Don’t Let Me Go(63)

“Did you have any idea?”

“Yes and no,” Felipe said. “I did and I didn’t. I was so surprised. But now I look back and see some things. You know how it is. At least, I think you know. You see but you don’t see. You see a thing. And you think it’s a certain way. But you tell yourself, ‘No, that’s crazy, you’re wrong.’ And then you find out you’re right. And part of you says, ‘Hell, I didn’t know,’ and another part of you says, ‘Oh yeah you did.’”

“What about su hijo?” Grace asked, her voice hushed with awe.

“What about what?” Billy asked, and then went back to shredding his thumbnail.

“His little boy,” Grace said. “Don’t bite your nails.”

“Well, I asked that,” Felipe said. “I asked her sister. I said, ‘What about Diego? How am I supposed to see Diego?’ I said, ‘After all, he’s my son. My flesh and blood.’ Know what she said?”

Felipe’s voice broke on the last sentence, and Grace found herself unsure if she wanted to know or not. She shook her head without thinking.

“She said, ‘Maybe he’s your son, and maybe he isn’t.’”

Grace got up from her chair and ran across the room, throwing her arms around Felipe’s neck.

“Lo siento, Felipe,” she said, in barely over a whisper. “Lo siento para su hijo.”

“Gracias,” Felipe breathed quietly.

“I have to go,” Billy said suddenly, from his perch by the door.

His panic must have hit him like a dam breaking, because Grace could hear how his words turned into the truth at nearly the exact same moment they rushed out of him.

She let go of Felipe and stepped back. Billy already had the door open.

“Oh, no. Billy. Can’t you please try just a little longer? It’s just getting to be a real meeting!”

“Sorry, baby girl. I can only do just so much.”

But he took a step into the room, not out of it. He took four or five steps, actually, toward Felipe, and stopped above Felipe’s chair and looked down, and his eyes looked soft. Felipe looked up and smiled sadly.

“What does ‘lo siento’ mean?” Billy asked quietly.

“It means she’s sorry.”

Billy bent down and hugged Felipe around his shoulders, kind of quick and careful. Like he’d better not hug too long or too hard.

“Lo siento,” Billy said.

“Gracias, Billy.”

Then Billy raced out the door. Raced. Even Grace didn’t manage to get places that fast, and she was a kid.

“I’ll go next,” Jesse said.

Everybody looked up as if they’d forgotten Jesse talked.

“Don’t look so surprised. I just thought I’d give you a chance to know me a little bit. Since I’m new here. And since I’ll only be here a few months.”

Nobody argued, so he did.

“I grew up near here. Actually, I grew up about four blocks from here. Which is part of why I picked this apartment. So close to where I used to live. Lot of memories. Of course, it’s changed a lot. And, then, the other reason I picked it is because I need to save as much money as I can. I’m on a six-month leave of absence, and my savings will only go just so far. They’ll stretch, I think. But barely.

“Anyway, I live in Chapel Hill. North Carolina. I left L.A. to go to college there, and I never came back. The only reason I’m here now is because my mother is dying.”

Grace opened her mouth to speak. She had tons of questions. A whole brain full. She wanted to ask how soon Jesse’s mother was going to die, and of what, and how close he was to her, and if it made him so sad he could hardly stand it. And if there was anything she could do to make him not so sad, even though she didn’t figure there was, not with a big, awful, sad thing like that. But she never got to. Then again, she never had to. Jesse was a good talker. You didn’t have to drag anything out of Jesse. He just opened the door and out it came. That was a new one as far as Grace was concerned.

“Funny thing about me and my mother. We never really got along. Never saw eye to eye. On just about anything. We had a very volatile relationship.” Then, before Grace could even open her mouth to ask, he said, “That means explosive.” As though he could read her mind. “I think most everybody who knew us thought we didn’t like each other. Maybe even that we hated each other. I tend to think of it more as a ‘fierce bond.’ If we didn’t love each other a lot, there’d be no place for all that fire. It’s love, and then it’s the flipside of love. We happen to have a lot of both.

“So I guess people figure it’s not as hard to lose your mother when you never got along anyway. But they’re wrong. They’re dead wrong. It’s always hard to lose your mother. Always. If you loved her, if you hated her. If she smothered you, if she ignored you. It doesn’t matter. She’s your mother. Your mother. That’s just a very tough bond to break.”

Grace opened her mouth to speak, and began to cry. Within seconds it morphed into sobbing. Full-on, uncontrollable sobbing.

It brought the meeting down, and fast.

Suddenly everyone was huddled around her, too close to her, on her, not letting her breathe. They wanted to know if she was OK — they asked over and over — but she knew she’d be more OK if they would step back and give her some air.