Chapter 9
LEO
I HANG UP THE PHONE, hating the sound of my voice.
I don’t sound like an adult or even a Tejano—just a needy, nasal, rootless kid.
With April watching, I feel too known, too seen, too small for my body, too old for my age.
I don’t want to think about the message I just left for my aunt and uncle, their voicemail recording the same as it’s been my whole life.
Hola, you found Nacho and Izzy! Leave a message.
Beep. Pause. Just kidding! Beep. Laughter. Kidding again. Real beep.
April wants me to reconnect with family before the wedding.
I agreed to call Nacho and Izzy, but I won’t try to contact my parents, who sent me away at seven years old and haven’t been in touch since.
I won’t track down two strangers who have no interest in me.
I don’t know where they are or whether they’re together.
I would have to ask Nacho, who was never fond of his sister, especially after she pawned off her kid on him.
I left my number on their voicemail, the time and place of the wedding.
Hoping to change the subject, I ask April, “What should we do for dinner?”
Between school and then meeting with Jonathan this afternoon, we didn’t get a chance to make evening plans. And though I’m always willing to cook something from my small rotation in my cramped apartment kitchen, April suggests, “My folks’ house?”
I love going over to Lexington Avenue. Cameron is there, Josie is currently home for the summer, and the Russos are somehow endlessly happy to add people for meals.
Plus, it’s like a miniature road trip where April and I get to talk or blare music with the windows down, her hair whipping at her face until she piles it on top of her head and keeps singing.
“That sounds good,” I tell her.
She texts her mom as I shrug into a button-up, slip on my good shoes, and skim a razor across my face. I’m still trying to prove myself.
An hour later, we swing open the front door to the unalarming sound of Josie sobbing. April raises her eyebrows, so I kiss patience into the top of her head before we call out, “Hello?”
From the kitchen, Deb hollers, “Well, if it isn’t my two favorite kids!”
Deb’s “favorite kid” changes constantly, the title losing all meaning. Her three kids fight playfully over the fickle honor, but I simply like being included in the raucous brood.
Hugs are passed around, except by Cameron, whose hands are covered in car grease.
He and Billy are restoring a ’68 Ford F-100.
With his greasy hands and skin bronzed from summer baseball, Cameron Russo is beyond cool.
His high school experience is completely foreign to me, yet he’s one of my favorite Russos.
Despite my being older, I look up to him.
He charts his path and sticks to it, quietly thoughtful and steady.
He and April are similar like that. Josie, on the other hand…
Mascara is underlining her eyes like she’s in the NFL, and April plops her purse down on the kitchen counter. “What happened now?”
The Russo sisters couldn’t be more different. For Josie, everything is a crisis. For April, nothing is.
“I didn’t get Sandy.” Josie smears more of her mascara.
April looks to her mom in confusion, so Deb lifts her eyebrows and explains, “Grease.”
Ah. Sandy. As in, Look at me, I’m Sandra Dee.
April turns toward her sister. “That’s it?”
I wince. I get it. April works with kids like Jonathan.
They can’t read, don’t have electricity, can’t imagine going to college or auditioning for plays because they can’t even get their medical bills paid or their grades above failing, because none of it is in their native language and the letters won’t stop fast-dancing on the page.
Still. I wish she would go easier on her sister.
I like that Jo gives air to small things.
Josie fires back, “Why are you here?”
So I interrupt them by doing something truly shocking: I begin to sing.
Like John Travolta. About summer nights.
My voice croaking, I stretch a hand toward Josie, who brightens.
She dons a golden Sandy voice. It’s a true wonder, Josie Russo’s voice.
I twirl her and then draw us together, cheek to cheek.
The rest of the Russos blink at me as I cue Cameron—the actual car grease on his hands making him primed and ready to be a backup singer.
He rises to the occasion, curling his lip and slicking his hair and singing his line, vibrato and all.
He’s no Josie, but his singing voice is definitely better than mine.
Everyone looks at April next, who is smiling ear to ear.
She hasn’t seen this side of me; she hasn’t really even heard me sing.
She smacks pretend gum and starts the hand jive right here in the kitchen on Lexington Avenue.
By the end of the song, even Billy thrusts a hip, causing Josie to holler, “Eat your heart out, Danny Zuko!”
We dance and botch harmonies and tell Jo how godawful she looks as a blonde.
Finally, I say, “Hey. You should have gotten the part.” And she says, “I know.” Then she starts talking about her next audition, which is glorious proof that my plan worked.
Deb reaches up to pat my cheek and declares me her favorite kid, prompting eye rolls from the Russo kids and giving me a delicious glimpse of life with them.
I will bury my former self and be relieved to do so.
Here lies a lonely child. He’s in a better place now.
After our bellies are stuffed with brisket, we play bocce ball on the lawn.
When no one else is looking, April makes bedroom eyes at me, summertime freckles across her nose.
All the happiness niggles at me, and I can’t help but flash back to my earlier voicemail, to pozole in my tía’s kitchen, to my mother’s singing voice.
But I blink that away and toss a ball with my new family.
When the time comes for our wedding in September, I scan the crowd for Izzy and Nacho as April walks down the aisle, white flowers in her hair.
They didn’t come. They didn’t call. The wedding canon begins.
I don’t have a single family member in attendance.
Three weeks after the honeymoon, a Dollar Tree card arrives in the mail with a short note scrawled in fading ink.
Congrats. Glad your wild days are behind you.
Best, N + I. There is no gift, no money, no apology for missing the wedding or indication that maybe we should catch up sometime.
There is only the reminder of the burden my existence has always been to my family.
I have the urge to crumple the card in my fist, but April wraps her arms around my waist from behind and asks, “Wild days?”
I haven’t told her much about my teen years, when I kept steady grades and jobs but also a steady buzz or high or whatever would take the edge off.
I walked to school and work, trying to keep from putting my aunt and uncle out.
But it wasn’t enough. I still saw their bald irritation at my late nights and Smirnoff bottles buried in the recycling.
I saw the sighing inconvenience of my need for another meal or birthday acknowledgment.
I lived every day in shadowy dread that they too would send me away.
So I strove to have such little need that I became nearly invisible.
The morning after high school graduation, I packed everything I owned into two fat trash bags.
Nacho and Izzy saw me off at the curb beside the beater I’d managed to buy.
I took their key off its ring and set it on Izzy’s palm.
I knew they would breathe a sigh of relief as soon as I drove away, finally leaving them to enjoy their morning routine in privacy.
Two black coffees, oats with blueberries for her, frozen taquitos for him.
I wondered if I should thank them, but the question filled me with pain.
I hadn’t asked for this. So after being a ten-year-long interruption, I nodded goodbye.
They never checked whether I arrived anywhere. We all knew I had no plan. At some elusive point, I had crossed from that poor child to that welfare bum. I had no idea when it happened, but it did. My life was no longer my parents’ fault—it was mine.
I spent a year and a half doing nothing before I found history. Before I realized that the least alone I ever felt was when I studied what had happened on the land or in the buildings through which I walked, the people who inhabited this very same world across layers of time.
I started community college with ninety-four dollars and a face full of pimples.
This, of course, was all before April. It was before I exchanged vodka for exercise and sulking for studying.
It was before I put myself through school and concluded that teaching history to teens was my life’s calling.
Then I met a young tutor one summer morning, my heart keeping time with the band, and I decided that maybe I had two life callings: history and her.
But I don’t want to think about that part of me—the morose part that my aunt and uncle deemed wild. So I shut the card, turn to April, and shrug.
Her arms are looped around me as she looks up. “Nice of them to send a card, yeah?”
It’s a sincere question. She doesn’t know what it’s like with them. But I can sense it behind her question just like I could sense it with my parents, and with Nacho and Izzy. The truth is a burden. Lie to me.
I meet her eyes. “Yeah.” I nod. “Nice.”
Concern leaves her face as if waiting for permission, and she slides her hand up me. “Okay, I know we need to do dinner, but I was hoping we could do something else first.” Her smile is coy as she reroutes her hand, sliding it downward. “Just real quick?”
I toss the card aside, mute my hammering memory, and take her in. Caramel hair falling out of its clip. Assured, inviting eyes. Curves pressing against her sweater.
I release her hair from the clip and ask, “But does it have to be quick, Mrs. Torres?”
An unbearably soft giggle. “No it does not, Mr. Torres.”
I shiver at the trill of my Rs on her tongue. The shared name is electric, the oneness it represents. The promise that I will no longer be alone.