from another shooting that had driven out the previous tenants, could be replaced—perfect to show off her Christmas tree. Coco already envisioned a backyard with her daughters playing and ignored the actual crumbling square of tar with its mangled shopping cart and trail of gnawed chicken meat. The two empty units above her, one of which had burned and still smelled faintly of smoke, meant no nosy neighbors—no one judging what they
couldn’t know, eyeing Frankie’s friends, calling the police. The girls didn’t have to transfer schools. The store had a pay phone she could use when the telephone company cut off her service, and Iris lived around the block. While Coco waited for the Section 8 inspector to approve the apartment, she and Hector snuck back into the condemned house on the hill to retrieve some pots, pans, and clothes.

Coco kept a close eye on Mercedes and looked for any change in Mercedes’s feelings about Frankie, whose return from Hector’s was imminent. Coco didn’t want her daughters to put up with what she had from men, but the best example she offered was her willingness to point out her own weaknesses and hypocrisies. Girls were surrounded by women who ignored the contradictions between what they said and what they did. Women routinely made grand pronouncements about all they wouldn’t tolerate, but the particulars were another thing entirely. Women didn’t ask questions of men in public directly, unless they were angry, and then the questions weren’t really questions but indictments that called attention to their own wounds. Iris asked Armando’s permission to lend Coco money or give her a lift, and every night—whether or not she actually did—Frankie expected Coco to cook. And Coco had her moments of defiance: at family gatherings, instead of serving the men, the children were the first to get their plates of food.

Mercedes believed in Coco’s best self, and when she recited Coco’s ideals back to her mother, the old refrains would strike Coco anew. But the idealism required vigilance. Mercedes cautioned her mother about spending too much money on birthday presents for other people’s children and reminded her, when the house swelled, that they didn’t have enough food to feed everyone. Mercedes publicly rebuffed the guests whom her mother privately scorned (“How come you always show up right when we about to eat?” Mercedes asked Platinum once). If Coco talked about putting $50 toward new outfits for her daughters on layaway, Mercedes would discourage her, advising instead, “Fifty to the house, not to us.” Yet it was Coco’s awareness of Mercedes’s dissatisfaction with Frankie that had become the focal point of their relationship. “I’m not going to give you what you want, but I am going to listen to what you want,” her mother would say.

While Coco settled into her new apartment, Cesar settled into his latest prison. He’d emerged from the grueling five-month stint in the box weakened, enraged, and somewhat dazed. He and Giselle had undergone
a period of estrangement, but she wanted to salvage the marriage. She believed in the relationship with a faith he could not imagine for himself. Cesar loved her and knew he needed her, but he still felt at a crossroads between need and his pride. It had been over a year since he’d seen any of his children. Coco’s letters filled his head with only more problems—usually, complaints about Mercedes, who was getting into trouble at school and upsetting Coco whenever she talked about boys.

Cesar’s avalanche of trouble did, however, create a pocket of opportunity. The latest addition to his institutional file labeled him as depressive—“violent-suicidal type”—and the categorization merited something called a double-bunk override. A double-bunk override was a coveted stigma in the crowded prison system, rather like SSI. Cesar was assigned his own cell.