The Burning Side(28)
His eyes puncture me with kindness, and my voice vanishes. The panic of the last few hours is catching up with me. This could have been a lot worse.
Ricardo shakes his head. “No, mija. It was nothing.”
I want to repay him, but I know I can’t. So I step toward him and insist, “It was everything.”
He watches Dad’s truck turn out of the lot, leaving the two of us standing in the butter-yellow cone of a streetlight. “I hope he’ll be okay.”
I put my hand to his arm. “Muchas gracias.”
And then we both turn to go.
* * *
Back at the house, Leo and Cameron are playing a two-person, chipless version of Texas Hold ’Em. I’ve always appreciated how much they love each other, Leo’s rumpled corduroys to Cameron’s pressed chinos.
I made a pit stop on the way home, so I put a bottle of champagne in the fridge as I ask, “Where’s Mom?”
Cameron raises five, tilting his head toward the back door. “Tacos and nightcaps.”
Leo sees and deals the flop.
I sink into a dining chair with a bag of tortilla chips.
Cameron remarks, “Long time for car trouble.”
And because I trust my mom, I lie to my brother. “Dad knew what he was doing, it just took a while.” I crunch a chip. “Really sorry we didn’t get to celebrate your engagement, though.”
Leo shifts in his seat. Raises fifteen. He’s in a clean white undershirt, hair wet from a shower.
Cameron folds. “Next weekend, when Rachel’s here.”
I sit up straighter. “All right, deal me in.”
“Okay.” My brother stands. “But you should know we’re betting push-ups.” He drops to the floor, starts pumping and counting.
I laugh. “I’m in.” Time to test these Otto-wrangling muscles.
Eventually, Cameron folds and does the requisite push-ups. Watching him, I’m overwhelmed with helplessness. Soon he will find out about Dad’s diagnosis, and soon he will lose a brother. All when he’s trying to bloom into his own new life and love.
Leo and I finish the game, dropping for five, ten, fifteen push-ups. When Cameron’s phone lights up with Rachel’s glowing face, he disappears. I win the game. As Leo drops for his final push-ups, he claims he went easy on me. I stack the cards, tap them straight, and slide them into the box. “You mean like when you went easy on me at the faculty party, or that Fourth of July?” He’s never been great at poker.
He finishes his push-ups and spins around, arms draped over his knees. He smiles and says, “Exactly.”
It’s like something from a distant past, this playful interaction. We’ve had to put up a facade around the family, but this is different. Cameron left the room a while ago and we’re still smiling.
I inhale. “Hey.”
He waits. The kitchen is silent except for the hum of the refrigerator.
And I say what I thought about my whole drive home. “Lo siento.”
“What?”
“Lo siento por lo que hice.”
Shadows close over Leo’s face like curtains. “Why are you speaking Spanish?”
On the way home, I kept hearing that manager call me mija, kept thinking about how Leo rarely speaks Spanish, how the pain of his family history seems to have taken Mexico from him. I didn’t give it much attention before. “I just wish we’d spoken Spanish sometimes. Seems important.”
Spoken. Already past tense.
Leo stands. “It isn’t.” His words are clipped, the Ts hitting hard.
I frown. “I’m trying to say sorry.”
His jaw goes tight, loose, tight, and the refrigerator hums on. I don’t know what I expected. Leo looks around at nothing, which is to say, at everything except me. “You can’t just say some words in my family’s language and think that changes anything.”
I study him for a long minute. “When did you get so dead set on ending this?”
He scoffs. “When I walked into the living room and—”
“That’s a bluff.”
“What?” He practically spits the word.
“It takes more than one day, more than one person’s one mistake for a marriage to fall apart.”
He lets out a bark. “So this is the kind of apology where you’re trying to convince me it wasn’t your fault.”
The box of cards is still in my hand, and I slam it on the table. “I’m not saying that. I’m saying it wasn’t only my fault.”
“Funny, I don’t remember being there when Cody—”
I stand up in a motion so swift that it almost knocks over the chair behind me. “Lower your voice.” I look around at the multiple points of entry to the kitchen, where our kids or my parents or my brother could walk in at any second.
At the exact same volume, Leo says, “I have nothing else to say.”
“I have things to say.”
He rolls his eyes.
“You’re so fixated on this one thing,” I continue. “What about everything else that happened before? What about everything that’s happening now? We have kids, and an insurance company wants to know where our family is going to live.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “You should have thought about that before.”