December 27, 2008
Toby
A migraine hangover is preferable to a migraine, but the world is hazy and slow. It’s 10 a.m. so I shuffle to the kitchen, hungry, and eat a piece of toast and a banana. I dress in gray sweatpants and a cherry red UNM pullover. I stand in front of the mirror staring at my mustache, shaving cream in one hand and a razor in the other. Saved by a knock at the door, I set both down.
A FedEx guy with a clipboard asks me to sign for something. He hands me an envelope and walks away. The return address is the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility.
I tear away the thin strip of cardboard to open the envelope. Inside is a single sheet of paper, which I pull out and read.
Dear Tobias Delgado,
I regret to inform you that Ricardo Delgado died of natural causes on December 24th in his cell in the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility. You are listed as his next of kin. His body has been released to a mortuary and must be claimed at your earliest convenience as disposition must be made as provided by law within 24 hours. Personal items will be stored for one week from the date of death. We extend our sympathies for your loss.
I read the letter three times, standing in the doorway with the door still open.
“Hi, Toby.” I lift my head upward. JerryAnn stands a few feet away on the second story entrance to my apartment complex. If I hadn’t discovered my dad died a few days ago, her arrival would have surprised me, but as it is, my mind swims with questions. Has my dad been alive all this time? Why is JerryAnn here? Why didn’t Mom ever tell me about my father? How does JerryAnn know where I live? What did my dad do to land behind bars? What does JerryAnn want?
I look down at the letter. My life is a lie. My dad didn’t die when I was a baby. He was a convicted criminal living a few minutes away.
JerryAnn moves closer. “Are you okay?”
Did Mom visit my father while he was in prison? Did she love him? Why didn’t she tell me about him when she was dying? I don’t look up. “No, I’m not okay.”
JerryAnn moves closer. She smells good, and a general glow of contentment wafts from her direction, and it aggravates me. She’s happy, and my life is a lie.
“I just got a letter telling me my dad died.”
She scrunches her eyebrows and pulls her head back. “I thought he died when you were a baby.”
“So did I.” I hand her the letter, which she reads while I step inside my apartment to cover my sockless feet and grab my wallet and car keys. I shouldn’t be driving because a migraine hangover slows my reflexes. I sit on the couch and slip on my sneakers.
JerryAnn finishes reading, steps inside my apartment, and looks around. “Your apartment is a shrine to you and your mom.” There are photos of us littered across every wall. “No wonder you miss her. “
Maybe it’s a criticism, maybe it’s not. I don’t know or care what JerryAnn thinks either way. My dad died, and I need answers. “Could you drive me to the Central New Mexico Correctional Facility?” Rose would drive me, but after last night and my migraine-induced judgments about her brothers, I’m not ready to tell her about my dad. Besides, JerryAnn is here.
JerryAnn’s fingers fidget in front of her. “My car broke down. I got a ride here.”
I tighten the laces on my right shoe and look up. “Why?” Why would she get a ride to come see me? JerryAnn’s face turns rosy. She’s wearing the shirt I told her she looked pretty wearing, the green one that makes her eyes bigger and brighter. She’s wearing makeup. Her hair is down, softly curled. I’ve never seen her hair curled. I work on my shoelaces.
“I just thought…” JerryAnn’s sentence lingers unfinished while I tie my shoe. “I thought after you texted last night I should come see you.” Her words are shaky and nervous, and she hasn’t stopped inspecting her cuticles.
“Texted you?” I don’t know what she’s talking about. I remember the car ride, the vomiting, Rose and me confessing our love for each other. “I didn't text you."
JerryAnn steps back, surprised. She drops her hands, her cuticles no longer fascinating, and her happiness falls to the floor like a bad souffle. Rose would never make a bad souffle. JerryAnn fakes a smile.
And then I remember. She called. “Sorry I missed your call. I had a migraine.” I stand, walk to the kitchen counter and pick up my cell phone. “I was going to call or text today, but I haven’t gotten around to it.” I tuck my phone in my back pocket. “Migraines turn me into an idiot.”
I shake my head. “Would you mind driving me in my car?” I walk toward JerryAnn and the door.
She nods. “No problem.”
I toss JerryAnn the keys.
The prison is twenty minutes away, in Los Lunas, where I was last night with Rose and her family. On the drive, JerryAnn doesn’t make small talk. We’re almost there when she breaks the silence. The radio isn’t on, and my mind is churning. What did my dad do to land in prison? Am I like him? Was staying away from me his idea or Mom’s? What was he like? My feelings flip from anger at my mother to grief at her loss, anger at my father and grief at his loss, and confusion over the grief and anger I feel for a man I never knew. I rub my face with my hands.
JerryAnn pulls into the parking area. “Do you want me to come in with you?” Her words are quiet and kind.
I open the door, step out of the car, and turn to face her. “I should do this alone.”
She nods, half-smiles. I shut the door and head inside. I talk with five different people before I’m given my dad’s possessions, which fit inside a large manila envelope. Not fifteen minutes have passed before I head back to my car, where JerryAnn still sits in the driver’s seat.
I open her door. “I’ll drive home. I’m feeling better.” I may be exaggerating my recovery, but the envelope in my hand is a burden I don’t want.
JerryAnn nods and steps out of the car. She stalls a second in front of me but doesn’t speak. I open her door for her and then get back in my seat, adjust it so my legs reach the pedals, start the engine, and drive away. The envelope sits on my lap, heavy and ominous. I lift it off my lap and set it on JerryAnn’s. “Please, open it.”
“Are you sure?” She’s gazing at me. Does she see me differently? My dad’s a criminal. Will Rose see me differently? Do I see myself differently?
Rose’s words about Mom sheltering me are more true than I’d imagined, and I vacillate between resentment and gratitude for my mother. “Yeah, I’m sure. Open it.”
JerryAnn breaks the seal and dumps the contents onto her lap. There’s a wallet, well-worn and thin, a few books—the Bible, a legal thriller—both as worn as the wallet. What catches my eye are the five-by-seven photos of Mom and me, the same ones hanging on my apartment walls, one taken every year since I was a baby until I graduated from high school. I try to keep my attention on the road, but my eyes sting. He must have loved us enough to treasure these photographs. Mom must have loved him enough to send them, and I feel like a trespasser in my own life. How could they have left me out?
JerryAnn is silent, flipping through a stapled bunch of papers within the envelope. I wipe away some tears, “Does any of that explain why my dad was in prison?” My throat catches. Like a wuss. I know how JerryAnn feels about men crying, but I don’t care.
She skims through a few pages, stops, and clears her throat. “Robbery and double homicide,” she says, whispering to soften the blow as if saying it quietly lessens the horror of learning your dad was a thief and killer. She reads his paperwork aloud, and I absorb it all. Dad was an immigrant who became a drug addict and murdered two people at a convenience store when they wouldn’t give him cash to score his next fix.
I don’t say anything, just nod my head. Would I have loved him? Would I have wanted to know him? Dad was always a hero, larger than life in my mind. I’d pictured him stepping in when I was bullied. I’d envisioned a better life for Mom and me if he’d lived, but I’d never pictured him alive, twenty minutes away, in prison, staring at photographs of us.
“Do you want me to drive?” JerryAnn asks as little rivers slip down my cheeks.
“No.” I drive past my turn and head to JerryAnn’s without asking her if that’s where she wants to go. JerryAnn sits beside me and reads about my dad. I should be angry that she knows more about him than I do, but then she reads the highlights aloud, and I’m relieved she’s sharing the burden with me.
As I turn onto Montgomery, I clear my throat while JerryAnn flips a page. “I need to tell you something.” I need to tell her to leave me alone, but JerryAnn is peering down at the documents in her hands, and I don’t want her to go away, not now or ever. I wait for her to look over at me, but there’s a shift of energy in the car.
Here I am ready to tell her Rose and I are serious, that this is the final goodbye, that she was right, I’m too short for her, we’re not right for each other, and we don’t fit. I have a lot to say, but instead a melody takes shape in my head, and JerryAnn has lightened the weight I’ve been carrying.
JerryAnn’s laughing, and her laughter cuts the tension into confetti. Her eyes lift from the pages in her hand. I should be livid when a laugh bursts from her mouth followed by, “I’m sorry.”
But I’m not mad. I smile as she takes a deep breath and tries to look serious. “It’s not funny. It’s not.” She turns the paper in her hands over to me. “It’s just…” She points at Dad’s photograph. “Look at that ’stache!”
She’s right, it’s not funny. It’s my dad, roughly the age I am now, and with an outstanding mustache, but it’s not just my dad—it’s me. The resemblance is uncanny. The only picture I’ve seen of him is a wedding photo, with Mom in her big poufy dress. This is a mugshot, a close up. We could be brothers.
The light turns green, and I look at Dad, and then at JerryAnn, who snorts. A laugh tears from my throat and doesn’t end until we’re at JerryAnn’s complex. Rose’s car is in the middle school parking lot, so I drive around to the back of JerryAnn’s building.
This is it. I need to tell JerryAnn to leave me alone, but I want to keep her and Rose. JerryAnn stops laughing as I reach for the envelope and Dad’s personal effects, but then think better of it. I don’t see how to grab everything without touching JerryAnn, and JerryAnn’s touch does things to me.
I step out of the car, stand up on the curb parallel to the passenger side, and open JerryAnn’s door. She’s placing everything back in the envelope. At the same moment I reach for the envelope, she stands and our faces are close. With me standing on the curb, we’re the same height.
JerryAnn puts her free hand behind my head and pulls my lips into hers.
Migraine hangovers mess with my reaction time, and I’d like to blame that for my inability to pull away, but I can’t. JerryAnn’s kiss paralyzes me. The melody in my mind comes to a loud crescendo, and it’s “Take My Breath Away” by Berlin.
I taste every moment JerryAnn and I have shared, every touch, every laugh. Her lips are tender, sensitive, unsure. Her kiss tastes delicious. Her tentative lips become insistent, desperate. It takes all my self-control not to kiss her back. Her kiss tastes new…and at the same time familiar.
She tastes like love.
My eyes burst open, and I pull away. I can’t look at her, afraid if I do I’ll fall back into the trap that is JerryAnn, the same trap I fall into every time we’re together. “What are you doing?” My voice is hoarse and breathless with longing.
JerryAnn doesn’t say anything, and I avoid her eyes. She shrugs. A kiss like that and she shrugs?
I’m shaken to my core. I love Rose, and I love kissing Rose, but our kisses have never felt like that, like worlds revolve around us, like an explosion, like I’m breathless. “Why do you keep doing this to me?” I don’t expect her to answer. It’s what she does, what she’s always done—mess with me. She shrugs, and I shake my head. “The bigger question is, why do I keep doing this to myself?”
I grab the envelope from JerryAnn’s hand, careful not to touch her. “Rose and I are serious, and you can’t just show up and…” I can’t talk about the kiss. Acknowledging it will make it real, but it wasn’t real. It was a mistake, a lapse in judgment. “Look. Thanks for driving me, I appreciate it, but you need to stay away from me.”
It’s lunchtime when I step inside my apartment, but I’m not hungry. I throw the envelope containing my father’s effects on the kitchen table and study my apartment, the pictures on the walls, Mom’s hand-sewn couch covers, Gordita sleeping in front of the stove. “I can’t live here anymore.” Gordita stretches.
In less than an hour, I’ve removed all the photos from the walls and torn Mom’s room apart. A second-hand store will be thrilled with the hand-sewn, outdated, and clearance fashions in a petite women’s size sixteen. I have no boxes, so I throw everything on Mom’s bed, and Gordita nestles into her stuff.
Mom’s wedding ring sits on her dresser where I left it. She never took it off until she was in the hospital, dying, and by then, it wasn’t easy to remove. A nurse rubbed medical lubricant on her finger to finally get it to budge. Mom took my hand in hers, put the ring in my palm, and said, “Encuentra una mujercita latina. Cásate con ella. Cuidar de ella. Ser Feliz .” Find a little Latina woman. Marry her. Take care of her. Be happy.
She closed her eyes, and I panicked, shook her, called out to her.
The nurse laughed. “She wants those to be her dying words.” She checked Mom’s vitals and gave me a somewhat apologetic look. “She’s not dead.”
I slapped Mom on the arm, and her laughter shook the hospital bed. She passed away a few days later. Her last words were, “Come algo.” Eat something.
I’m finding it hard to be angry at Mom, but she didn’t just tell me one lie. She’d told me a lifetime of lies. I thought Dad was a fireman. In the mirror above Mom’s dresser, I see my face, but I also see my dad’s face, and I definitely see his mustache.
Slipping the ring into my pocket, I head for the bathroom. My razor and shaving cream still sit next to the sink.
I shave off my mustache.
My front door creaks. “Hola,” Rose yells from the entry. “What is going on?” The apartment is a disaster. “Toby? This is your place, right?”
“Yeah, just a minute.” I hardly recognize my reflection. “I’m in the bathroom.” I’m unrecognizable, but I’ve always wanted someone to love who loves me in return, and I have that in Rose. She’s Mom’s almost dying wish. We fit. We’re perfect for each other.
Before I open the bathroom door, I rub the ring between my fingers.
I could do worse.