The Unhoneymooners(71)

Natalia presses her hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh, and I take a sip of my tea. It tastes like sadness and hot water.

My mom stops chopping and sets down her knife. “Why does that mean she’s a lesbian?”

Tía Maria blinks at her. “Because lesbians use those strap-on things.”

“Mom, stop,” Natalia says. “Lots of people have vibrators. I have a whole box full of them.” She waves in my direction. “You should see Olive’s collection.”

“Thanks, Nat.”

My mom picks up a glass of wine and takes a large gulp. “It seems smart to be a lesbian right now. Men are awful.”

She is not wrong.

I lean a casual hip against the counter. “So. Why are you guys cooking at my apartment?” I ask. “And when are you going home?”

Natalia turns off the stove and moves her pot to an empty burner. “Your dad needed some stuff at the house.” That’s it, that’s her entire answer, and in this family, it’s plenty: Dad rarely goes to the house—he lives alone in a condo near Lake Harriet—but when he does visit, my mom evacuates the premises immediately. The rare times she feels spunky enough to stick around, she’ll commit some pretty petty sabotage. Once, she pulled out his collection of vinyl records and used them as trivets and coasters. Another time, when he stopped by before a weeklong business trip, she put a whole fresh trout under one of the seats in his car and he didn’t find it until he got home. It was in August.

“I wish I’d been born a lesbian,” Mom says.

“Then you wouldn’t have me,” I counter.

She pats my cheek. “That’s okay.”

I meet Natalia’s eyes over the top of my mug and fight the laugh that is bubbling up inside me. I worry that if it escapes, it could turn into hysterical cackles that would immediately transition into choking sobs.

“What’s with you?” Tía Maria asks, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s talking to me.

“She’s probably tired from her new boyfriend,” Natalia sings and does a little sexy dance back over to the stove. “I’m surprised he wasn’t with you. We only came in because his car wasn’t out front. God knows what we’ll see.”

They all spin out of control about me and Ethan for a few minutes—

Finally! Se te va pasó al tren!

So perfect, so funny because they hated each other!

Twins dating brothers: is that even legal?—

before I’m able to get them back into orbit. Diego walks into the kitchen and burns himself sneaking something from the frying pan.

“I’m not sure we’re still a thing,” I warn them. “Maybe we are. We had a fight. I don’t even know.”

Everyone gasps and a small, dissociated piece of me wants to laugh. It’s not like Ethan and I have been together for years. My family just gets so immediately invested. But then again, so did I.

I can’t think about things with us being over. It pushes a spike of pain through me.

And wow did I kill the mood. I debate for about three seconds whether I’m going to bother telling them that I also lost my job, but I know I am. If Dane tells Ami, and then Ami talks to one of my cousins and Mom finds out that I got fired and didn’t tell her, she will call all of her siblings and before I know it, I will have forty text messages from my aunts and uncles all demanding that I call my mother immediately. Facing it now is going to be terrible, but it’s still infinitely easier than the alternative.

“Also,” I say, wincing, “I lost my job.”

Silence swallows us all. Slowly, very slowly, Mom puts down her glass of wine, and Tía Maria picks it up. “You lost your job?” Cautious relief takes over her face when she says, “You mean the Butake job.”

“No, Mami, the one I started today.”

Everyone gasps, and Diego comes up, wrapping his arms around me. “No,” he whispers. “Seriously?”

I nod. “Seriously.”

Tía Maria takes my hand and then glances at Mom and Natalia, eyes wide. Her expression screams, It is taking everything in me to not call everyone in the family right now.

But Mom’s focus on me remains intense; it’s the protective mama-bear expression that tells me she’s ready to battle. “Who fired my daughter on her first day of work?”

“The founder of the company, actually.” And before she can unleash a tirade about the grave injustice of all this, I explain what happened. She sits down on a barstool and shakes her head.

“This isn’t fair. You were in an impossible situation.”

I shrug. “I mean, it’s actually totally fair. I got a free vacation. I didn’t have to lie about it. It’s just my luck he showed up, and I got caught.”

Natalia rounds the counter to hug me, and I’m swallowing every few seconds just to keep from crying, because the last thing I want is for Mom to worry about me, when—although she doesn’t know it—she’s going to need to save all her maternal sympathy for Ami.

“Call your father,” Mom says. “Have him give you some money.”

“Mami, I’m not going to ask Dad for money.”

But Mom is already looking at Natalia, who picks up her phone to text my father on my behalf.