Chapter 19
APRIL
Two Days After the Fire
AFTER STEPPING AWAY TO CALL him, Mom announces that Dad is having car trouble. Cameron offers to go since he knows that truck inside and out. But Mom says it’s not necessary—Dad just needs a tool. She can take it to him.
Cameron shrugs and takes over the fish tacos, and Josie’s attention shifts back to whether she should check a bag or try to cram everything into a carry-on.
I alone know that our mother is lying through her teeth.
She looks imploringly at me, so I inhale and say casually, “I’ll come with.”
Leo says with impatience, “Guess I’ve got the kids.”
I’m tempted to defend myself. Mom’s lying. Dad’s sick. Instead I say, “Sadie might not want fish. She can have turkey or something.”
He volleys back, “I know how to take care of my child.”
The unnecessary hostility. He heard an accusation I neither said nor thought. But my father is missing, and my mother is watching us like a hawk, and so I grab the keys.
Mom declines my offer to drive. She needs something she can control.
So from the passenger seat, I start dialing Dad’s cell repeatedly.
We brought no tool for the alleged car trouble.
We go by the store, his office, his favorite nearby duck pond.
After twenty minutes of increasing panic, he answers his phone.
I flood with relief. “Dad, where are you?”
Mom looks from the road to me to the road.
“In Waco?” I say into the phone.
I turn and mouth Waco, but Mom is already hanging a U-ey like we’re in an action flick. When Dad tries to argue that he’ll just drive home, Mom holds her hand out for the phone, palm up in a way that says, Oh no he will not.
“Sweetheart,” she says firmly. “Stay right where you are. We’re coming to you.”
After confirming that his phone has battery and the ringer is turned up loud, we hang up and the car goes quiet.
“Why Waco?” I ask.
Mom shakes her head. “I don’t know. Familiarity?”
Dad studied dentistry at Baylor. Four decades later, he went out for champagne and ended up at some hardware store near his alma mater.
“You’ve got to tell people, Mom. This is worse than I thought.”
She sighs. “It’s not only up to me. It’s not like your dad doesn’t understand what’s happening.”
“Did he understand what was happening when he randomly drove to Waco?”
Her eyes are glued to the road in front of her. “Dad knows that he has memory problems—he just doesn’t always know when he has memory problems.” She bites her lip and says, quieter, “We haven’t had enough time to process this.”
I make a face, but I drop it and text Leo. GONNA BE A FEW HOURS.
His response comes immediately. HOURS? SERIOUSLY?
I roll my eyes and turn the phone over in my lap.
“Kids all right?”
“Yeah.”
“And Leo?”
Here we are with a long car ride, sun plunging below the horizon, and I still haven’t told my perceptive mother about my impending divorce. I adjust the air vent and lean my head back against the headrest, sighing. “Will you hate me if we can’t make it work?”
She flinches, trying to tamp down her surprise at the casual severity of my words.
“I’d never hate you. Sheesh, what a question.” She pauses. “Is it really that bad, though? You wouldn’t want to do anything rash.”
I pick a cuticle. “I don’t know.”
But it is that bad, and I already did something rash. She would never understand.
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not right now.” Cuticle on my other hand. “Do you want to talk about Dad?”
She adjusts her hands on the steering wheel and sighs. “Not right now.”
So we talk about high-waisted jeans. Adam Driver movies. What form of exercise we’re doing these days. Mom: swimming. Me: nothing, unless you count wrangling my crawling baby, which Mom emphatically does count. The sky shifts from blue to pink to velvety purple.
When we finally pull up at Jed’s Hardware, Dad is on a bench beside a man with a kind smile and silver teeth. Mom rushes over. I follow close behind, wondering if Dad will recognize us—I don’t know much about the progression of this disease.
To my relief, he stands to kiss Mom, a plastic bag around his wrist with red letters repeating thank you thank you thank you. The man beside him has green eyes and a tool belt, and he says, “Looks like you’re in good hands.”
I glance at the shop. It closed over an hour ago. This guy stayed here to watch over my father. My heart lurches in gratitude, and I note his name tag: Ricardo, Manager.
Dad also steals a glance at his name tag, and—as though we’re at some evening shindig—he introduces us.
“Ricardo, this is my wife, Deb, and our daughter, April.” He doesn’t seem like a person with Alzheimer’s to me.
“Ladies, this is Ricardo. The guy is a hammer expert.” Dad raises his bag-heavy arm.
“Got some new ones. Can’t believe we’ve never had a—what do you call it? —jeweler’s hammer before.”
There is no champagne in sight, I note. And then there’s the fact that we are two hours from home.
I swallow, understanding that this sickness is no less real for its cat-and-mouse approach.
Dad must have dropped enough concerning clues to make this guy stick around after his store closed.
My gentle, confused father, who was meant to be celebrating his son’s engagement.
Mom loops her arm through Dad’s and says to the manager, “Thank you for your help.” Then to Dad, “Ready to go home?”
Dad grins as though nothing is out of the ordinary, and I wonder if he truly doesn’t know, or if he’s pretending because he believes that somehow I don’t know.
Which makes me think of Sadie. She must have some sense of our marital strife.
Parents think we’re hiding things, but kids see straight through us, even if they don’t quite know what they’re looking at.
Dad addresses Ricardo. “Good luck with that timing belt.”
“And good luck with those grandkids.” The two men shake hands, Dad’s arm a blank canvas beside the manager’s sleeve of tattoos. “Take it easy, papi.”
My parents turn toward the truck, and Mom says over her shoulder, “See you at home, sweetheart.”
I’ll drive her car to Dallas, but I hang back.
The manager has already started to walk away when I call after him. “Sir?”
He turns, the moon suspended above him.
“If you hadn’t— I mean, my dad, he could have—”
His eyes puncture me with kindness, and my voice vanishes. The panic of the last few hours is catching up with me. This could have been a lot worse.
Ricardo shakes his head. “No, mija. It was nothing.”
I want to repay him, but I know I can’t. So I step toward him and insist, “It was everything.”
He watches Dad’s truck turn out of the lot, leaving the two of us standing in the butter-yellow cone of a streetlight. “I hope he’ll be okay.”
I put my hand to his arm. “Muchas gracias.”
And then we both turn to go.
Back at the house, Leo and Cameron are playing a two-person, chipless version of Texas Hold ’Em. I’ve always appreciated how much they love each other, Leo’s rumpled corduroys to Cameron’s pressed chinos.
I made a pit stop on the way home, so I put a bottle of champagne in the fridge as I ask, “Where’s Mom?”
Cameron raises five, tilting his head toward the back door. “Tacos and nightcaps.”
Leo sees and deals the flop.
I sink into a dining chair with a bag of tortilla chips.
Cameron remarks, “Long time for car trouble.”
And because I trust my mom, I lie to my brother. “Dad knew what he was doing, it just took a while.” I crunch a chip. “Really sorry we didn’t get to celebrate your engagement, though.”
Leo shifts in his seat. Raises fifteen. He’s in a clean white undershirt, hair wet from a shower.
Cameron folds. “Next weekend, when Rachel’s here.”
I sit up straighter. “All right, deal me in.”
“Okay.” My brother stands. “But you should know we’re betting push-ups.” He drops to the floor, starts pumping and counting.
I laugh. “I’m in.” Time to test these Otto-wrangling muscles.
Eventually, Cameron folds and does the requisite push-ups. Watching him, I’m overwhelmed with helplessness. Soon he will find out about Dad’s diagnosis, and soon he will lose a brother. All when he’s trying to bloom into his own new life and love.
Leo and I finish the game, dropping for five, ten, fifteen push-ups.
When Cameron’s phone lights up with Rachel’s glowing face, he disappears.
I win the game. As Leo drops for his final push-ups, he claims he went easy on me.
I stack the cards, tap them straight, and slide them into the box.
“You mean like when you went easy on me at the faculty party, or that Fourth of July?” He’s never been great at poker.
He finishes his push-ups and spins around, arms draped over his knees. He smiles and says, “Exactly.”
It’s like something from a distant past, this playful interaction. We’ve had to put up a facade around the family, but this is different. Cameron left the room a while ago and we’re still smiling.
I inhale. “Hey.”
He waits. The kitchen is silent except for the hum of the refrigerator.
And I say what I thought about my whole drive home. “Lo siento.”
“What?”
“Lo siento por lo que hice.”
Shadows close over Leo’s face like curtains. “Why are you speaking Spanish?”
On the way home, I kept hearing that manager call me mija, kept thinking about how Leo rarely speaks Spanish, how the pain of his family history seems to have taken Mexico from him. I didn’t give it much attention before. “I just wish we’d spoken Spanish sometimes. Seems important.”
Spoken. Already past tense.
Leo stands. “It isn’t.” His words are clipped, the Ts hitting hard.
I frown. “I’m trying to say sorry.”
His jaw goes tight, loose, tight, and the refrigerator hums on. I don’t know what I expected. Leo looks around at nothing, which is to say, at everything except me. “You can’t just say some words in my family’s language and think that changes anything.”
I study him for a long minute. “When did you get so dead set on ending this?”
He scoffs. “When I walked into the living room and—”
“That’s a bluff.”
“What?” He practically spits the word.
“It takes more than one day, more than one person’s one mistake for a marriage to fall apart.”
He lets out a bark. “So this is the kind of apology where you’re trying to convince me it wasn’t your fault.”
The box of cards is still in my hand, and I slam it on the table. “I’m not saying that. I’m saying it wasn’t only my fault.”
“Funny, I don’t remember being there when Cody—”
I stand up in a motion so swift that it almost knocks over the chair behind me. “Lower your voice.” I look around at the multiple points of entry to the kitchen, where our kids or my parents or my brother could walk in at any second.
At the exact same volume, Leo says, “I have nothing else to say.”
“I have things to say.”
He rolls his eyes.
“You’re so fixated on this one thing,” I continue. “What about everything else that happened before? What about everything that’s happening now? We have kids, and an insurance company wants to know where our family is going to live.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “You should have thought about that before.”
“I should have thought about the fire before the fire even happened?”
“No.” His face takes on a look of pain and contempt. Of something like threat. “You should have thought about the kids.”
Cold fear slices through me, and my eyes sting. Leo could spin this. To himself, to me, to a family court judge. He could try to build a case that I’m not fit. Would he do that? Take this to court? Hurt me however he possibly can?
I cross my arms. “I said I was sorry.”
“And it fixed everything,” he scoffs.
With that bitter note, he leaves the kitchen.
A terrible thought chooses right now to intrude: I wish I were Dad, forgetting this.
Except I don’t wish that at all, but as quickly as the thought arrives, it multiplies into new fears: that I am Dad, or will be. I haven’t asked Mom yet about the potential of inheritance, but I know it’s there.
I exhale sharply and clean up the deck of cards.
I put away Dad’s new hammers and the bag of tortilla chips.
Another endless day, one crisis distracting from another.
I check my phone, closing the map to Jed’s Hardware and opening a text from Josie.
LANDED IN CHI-TOWN BUT JUST SAY THE WORD IF YOU NEED ME, APE.
I whisper, “I need you.” But I press the thumbs-up reaction and close the text.
Then I notice a missed text from earlier. Leo sent a picture of Sadie with a toothpaste-foam smile. SHOW THIS TO YOUR OLD MAN FOR ME. FLOSS *AND* A TIMER!
I sigh. You can’t just say some words in my family’s language…
I tap over to my inbox and swipe away a few spam emails.
Then I notice one from David Marquez, Esquire.
I click it open and fill with heat. It’s an estimate, with a request for the name of my counsel.
Leo called a lawyer? While I was out searching for a missing father?
And he decided not to mention this when I attempted to apologize.
He wants to do this through attorneys and paperwork, all while we’re living at my parents’ house.
I lower my phone, shocked that this is how it’s ending.
That a few little sparks have spread far enough to burn this whole thing down.