When you were starting first grade, I was finishing high school. 

Any of the neighbors—Charnette, Javon, Paul and Diana, Katie—could’ve watched you, taken you to the bus. But I needed to be there for your first day. I’d missed pre-K because Charnette told me if I didn’t quit skipping to take care of you, she’d be on me, and she didn’t play. For what you called “kinnergarin,” I just got to see you off to Charnette’s apartment before I had to get to school.

“You’ll be cool,” I said, leaning down to brush off the front of your shirt. It was your favorite one, blue with a gator with sunglasses doing a thumbs-up. “You already got friends. All the kids are zoned for your school.”

“Zoned?”

“Just, like, they make all the kids from the same place go to the same school. It’s not like pre-K with kids from all over.”

“’Cause it was for everyone who got food stamps.”

“Right. Where’s your lunchbox?”

Your face scrunched in thought, then relaxed into the side-eye smile you always gave when you knew I was messing with you.

“In the fridge, where you told me.”

I smiled back. Pushed your shaggy hair out of your eyes, knowing it’d fall back in front of them in two seconds. “You’re big now, remembering where all your stuff goes.”

We made your PBJ and chopped up an apple and half a carrot the night before. You grabbed your turtle lunchbox out of the fridge, unzipped the LEGO dragon backpack that I’d borrowed from the Walmart on Serene like I’d borrowed the rest of your school supplies, and stood there with your chest stuck out after you got your lunch in. I tightened the straps so your bag wouldn’t hang all the way down to your ankles. You were a tiny kid, a peanut.

“All right,” I said. “Bus’s coming.” You grabbed my hand. On our way out, I looked at dad’s door, cracked open. Sleeping through it all. There was that Las Vegas morning heat outside, the kind that broiled because it didn’t cool past eighty overnight.

The bus was idling out front of the complex, already with a knot of kids and parents on the sidewalk. Charnette waved at me, and her twins, Braxtyn and Jazmyne, waved at you. Javon and his daughter, Denice, a big ten years old, rolling her eyes at all the little kids. Paul and Diana with their four kids: Ocean, Lake, River, Rain. All the people who’d watch you and whose kids I’d watch when anyone had a late shift, a date with the court or a girlfriend, a need for a night to kick their feet up before they lost their shit. Screamed goodbyes, parents begging their kids to use inside voices on the bus, cars zipping past over six lanes, and kids’ sneakers thumping on the metal bus steps.

I slipped my hand out of yours when you tried to pull me forward. And just like that, you looked over your shoulder. The smile you were giving the twins slid off your face. Your big brown eyes widened and your hand darted back to grip mine.

“You’re not coming with?”

“The only grownup who can be on the bus is the driver, Davey.”

“You’re not a grownup. You’re seventeen.”

“Okay, you have to be eleven or younger to get on the bus.”

You grabbed my hand with both of yours and tugged. It wasn’t a real pull, because you weren’t really upset yet, but you were digging your heels into the concrete, leaning back. “But I’m not gonna have fun if you’re not there.”

I realized I hadn’t stressed that elementary school and high school were in separate places. You must’ve pictured us at the same desk, coloring the same sheet, making letters out of the same pack of Play-Doh.

“Come on,” I said, picking you up. “If you go now, I’ll be there right when you get out.”

You furrowed your eyebrows. “You will?”

“Yeah, so you won’t have to ride the bus home. Who else is gonna get you?” I could see you thinking through your disappointment that I couldn’t come with you, but I had to redirect. “I’ll be there. Trust. Now you got to get a seat by your buddies. Go!”

I don’t remember how many kisses I gave you on top of your head and on your face or how many times we said I love you before I put you down, but I remember your hesitation melting, and I remember watching you run up the bus stairs, almost trip, and look back to grin at me with your hand on the rail.

As we all walked back to our building, Charnette was dabbing her tears. They’d switched her to afternoon shift cleaning at the M, so she couldn’t pick them up anymore. The twins had to go to school with a house key looped around each of their necks. Paul and Diana were assuring her it’d only get easier. Their oldest, Ocean, was in eighth grade, and their youngest, Rain, was still wrapped in a blanket in Diana’s arms. Javon said Denice knew she needed to get all the younger kids home.

Before I left again, I looked hard at dad’s door. It was twenty minutes to walk to Silverado—I had time. I nudged it open. The hall light lay in a rectangle on the carpet at the foot of his bed. It reeked like piss and shit, which for anyone else would’ve been a clue but for him, for me, was normal. I was going to put the back of my hand under his nose to feel if he was breathing like always, but his lips were blue. One of his arms was slung over his chest and his fingers were blue, too. All puffed up and fat. How your face and hands looked when you were really little and you’d stuff your face with a whole pound carton of blueberries in one sitting.

—

Waiting outside La Barca, I see you before you see me. Coming up from the Vermont and 25th intersection as the sun’s setting. You’re walking on the outside of the sidewalk, your mom’s on the inside, and you both look as lost and guarded as anyone else visiting Los Angeles for the first time. Half of your face is flashing red from the glowing neon signs for John’s Liquor and Hilda’s Boutique, and half is gold from the sunlight coming over the rows of storefronts.

Eleven years. It looks like your head got stretched lengthwise, all skinny. But the other pieces of you are still there. Your huge brown eyes, our mouths, close to identical but not quite, because our dad had a type and because my mom was popping everything but prenatals the first few months of pregnancy, so I have that cleft to one side. I spot the freckles on your cheeks and the sides of your neck as you get closer. Your eyebrows thickened without losing their shape, your hair darkened without losing its glossiness, and you didn’t end up all that tall, but now you’re wide in the shoulders and chest from your soccer, swim, golf, lacrosse.

Your mom sees me before you do, craning to check the restaurant sign, then looking at the people standing beneath it and getting stuck on me. She looks like she did back then, just with new lines on the corners of her mouth and under her eyes, still small and skinny. I always thought you were lucky not to get her red hair. 

She hangs back with a pinched smile and her hands clasped in front of her. You look at her first, over your shoulder, then follow her eyes to my face. I didn’t know what facial expression I’d end up making, but I’m smiling like an idiot. I didn’t expect your face to change, so I’m not surprised when it doesn’t.

“Hey, D,” I say, stepping closer and making up for the rest of the distance with my outstretched hand. You take it. Firm grip. You’ve practiced. We pull each other in for a sort-of hug, one quick slap on each other’s shoulder before we let go, hands still clasped between us so our chests don’t touch and you can’t feel my heart racing. “Congrats.” 

After we step back, your mom accepts my handshake. “And congratulations to you, too, Dr. Hranica,” I say. “I’m sure you must be proud of him.” 

“Thank you, Rahfeal. Florence is fine, really.”

“You say it Rafael,” you correct, and her smile doesn’t shift at all.

I’m laying it on thick and she knows it. Her posture is stiffer than a board. Must’ve been hoping I’d meet you six margaritas deep so she could steer you away to the DoubleTree by Hilton, saying, we tried, Davey.

I don’t let myself feel insulted or think that she’s not the only one who decided she’d never be like the man she had a kid with. Because I get it. I’d be afraid, too, if I was her.

“How was campus?”

“Campus was beautiful,” she says for you, “just beautiful.”

“It’s huge,” you say, while I’m gesturing you both into the restaurant and holding up three fingers with a smile to the waitress. She gathers up menus, scans the dining room, nods at me to follow. “I have no idea how I’m not gonna get lost all the time.”

“Yeah,” I say. I have to speak up over the shouted conversations and the music, all in Spanish, a language I’m not sure you know. “My coworker’s kid said you kind of have to go out of your way to explore, but that your classes’ll mostly be in the same three buildings.” The waitress ushers us into a booth against the wall. Your mom runs her fingers over one of the flower petals etched into the table before a menu plunks down in front of her. 

“I think I only have classes in two places,” you say, looking up at the ceiling like there’s a schedule printed on it. “But, man, I didn’t realize you had actual restaurants. The tour guide said there were, like, five Starbucks within a mile of campus, and all I saw was stuff like Chipotle. Kind of like home.”

I can’t get used to your voice. I act like I’m reading the menu, but I know I want the chile verde burrito. My hands would be shaking if I had to hold them straight out. You sound grown. You are grown. I’d heard you on the phone but you’d stayed six in my mind, and I need to match the voice to an older version of the face that used to puppy-dog-eye me at Smith’s for Goldfish and throw screaming tantrums because I couldn’t make the sun wake up at 9:00 PM because you missed watching it go to sleep that day.

“There’re decent places if you go off,” I say. If your mom hasn’t scared you by saying you’ll get shot just stepping into South Central, anyway.

“You didn’t attend, though, did you, Rafael?” your mom asks, her pronunciation aggressively correct.

“Never needed to. I’m a site manager for a home remodeling company.”

“That’s a shame,” she goes on, before I can think of another topic. “I’ve heard they have amazing resources for first-gen students. But you know what they say about the trades—fantastic job security.”

“I’ll keep that in my back pocket,” I say, then look at you. “You get to pick your classes?”

“They sat him down with an advisor after orientation,” she answers, and you shrug at me. “It was such a relief. They’d sent us an enrollment how-to just in case we couldn’t make the date we picked, but we couldn’t figure it out the registration system.”

“What’d you end up with, David?”

“Uh . . .” you say, as she’s inhaling to jump in again. “They said first-year composition would be a good idea, so it’s that, business stats because I got to waive calculus, this, like, organizational leadership class, and . . .”

“A first-year seminar focusing on climate fiction!” she finishes, beaming. You nod.

“I thought I’d lighten up all my finance bro stuff with some reading about starving polar bears,” you say, and all three of us laugh, even though I have no idea what “climate fiction” is. You smile in the same silly way that almost makes my eyes well up, but you must’ve gotten braces. Your front left tooth, the first one you lost, was twisted at an angle when it grew back in.

“Business, man.” I shake my head. “That’s great, really great. You want to be an accountant, or . . .”

Drinks on the table with a basket of chips and salsa. That awkward pause so everybody can mutter thanks and study the menu again like we’d been caught doing something bad. You order in halting classroom Spanish—“Por favor, quisiera las enchiladas”—and your eyes flick over to me when you’re done. I didn’t speak a lick of it when I was your age, either. I order a sope because you’ll be able to tell how nervous I am if I only finish a quarter of a burrito. We all sip our drinks and take a moment to pretend they’re the most delicious we’ve ever tasted. I wonder if your mom realizes I don’t drink, or if she thinks I got my margarita virgin for show.

“Raf, uh . . . What were you gonna say, before?”

I look at you. “Oh, if you’re gonna do accounting, or something else.”

“Yeah,” you say, pushing your Coke away and scooping a heap of salsa onto a chip. Your mouth quivers for a second before you eat and your ears are bright red. “Business admin with an emphasis in finance. But, yeah, we’ll see.”

—

I picked you up. There was a loose ring of parents, grandparents, and older siblings around the dark blue metal doors on the side of the school. The heat was scorching by then, and sweat was sliding down my forehead, neck, and ribs, but I wasn’t yanking my shirt away from my stomach or wiping my face dry. I could see your teacher through one of the rectangle windows, chin pointed down as she tried to keep all of you from shoving the doors open before the bell rang. Tiny hands reached up for the glass, smearing it with the day’s grime. The bell shrieked, your principal came on the intercom with some announcement about a great first day, and an aide opened the doors so you all could come flooding out.

You were at the front of the pack. The kids were aimlessly shoving, jumping to see over other kids’ heads, trying to figure out where their people were. You, pushing your hair out of your eyes and looking all around. My head was all leaden and watery, but I was smiling as soon as I saw you. Your grin when you spotted me, huge on your face. Relief and joy. 

“My Raf’s here!”

You sprinted for me. Your backpack bounced off the backs of your knees. All I expected was a leg-hug, but you got low to the ground with your running start and jumped. I just had a second to lean forward, bend at the knees, scoop you up. 

I held you close to my chest. “’Cause I promised,” I told you. “Hello, my David.”

I didn’t know how to explain to you that there was a woman called Kelsey, also called a social worker, waiting in a Ford Taurus with everything we owned heaped into black garbage bags in the trunk. I’d spent the afternoon dumping your toys and outfits in after I’d decided to call 911. I didn’t know how to tell you she was going to take us to what she said was an emergency foster placement. I’d begged her to let us stay one more night in our old place, just to make it less confusing for you. But we were liabilities. So I let you wiggle around and jam your face into my shoulder, hard, like you always did, like you wanted to be glued to me, and asked if you were ready for a sleepover. 

“With Braxtyn and Jazmyne?”

“No, someone new. Probably just for a couple nights. And guess what?”

“What?” Your voice muffled by my shirt.

“I get to be there.”

I knew I should tell you he was dead, but I knew I could only say it in a way that would lead to an endless cycle of whys. I couldn’t distill the words yet because my head was stuffed with pictures. I just wanted to go back to our apartment, sit on the green benches next to the busted-up playground, and watch you with the twins and all the other neighborhood kids until the sky was pitch black. I wanted Charnette to sit next to me, smoking Pall Malls and saying ’member when. I wanted Diana to walk by and ask if anyone needed anything at Smith’s. To be somewhere we all cared about each other, some way, if only because none of us could do it alone.

—

I lean back after I finish my sope because even that little food has me nauseous. When I go out to a place like this, my table is loud like the rest, all of us talking with food in our mouths. This time, eating and drinking are breaks from coming up with anything to say. But I try.

“So, why LA? Don’t they have good schools up in Michigan?”

Your mom checks her watch.

“Good schools that don’t have three hundred days a year of sunshine,” you say.

The waitress saves me with the check. She must be able to tell which of her tables are coming from a funeral or anything that makes talking worse than breaking a bone. I fold some cash into the clip before your mom and I can go back and forth about me not needing to pay.

“You said you have a spare room, right?” you ask.

“Yeah, my aunt’s house is a three-bed. But if you stay over, you can have mine.” I’d been banking on this. New sheets and everything. “My aunt mostly uses the spare for storage.”

Your mom slides a card on top of the money and clears her throat, tries a watery smile. “It’s past seven, David. Are you sure you don’t want to spend the night at the hotel?”

“No,” you say. “I want to take the train. I want to see Boyle Heights.”

“David.” Your mom clasps her hands on the table until her fingers go red.

“You said I could if I wanted to, and I want to.”

“It’s a ten-minute drive from your hotel,” I say.

Finally, she relaxes. I get the sense that she knows she’s leaving you here for school, that you’d come see me anyway, and she’d rather be here the first time you do. Like parents letting their kids drink under their supervision. “Just keep your phone charged, sweetie.”

“I don’t mind clearing out the spare for you, if you want to stay too,” I lie. “I was going to sleep on our air mattress anyway.”

“I’d hate to intrude,” she says, and after we go outside I wait behind the rented Honda Pilot while you rummage through your bags to pick out enough stuff to last you a night. I’m tracing the quickest walk to the train in my mind. But she says, “Let me take you to the station,” so I get in the back and slide the TAP card I’d preloaded for you over the console while none of us speaks.

At the station, she leans over to hug you, kiss you, tell you she loves you, all the things I used to do without hesitation. I check both sides of the track to see if the train’s coming from either direction, see if we’re going to miss it. I show you how to tap your card.

“You ever been on a train?”

“No,” you say. You don’t look back at her car. Instead, you’re looking at the long concrete strip of the train platform, craning your neck to squint at the lights overhead. There’s a sleeping man with a blanket draped over himself and his push cart. Your eyes linger on him. “We just have a bus and I never even took that.”

“I’m sorry if it smells like piss.”

“My mom told me it might.”

I try not to bristle. “It’s not that bad. Most of the time.”

You stare at the train’s yellow top light coming out of the tunnel, lean back a little as it rushes past. It squeals to a stop, and you glance at me after the doors swish open like you need me to let you on. Almost eight at night, and I have to scan the car to find an empty pair of seats. People are slouching, sleeping, staring out the windows with headphones in. 

The train rumbles around a curve that makes you lean against my shoulder. “Sick whip,” you say. I laugh, sit back low in my seat, and mime steering. 

You grab my wallet out of my hand, flip it open to my driver’s license. I watch you squint at my picture. I think it’s a pretty good one, even though it’s almost ten years old. I’m smiling in it because the DMV lady told me to and I hadn’t wanted to let her down because the kid in front of me got told the same thing, but he just had to mean mug.

“You fixed the spelling,” you say. “You’re not Ruh-feel anymore.”

“My Aunt Gigi said I could have anything I wanted for my eighteenth . . . as long as it was under fifty bucks,” I say. “And I was sick of everyone knowing my parents were druggies or teenagers or both just by reading my name. Lucky thing was we were poor as shit, so the whole thing was free. No more Ruh-feel.”

“What’d you spend the fifty on, then?”

“Shakey’s Pizza. I love their wings.”

“And not their pizza?”

“It’s good, but for a birthday, you gotta think bang for your buck.”

“If you have a license, why don’t you drive?”

“DUI,” I deadpan.

“You’re full of shit.” That side-eyeing face where you can’t help yourself from smiling, eyebrows up. Just the same as it was.

I shrug, smile. “So’re you, ’cause you held it in ’til your mom left.”

“I mean, so?” Then, more sheepish, “She says she doesn’t care if I swear as long as she’s not around to hear it.”

“Oh, man. Well, Gigi just thought it’d be smart to have, in case.”

—

They were fine, those months with the temp foster placement. The Greens were old and didn’t make us talk to them but made me a bowl of oatmeal with fruit and a weak cup of coffee every morning. You got Cheerios with bananas cut up in them and apple and orange juice that you cycled between. The lady’s name was Maryanne and they had an ancient mop of a dog named Henrietta. I could tell they were good people. I could tell they let all the kids they fostered spend as much time as they needed opening up.

The court had a different timeline. They didn’t put much thought into whether we wanted to stay together. They saw me and saw what everyone sees looking at a seventeen-year-old boy—a selfish, lazy shitbag. And what selfish, lazy shitbag cares about a kid just on the far side of being a toddler? Didn’t matter that it’d just been you and me since you were two.

I guess that’s unfair. Maybe your mom always planned to come back. Maybe it was too embarrassing to show up at her parents’ with a pill problem and a kid after going to Vegas to find herself. She had to parcel out the shocks so the money wouldn’t dry up.

Kelsey sat me down, though. Asked what I wanted. But by then your mom had already shown up from Ann Arbor in a charcoal fucking pantsuit, hair all voluminous like she’d stood in front of the plane engine, but I only remembered the way she used to look right through me until dad yelled at me to fuck off if I was still home when they got in. I could smell the money on her, just like I could back when she was using but never got that hollow-bloat look that dad did.

Kelsey said she could push for us to get placed together. She said having me there might make things easier for you, because it’d be a while before you could think of your mom as family. But we’d have to stay with the Greens a little longer while they tried to get your mom to take a busted-up teenager who wasn’t hers, and if she wouldn’t, find us a permanent foster placement.

And give you more of a chance to start believing that you were a kid whose possessions belonged in trash bags. No. Your mom could give you everything you should’ve had to start with and all I’d be is a reminder that you used to have nothing.

I shook my head and kept shaking it even though Kelsey said we had more time to figure out what we both wanted. I was old enough, she told me, so I had more say. But I couldn’t talk.

I remember your fist balled up in my shirt that last night together, mashed up in a twin bed. The Greens had a bed for each of us, but I’d always cuddled you to sleep. I knew there’d be a day when you didn’t want me to anymore, never thinking there’d be a day when you just wouldn’t be able to.

A mess of blankets, my feet hanging off the end. Your hair was pasted to your forehead from sweat and I was lying in a pool of my own, but I didn’t shift the blankets or roll away from you. In the morning, your mom was picking you up. Sometime after that, my Aunt Gigi was coming for me. The difference between someone who could afford a last-minute flight from Ann Arbor to Vegas and someone who had to get time off work to drive her beater up from LA.

I spent two weeks with the Greens after you were gone, and I slept through most of it. Only seemed like a day’d gone by before I was stuffing my miscellaneous shit back into trash bags and lugging them out to Gigi’s white Tacoma, letting her greet me with an arm around my shoulders and a thump on my chest. She didn’t look a thing like dad. More gray hair than black wrapped in a knot around the back of her head. Warm brown eyes, smile lines etched into her broad, square face. A blue men’s work shirt splattered with paint from all her restoration odd jobs. It had her full name on the pocket—Griselda.

—

We spend a couple minutes watching the dudes in starched white shirts and starched baggy jeans skate around Mariachi Plaza with the dudes wearing chain jeans so tight they look painted on. Then, I jerk my head down First Street, at the bars and shops lining either side of the street. Mostly places I haven’t been to because the closest places to downtown are the most expensive. They’re the only places people outside the neighborhood will go.

“Are you tired?” I ask.

“Not really,” you say.

“Then I wanna take you to my favorite park. It’s super close to the house. But we can drop off your stuff first.”

You stick your hands in your pockets, glance at all the shuttered and gated storefronts.

“You’ve never felt unsafe here?”

“What?”

“I’m just asking.”

When I see the vegan Mexican restaurant, the trophy shop, the place for trajes de charro, I have no idea what you’re seeing.

“Would you ask that if we were in Westwood?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Somewhere you pay four grand for a studio and even the shittiest ones have a doorman.”

“Oh.” You do that quivery thing with your mouth. “Mom just looked up the crime rate for your zip code, is all.”

The inside of my chest goes hot. I want to say she didn’t mind the crime rate in the zip code where she came to get high. 

“She tracks your location, right? That’s why she let you come?”

You don’t say anything, but you pause after the light on Vicente Fernández turns green to look at the mural on a bar—a man looking out, suspicious of us, from under the brim of a mariachi sombrero, neck of a guitar in his hand. 

“But she let you come,” I add, and we keep walking. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know if you give a shit about my neighborhood’s history, or if you care why Mariachi Plaza is called Mariachi Plaza. I’m probably the only thing here that has any meaning to you. I just keep walking next to you until we’re at the gate to Gigi’s on Third and Chicago. 

I hate feeling embarrassed by a home I love. Pale green, thatched roof. A porch with wicker chairs Gigi and I spend evenings on and a kitchen full of all the dining ware she’s collected over the years from swap meets and yard sales. 

“I know my aunt’s not here,” I say, pushing open the gate. “Our aunt. Shit.” Gigi said she wouldn’t be around because I’d been waiting long enough for a night with just you. I told her it wasn’t a fucking lovers’ reunion, and she said, no, more important than that.

Her loveseat by the couch is empty, but there’s the lumpy gray air mattress rolled next to where she’d have her feet. Like a dog.

“Where’d she go?” you ask.

“Friday and Saturday nights, they play cards next door.”

“Sunday?”

I make the sign of the cross. “After that, they get drunk as shit and do karaoke.”

You laugh and then I do, too. Then you glance around the house, looking lost. I nod you toward my room. My stomach clenches, wondering if what I’ve got in there is too poor or weird or whatever for you. But you don’t even turn on the light. You set down your stuff, smile at me, and we go.

—

“Tell me, have you heard of another man who loved slots so much he moved to Vegas? No. I figured he was such a clown he could never get a woman, much less a kid. So I never checked. And I should have. I could’ve been there for you.”

That’s how Gigi was. She’d grown up in Boyle Heights with our dad until he started, as she said, his clown shit, then she stayed there in her house off Third and Chicago, fed the stray cats who showed up on her porch. She’d make a comment like that in passing, now and then. But mostly she let me alone to be miserable.

“I’m not enrolling again,” I told her. We’d just come home from the Food4Less on First and Mott. She and one of the managers, Lalo, had talked about being back at Roosevelt High. No doubt because I’d been there a month and the registration packet was gathering dust in the room she’d given me. “I’m getting my GED when I want.”

She was sitting in her chair, playing solitaire with a browned deck of cards. “Okay,” she said, not looking up. “Then work.”

I stocked overnights at Food4Less. Lalo told Gigi my Spanish was too shit to cashier, which was kind, because I didn’t speak any. The other stockers, guys, talked mostly to each other for a while, until they felt bad or saw me around Gigi enough and taught me some stuff. Mostly things like, fuck your mother, son of a bitch, your mom’s a dog or whore. I don’t know why so many cuss words have to do with moms not being up to scratch when the dads are just as shit. 

Gigi was always smiling, even just a little curve at the corner of her mouth. One of the few times I saw her stop was when I told her my coworkers called me Hendido.

“Raf, that means ‘Cleft.’” She sighed. “But that’s how it works. Your biggest insecurity? What they think you should be insecure about? That’s your nickname. Gordo, Flaco. Así es.”

“At least they’re not ignoring it,” I said. “What did they call you?”

“Prieta. Little dark one. Y luego, machita. O lencha. Lesbian. Todos verdaderos, pero . . .” She smiled. “Sure. At least they’re not ignoring it.”

I slept through the day and woke up when Gigi got off work. My breakfast and her dinner were the same food. We listened to 107.5 or her CDs: Chente, Los Tigres y Los Temerarios, Los Bukis. We fed the cats. Gigi took me to Benjamin Franklin Library and I got my GED in three days. Sometimes her girlfriend, Lupe, came over, and they bickered in the kitchen, shared a peck in Gigi’s chair. Sometimes, after I learned more Spanish, Gigi and Lupe took me to kickbacks, made me sing. Sometimes I went along to a resto job to paint or rip up flooring until my arms were numb. 

I can’t say I wasn’t happy. That I didn’t have reason to be. Life was different, so different that maybe someone else could’ve pretended they’d always been in Boyle Heights, always with Gigi. But I was always waiting for your calls, even as they went from near daily to weekly, monthly, twice a year, and you stopped saying I love you, too. Your mom always found a way to draw you away after, at most, an hour—ice cream, soccer match, toys. There was static in me after those calls, nothing but gray static that made every day so much like the last that the years were one ten-to-seven shift.

Gigi left flyers for the community college around that I ignored. I bounced between Food4Less and Gigi’s jobs until I landed at a remodeling company. When I wasn’t just another guy for hire, the pay shot up. The company took care of upkeep on the work truck. I got dental. But you were a senior by then, and my bigger paychecks didn’t matter. You were the one who told me you were coming to LA for school. I couldn’t believe you said yes when I asked if you wanted to get dinner, see my side of town.

—

“Well, Hollenbeck Park. It usually looks cooler, but we got here after sunset,” I say, opening my arms wide at the hills, the benches washed gray by the flickering lamps, the artificial lake turned to a dark oil slick. “We can still walk around the lake if you want.”

You just start walking downhill to the water and I follow. We hit the blacktop path. There’s no one else tonight but the ducks and geese sleeping in the waterside grass, heads tucked under their wings. 

I almost walk past the bridge like I’ve done every time I’ve come here in a decade, but you hang back and rattle the padlock on the gate. 

“Are you serious? They have a cool-ass bridge and they don’t even let you walk on it?”

“Yeah, it’s pretty dumb,” I say, coming back. It’s old, wooden, and I don’t trust it. It has a couple platforms jutting out from the main bridge that look like they could be for fishing. The middle curves up, above the water. “But it only takes five minutes to just walk around.”

“What do they think someone’s going to do to it?”

“Dive off it? Burn it? I don’t know. Mostly it’s cats living on it.”

“Can you get on it?”

“Never tried,” I say, and you follow when I keep walking. We pass under the trees, down by the far edge of the park, Hollenbeck and Boyle, to the concrete part of the path beneath the highway. The generator here, all fenced up, hums as cars rumble overhead. Even this late, it’s loud. It’s pitch dark because the lights are busted.

“Why LA?” I ask you again.

“This.”

“You could’ve walked under a sketch highway interchange anywhere.”

“I know.”

You jog back onto the lighted path, to the other bridge gate. I watch you hang off the top of the fence, brace your feet against the bars. I’m not going to tell you to stop because I get that you’re playing tough and you don’t need to listen to me, anyway. You haul yourself over, and I start running because the back of your shirt gets caught on a spike. You’re off-balance, tipping forward to land half on your tailbone, half on your ankle. 

I am never going to see you again if your mom has to pick you up from the ER. I don’t try to climb over the gate. Instead, I lean as far as I can off the bank and grab the top of the bridge railing. Cold sweeps my gut as I swing my legs over the water, but my feet hit the bottom railing and I scramble over to you. My arms are out, and I want to touch you, but I cringe back. Things aren’t like they were back when I’d brush you off every time you fell.

“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me you could get onto the bridge like that?” you snap, and then you just start bawling.

I sit back on my heels. The bridge shifts under me, or it’s the water lapping the bank in my peripheral vision that’s making me seasick. I don’t say anything. Your breathing is heavy and you grit your teeth and make a noise between a growl and a shout, deep in your chest.

“Would you even’ve seen me if I hadn’t come out here?”

“Is your ankle busted or did you just roll it?”

You lift your head and just look at me, eyes glittering.

“I don’t know, Davey. Maybe,” I say. “I didn’t wanna do anything that’d make you feel like you were missing something, you know, that you didn’t have everything you needed.”

“But I didn’t.”

I look down at the bridge, at my own hands, and have to stop to take a deep breath because my throat is closing up and my guts feel cemented into a lump. How to tell you I thought so little of myself that I believed what was best for you was a life without me. How to tell you how small I was in that courtroom. “I didn’t think about that. I was too fucking dumb.” I clear my throat, which doesn’t help, and look at you. “I was afraid. That I was gonna fuck you up.”

“Are you serious,” you say. You fix your face like you’re tough, chin jutted out to sharpen the baby fat off your jaw. 

“Are you serious? I mean, for real, David. I don’t know. I don’t know what you would’ve wanted me to do.” I spit. Away from you, so you know I’m spitting at the idea, not you. But you probably don’t know spitting etiquette exists. “You think your mom would’ve let me win?”

We sit with that.

“I thought about not calling the cops,” I say. “About just picking up and leaving. But they wouldn’t let a first-grader go missing. You’d be on every fucking broadcast ’til they found us, and they’d’ve separated us anyway.”

“It’s not fair.”

I would say at least you’ve never had to worry about safety, food, attention, and that not having to worry was fair enough. For anyone else who grew up in Ann Arbor, that would be the limit of my sympathy. But I see in your eyes the need that I’ve seen in my own so many mornings when I didn’t care if I died, and I know. I know I failed you, and maybe that’d be enough to make someone from Ann Arbor give up, stay on the bridge until they turned to mush. But I’ve never had that luxury.

“It’s not. Parents,” I say, “get visitation. Even the shittiest ones can get a supervised weekend with their kids. What do brothers get? Come on. Get up.” I stand, stick out my hands, and you take them, letting me heave you to your feet. “Go back over the way I did this time.”

Someone with a modded engine roars down Saint Louis and a chorus of car alarms picks up right after. You’re fine, weaving around all the duck shit on the path. Nothing’s sprained, nothing’s broken. You don’t even have to lean on me on the slight uphill walk back to Gigi’s.

At home, the kickback’s still going. I distract you with a glass of water and sleep clothes because you only packed an outfit for tomorrow.

The air mattress screaming as it fills up is more than enough to stop conversation. You’re standing in the kitchen, taking your sweet time to drink your water and looking out over the counter that separates it from the living room. I’m pretending I have to do more to set it up than turn a dial and throw blankets and pillows on top. But I have to turn it off or it’ll explode, and with that silence, you come out of the kitchen.

“You don’t put sheets on your air mattress?”

“What? Who does that?” 

You laugh at me. 

We stand there in our stupid sleep clothes. I gave you running shorts that’re way too short and a Godzilla shirt from El Mercadito that’s way too big. I’m probably supposed to hug you. Instead, we’re just relearning each other’s faces.

“Do they ever turn off the music?”

“What?” Then I hear it because you’re hearing it—all the sad trumpets, drifting through the window from the kickback. “Usually not ’til one,” I say, cringing. They probably have noise ordinances in Michigan. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’s just—it sounds like he’s crying, but he’s happy about it.”

“I think he is,” I say. “Well, if you want more water, help yourself.”

“Okay, Raf, good night.” 

“Night.”

I love you.

You turn and walk off into the dark and I turn off the lamp on the stand next to the couch before I lie down. There is no chance I’m falling asleep. I stare up at the ceiling with my hands clasped over my chest like a corpse and keep my eyes open until they’re so dry that I have no choice but to blink. I do that and I practice breathing in through my nose, holding until I feel my diaphragm all the way expanded, and exhaling through my mouth. 

I’m figuring I’ll wait for an hour or so until you’re definitely asleep before I go sit on the porch, but I hear the floorboards groan. You make a new note from the squeaking floor with every step. I’d laugh if my mouth hadn’t dried out and my heart wasn’t beating so fast.

The air mattress sags with your weight. I lie there, still, except the tears that start streaking down my face and dripping into my ears. And like that last night, eleven years ago, you ball up your fist in my shirt and put your head on my chest. You jam your face into my shoulder, hard, like you want to be glued to me. My collarbone gets wet with a mess of your tears and snot and I’m crying so hard, I can barely breathe. I wrap my arm around you, smell your hair. That milky baby smell you used to have is all gone, now. Now you smell like pine soap and mint toothpaste and I love you so, so much, listening to the air mattress hiss and deflate, to Marco Antonio Solís singing about devastation next door, that it’s like I never let myself leave you. ■

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