This Side of Providence (28 page)

Scottie stands on the back porch with the other men and watches a football game on their portable TV. I watch him pour liquor into a cup of coffee that his sister brought him to help sober him up. Why are adults so stupid? The men roll their own cigarettes and smoke them quickly by taking long, deep drags. The smell is sweet like summer grass. They pass them around and joke about burning their fingertips. My mother watches them quietly. She smokes her own cigarettes, from a red and white carton she carries in her chest pocket. She looks like she's thinking about a faraway place, not someplace she's been, but someplace she'll never get to see.

I see my mother and Scottie in the same room only once during the party. They look at each other for a long time, over
the heads of other people, but don't say anything. When he walks up to her she's holding an empty plate. He takes it from her and says something I can't hear. She shakes her head. He smiles. She says something while Scottie lights two cigarettes. He offers one to her, but she hesitates before taking it, as if she doesn't trust what it could be. She places it gently between her lips, like even the filter could burn her. He holds up a baggie filled with small green pills, just like the ones we found in Kim's purse, and rubs it between his fingers. My mother shakes her head. He's looking at her, but she's looking at the bag.

I lean over to tell Cristo but he's already watching the whole thing go down. “Don't worry,” he says to me. “Mami can take care of herself.” I want to believe him but I'm not convinced. We both watch her as she backs away from us and out of the room, her eyes locked on Scottie.

When it's time to say good-bye Trini doesn't want us to leave. She wraps her legs tight around Mami's waist and buries her head in her neck. She cries as Scottie pulls her off, taking her out the back door like an animal that's misbehaving. The screen door slams and I can hear her wails from the driveway. Mami wipes her eyes on the sleeve of her shirt and walks out the front door without saying a word. I thank Scottie's sister before we leave, and wrap up a big piece of birthday cake to bring home for Miss Valentín.

The sun is setting when we leave the party. Mami walks on the sidewalk while Cristo and I bike along a row of parked cars in the street. Cristo sings a song by Lauryn Hill, something about how you might win some but you just lost one. Mami and I don't speak. I want to say something to comfort her but I don't know what that would be. We stop at the CVS on Hartford Avenue and Mami goes inside to fill a prescription she just got from her doctor. Once she's inside I ask Cristo why she still takes the medicine if she's not sick anymore.

“What do you mean?” he asks. “She's still sick.”

“But she looks better now. She seems all right.”

“That's just the outside. On the inside she's still fighting. That's why she's got to keep taking the medicine, even when she feels okay.” He taps the handlebars on his bike. “The sickness
she got is the kind you can't see.”

I put my feet on the ground to balance my bike. “You mean like spilling juice on a dark carpet? You can't see it but the stain is still there.”

“Yeah. Kinda like that.”

The sun falls behind the hills and the street gets darker. “Why'd she get sick?”

“Fuck if I know,” Cristo says.

“Is it because of the drugs?”

He looks at me. “Which drugs?”

“The ones she used to take when we lived on Sophia Street. The kind you buy on the corner instead of in the pharmacy.”

He's quiet for a few seconds. “I think so. Maybe. But she stopped doing them a while ago. I don't think it matters anymore.”

“Maybe getting sick is her punishment.”

He spits on the ground. “Going to jail was her punishment. Being sick is extra.”

I roll forward on my bike, making checkerboard tracks in the mud. “Is that why she's mad all the time?”

“She's mad because they keep taking her kids away. We're all she's got but she can't even get us under one roof. How would it make you feel if we were your kids?”

I don't want to have kids. To be a mother. To love something so much but not be able to control it.

“Do you think Trini's ever coming back to live with us?” I ask him.

“Of course she is. What are you talking about?”

“I don't know…sometimes I think maybe she won't.”

Cristo grabs the handlebars on my bike, stopping me in my tracks. “Don't ever say that again, okay? And don't ever let Mami hear you say that. Trini belongs with us, Luz. Period. She's our sister for God's sake.
Tu hermana.
No one can take that away.”

He lets go of the handlebars and pushes me backward. The bike wobbles and I have to stand to keep it from crashing to the ground. One foot lands in a puddle, splashing mud across the bottom of my pants. When Mami comes out she yells at me for
getting dirty and I don't bother to defend myself. My pants stay wet for the whole ride home, which seems like punishment for my lack of faith.

We split up at the Elmhurst cemetery. Cristo and Mami head down Broad Street while I stay on Elmwood to go home to Miss Valentín's. I feel guilty as I bike away, knowing that I'm going back to a nice apartment while they're going to a loud and crowded shelter, but I don't know what to do about it. I know staying together is supposed to be the most important thing, but I don't think it's worth any cost. But I'd never tell Cristo that. Maybe he's a better person than I am, since he's willing to sacrifice his own comfort to stay with Mami. Maybe he's a better son to her than I am a daughter.

When I bring Miss Valentín the piece of birthday cake her eyes get big and she tells me German chocolate cake is her favorite. She says she's gonna put it in the freezer to save, but after dinner I see her in the pantry, eating it right off the plate with no fork. She eats the whole thing in a few bites, like she's racing to be the first to finish. When she's done, she wipes the crumbs off her face and buries the plate at the bottom of the garbage so nobody sees it.

I hide behind the door when she comes out so she doesn't think I'm spying on her. But I am. I like to watch her when she doesn't know I'm looking. I noticed a long time ago she's weird with food, but seeing her every day makes it obvious. Adults think they're so sneaky, but everything they do is so predictable. She eats the way my mother smokes cigarettes and Kim drank that pink wine. Like they can't see anything else, even if it's right in front of their face.

After I finish all my homework I lie in bed and write on the wall. The part next to the window so the curtain hides it. Every night since I've been here I've written my name at least once. When Miss Valentín comes in to say good night I stop writing. I hide the pencil under the covers like she hides her food.

“Luz. I want to talk to you about something.” She comes
into my room after I brush my teeth and sits on the bed. Her nightgown rises up, exposing the pale skin of her legs. They look like they've never seen the sun. “You know how you write your name on your papers at school, so the teachers know it's yours?”

I nod. Maybe I'm not so good at being sneaky either.

“Or how you write your name in your coat, or on your lunch box? You do that so it doesn't get lost or so someone else can't claim it as theirs. But with bigger things, you don't have to do that. When you have something that everyone knows is yours, when it really belongs to you, you don't have to mark it like that.”

I try not to look at the wall, but my eyes keep going straight there.

“Slave owners used to mark their slaves,” I tell her, “because they were their property. They owned them. I read that in a book once.”

“You're right,” she says. “But they were wrong to do that. You can't own another person, not like you'd own a car or a house or a book.”

I feel the pencil under the blankets, hard like bone.

“But when you love someone, don't you belong to them?” It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but I've heard about it in love songs.

“Sure,” she says. “But in a different way. When you really belong to someone they don't have to mark you, not in a literal way. The branding is on the inside.”

I don't know what to say so I look away. I still feel her staring at me.

“Everything you have here is yours. Everything in this room. No one's going to take it away from you.”

I let go of the pencil, afraid I'll snap it in two. I look back at her. Her eyes are big like a cat's and she's holding her hands together as if she's about to pray.

“You say that now, but what if I don't get to stay? What if they move me again?”

My voice starts to crack so I stop talking. I hate the fact that I'm sometimes soft like a little kid, that I want to cry. Miss
Valentín turns to me, her elbows digging large red grooves into her thighs. “I'm not going to lie to you, Luz. I don't know what's going to happen. But I can promise you this much: you will always have a place in my home. The door will always be open.”

She says good night and leaves me alone in the room. My room. I grab the book of stories from my mother and climb back in bed, scooting my body deep under the blankets. When I usually start a new book, the first thing I do is write my name inside the front cover. This time, I leave it blank. I don't even look for the pencil, lost somewhere in the warm darkness of my bed. I don't need to own the book, just the story inside. Because once I read it, nobody can ever take it away from me.

Cristo

W
hen we get to the shelter, the first thing they give us is a list of where to eat. The soup kitchens are the best, since the food is hot and free, and, luckily, they serve more than soup. The closest one is Oxford House, right off Broad just a few blocks from the shelter, and the food's actually pretty good. Much better than the cafeteria at school, and way better than everything we used to make at Chino and Kim's. The trick is to get there early and get a good seat. I like sitting at the end of the table, that way I don't get squashed between two old dudes who never shower. I usually sit near the kitchen, so I can get up for more bread and refill Mami's coffee cup with milk when she takes her pills. There's a room in back with a few dozen beds, but only men can stay overnight. Most times I'm the only kid in here and Mami's the only lady. Once I saw a lady eating with three little kids, but the men stared so much she left before dessert and never came back. Can't blame her, after what I heard them say in the bathroom.

The people here are supposed to be all nice and thankful since they're poor and usually homeless, but a lot of what I see is people hanging out in small groups making fun of each other. It's pretty much divided by color, with the black people on one side and all the whites on the other. The Puerto Ricans and the Dominicans are split up, too, neither getting too close to the whites or the blacks. And the women, if they show up, usually hang by themselves within those groups. Sometimes I'll see an old couple together, cutting up their meat into baby-sized
bites, and it makes me sad to think they don't have anywhere else to go.

There's a backyard behind the building, a fenced-in square lot covered with picnic tables, but it's been too cold to eat outside. After dinner most people stand by the door, smoking and talking shit about the food. One night when Mami and I are standing there this guy in a hooded parka comes up behind her, throws his arm around her neck and says, “Stop or I'll shoot.” I'm about to kick the guy in the balls when Mami turns around and hugs him and says, “Hey asshole, what rock have you been hiding under?”

When he unzips the parka and drops his hood, I'm shocked to see Charley staring at me. He looks equally surprised, though he hides it well.

“Hey, I want you to meet my kid,” Mami says, pushing me in front of her. I shake Charley's hand and we both pretend this is the first time we laid eyes on each other.

They laugh for a while, talking about places and people I never heard of. Mami lowers her voice every time she says something she don't want me to hear so I can't quite follow the entire conversation. Bottom line, they broke a lot of laws together. It's weird to think of Mami having her own life, completely separate from mine. And I can only imagine how pissed she'd be if she found out about the life I been living without her. I already know I can never tell her about the months I worked for Snowman, and now I know I have to add this to the list.

Mami sends me inside to get dessert, and I come back with three pieces of cherry pie. They don't see me in the doorway because I'm stuck behind a real fat guy who needs two people to help him walk. That's when I hear Charley asking Mami about being in the joint.

“It almost killed me,” she says. “But you wanna know what's more fucked up? I miss it sometimes.”

Charley laughs. “Try doing six months in the men's unit,” he says, lighting another cigarette. “So, you still clean?”

“So far,” she says. “What's that shit they say,
One day at a time
? That's where I'm at.”

“I wouldn't know anything about that,” Charley says. He pulls on his beard and laughs. “So how's that working out for you?”

Mami blinks when a cloud of smoke covers her face. “Got no choice.”

He shrugs. “Shit. You always got a choice.”

Right then I come out from behind the fat guy and hand them each their pie.

“We should go now,” I say to Mami. “Your meeting starts at seven, right?”

“My little assistant,” she says to Charley.

“Everybody needs one,” Charley says, staring right at me. He puts his cigarette out against the brick wall and gives Mami a kiss on the cheek. Then he pats me on the shoulder. “Hope to see you around, kid.”

“Not if I can help it,” Mami says, forcing herself to smile.

Charley throws the plastic fork I brought him into the garbage. “Well, sometimes you can't.” Then he bites into the pie like it's a slice of pizza.

“Let's go, Mami. I don't want you to be late.”

“Slow down, boy,” she says, as I pull her inside. “Who do you think you are, my mother?”

I grab her hand and we walk through the crowded dining room together. A bunch of the men lift their heads to watch her pass them by. It's been that way since I was a little kid, everyone staring at Mami like she's famous. I know she's pretty, but there's gotta be something else that makes people stare like that. Even women can't look away.

She walks me back to the shelter and then heads off by herself to catch a bus to her meeting. I sneak down to the corner and hide behind a minivan to watch her as she waits at the bus stop. Just to make sure. A bus comes and goes, without her getting on it. She rubs her arms and hugs herself to keep warm. The air outside feels cold like a refrigerator and I wish both of us had on heavier coats. She walks in a circle looking at her feet, something Trini used to do all the time. From this far away Mami looks like a teenager, taking the bus home after basketball practice, or going to the mall to meet her girlfriends.
She looks like she don't have a problem in the world.

Another bus comes by and this one she gets on. I wait for it to drive past me, so I can read the sign that says where it's going. “Plainfield Ave—Johnston,” it reads, the opposite direction of her meeting. First thing I wonder is where she's going. The second, when she stopped telling me the truth. Later, when I'm lying in bed at the shelter, on a mattress no thicker than cardboard and probably not as comfortable, I think maybe she's not going anywhere at all. Maybe she spends her nights riding around on that bus, staring out at the dark city just beyond her reach and watching everything in the world pass her by.

Snowman once told me there's only one hour of the day when he can't be interrupted: from 11 a.m. to noon weekday mornings, when he swims laps at the downtown YMCA. I know I should wait until school's over, but sometimes he's hard to find later on, so I sneak out of school early and take the bus to the Y. There's a guard at the door who wants to see my pass, but when I tell him I'm lost and that my father's inside, he lets me in.

The pool is in the basement, in a room with a low ceiling and brightly colored flags hanging from the overhead beams. Even in the water he is easy to spot. His body's long and thin like a dolphin bleached white from hours in the sun, and he's the only person in the pool who swims without stopping. During one lap he crosses the entire length of the pool in one breath, which impresses the lifeguard so much he claps when Snowman lifts his head out of the water to finally breathe.

When he gets out, he dries himself off with a stiff towel the size of a washcloth, and then wraps a beach towel around his waist. He's halfway to the locker room when I call his name. The echo is loud and everyone in the room looks at me. He stops, but doesn't turn around. He waits for me to catch up with him.

“What time is it?” he asks me, looking down at the tiled floor and not at my face.

“11:45.”

“Do you know what that means?”

I do, but I don't want to admit it. “I waited until you got out of the pool.”

“Is that your answer?”

I feel my face get hot. “No. It means that it's still your time.”

“When does my time end?”

“Noon.”

“Can you wait until then?”

I look at the clock on the wall. The second hand doesn't move, as if time is stopped. I nod.

“Wait here,” he says, still not looking at me.

He disappears into the locker room, his flip-flops smacking against the wet floor. I sit on the bleachers while I wait for him, watching a few people swim laps. The sound of laughter echoes throughout the room, but I can't tell where it's coming from. At noon he's back, sitting beside me on the aluminum bench. It smells like he used half a jar of cocoa butter to cover up the smell of the chlorine, but it didn't work.

“What's up?”

“We need a place to live, another apartment.”

“Who's we?”

“Mami and me, and my sisters. A two-bedroom at least, maybe three.”

He looks up at the ceiling. “Three bedrooms ain't cheap. And they ain't plentiful.”

“Okay, two's fine.”

“How soon?”

“Now.”

He looks at me.

“We're staying at a shelter,” I tell him.

He looks confused. “Since when?”

“A few weeks.”

“Why didn't you tell me sooner?”

“I didn't want you to think I was using you.”

“And now?”

I shrug. “Now I'm desperate.”

“Why? What happened?”

“I don't know. Maybe nothing.” I rub my hands over my face.

“You wouldn't be here if it was nothing.”

“It's Mami,” I finally tell him, feeling my heart start to race. “We're too close to everything bad at the shelter. Everything she needs to stay away from.”

He nods, scratching his all-white goatee. “Did she slip?”

“Slip where?”

“Never mind.”

He looks hot suddenly, and his head starts to shine. He uses a small towel from his bag to wipe up the sweat.

“I might have something open in the Armory,” he says. “Should be ready by March 1st. A nice two-bed near the park. How's that sound?”

“Good,” I say. “That sounds good. How much you want for it?”

“Right now it goes for seven hundred.” He wipes his head again. “I could do it for five if you're willing to shovel out the driveway and clip the trees or whatever.”

“Yeah, I can do that. How much you need for a deposit?”

“Five will do. Tell your mother she can bring it by the Laundromat next week.”

I pull an old, worn envelope from the back pocket of my jeans and hand it to him. “There's six hundred forty-two dollars in there. Consider it the deposit and some of the first month's rent.”

He looks down at the envelope but doesn't take it. “I don't want your money, Cristo.”

“It's your money now,” I say, offering it to him again.

“Come on, kid. Put that away before the lifeguard sees it.”

“Fine.” I tuck it back into my pocket. “I'll give it to you outside.”

His hands are still holding the towel, damp with sweat. I watch him squeeze it out, until the white part of his knuckles turns red. “You worked hard to save all that. It shouldn't just go all at once.”

“But this is what I was saving it for.”

He spreads the towel onto the bench and relaxes his hands. In a few seconds the normal color returns, brown and white splotches like the marble cake I've seen Teacher eat in her
classroom once all the other kids have gone home. I wonder how he feels looking so different from everybody else.

“Listen,” he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. “That's not your job anymore. Paying rent, saving money, buying food. It's your mother's job. She's the grownup.” He shakes his head and exhales. “I know she's getting help from the state, and from that agency, so she should have enough to cover things for now.” He looks at me. “It needs to come from her, okay? Not from you.”

A whistle blows and I hear the slap of bare skin against water. I try to imagine how the pool would look without any water, like the one in my old neighborhood.

“You understand, kid?”

“Yeah. I get it.”

“If she needs time to get on her feet with a job or whatever, it's okay. I can give her that.”

He stands up and pulls on a hooded sweatshirt, then zips himself into a black down jacket, doubling his size. I grab onto his puffy sleeve and watch my hand sink into the dark fabric. Under the soft feathers, I can feel the strength of his arm.

“Thanks, Snowman.”

“No problem,” he says, throwing his bag over his shoulder, “but next time you show up here, you're doing laps.” I know he means it like a threat, but to me it sounds like a promise.

When we pass the front desk, the guard calls out to us. “I guess you found your dad, huh?”

“Yeah, thanks,” I say, careful not to make eye contact with either one of them.

Snowman shakes his head and laughs softly, holding the door open for me to pass through. The cold air shocks me like a slap in the face. I zip up my sweatshirt and pull the hood down over my eyes. Snowman steps in front of me, shielding me from the brutal wind. We walk several blocks like that, until he puts me on a bus and sends me back to school.