Page 64 of The Kiss Principle

He laughed, the edge of it jagged. “It’s unreal, you know that? When you went to college, I thought, ‘He’s out. He made it out. He’s going to have his own life now.’ And instead, you came back. And I know—” He stopped, and some of the heat left his voice. “I know Gus-Gus needed you. I know I wasn’t taking care of him, and Mom…” He clicked the button for the window, but it couldn’t roll up any more. He clicked it a few more times. Now he sounded like he was trying to ask a question. “But when he got to high school, I thought you’d leave. And when he went off to college, I was sure you’d leave. And you stayed, Fer. And you know what I figured out? You like it. This is what you want. It took me a long time to figure that out about the world. People always do what they want.”

When I finally spoke, my throat was so thick I could barely get the words out. “You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

Chuy slumped back against the seat and shook his head. It must have been an hour, driving in silence through long, emptyvalleys, the blue of the sky graying at the horizon until it was almost the same color as the asphalt.

“I don’t want you to do this anymore,” Chuy said. “I don’t want you to keep giving up your life for me. I want you to be happy. I want you to have a good job. I want you—Jesus Christ, Fer—I want you to be done with Mom. I know you do it because you love us. But you’ve got to stop. Please stop.”

“Sure.” My face prickled, and I fought to keep my eyes clear, to focus on the road. “Great fucking idea. And the next time you OD, the next time you hit a dealer’s stash and somebody puts a knife in you, what, Chuy?”

The tires hummed.

“It’s my life,” he finally said. “You’ve got to live yours.”

I couldn’t say anything. If I did—if I said, do you remember how we made our own Voltron out of cardboard boxes, and when the Serrano assholes kicked it to shit, you went berserk. If I said, do you remember when you made me a birthday cake out of Graham crackers. If I said, I remember when you got a fever when you were two, and I’ve never been so scared in my entire life. I remember how you looked your first day of high school, I remember how nervous you were when you asked me what to do with a girl, I remember when you told me you were going to be a rock star, and we spent every Saturday for a month trying to find you a guitar. If I said any of it, the dam would burst, and I’d probably drive us into a power pylon.

Instead, I blinked until I could see, and we drove on.

We stopped for food, and I got a wrap. Chuy got the Bacon Slayer, and I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

“What?”

“I had one on the way up.”

He grinned. “These things are fucking amazing.”

“Talk to me after you’re a half a pound of mayonnaise into it.”

We ate as we drove, and Chuy broke the silence between bites. “How’s, uh, the baby?”

I grunted.

He picked at his fries.

“Is she yours?” I asked.

“We did a test.”

“Where’s her mom?”

“She’s gone.” When I looked over, he had pinched one of the fries into mush. “OD’d. Kaliyah was like that when I got there, and the baby was there, and I didn’t know what to do. I knew you’d know what to do.” He cleaned his fingers on a napkin. “I had to get out of there.”

Which meant getting high. I tried to think of what to say. The best I could come up with was “I’m sorry.”

He nodded.

Grief wasn’t what I’d been expecting, but I could feel it, the raw wound of it. For a girl named Kaliyah, yes. But maybe for himself, too.

“We call her Isabela.”

For a moment, I thought he was going to cry. He wrapped up what was left of his food, and his hands were shaking as he did. “Isabela. That’s nice. That’s a nice name. Kaliyah would have liked that.”

“What about Kaliyah’s family?”

“Her parents are dead. I don’t know if she had brothers or sisters; she’s not from here, you know?”

I nodded.

He dropped his head against the window again. After a while, he said, “Isabela.”

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