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  Eventually, I was assigned to escort my uncle to the ticket office.

  “Tío knows enough English to buy a ticket,” I protested.

  But my uncle objected, “What if they ask me things I can’t answer?”

  I rolled my eyes at that remark, but I knew I could never win with the “what ifs,” so I kept my mouth shut and headed off with him.

  It panned out to be an unpleasant, hour-long bus trip all the way downtown, the chemical smell of air-conditioning combining with the body odor of men on the bus. On top of that, Tío Paco wasn’t easy to be with. His height and oversized mustache distanced him from other people, and he didn’t converse much. When he did, his jokes were sarcastic. A brief marriage to a gringa had resulted in her leaving him, and since then he was always moving. My mother collected mail for him when he was trying out places. “Some men have trouble finding their hearts again, mi’jita,” she’d told me once, assuring me that once upon a time my uncle had been a sweet boy. “Suffering can make a person hard,” she’d foreshadowed wearily.

  As I stood in the Greyhound line, I had trouble enough picturing my uncle suffering amicably with my father in their Massachusetts room, let alone successfully managing my father’s temper. When my turn at the ticket counter came, my uncle shoved money into my hand and I purchased the tickets without having to say much; all in all, it was a simple transaction, and I rode home feeling disheartened by the never-ending helplessness of my family.

  Back home, I roamed the house to let the idea of my father leaving sink in. He spent most of his time in his dark bedroom these days, but a sense of him radiated throughout the entire house. Would he really go?

  Only when Tío Victor and Tía Rita hosted a good luck party a few nights later was I truly convinced that he was leaving us.

  The party lifted everyone’s spirits except Mami’s. She finally cheered up with the arrival of Fernandita, her niece and only other relative in the U.S. besides Tío Paco, who was now abandoning her like my father. Fernandita had always been good to Mami; she even ordered her wild boyfriend, El Loco, to provide needed rides if the uncles weren’t available. After Fernandita brought her a glass of wine, Mami began to relax at last and enjoy the antics of Tía Rita, who’d teased her blue-black hair into a bob and kept gossiping about Jackie Kennedy and Liz Taylor—her favorite heroines—in between playing a Petula Clark record over and over and chiming in for the one-word chorus.

  The party seemed to confirm the truth in the toast Tío Victor made after dinner. Putting his arm around my father’s shoulders, he raised his glass on behalf of every relative present that night and announced, “A family is much more than a man, his wife, and his children.” Everyone smiled, nodded, and, as if further illustrating his point, began to dance around the living room before the dishes had been cleared. Even Tía Rita’s tiny elderly aunt was able to hang on by her chinny chin chin to my cousin Luchito, who was exactly her height, as they made their turns.

  “Why don’t you marineras get up?” Tío Victor teased Raquel and me as he twirled Tía Rita through the room. He’d only called us sailor girls because of the identical red-and-white dresses my mother had sewn for us.

  “That’s for old people,” Raquel called back, her sloping brown eyes smiling.

  “Bah! Don’t be tonta.”

  Raquel and I looked at each other, shrugged, and got up. We mixed cumbia steps with American dances like the Fish, but when a slow vallenato came on, immediately took our seats. Tío Victor joined us and put his arm across Raquel’s shoulders. With interest, we watched my parents waltz, my father’s crystal whiskey glass jiggling at the small of my mother’s back and her hand resting on his arm. For a moment, my father seemed really happy, the way he used to be on holidays in New York when he wasn’t working so hard to prove himself worthy of my mother.

  I was happy too. At last, our family seemed to be headed in the right direction. Leaning my head back on the couch, I listened to the music. “What a funny love song,” I said to Raquel and Tío Victor. It spoke of love as a soldier’s loyalty, of a grito de independencia—they were words for an anthem, really.

  “Ah, but the accordions are fantastic,” Tío Victor pointed out with his finger in the air as he stumbled up for a refill.

  “My father’s drunk,” Raquel observed. “And look at my mother.” Tía Rita was dancing a salsa caleña with paunchy but fleet-footed Tío Lucho. “Pretty soon, she’ll be coming over to tell us how much she loves us,” Raquel predicted with a tolerant smile.

  My parents never did that, even when drunk. I knew they loved me by their gestures. The gallant way my father pushed a chair in for me when I had to study; the battles my mother waged against my impudent hair to make it beautiful. Everyone loved in a different way, didn’t they?

  Two days later, my father’s travel date arrived. He came into the kitchen on the eve of his departure and stood silently watching my brothers and me for no ostensible reason as we did homework.

  By dawn, he was gone. Mami confided afterwards that he’d come to our rooms to kiss us good-bye when it was still dark.

  That morning over breakfast I relaxed, glad to be done with worrying about my father and all our family problems. As the day progressed, though, his absence grew into a shadow that trailed me through the house. An impression of something I’d once experienced when trying to learn to float came back like déjà vu. It was the moment Tío Victor had taken his hand away and ocean water had unexpectedly lapped my face. That had scared me, making me flail in panic. My uncle had laughed with his Pall Mall cigarette between his teeth and reassured me, “Relax, nena, no one’s trying to drown you.” But a dread of the things you couldn’t count on stayed beneath the surface of the words and their comfort.

  [ FIVE ]

  WITHOUT MY FATHER AROUND, Mami loosened the reins. On Saturday, I got permission to spend the day at Alina’s apartment on the other side of Flagler Street. With the swamp-cooler on, Alina, Lydia, and I tried on glittery ball gowns and strutted around smoking cigarettes. The next day, we crashed a swimming party at the elementary school, this time pretending to be younger instead of older than we were.

  Suddenly I was happy about everything! And Mami seemed happier too. Her friend Camila walked over on Sunday night with a bottle of jerez that they nearly emptied over a marathon of bizarre stories and gossip, which took their minds off their own troubles. Like my mother, Camila had had her fair share of them—her husband suffered from leukemia.

  When a money order from my father arrived a week later, Mami wasted no time paying bills and buying lots of groceries. “I’m cooking you kids sancocho tonight,” she announced gaily. While the substitute Man-of-the-House Manolo cut our grass, Pablo and I helped her chop yuca. After dinner she put on a movie in which Cary Grant did somersaults with Katharine Hepburn and engaged in witty repartee that Mami didn’t understand but smiled at anyway. She sat cheerfully sandwiched between Pablo and Manolo on the two-seater couch. It was like those nights back in Queens when my father used to work and when, for simple entertainment since we didn’t own a TV, the three of us would snuggle together in bed with her and watch the searchlights sweep the city. All in all, I couldn’t decide if it was better to be small and loved or to live a glittering, grown-up life.

  Without paternal obligations to fulfill, I had more time on my hands, and the southern horizon itself became interesting. In social studies class, I discovered that Florida had once been “old agriculture,” but now it was a kind of new land of opportunity. Mr. Lanham’s grainy slides of the old Florida showed us swamps, palmetto groves, and tiny fishing towns. They led to slides of the “new” Florida: Dixie Highway, Miami Beach hotels, the Cape Canaveral Space Center, I-95, and cluttered images of downtown with its tall, centrally air-conditioned department stores and noisy buses that crossed the Miami River north, south, east, and west.

  Miami was a unique mix of big city and hick town. Some hick parts were like my neighborhood—houses looked nice enough, but were bui
lt on streets that dead-ended unexpectedly into canals lined with sharp, weedy grass. The canals often went on for miles, piercing the distant Everglades, including the tourist section in which fearsome-sounding airboats cut through the saw grass clogging the water but never disturbed the alligators.

  After seeing Mr. Lanham’s slides I began to walk around and explore my neighborhood more, just to see how the old Florida was holding out against the new one. Modern houses were all painted mint, flamingo pink, and turquoise. New lawns grew tough, spiky grass—the only kind that could flourish in this intense climate. But there were no sidewalks to speak of, only bleached-white gravel pebbles of the old Florida that had been there long before. Around me, Miami stretched out in quadrants, cut by Flagler Street and Eighth Street (nicknamed Alligator Alley down past the Calle Ocho part), toward an infinite flatness. The flatness made every destination—the A&P, the tailor shop where my uncles worked, the post office—a horizon without end; as if God himself had ironed Alligator Alley and our wait for eternity began right here with it.

  That night, my father called from Massachusetts.

  I stood by and listened while Mami chatted on the phone. It seemed that the “short time” he and my uncle had expected to remain up north was about to be cut shorter. Their Puerto Rican roommate was facing eviction after little more than a month. Rent was expensive there, so Tío Paco was looking into replacement jobs for them in Hartford, Connecticut.

  “Connecticut?” she asked fearfully. A few moments of silence passed before I heard her tell my father to come home.

  I ran to my brothers’ room at once with the distressing news.

  “Why doesn’t she let him go?” Manolo complained, tossing his Flash comic at Pablo, who reached out and caught it.

  “Yeah,” Pablo chimed in. “She could tell him we have to move out too.”

  “Pablo, she can’t make up any old thing,” I said. “Papi’s not a fool.”

  He laughed out loud.

  “He’s not,” I insisted. “He’s just—odd.”

  Manolo stared at me. “He’s totally crazy, Gabi! Lo-co.” He eyed me like there was something wrong with me too.

  “Yeah, well, you guys better get your heads together in case he does come home.” I stood up to leave. “I hope Mami doesn’t show him your teacher’s letter, Pablo.”

  Pablo’s face fell, and Manolo gave me a dirty look that instantly filled me with remorse. “I’m kidding, Pablo,” I backtracked. “She’s not gonna do that.”

  For the next few days, though, Mami got easily upset over simple things that went awry. She obsessed over the silly letter Pablo’s teacher had sent home about his constant talking, and she bemoaned our many broken wares, like the lazy Susan. All these problems, she insisted, perhaps to convince herself, were due to the absence of a man in the house.

  “I’ll fix that, Mami,” Manolo promised as he inspected the broken cabinet. And to our surprise, he retrieved my father’s toolbox from the shed and bolted the lazy Susan so that it swung again.

  “How’d you do that?” I asked, impressed.

  “Papi used to show me things.” His crooked tooth shone brightly when he smiled.

  But Mami only found new subjects to complain about, namely me, my wardrobe, and my American influences.

  “Are you wearing those faded pants to Rita’s, Gabriela?” she challenged, as she stared intently at me from the doorway before our outing that Sunday.

  “Most of my clothes are like this,” I argued.

  “Please change out of ese hipiado,” she ordered, disparaging the jeans she considered “hippie” attire. “Cámbiate.”

  Literally, her command meant “change yourself.” All I could really do, though, was force myself into a dress, the least close-fitting one available that wouldn’t mark me too obviously as a female, attractive to nasty men like the sicko who’d chased me around the Laundromat and the chorus of Calle Ocho lechers who beeped when I walked down the street. My best choice was a faded Nehru from the donations bin at St. Stephen’s. I hated that dress. I never knew when the original owner might show up and tell the whole free world that I was wearing her hand-me-downs.

  My mother appraised me silently in the mirror. “You have to try to look like a lady, Gabriela,” she reminded me. A big believer in making the best of one’s limited resources, Mami herself dressed to the nines even for public hospital check-ups. Judging from her expression as I halfheartedly brushed my tangle of hair, I wasn’t trying hard enough. With her hand on one hip, she shook her head and frowned. “Ay, ay, ay, Gabriela,” she muttered, then asked—rhetorically of course—why I had to part my hair in the middle, sin gracia, without any grace or style? “You look like una india,” she complained, forgetting all about the Chibcha in the shadows of our family tree.

  “Cut it!” I abdicated in frustration, throwing down the wooden brush. “Chop it all off, if that means so much to you!”

  Cutting my hair wasn’t going to bring my mother real happiness, though, I knew. Not if what she longed for was a soap opera daughter like the one with the fairy-tale outfits my mother so admired on As the World Turns. I wished I could tell Mami: Be grateful I don’t care about nice clothes or hairdos! But it was all so tiring, being the object of someone’s eternal disappointment, that I lost the will to explain what was okay about how I was turning out, that I didn’t want to change myself.

  Mami took my hairbrush, began pinning my hair behind my ears, and then shot me with her can of hair spray. “Ya,” she said, “That’s more civilized.” I knew the bobby pins wouldn’t outlast the afternoon, that the sorry mess would come tumbling down. My tough locks, like the slaves of the Caribbean, would free themselves. But for peace’s sake, I let her keep her illusions. After all, hair was a small thing she could fix while my father’s broken spirit haunted the air.

  Late that night, after we’d returned from Tía Rita’s, I heard the phone ring as I washed my face. I had an intuition that it might be my father so I finished quickly to go find out what was happening.

  In the kitchen Mami sat grimacing through her pink reading glasses at the bills splayed on the table: one big, bad hand of cards. With a tired glance at me, she removed her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know what to do. Should I put the seventy-five toward the mortgage or other bills?”

  I slid into a chair across from her. “Is Papi coming home?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “Mami.” I hesitated. “Don’t you think it might be good if he keeps working there a little longer? You know, so we can pay more things.”

  “But paying for two homes—” she started to explain.

  “You said before he could go for a year.”

  “Are you complaining about your own father?” she snapped.

  “No! But maybe a year would give Papi time to, um, recuperate.” That was her word, I recalled, the one she’d used at Tía Rita’s after the tailor shop fiasco.

  My mother peered at me over her glasses. “Where do you get these americanismos, Gabriela? What kind of girl thinks that way?”

  Not a backward person like you, I wished I could toss back. But I had no freedom to be mean. I could only dream of a golden ticket out of this place into some imaginary one, where conflicts wouldn’t barrel down on me like the Greyhound bus heading home from Massachusetts.

  Tío Victor delivered my father to us in his wrinkled ivory shirt and gray pants. My lone ranger uncle Paco had decided to move on to Connecticut.

  A living soap opera, Mami embraced my father with tears in her eyes. “¡Por fín!” she proclaimed. At last he was home!

  Smiling with embarrassment, my father accepted a quick peck on the cheek from each of my brothers, who then willingly went to bed.

  “Hola, Papi,” I said, trying to muster up enthusiasm as I kissed him too.

  “You’re taller, mi’jita,” he observed proudly.

  “Uh huh. Everyone tells me that lately,” I said, carrying his bag into his r
oom and then returning to mine. From there, I heard Mami begin to enumerate the outstanding chores, as if my father had never been away. A family should always stick together, she’d taught me fervently. Even if a couple didn’t get along well, like Lydia’s parents, my mother would object to divorce, whether or not it was legal in the Church. I didn’t know how I felt about that part anymore. But as I lay in the dark and tried to ward off a vague disappointment, I divined what she couldn’t from the paltry homecoming—that although our family was together again physically, forces bigger than us had already started to pull us apart.

  My father slept peacefully through the entire next day.

  Then he got up early the following morning and dressed. Donning his old visor cap, he marched purposefully to the shed. I was heating up café con leche when I happened to glance through the screen and I saw that he’d taken out his silver wrench. Wow, I thought, how tickled pink Mami would be if he actually tackled her number one complaint besides me these days—the bathroom sink. But instead of coming inside with his tools, he shouted loudly for Manolo and Pablo to join him out front. My brothers quickly threw on their shorts and rushed out, as Mami and I tagged along to investigate.

  My father had wheeled our rusty, scraped blue two-wheeler bike around to the street in front of our house. The ancient bike, bent and haunted by the remains of its silver and white streamers, was a present he’d given us back in the day when he worked regularly. But it had been too small from the outset, and after an obligatory trial run he’d demanded of my brothers, they had declined to ride again.

  Now, standing next to the hated bike, Manolo frowned at a mint green house up the street where his friend Johnny lived. The smarty-pants had made fun of my brother for riding it.

  “This is a girl’s bike,” Manolo protested. Not that he’d won with that point before.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Tersely, my father pushed the corroded blue handlebars at him.

  Shaking his head, my brother grabbed the bike. He pedaled slowly, with his knees turned out, almost bow-legged, while the sun beat down. The rest of us watched, some neighbors joining in from across the street, as he circled the block and came to a halt.