Page 26 of Outside the Veil
“And his?”
“Finn’s from Ireland,” Diego blurted out, to stall for time.
“Oh, he’s all set, then. I’ll call you back this afternoon.”
Why hadn’t he thought of that? Even before the tightening of border security, Finn would still have needed identification. A driver’s license. Something. They asked for everyone’s…
No, wait. They asked for every human’s ID. A solution presented itself, if Finn would agree to it.
He placed the next call to his father in Miami. After his mother died, his father had moved back to Florida, where the bulk of his family lived so he no longer had to struggle with English.
“Hola, Papi.”
“Diego! Cómo estás?”
“Fine, fine,” he continued in Spanish. If he spoke anything else, his father would pretend not to understand. “Papi, I wanted to tell you I would be away for a while. Up in Canada.”
“Why would you go there? Isn’t it cold?”
“My agent thinks it will be good for me. For my writing. To get out of the city.”
“Mijo, don’t you have a real job yet?”
“This is my real job. Please, I don’t want to start this again.”
“Then why not come down here? Where you have family and sunshine. Where we can make sure you have enough to eat.”
“I get enough to eat. Please don’t worry. I wanted to leave the number in case you or Analisa need to find me.”
“You truly want me to tell your sister? She will call, whether she needs to or not.”
Diego smiled. Yes, she would, to complain about her husband and to gossip about the cousins. “That’s all right, Papi. I don’t mind.”
“Don’t get eaten by bears.”
He laughed and assured his father he wouldn’t.
That had been nearly painless, unlike their conversations a few years ago when Diego had first come out to his family. His sister had been shocked but accepting. His father had ranted and cried and hounded him for months about getting help for his ‘illness’. Eventually the hand twisting and hair tearing had given way to a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. Papi didn’t ask about his personal life, he didn’t offer any details, and relations evened out to stilted but civil.
Father John at the mission was next, to let him know he wouldn’t be able to do his usual rounds for a while. “Go, Diego,” Father John reassured him. “Someone else will look in on everyone and make sure the cold weather warnings get out. You need a rest.”
The last phone call went to Mitch’s voicemail. Cowardly, perhaps, to leave a message, though Diego wasn’t sure he owed him even that much any longer. He simply couldn’t stand the thought of Mitch thinking he had slunk away and gone into hiding.
Around noon, after three false starts on a new story, he got up to check on Finn. The pooka sprawled on his stomach, one foot idly waving in the air, the tip of his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth. A dozen sheets of paper littered the floor around him, most with random scribbles that appeared to be experiments in crayon technique. The one he leaned over now in such intense concentration seemed a more structured effort, a mosaic of carefully interlocked, jagged shapes.
Finn finished the shape drawn in Mango Tango, placed the crayon with the growing pile he had already used and nearly stuck his nose inside the box to search for the next one. He pulled out Eggplant, turned it in the light, and nodded in satisfaction before he noticed Diego crouched beside him.
He held out the clipboard. “What do you think?”
Diego studied it, the same anxiety gripping him as when a four-year-old handed him a picture he couldn’t decipher. He always guessed wrong, earning him that brain-addling, scornful look only the pre-school set could manage.
“It’s…well….”
Finn sat up. “You don’t like it?”
“What is it?”
“Colors. They all have such different flavors.”
