The Black Kids(58)

She laughs. “Babygirl, let’s see if I like him first.”

“Well, then why are you going out with him if you’re just gonna leave soon?”

“Can’t I have a little fun before I leave, mija? Dating doesn’t have to mean you get married. Sometimes it can just be to have a good time with a pretty face.” She laughs again.

Umberto and Roberto have grown into men while their mother raised me. I’ve charted their growth alongside my own, something adult metastatic in us—the ripening of our bodies, the ever deepening of their voices when they call the house phone: “Hello, Miss Ashley. May I speak to Lucia, please?”

I wonder if they would trade their nice school and guitar lessons and textbooks for this moment in the kitchen with their mother, curls wild, dancing. Maybe by now she’s an ache they’ve learned to live with.

She goes over to the radio on the wall and tunes it to the station she’s listening to on the Walkman. The Tejana’s voice bounces around our tiled kitchen.

“Lucia?” I want to tell her everything. I want so badly for her to tell me how to make everything better.

She sings along to “?‘Baila Esta Cumbia” and instead of spilling my guts, I bailo around the kitchen and join in.

My father enters the kitchen and we dance with each other. He laughs and twirls Lucia around.

My mother comes down the stairs, her Jheri curl in flat wet rings around her face, and my father looks up, guilty, ’cause he’s been caught being a dolphin with somebody else.

My mother looks askance at Lucia, and Lucia abruptly stops dancing. I feel a quiet nimbus beginning to swell in my mother. Best to provide a distraction before it rains, I decide.

“I spoke to Jo this morning,” I blurt out.

My mother stops looking at Lucia and my father together and turns her attention to me. “You didn’t think to tell us this earlier?” she says.

My father starts to scratch above his eyebrow. “How is she doing?”

“She’s fine. She says she’s a communist now,” I say. I don’t dare tell them that she’s been out doing whatever the hell she’s been doing in the middle of the riot. Jo would never forgive me if I did.

“That’s what college kids do. They go to college. They try these things on,” my dad says.

“But Jo’s not in college,” I say.

“I’m gonna call her,” my mother says.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I say.

“Your sister’s gonna be the death of me.” My mother collapses into a nearby chair.

Lucia quietly leaves the room. I think my mother’s afraid that my father’s having an affair with Lucia. That’s not it, though; I think Lucia and my father just understand something elemental about each other. I overhear him telling her things he’s never told us, things I’m not sure he’s ever told my mother. The less my parents talk to each other, the more he seems to talk to Lucia. Being an adult sometimes seems even lonelier than being a kid.

Like the story he told her about his friend Quincy’s Uncle Earl. He and Quincy used to shoot hoops in the park by their house, and Quincy was the happiest kid ever. Quincy had a momma and a daddy who were both teachers at the local high school and who seemed like the happiest teachers to ever teach, and even sat and laughed together during their lunch breaks like best friends instead of married people. Quincy’s uncle had been Daddy’s third-grade teacher and taught him about Frederick and Booker T. and how it was important to stand up straight and be a good man, even if nobody expected it of you. One day, while he and Quincy were shooting hoops, they found Quincy’s uncle lying really still on a park bench. He could’ve been anyone, but they knew it was Earl because of the birthmark the shape of Texas on his cheek. After that, Quincy and Daddy didn’t play ball at that park no more. Then, Quincy’s parents didn’t eat lunch together no more. Finally, Quincy moved with his momma back to Louisiana, where she was from, and Quincy’s daddy ate lunch in his classroom in California all alone.

“That was the first person I knew who died of a drug overdose,” he told Lucia. But not me; I’d just overheard because I’d been standing outside the kitchen the entire time listening. Lucia and my dad both feel slightly unknowable to me. Their lives before me are so foreign to mine and yet also somehow not so foreign to each other, some invisible bridge crossing the years and thousands of miles between them.

Sometimes my mother gets strangely competitive with Lucia over weird things, like she did with my prom dress. Lucia and I had already driven around together shopping for dresses, and I was pretty certain I’d narrowed it down to the final two. She’d taken me to somebody’s abuela on Santee Street who had gnarled hands that made exquisite things.

“None of your friends will have one of her dresses!” Lucia exclaimed.

I told my mother this, and she looked up over her reading glasses and narrowed her eyes like she was deciding something.

“We should pick out your dress together,” she said. “The two of us.”

“But Lucia and I already—”

“I’m your mother.”

And that was it.

We went to the Neiman Marcus near Rodeo Drive, which was full of crusty old farts with big fat baubles dripping from their ears and necks and fingers like candy tumors. Many of the salespeople are up their own asses for having the good fortune to serve such wealthy, important people. I didn’t want to be there.