Page 69 of For The Record

A voicemail from Skye. I open it.Hi, Leo. Um, I just want you to know… I heard about your parents, and I’m so, so sorry. I can’t imagine what you must be going through right now. If you need anything, just call me, okay? I‘ll be there. Bye,

My fingers move before I can stop them, and I type out a message to her in response, hoping she’ll read it in time. Then I hope she won’t read it at all, as I let my eyes wander over the words once more. But I hit send anyway. I need to keep going.

So I write a note to Raina telling her that I’m going out but will be back in time for the funeral. I slap it on the coffee table next to her, where she’s precariously close to rolling off the couch and landing face-down on the floor. The thought almost brings a smile to my face, but it doesn’t come.

Not when I know why Raina is in my apartment, why she spent last night playing the same baby grand that Skye’s fingers touched, why I picked her up along with a duffel bag and a skateboard and tears in her eyes. I can’t let myself be happy that she’s here because our parents are dead.

Despite my best efforts to ignore my phone, it keeps buzzing with notifications. A missed call from Tia Flores, my mother’s younger sister. I pick it up. “Hello?”

“I’m stopping by your place today with a casserole,” she says, as though my mother used to bring me food all the time. As though I’m not a grown man who can’t cook his own meals—pasta counts, doesn’t it?—and may starve to death immediately upon the loss of my mother. Then, the irrational anger fades and I remember that she’s just my aunt who wants to take care of her family members. “I will be there in two hours.”

“Raina is sleeping right now,” I tell her as I swing my keys in my hand, striding toward the door of my apartment. I check my watch. Ten am. Did I sleep in so late? Usually, I’m up by six. “I don’t want you to wake her.”

“Tsk, tsk,” Tia Flores says. “Young girls shouldn’t be sleeping in so late.”

Young girls also shouldn’t have to deal with the deaths of their parents in one fell swoop, but I don’t add that. Scolding is how she shows her love for us. “You can henpeck her when you get here.”

“I have to go, Leo,” she says. “Te amo.”

I echo the words before hanging up. Raina hasn’t woken. I get into my Audi in a daze, unsure of where to go but only knowing that I cannot stay here any longer. Not in this empty, cold apartment; not with my little sister who is too young to have to face this kind of pain, whose eyes seem too heavy for her age. There is nothing about this situation that is right or good or ideal. But it is what it is.

Somehow, I just have to accept it.

Sitting in the driver’s seat, I realize I haven’t even put the key in the ignition. Traffic will be so horrendous that it will take the whole two hours to drive there and back to the apartment. Why don’t I just walk? I don’t have that much to get, surely, and I need to get this restless energy out of my system anyway. On the way to the grocery store, I call my housekeeper and tell her she doesn’t need to come in this Sunday. She sounds surprised, but doesn’t ask too many questions. Staring at the long, vast aisles of Trader Joe’s, I realize that I haven’t actually done my own grocery shopping for a long time. Blindly, I put in random items that I think Raina might like. Cheetos. Mac and cheese. Green juice. Everything bagel seasoning. Something called shakshuka starter. Bruschetta. Mini croissants. A mini vanilla sheet cake. Mini ice cream cones. Mango yogurt. Two types of ravioli. On my way to the cash register, I pick up staples. Bagels. Skim milk. Smoothies. Steaks. Frozen chicken wings. Broccoli. That should be enough, right?

When I’ve rung up my things, I realize I have no car, and four bags of groceries. The walk home from Trader Joe’s tells me that, in fact, I need to stop skipping arm day. It also reminds me of all the times my mother told me I was too skinny and force-fed me ropas viejas every time I went back home. And then I’m halfway down the block back toward my house, past the gate, watching with blurry eyes as my aunt’s car pulls into my driveway.

I need to stop. Dios. I thought I was okay. I thought so many things that it hurts. The bags feel like hundred-pound weights, and I speed-walk the last few steps and hurry into the house in time to help Tia Flores with her casserole dish.

Dumping the grocery bags on the porch, I press the keypad with one hand covering the other before pushing the door open. Raina has disappeared from the couch and I hear running water sounds. She must be in the shower.

Aunt Flores smiles at me as I carry the casserole dish into the kitchen, but her grin is teary-eyed. She hugs me, her five-foot frame squeezing mine with all the force of a concerned mother. “Have you eaten today?”

Going back out for the bags, I haul them in with a grimace and begin putting the things away. I pause at the ravioli. Does that go in the fridge or the freezer? As if sensing my culinary ineptitude, Aunt Flores immediately begins taking parcels from my hands and ushering me into a chair. “No, no, let me do it.”

I dismissed the housekeeper today, needing to be alone with my sister without the intrusion of a stranger into our familial grief.

“You’re a guest.” I stand up. “Do you want something to drink?”

“Agua,” she says, but her voice is still stern, disapproving. Some things, at least, never change. I scramble to pour a glass of Aquafina for her, which she accepts without comment. She tsks when she holds the glass, examining it the way I imagine an archeologist would uncover some artifact. “This is dusty.”

“I’ll make sure to tell my housekeeper to put the glasses in the cabinet, then, not on the shelf.” The complaining, at least, is normal. At least some part of the world is still spinning, even if I don’t want it to. “Anything else?”

“Leo, do you ever remember where you’re from?” she asks with a sigh, her Cuban accent thickening with emotion. “Do you remember who you are?”

I’m on the verge of saying, you just brought me a casserole, the whitest food there is and you sit on a PTA board and yell at kids who walk on your lawn, which Ricardo landscaped. Of course, I stop myself, remembering how it feels to have a chancla flung at me in punishment. “I know who I am.”

Do I? Or do I know what I do, where I sleep, what I eat? Even that last one is called into question, now.

“Your mom and I didn’t come here and work as maids and waitresses so that our children could live in these big, empty houses and have housekeepers,” she says, her voice filled with an emotion that I don’t understand or recognize. She smoothes back a dark curl of hair, pinning it back with a tortoiseshell clip before smoothing out her floral dress.

I throw my hands in the air. “I have made more money in my work than my mother has in a lifetime, but I don’t rub that in her face. I paid for her and Ricardo’s vacations, for their house, so would you like me to take that back?”

Isn’t this the immigrant dream? To break your bones for your children to pull themselves up on? Isn’t this what we’re supposed to want? Yet all I want back now is my mother and Ricardo, and Tia Flores, loving and maternal as she is, is a poor substitute.

“Aren’t you lonely, Leo?” Tia Flores rubs her temples. “You can’t take your money with you when you’re gone. Dios, look at your parents.”

“I—” I stop myself, unsure of what even to say to her. What defence do I have against the truths she so deftly flings at me?

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