Try to Remember Page 4

  “We’ll do what we can,” said Tío Lucho wearily. “Maybe we can use another sweeper, eh Victor?”

  Tío Victor cocked his head doubtfully. “Maybe.”

  After the uncles had gone, I washed out the coffee cups and returned to my room while mulling over the jobs my father had held since his airport layoff. How abruptly they’d all ended. My parents hadn’t really explained why that contractor stopped calling my father for work either. The story of the Hialeah jefe and the drill nagged at me.

  “Mami,” I inquired when she came in, “what if Papi says or does something that turns into a problem for the uncles? What if they end up losing their jobs?”

  “Don’t be disrespectful,” she retorted. “I’ve told you a thousand times. Your father is a hard worker. Where did those nice things in your room come from?” She gestured toward my pink and white décor. “Your father’s sweat, mi’ja. Your father’s sweat.”

  But I saw trouble in her eyes.

  That afternoon I grimly rescued myself from my private struggle by making Manolo stick with me through all stages of Laundromat washing and drying. No way was I going to be left alone with that pervert anymore. Manolo gave Arnoldo his ignorant, goofy-tooth smile and sat down to drink his free Coke, and I quickly nabbed a vacant seat between my brother and another kid. I refused Arnoldo’s complimentary drink offer.

  “I don’t like Coke,” I told Manolo, who looked at me puzzled.

  “But there’s Oranhina,” Arnoldo replied, pronouncing it the Latin way—h instead of g.

  “I don’t like any sodas,” I insisted, staring into my novel.

  Arnoldo returned a wicked chuckle.

  Only when I got home to my room did I give in to feeling sorry for myself. My gaze fell on the photograph of my grandfather from my little kid days. He was wearing a white guayabera and smiled out of those slow eyes I’d inherited. Back then, either my grandfather or Mami would grab my hand the second we walked out the door and hold on tightly until I’d been safely delivered to wherever I was supposed to be. In my mind, I knew I was too old for that silly hand-holding stuff, but the little girl still inside tried to push out of me, only she got stuck, leaving a huge, terrible clump in my throat.

  Later, I sat cautiously in front of the TV after my parents had gone outside to meet a new Cuban neighbor. I flicked the channel to one of the movies I’d screened as “safe” and watched curiously for a while. My brothers soon joined me. When the fairy-tale ending neared with its inevitable kiss, my heart began to flutter and a discomforting shame overtook me, though my father was nowhere in sight. I stood up in despair, abruptly telling my brothers that I didn’t like movies anymore and, grabbing the TV Guide, returned to my room. Manolo promptly switched the channel to an unscreened movie. “I’ll take my chances,” he called after me, as if he’d figured out that my father’s screaming moral patrols were for my benefit and not his.

  I read the TV Guide quietly in my room. From time to time, I closed my eyes and imagined a movie into action. Effortlessly, I became the big-hearted cowboy, the charming reporter, an English doctor curing heathens on the Dark Continent. Never a confused teenager with a furious father on the loose. In my private movies, I could kiss any hero if I wanted to in the grand finale.

  [ FOUR ]

  MY FATHER’S ONE-WEEK SWEEPING JOB at the tailor shop was un gran desastre.

  We were summoned to Tío Victor’s. Mami and my aunt retreated with their drink glasses into my aunt’s bedroom after dinner to speak privately. My cousin Raquel and I followed, sneaking outside to the wrought-iron patio bench where we could kneel and peek in through the bars of the bedroom window.

  Our mothers were perched on the edge of Tía Rita’s bed. “The dress was ordinary,” we heard her say. I could barely make out my aunt pulling on her tight skirt with one hand while balancing her drink with the other. “Aida told me it was a little short,” she continued. “Still, as long as the girl’s mother didn’t object, why should anyone else?” My aunt stopped to sip her whiskey, and Mami joined in with her own drink.

  Raquel and I lifted our heads higher for a better view.

  “Well, imagine,” my aunt continued, “when that girl tried it on, Roberto came out raging like a maniac and attacked that poor customer as if she’d sold her daughter into prostitution. ¡Desgraciada! ¡Inmorales! Who knows what other insults he humiliated her with? And imagine that child standing there in her bare feet—horrified! Aida told me that she practically swallowed her pins. Roberto created such a scandal!”

  “Qué vergüenza, Rita,” said my mother in a timid voice. She looked down at her drink as if it might be poisoned.

  My aunt rushed to finish Mami off. “Victor and el italiano—you know, the son of the owner—dragged Roberto out of there to calm him down, all the while protesting of course about going back to work. What a fiasco!”

  I ducked when Tía Rita glanced out the window, but when she turned back toward Mami, I bobbed up again.

  “Evi. I’m not burdening you with these details to mortify you. I’m only telling you because you have to understand that Victor can’t have him there. It’s impossible.” She paused. “Can you imagine if he’d actually hit someone?”

  “¡Rita!” my mother protested. “¡Roberto no es un delincuente!”

  “No.” My aunt shook the remaining alcohol out of her ice, her Lucite bracelets jangling. She raised the glass to her mouth and swallowed. “But he’s not the man he used to be.”

  “He hasn’t changed that way, Rita,” my mother insisted. “Roberto would never dishonor us.”

  In silence, they both stared into their glasses.

  “If only he could go back to a regular job,” Mami said wistfully, “I’m sure he could recuperate himself.”

  “Gabrielita.” Tío Victor had come out to the patio. “What are you two doing there?”

  Startled, Raquel and I climbed down.

  “Come on,” my uncle said. “I have to drive you back. Everybody has to work tomorrow.”

  “Not everybody,” I answered softly.

  As I went to grab my things off Raquel’s bed, my cousin watched me. “How come your dad gets so mad, Gabi?” she asked quietly.

  I looked away. “I don’t know.” On Raquel’s dresser was a porcelain ballerina balanced on one tiny toe. “It’s just his temper,” I offered by way of apology. “Everybody gets mad sometimes.”

  Raquel shook her head. “Not like that. Not my father.”

  “Well, a lot of people do,” I said, defending my father. His temper just happened. It wasn’t a matter of fault.

  That night at home, though, the house seemed too quiet and I had trouble falling asleep.

  No one sent Manolo to buy the Seminole Sentinel the next morning. Mami seemed to be upset with the entire family and pretended not to be home when Tía Rita called. She played that game until Tío Victor finally got through the following night and informed her that he was buying Tía Rita a new washing machine and giving us their old one. I could barely contain my joy when I heard the news. Even if my father never worked another day in his life, I swore, no matter what else my parents demanded of me, I would forevermore love washing clothes.

  All cheer evaporated, though, when we learned that the tailor shop customer had filed a criminal complaint against my father.

  “Oh my God,” I gasped to Mami while my distraught father was on the phone with Tío Victor. “Could they put Papi in jail?”

  “¡Mi’ja! Why do you always think the worst?” My mother rubbed her temples. “Victor will find us a lawyer.”

  Sure enough, later that week, my parents and I took the downtown bus to meet a lawyer my uncle found. The building was near the Parque de las Palomas on Biscayne Bay, where so many pigeons had congregated along the wall that you couldn’t help but be reminded of that disquieting Hitchcock movie The Birds.

  A rickety elevator took us to the sixth floor. I gave my father’s name to a lanky African-American guy wearing thick editor’s glasses
who seemed to be the receptionist. “Mr. Korematsu’s not back from court yet,” he disclosed.

  My mother returned a faint smile.

  Luckily, both my uncles made it there on their breaks before the young lawyer appeared, laden with folders. He was wearing a proper suit but sported a haircut from which shiny black strays stuck up, defying maturity. Smiling breezily, he rushed into his cubicle of an office and kicked the door shut behind him.

  My father turned to Tío Victor with a puzzled look. “¿Es chino?” he inquired.

  My uncle shrugged.

  “Hawaiian,” volunteered the receptionist guy, who’d evidently understood, in English.

  When the lawyer’s door finally popped open, the receptionist guy, Arthur, offered him a file. The youthful Hawaiian lawyer took it with a cheery smile and walked toward us. In deliberated, accented Spanish, he inquired who Mr. De la Paz was. When my father and both uncles stood, the lawyer laughed, saying, “No, no, perdón. I mean el cliente.”

  Tío Lucho promptly dropped to the couch while Tío Victor remained on his feet. At my mother’s nudging, I stood too. “Excuse me,” I said. “It’s just that my uncles can explain things better. My father doesn’t speak English that well. So my mother was thinking maybe we could all—”

  “I’ll have to talk to your dad alone first,” he told me in an earnest tone. “Then we’ll bring you guys in, okay?” He translated the same thing more or less to my mother and uncles, who acquiesced with nods.

  As my father headed for the cubicle office, Tío Victor tapped his shoulder and reminded him, “Don’t forget to explain about the green card problem.”

  “Claro,” my father agreed.

  I waited until we were sitting to ask, “What green card problem, Tío?”

  “Who knows if it’s a problem yet,” Tío Lucho cautioned.

  “I know it takes two crimes,” countered Tío Victor, holding up two fingers for emphasis. Turning toward me, he added, “You should learn about these things too, Gabrielita. Your green card can be taken away if you get into any trouble with the law.”

  “Not any trouble,” Tío Lucho clarified.

  “Why do we have to worry about that?” I asked. “I thought we were allowed to live here permanently.”

  “Well, your father had one problemita in New York,” Tío Victor informed me. “This is number two.”

  “He did?” I looked at Mami.

  “Oh, that was a misunderstanding,” she responded quickly, swatting at the air as if there were a fly. She went on to explain that my father had been shopping in a big store on one floor and then taken an escalator to another floor without realizing that they were two different establishments. “He hadn’t paid,” she clarified, “but that’s not stealing. He tried to get that horrible man, that security guard, to understand. But he didn’t have the facility with the language.”

  “How come you didn’t help?” I asked in surprise.

  “I wasn’t there,” she admitted, then she described how my frustrated father had lost his temper so that, in the end, “Nobody believed him and we had to pay the fine.”

  Tío Lucho, less familiar with these details than Tío Victor, quizzed her about what had happened to the case after my father’s arrest, while I tried to take in the fact that it had happened at all. My father—arrested as a thief?

  When the lawyer’s door finally reopened, he called out to Arthur to send the family in.

  We filed into the cubicle office and sat among piles of files. Mr. Korematsu posed questions to my uncles, in a mixture of English and bad Spanish, about what had happened at the tailor shop that day. When they’d finished, he pronounced that everything “was consistent with the police report and the victim’s story.” Mami flinched at the word “victim” and my father began to argue about whether there had been such a thing, but the lawyer fended them both off by reading “allegations” from the report until they both backed down in alarm.

  “So here’s the recommendation I’ve made to Mr. De la Paz about how to handle these charges,” he explained, turning to my mother. Whereupon he set sail on a sea of legal discourse until his ship floundered on the shoals of translation and he gave us a wobbly smile. “In English it’s known as an ‘Admission to Sufficient Facts,’ ” he stated after a pause. “Similar to a guilty plea, except that you’re not actually found guilty. The disposition gets deferred. The idea is, if Mr. De la Paz doesn’t get into any more legal problems for the period in question, the charge will be dismissed. If we take care of the Disorderly Conduct count that way, I’m pretty sure we can dismiss the more serious Assault on a Minor without any admission or finding of guilt.”

  Had my father assaulted a kid? As I recoiled, my baffled mother asked, “When do we go to the court?”

  “Tuesday,” the lawyer informed her. “We’ll resolve everything right at arraignment.”

  “What about his green card?” Tío Victor demanded. “Did he tell—”

  “That’s the whole point of the deferred disposition,” the lawyer answered smoothly. “If Mr. De la Paz keeps his nose clean for the entire period—think of it as a kind of probation—the whole thing goes away and there won’t be any adverse immigration impact.”

  “Gracias a Dios,” Mami said, sighing with relief as my father stroked her hand and smiled benevolently.

  “But”—Tío Lucho threw a dubious glance in their direction—“what if we did have another problemita?”

  The lawyer held up both hands as if surrendering to the entire De la Paz family. “Then the disposition doesn’t work, right? If he’s arrested, he can be convicted on both of the outstanding charges. Plus, he could be convicted on any new ones,” he noted. “Unless we had some reason to think we could go to trial and succeed.”

  “That would mean losing his green card,” Tío Victor stated soberly.

  “Based on what he’s told me, yes—if there’s moral turpitude involved.” The Hawaiian turned toward my father. “But I’d have to see your out-of-state conviction records to be sure,” he qualified. “Hypothetically, though, the larceny plus any kind of enhanced assault could certainly lead to deportation. I would probably refer you to an immigration lawyer.”

  “Deportation?” I echoed. Visions of border guards danced in my head.

  The lawyer shot me a reassuring smile. “Let’s hope it won’t come to that.”

  On the morning of the arraignment, Tío Victor took off from work to drive my parents to court, where they were supposed to meet up with El Chino, as all of them were now referring to my father’s lawyer, even though we’d been told he was from Hawaii, not China. Korematsu wasn’t even a difficult name to pronounce, but maybe the nickname helped them trust him more. He became an immigrant, one of us.

  When my parents got home, Mami was palpably relieved that everything had gone according to El Chino’s plan. My father, she informed me proudly, wouldn’t even have to return to “the court” at all until his probation period—or whatever it was supposed to be—expired.

  “Two years seems so long, though,” I observed with concern. Could my father really keep his temper under wraps all that time?

  “The best thing,” Mami replied, ignoring my concern, “will be for your father to go back to a decent job once and for all. And that’s where you come in, muchachita,” she added, poking my shoulder with her finger.

  Obviously, she had the classified ads in mind. But her hope that my father, shaken by his legal crisis, would get promptly on the right track was thwarted when he buried his face in his magazines again.

  Her own brother was the culprit who really upset her applecart of family order, however. Having quit a job at Pan Am that he’d gotten after his own airport layoff, Tío Paco located a shoe factory that he said had lots of openings, even one for my father. The only problem was, it happened to be located hundreds of miles away in Lynn, Massachusetts—a detail he revealed ten days before the work was to start.

  “¿Cómo se te ocurre, Roberto?” Mami exclaimed at the p
rospect. How could my father possibly think of leaving her alone with the kids?

  My brothers and I, bent over a game of Trouble at the kitchen table, perked right up.

  “¿Y cómo me quedo en esta situación?” my father bellowed back.

  Yes, how could she expect him to stay, Tío Paco agreed, adding, “Roberto can’t very well return to the tailor shop now, can he?”

  That silenced everyone.

  Eventually, he spoke again. “Evangelina,” he said thoughtfully, rolling his mustache hairs between his thumb and forefinger, “it’s only for a short time. Until the situation improves.”

  Mami didn’t respond. Obviously, she was scared to be left behind, though my father couldn’t see it through his own desperation. The youngest of nine children, she’d often seemed overwhelmed to me, and this new development had definitely caught her off guard.

  “There’s only one room,” my uncle added apologetically. Sharing one room in his Puerto Rican friend’s apartment would keep costs down, Tío Paco reasoned, allowing my father to send us more of the money he earned.

  As my mother’s arguments thinned out, my uncle suggested trying it out for a year. By then, the situation in Miami would surely have improved. “I can keep an eye on things too,” Tío Paco offered obliquely—meaning my father’s temper, I presumed.

  Mami fell silent, her shoulders slumping with resignation.