The Book of Unknown Americans(57)

I walked down the hall slowly, unsure about what to expect, preparing myself to be yelled at again. Maybe I’d messed up something in the car when I snuck in there with Maribel and he’d just now noticed. But my dad had been in the car since then—all of us had gone to White Clay to skate on the marsh the week before—and he hadn’t said anything. Or maybe Sra. Rivera finally said something to my mom about how I’d been over there when I wasn’t supposed to be. Or maybe anything. You never knew with my dad.

But when I got to the table, he didn’t say a word. He was sitting with his arms crossed, still wearing his coat and knit cap, while my mom dumped arroz con guandú onto plates, knocking the side of the spoon against the paila with each motion. I didn’t say anything either. I just concentrated on being invisible, lowering myself quietly into a chair, holding my breath.

When she had finished half the food on her plate, my mom looked at my dad and said, “Aren’t you going to tell him?”

“Leave it alone, Celia.”

“He deserves to know, doesn’t he?”

“Know what?” I asked.

“Go to your room,” my dad said.

“What did I do?”

“That’s how you answer me? When I say go to your room, you go.”

“Mayor, stay where you are,” my mom said. “He hasn’t eaten yet, Rafa. Let him eat.”

“Mayor, go to your room,” my dad said again.

“Mayor, stay where you are,” my mom said.

I waited for my dad to counter, and when he didn’t, I hesitantly picked up my fork and poked it into my rice.

I took a few bites while my parents watched me. My mom was curling and uncurling her lips like she wanted to say something. A geyser waiting to spew. After a minute and twenty-two seconds—I watched the time tick by on the clock on the wall—my mom said, “Well, what if you don’t find anything?”

“Jesus, Celia!”

“I think it’s a legitimate question.”

“I’ve already told you I’ll find something.”

“But what if it’s not for a while?”

“Then it’s not for a while.”

“Rafa!”

“This woman!” my dad said, looking up at the ceiling and pressing his hands together like he was praying. “Que Dios me ayude.”

“Don’t say that.”

“You don’t listen to me.”

“You’re not telling me anything.”

“I’m telling you I’ll find something. Do you want me to say it again? I’ll find something. I’ll find something. Do you hear me?”

After my dad left the table, snatching his pack of cigarettes from on top of the refrigerator and escaping to the balcony, my mom looked at me and said, “Well, I guess you might as well know. It finally happened. Your father lost his job.”


THE REST OF the story emerged little by little: The diner was closing. Windows boarded up. Doors locked. Out of business after forty-five years. All that time my dad had spent worrying that he was going to get fired for dropping an omelet or for leaving the freezer door open, and now the reason he’d been axed wasn’t even his fault. It was the rotten economy that had landed him in the water and that had capsized the whole ship along with him.

For fifteen years, my dad had been working at that diner. Fifteen years of taking the bus to the same place with leatherette booths and a coffee-stained linoleum counter and wood-paneled walls. He’d started as a busboy, clearing tables and wiping up bits of egg that had been left behind on the tables, and he’d never complained. “I wouldn’t have done much better in Panamá,” I’d heard him say before. “I didn’t have the brains to make much of myself.” My dad was smart, though. He’d never gone to college, which gave him the wrong idea about himself, but the only reason he hadn’t was because he’d been forced into getting a job after his parents died. He’d waited tables at a roadside restaurant in Panamá, which turned out to be the only experience he needed to find work in the United States.

Eventually my dad worked his way up from busboy to dishwasher to line cook. He flipped thousands of omelets and fried mountains of hash browns. He strained the pulp from the orange juice by hand when they used to do that sort of thing and then dispensed pre-fab OJ from a machine when the management switched to that. He remembered the days when everyone who came in ordered coffee and remembered how the waitresses had complained when everyone started asking for lattes instead. Fifteen years. Six days a week. Early mornings. Up to his elbows in grease. And now it was over. Just like that.

My dad scoured the newspaper every day, searching the classifieds, calling any that sounded promising, and hanging up either in fury or in disappointment. He went all over town, filling out applications to work in the kitchens at the Christiana Hilton, Caffè Gelato, Valle Pizza, Grotto Pizza, Friendly’s, Charcoal Pit, Ali Baba, Klondike Kate’s, Iron Hill, Home Grown, the Deer Park, and even the restaurant at the Hotel duPont. My mom suggested he go to the Community House to see if someone there could help him, but he hated the idea of it so much, either of my mom interfering or of accepting help from a place that he called “the Handout House,” that he shouted at her to keep her big nose out of it, to which my mom said, “Big nose?” to which my dad replied by holding his arm in front of his face to mimic an elephant. My mom didn’t even have a big nose, but the two of them were down to cheap shots by then, and my mom ran to the bedroom, where she shut herself away all afternoon. Even when my parents were speaking civilly to one another, they spent the dinner hour complaining about how so far President Obama hadn’t done anything and how they saw absolutely zero improvements and about how people were getting desperate and thank God we had the money from Gloria but everyone else was in a tough spot and it had gotten so bad now that people were getting mugged outside of Western Unions for the money they were about to wire to relatives back home. “They’re targeting people who look like us,” my dad said. “It used to be the Orientals, but the style now is to pick on the Latinos. And the Arabs. At least them I can understand. They did September eleventh. What did we ever do to anyone?”