C. Adán Cabrera is is a Salvadoran-American writer and translator based in Barcelona. His stories have appeared in Kweli Journal, Spanglish Voces, and The Acentos Review, among other publications. Visit him online atwww.cadancabrera.net.
It all went down just before the Fourth of July the year I turned ten. All week long my siblings and I had been too scared to ask Mamá and Papá whether we would have as many fireworks as we did the year before. For days, they seemed to be passing some secret worry between them, like they did right before abuela died, or when they announced that we were leaving overpriced Echo Park for the suburbs. But things seemed tenser than they ever had before. Mamá stopped dancing cumbias when she washed the dishes. Papá no longer listened to his vinyls after work, stretched out on the living room sofa. It was times like this, when the house was too quiet, that we didn’t have to ask if something was wrong. It was evident. And whatever the problem was this time, it apparently had no easy solution. But things always worked themselves out; we thought it was just a matter of time before things went back to normal.
But then, even at meals, our parents stopped talking to each other. Mamá feigned a smile every now and then between bites and made some bland remark about the heat or the grocery list, but as soon as we looked away her mouth snapped back into a thin pink line. Papá, however, didn’t even pretend to be okay. For the entire week leading up to the Fourth he sat across from us, not saying a word. He spooned his oatmeal and bananas silently until one morning he exploded after a bit dribbled onto his work uniform, leaving a milky white stain. Papá dabbed madly at it with a wet napkin, cursing his sloppiness, and he cut his eyes at Mamá when, instead of helping, she ignored him and kept right on chopping cilantro like nothing had happened. Papá scraped the last bits of his breakfast into the trash, tossed his plate in the sink, and mumbled goodbye to my siblings and me before disappearing behind the black screen door. He got into his faded green Camry and drove away. My siblings searched my face for answers but before I could say anything, Mamá intervened.
“He’s just having a bad day, that’s all,” she said flatly, hacking at the last few stems with her cleaver. She didn’t look at us. “Papá will feel better when he gets home from work.”
But Papá didn’t come home that evening.
. . .
We didn’t understand things back then, but we sensed that asking about the pop and peal of fireworks didn’t seem like a great idea considering how Mamá and Papá were acting. My sister Laura and brother Juan, however—both younger than me—flew into a panic. With Papá gone, would there be fireworks at all? After all, he was the one who always drove to the mall to buy some. Mamá hated them and steered clear—she’d heard enough bangs in San Salvador, she’d say—but she always allowed Papá to buy a single variety box of the cheapest ones available anyway. Every Fourth of July, all the kids in our cul-de-sac would come out and together we’d ride our bikes, launch water gun fights on the battlefield of each other’s lawns, and, when night fell, we’d light fireworks in the middle of the street. No one in our neighborhood really socialized with each other, apart from the occasional hello or goodbye, but the Fourth of July was always special. That night every family pulled out their green lawn chairs and sat in their respective front yards. Some barbequed and offered their neighbor a hot dog or plate of potato salad; my family grilled carne asada and homemade tortillas that some of our neighbors had never tasted before. The smell of grilling meat hung heavy in the air and stuck to our clothes. Once our bellies had been satiated, the main activity would commence: every family would light firework after firework until well into the night. This had been our tradition for as long as I could remember.
The year before, when I was nine, Papá went nuts and didn’t buy the usual cheap box of assorted fireworks that my siblings and I would have to share. (Mamá was pissed for a week after.) Instead, he bought each of us a pack of our favorite fireworks: sparklers for Laura, who had just turned seven and pretended to grant wishes to the neighborhood girls; smoke bombs for five-year-old Juan, who would watch the smoke with a mixture of fear and fascination; and rockets for me. I’d removed each rocket individually from the shiny cardboard box, stopping to consider the weight and girth of each one and imagining how loud and how high it would soar into the night sky. Since I was the oldest—in September I would start the fifth grade—Papá trusted me to light them by myself, as long as I followed his instructions. Mamá, sitting on a stool some fifteen feet away, crouched down every time a rocket went into the air and shouted that Papá wouldn’t be happy until someone blew off a finger. He waved her off and lit a smoke bomb and tossed it playfully in her direction, making us all chuckle when she ran back into the house, shrieking.
That Fourth of July, even Mr. and Mrs. Evans from next door—los gringos, as Mamá called them—made an appearance. They had not bought any fireworks, and my sister, who has always been more generous than me, offered to share her sparklers with their daughter. Soon after, the Evans family brought their lawn chairs and joined us in our yard. Papá and Mr. Evans sipped from the same Heineken bottle, and Papá, whose English wasn’t very good back then, still made an effort at telling jokes even though he kept messing up the punch line. Mr. Evans laughed politely anyway, his belly trembling behind his tight white shirt. The mothers, on the other hand, didn’t say much to any of us, nor to each other. I thought this was because Mamá didn’t speak much English, but later we found out that both women were actually paralyzed with fear, as they shared a common phobia of loud noises and jumped together in fright at every flash and burst of light.
That night the world was a keg of colorful destruction. After his fifth or sixth beer, Papá pulled out our speakers and played AC/DC and Led Zeppelin albums, the only ones he owned that were in English. The music filtered out into the street and mingled with the gunpowder and smoke filling the air. We lit fireworks until one or two in the morning, Papá’s curly hair turning yellow and green and red in the fired light, his deep-throated laughter rising and falling over us, as if it were the only thing that had ever existed or mattered in the whole wide world.
. . .
After Papá didn’t come home for two nights, saying he was at a friend’s house downtown, and after Mamá slept on the couch with the phone nestled between her ear and shoulder, we knew things were escalating. Whenever we asked, Mamá repeated that Papá was at work and that he’d be home soon. Seeing her lips tremble and her eyes begin to water and remembering the morning when Papá had stormed out after breakfast, I knew she was lying. I missed him, but I also knew better than to ask any questions with Laura and Juan within earshot.
The first night Papá was away, I stirred awake in the early morning, needing to pee. When I walked past my parents’ bedroom on the way to the toilet, I stopped when I saw that their bed was empty. For a moment I felt panic begin to swell, until I heard soft whimpers coming from the living room. Mamá was lying on her back, staring up at the white ceiling. She didn’t move except to wipe at her nose with the back of her hand. Otherwise, Mamá just lay there, her gaze seeming to search the ceiling for a secret message etched into the stucco. I don’t know how long I stood watching Mamá, but when she rolled onto her stomach and began to cry into the pillow, her hands tearing at either end as she sobbed, I knew it was time for me to go back to bed. But I didn’t sleep and instead stared at the night sky framed by my open window, counting stars until I fell asleep. Mamá went off to work the next day, her smile stiff and taut. My bladder woke me up the next night as well, but this time I held it until morning.
The day it all went down, the third of July, Papá hadn’t been home in two days. Things were starting to get serious. At breakfast, Juan and Laura were starting to wonder aloud why Papá still hadn’t come home, and since Mamá had left early for work, they asked me instead. “He’ll be here soon,” I promised, and I poured them another round of cornflakes. Laura, the family crybaby, was already starting to turn red, the prelude to a screaming fit that no one but Papá could assuage. And Juan, little as he was, didn’t say anything. He just stirred his breakfast emptily, the spoon scraping the bowl. Mamá wasn’t off work until one o’clock, but she’d promised that we’d take a trip to the swimming pool. There was nothing better than spending a summer day at the pool to escape the heat: staying indoors during a Southern California summer was like trying to walk on the hot sand at the beach without burning the soles of your feet. Impossible. I reminded my siblings about the waterslide and soda fountains and all our friends that would be splashing at the pool. Their smiles, tentative at first, soon returned and we went back to our Brady Bunch reruns.
Around noon, right when I was spreading mayonnaise and stacking bologna on slices of bread, Mamá’s car pulled into the driveway. She was home early. The iron gate shrieked when she jerked it open, and a moment later she appeared in the doorway, red and breathless. Loose strands of brown hair were tousled on either side of her eyes. Her yellow name badge, framed on either side by the gas station’s logo, hung crookedly from the breast pocket on her navy blue uniform. She still clutched the car keys in her sweaty, ringless hand.
“Have you all had lunch yet?” Mamá asked when she walked in the door. Juan and Laura were still focused on the Brady Bunch, pausing occasionally to eat some chips.
“Not yet,” I said. “I was making sandwiches.”
Mamá’s gaze swept over the open mayonnaise jar, the bag of wheat bread, the pink bologna. “We’re going to eat in the car,” she said.
“Why?” Laura asked. She and Juan, hearing Mamá’s comment, had turned off the television and were now staring at her, looking confused.
Mamá set the car keys down on the kitchen table. She pulled off her yellow name tag and set it down next to the half-made sandwiches.
“Because we’re going downtown,” she said. She picked up her name tag and examined it before setting it back down. “We’re going to find your father.”
“Why do we have to go all the way downtown to find Papá?” Laura asked. She stomped the floor with her foot, another prelude to her infamous tantrums. “I don’t wanna go! I wanna go swimming!”
I cringed, already imagining Mamá’s swift hand on my sister’s backside. Her smackdowns hurt less than Papá’s, but she still had a mean hand on her. Mamá shifted her weight and closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, their familiar softness had returned. Mamá wiped a sweaty brow on her shirtsleeve and motioned for all of us to embrace her.
Juan was the first to run up to Mamá and wrap his arms around her. Laura was next, the tantrum apparently having failed to materialize. She found a spot between Mamá’s breasts while I was wedged between our mother’s bicep and belly. We stood there for a few moments, no one saying a word, although I could tell by the uneven way Mamá was breathing that she was holding back tears. I buried my face in her blue cotton shirt, feeling the wet spots with my nose. She planted a kiss on each of our foreheads before letting us go.
“Let’s go find Papá,” she said, clearing her throat. She told us to get dressed and to not forget a jacket—she didn’t want us to catch a cold, even in July. We all moved toward our respective rooms. None of us was entirely sure what was happening, but we were happy to know that at least we would soon see Papá. As we moved off, Mamá said one last thing.
“Junior,” she said, speaking to me, “thank you.”
And she smiled a sad smile, the kind I saw once in a movie at my Tía Miriam’s house. It was a love story at sea where the protagonist drowns at the end. Before she surrenders her soul in a boil of bubbles, the shadow of a smile appears over her face before she floats, open-eyed, toward the sunlight dancing on the surface. My tía had looked at me and declared that scene to be the saddest thing she’d ever seen in her life. I, however, couldn’t see what was so sad about it: now, at least, she would go to heaven and be reunited with the man she loved.
“You’re welcome,” I said, even though I didn’t know what Mamá was thanking me for.
. . .
An hour later we were in the car, our sandwiches bundled safely between Juan and Laura in the backseat. We had quickly thrown on some shorts and some flip-flops, the quintessential summertime outfit. Mamá also changed her clothes: instead of her work polo and khaki pants, she’d put on the purple blouse with the matching skirt that she’d normally only wear to baptisms or weddings. She’d also put on some electric blue eyeliner and rubbed some of her special perfume behind her ears, cheeks, and the base of her wrists. Two silver hoop earrings, her only pair besides the plain black ones she wore to work, hung from her lobes. Mamá looked beautiful, young like in the picture I’d once seen of her and Papá on a beach in El Salvador. In it she’s holding a bottle of beer, her arm wrapped around Papá’s shoulder. Mamá is thinner in the picture: the leopard print bikini clings to the even curves of her waist and breasts. Papá is also young and has the shadow of an uneven beard. It is a sunny day brimming with possibility, and while Mamá is looking right at the camera, Papá is looking slightly to the right at something in the periphery.
After checking (three times) to make sure that our seatbelts were locked and secure, she crossed herself and offered up a mumbled prayer for our safe passage to downtown Los Angeles. Mamá was used to driving exactly six miles a day: three to the gas station and then three back home. Every time we went out as a family, Papá was the one who drove. We’d only been in the car with her twice: once, on the way back from the Lozano wedding in Bakersfield, when Papá was dozing off in the driver’s seat; and again the year before when she had to drive Juan to the doctor because Papá was away at work. From the jokes that Papá made, I gathered that driving wasn’t something that Mamá enjoyed very much or was very good at, but was instead a task that had to be completed as safely as possible. This was most evidenced by the way she would extend her hand over the passenger’s chest every time—and I mean, every time—she pressed the brake to prevent them from hitting the dashboard in case of an accident.
“Almost ready,” she said, pulling the seat up until it grazed her belly.
She tilted the seat several inches forward until it was nearly vertical. She then adjusted the mirrors and pulled down the sun visor. And one last test: she drew circles on the notepad that was taped onto the dashboard to make sure the pen had ink. The pad was there in case we were involved in a hit-and-run and she had to jot down a fleeing license plate number. Finally, crossing herself again, and just when we were all getting prickly hot, Mamá started the car.
We passed our house and then the Evans’ and then the Hsieh’s. We then turtled to the right once we’d exited our cul-de-sac and merged carefully onto the main road that led to the freeway. Mamá’s hands never came off the steering wheel. Instead, she asked me to move the side mirror this way or that, or to roll my window up or down when she thought Laura and Juan in the backseat were getting too much air. Her eyes shifted to the rearview mirror continuously and beads of sweat glistened on her forehead in the early afternoon light.
Our car began to rumble the moment we merged onto the freeway and began to pick up speed. Mamá’s eyes darted toward the control panel. There was no traffic heading toward the city, but leaving it was a bumper-to-bumper sea of red lights that not even Moses could hope to part. We sped past the constellations of cars and I caught glimpses of some of its occupants. A black man in a white hearse lighting a cigarette. Red hair escaping like vivid flames from an open window. A dog panting in the flurry of summer wind. A family of five, singing a silent tune, swaying to the rhythm. The dancing glimmer of a silver lowrider.
There was a bit of traffic up ahead. Mamá said that something had happened, perhaps an accident, judging by the flash of cop cars in the distance. As we neared the scene, cars on the opposite side of the freeway had completely stopped to see what had happened. Papá always joked that the drivers in L.A. would stop a funeral procession to gaze at a shoe someone had left in the middle of the road. This time it wasn’t a shoe, but instead a car that had rear-ended another, making every other vehicle on the freeway have to go around them. We merged to the left and passed them. Both drivers were arguing, one furiously scribbling something down on the back of his hand. I saw the dented cars and the shattered glass littering the asphalt. And the memory came flooding back before I could even realize it.
Three years earlier, we were on our way to my abuela’s house, picking up speed along the same stretch of highway, right near the Motel 6. It was one of those rare cloudy days in August. It was the same freeway we’d been taking every Saturday afternoon for as long as I could remember. Laura and Juan were both asleep and safely strapped into their seats. I was dozing off, lulled to sleep by the hum of the tires on the asphalt, when I suddenly heard tires screeching, followed by the sound of glass breaking. I smelled burnt rubber.
Dios mío, no puede ser, Mamá cried out. It can’t be.
I knew what Mamá meant when I saw the little girl hanging upside down, her bloody forehead pressed against what was left of the windshield, her ponytail sweeping the place where the moonroof used to be. The child opened her eyes and started to scream. Her father next to her had his eyes closed, the seatbelt pulled unnaturally across his throat. Papá growled at us to look away, but even he couldn’t pull away his gaze. We sped up to pass the accident site. Papá turned up the music. And though I’d probably get in trouble, I looked back one more time. The man who hit the little girl’s car was limping away from the scene, his clean white shirt sullied with blood and broken glass. He looked like the entire freeway had collapsed on top of him.
“They’ll be okay,” Papá called back to me. He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “They’ll be okay, hijo, I promise.” He stretched a hand back toward me and squeezed my knee. For a moment, I was in awe of my father and how with one gesture he could rid the world of chaos and make everything right again.
. . .
When we passed the green knees of the Montebello hills—at the bend when the skyscrapers that guard downtown became visible—the car started to rumble again. The floorboard beneath my feet shook violently, followed by white smoke seeping out from the car’s hood.
“Hijo de la gran puta,” Mamá cursed. She looked down at the control panel, where a red light was flashing angrily.
A big rig rolled by on the opposite side just at that moment, making the car shake. Laura, who had fallen asleep the minute we hit the road, woke up in time to see the wisps of white smoke curling around the car.
“Are we okay, Mamá?” she asked, the first notes of tears tinging her voice.
“Sí, Laura,” Mamá yelled back to her. She kept both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road. “We need to get off the freeway.” Juan woke up when he heard Mamá’s voice, only to nod off again just as quickly.
More white smoke. The faint smell of burning rubber started to fill the car. The front view of the car was nearly obstructed. Mamá rolled down her window and motioned for me to do the same. She then hit the emergency lights and, after crossing herself quickly, we started to inch our way toward the offramp. I stuck my hand out the window so that cars would let us pass, like I’d seen Papá do whenever we needed to merge lanes. A BMW sped past us and swerved violently into our lane. Mamá cursed out loud again. We pulled into a burger joint just off the highway.
Mamá turned off the car and sat still for a moment. She took a napkin and dabbed at her forehead. The electric blue eyeliner that she’d so carefully put on had started to run. She took a deep sigh. And then, another.
“Is Papá here?” asked Juan, after a minute. Both he and Laura had taken off their seatbelts. My sister was leaning her head against the back of my seat.
“No, honey, he’s not here,” Mamá said. She closed her eyes, then opened them again. She tried the ignition. Click, click, click. The white smoke had stopped coming out of the hood, but the car wouldn’t start.
“Are we going to eat hamburgers?” Laura asked. She looked back at the golden arches and the line of cars in the drive-thru.
“No, honey, we’re not,” Mamá said evenly. She reached under my seat and pulled out her purse. She counted out some change and placed it in the palm of her hand. “But you can eat your sandwiches while I go inside and call your Tía Miriam.”
Laura and Juan moaned at hearing our aunt’s name. Mamá hushed them up.
“And then we’ll go find Papá?” Juan asked after a moment.
Mamá paused. “And then we’ll go find him, yes.”
Then Mamá looked at me. “Junior, make sure your siblings eat. I’ll be right back.” When she stepped out of the car I handed Juan and Laura their tinfoil-wrapped sandwiches. Laura saw that mine had more bologna in it than hers and she insisted I trade. I gave it to her: I wasn’t hungry and was never used to keeping anything for myself back then anyway.
It wasn’t yet two in the afternoon, the peak of the summertime heat, so we got out of the car and sat on the curb beneath the shade. I sat between Laura and Juan and we ate our sandwiches in silence, watching Mamá patiently wait her turn in the line for the payphone. She glanced back at us every now and then, and I watched her gaze pass over each one of us, as if contemplating her children for the first time. Her earrings glittered in the sunlight.
“Don’t eat so quickly,” I scolded Juan. “No one’s going to take your sandwich away.”
Juan always had the bad habit of overstuffing his mouth whenever our parents weren’t around to control him. I kept my eyes on him until I saw that he was taking smaller bites.
Mamá disappeared inside the phone booth, obstructed from our view.
“Is everything okay?” Laura asked me. She had finished eating and rested her head on my shoulder.
“Yes,” I answered, “don’t worry.” I put my arm around her the way I’d seen Papá do so many times before.
“What about Papá?” asked Juan. I felt Laura’s gaze search my face for clues.
“Papá is okay too,” I answered him again. “As soon as the car is fixed we’ll go pick him up.” I kept my eye on the phone booth, waiting for Mamá to reappear. When she finally did, she didn’t come back to the car and instead went inside the restaurant. From where I sat I saw her hold up three fingers and point at the menus. A minute later, she walked out with three ice cream cones between her hands. They started to melt the second she stepped out in the heat. As Mamá neared us, I could see it running in white rivulets down the cone’s brown surface. Mamá picked up the pace and I helped her give a cone to my sister and brother before taking one myself. Mamá took a few licks off of mine.
“I don’t want any groaning,” Mamá said, wiping her fingers on the blue paint of the still-smoking car. “Your Tía Miriam will be here shortly to help us with the car.”
Laura and Juan didn’t say a word, placated by the surprise dessert. Mamá hated spending money on things she said we could not afford, but she seemed to have made an exception this time.
The car sent up its smoke into the early afternoon air much in the way the incense rose at church whenever the priest passed by to bless us. Mamá sat on the curb next to Juan and kissed his forehead. A family of three walked out of the restaurant and made their way to their car. The mom helped the dad buckle the little girl into the carseat, as the little girl giggled and pulled playfully at her mother’s curls of hair.
. . .
Tía Miriam, my mother’s older sister, had the reputation of having the shortest fuse this side of San Salvador. She was quick to anger: she had once exploded furiously, arms flailing wildly, after Juan knocked over a stack of porcelain casino plates, souvenirs from her honeymoon in Las Vegas. Another time the police had been summoned to the apartment that she shared with my uncle after the neighbors had reported the sounds of screaming and glass breaking. The cause, it turned out, had been a particularly insistent pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who nearly tripped down the stairs as they ran away. Any nuisance, large or small, would be enough to send her into a spiral of fury.
I always got along with her, though. She always gave me the best Christmas presents. And the biggest helping of food. And she always let me play videogames as long as I wanted whenever my siblings and I had to spend the night at her house because my parents had to work the graveyard shift. She often whispered to me that I was her favorite. I never understood why she was so grouchy all the time. But one night, when we were driving home, I heard Mamá telling Papá that Tía Miriam couldn’t have children because of an accident and maybe that’s why she was so unhappy.
An hour had passed by the time Tía Miriam’s shiny new Buick pulled into the parking lot. Laura and Juan were inside the restaurant, playing in the ball pool. Mamá and I were still sitting on the curb. The car had stopped sending up smoke but the smell of burnt rubber still clung to the inside. Tía Miriam parked in the spot next to us and waved to my mother and me. Her power window rolled down.
“What’s wrong with your car, Ángela?” Tía Miriam asked. She turned off the car and got out. She hugged my mother and gave me three loud kisses on my cheek. My tía always smelled of menthol cigarettes and too-sweet perfume.
“And why are you dressed like that?” she asked.
“I can wear whatever I want,” Mamá answered. She stood up. “And if I knew what was wrong with the car, I wouldn’t have called you.” Mamá’s voice was cold and even.
Tía Miriam, perhaps noticing the unusual firmness in Mamá’s tone, didn’t press the subject. Instead, she looked at the car and then at me. She then looked at the restaurant and saw Juan and Laura in the ball pit.
“Where’s Héctor?” she asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Mamá answered, and took a step toward Tía Miriam. My aunt didn’t respond. She passed the keys from one hand to the other before placing them in her purse. Tía Miriam looked at me again, this time with something different in her gaze. It reminded me of the way Papá looked at us when he apologized after giving us a spanking.
“He’s up to it again, isn’t he?” Tía Miriam said.
Mamá didn’t respond right away. “This one’s the fourth time,” she finally said, her voice barely above a whisper. Mamá cast her gaze toward the deaf sky and down at the faithless car and at her children laughing in the ball pit.
“I need to borrow your car, Miriam.”
“And go where?” my tía retorted. She paused. “Do you even know where he is?”
“I know enough,” Mamá said, “from past experience.”
Tía Miriam said nothing. A cloud passed in front of the sun, casting its dark shadow over the world. She reached into her purse and gave my mother the keys.
“I’ll have my husband pick us up and he’ll take a look at your car,” Tía Miriam said finally. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.” She looked at me again and pointed to my siblings inside the restaurant. “I’ll watch these three until you get back. Santiago will pick us up.”
For a moment, I thought of my uncle’s black pickup truck delivering us back to our dark empty house. I thought, too, of Mamá driving by herself to find Papá. And if he wasn’t at a friend’s house, where else would he be? I didn’t want to leave Laura and Juan alone, but I also didn’t want Mamá to be by herself.
“I’m coming with you,” I announced to Mamá.
“No, you’re not,” Tía Miriam replied. She placed a hand on my shoulder. “This is between your parents. Don’t get involved, m’ijo. These aren’t things for children to see.”
“It’s okay, Junior,” Mamá said. She smiled at me, and this time it was genuine. “You’re old enough now to know the truth anyway.”
A moment later I was in the passenger’s seat of my tía’s car. The leather seats were sticky and my tía’s perfume still lingered in the air. My mother crossed herself and soon Tía Miriam’s image appeared in the rearview mirror, framed by the restaurant and the last traces of smoke rising toward the blazing eye of the sun.
. . .
We were crossing the 4th Street bridge. The fancy white crown of the U.S. Bank tower reigned supreme over the city. The yellow lights of the skyline’s buildings held as still as the stars as we neared downtown. On either side, factories, auto repair shops, Mexican markets, and the electric signs of gas stations spread in all directions.
We had been driving in silence when Mamá suddenly started up a conversation. We were getting off the freeway.
“Do you remember what happened by the pool?” Mamá asked me. “Two summers ago?”
I didn’t respond, playing with the power window. It was my favorite part of my tía’s car.
“Junior, do you remember?”
I had that dark feeling again in the pit of my stomach. That same heaviness when Papá didn’t come home or when I saw Mamá crying that one night.
“You and Papá got into an argument while we were all swimming,” I said. “And then you started to cry.”
I pressed the button to roll the window up, then down.
“That’s all I remember,” I lied.
I didn’t tell her that I remembered how Papá had called her a bad name that made her gasp in disbelief and that as she was getting out of the water he slapped her wet calf hard enough to leave an evil purple mark. Or how Papá had gotten livid and told her that he was leaving and didn’t care what happened to her, didn’t care that the kids were hearing everything because someday they’d understand and would forgive him. Or how my sister had run out of the pool and slipped on her side before leaping up to wrap her skinny arms around Papá and how he had pried away each little finger while she screamed into his leg, nearly biting it as she slid down. How he had bellowed that he would never be coming back, not ever, he roared. But he didn’t leave that time. This time, he did.
Mamá turned left. Neon lights started coming into view “We promised that we would always be a family, no matter what,” she said.
We turned right on Olympic and passed under the freeway. Pink neon lights came into view. Mamá drove toward them. After a few more blocks, we pulled into a parking lot across from the pink neon lights. Mamá parked, facing the front entrance. Two black security guards stood on either side of the double doors. Men approached and exchanged words with the security guards before flashing their ID and being let inside. Women with big hair and small skirts entered, too. The men didn’t say anything to them, though. They just grinned and let them in, too, slapping the women on the butt as they passed. Some of these women came out of the building with a man on their arms, and others walked arm-in-arm toward a motel a few doors down. There were several cars parked directly in front of the establishment. I instantly recognized my father’s faded green Camry.
Mamá started the car. We pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the street. A few minutes later, we were on the freeway, on our way home. Mamá rubbed my hair.
“He’ll come home eventually, hijo,” Mamá said. “He’ll come home.”
That night, Mamá stopped by the mall and bought us each a box of fireworks, like Papá had done the year before. He didn’t come home that night either. The next day, the Fourth, just after dinner, when the neighborhood kids were starting to gather in their respective driveways, Papá’s car pulled up. He honked the horn three times. Laura and Juan ran toward him, leaving their fireworks on the lawn. I sat still for a moment and contemplated Papá’s green car. I stared at it, holding every detail of its rusted paint in my mind for as long as I could bear, before I walked out to meet him.
