“This is so weird,” I said. I looked up at the light fixture above my head, unimpressed. “Also, I’m pretty sure these are just a bunch of red LEDs.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re right.” The light cast his face in an otherworldly glow, and I knew that this image of him, his features simultaneously flattened and sharpened in red, would be etched in my mind from now on. “Thank you for coming here with me, by the way.”
I blinked myself out of my stupor.
“Thank you for bringing me,” I said in a small voice. “Sorry that I wasted precious spa time fighting with my parents in the locker room.”
Ricky’s brow furrowed. I watched, fascinated, as his gaze dropped from mine, his eyelashes casting layers of shadow across his cheeks.
“Why do you still talk to them?” he asked softly. “I mean, every time they call they upset you, right? Why not just . . . stop picking up?”
I watched him, waiting for him to regain his resolve and look me in the eye. I knew that his question was layered; for someone who reportedly despised his father, Ricky seemed almost obsessed with him. With what he was and wasn’t doing, where he was, how he’d failed his family. I remembered a story he told me once, of returning home after a Child Life shift in high school to find his biological father seated at the head of the dining table, playing Lotería with his grandparents over a bowl of menudo. The week prior, Gabriel Gutiérrez had called his mother from the county jail after instigating a bar fight to demand that she post his bail. Ricky had begged her to refuse. “He’s just going to be back in there next month,” he’d said. “It’s too much money, Abuelita, please.” And yet there Gabriel was, dribbling hominy all over his board and bragging about how much his father was going to owe him as if they hadn’t just sunk eight hundred dollars springing him out of the box.
“It’s like Groundhog Day,” Ricky had said. We’d been sprawled across the grass in a park not far from the hospital, Ricky watching dandelion fluff float across the sky, me watching him. After a moment, he reached up and snatched a floating seed from the air, rolling the thin white fibers between his fingers. “We just save his ass every other day and expect him to someday appreciate it. And surprise, he never does. Nothing changes.”
How do you love someone who hurts you over and over again? he seemed to be asking me now. And I didn’t have an answer for him. I knew how I could love my parents, who had provided for me, sacrificed for me . . . but how could he love a man who had done neither?
“You know,” I said, “Tabs asks me the same thing all the time.” I smiled; my kid sister always came to my defense. “And to be fair, I did block them today.” When Ricky didn’t laugh, I sighed. “How old were your grandparents when they came to America?”
“Young,” Ricky said, looking at me directly now. His eyes were black under the light, huge and reflective. “In their twenties.”
“My parents were in their thirties.” I rolled onto my back, studying the ring of light above my head. “My mom won the green card lottery, and so they decided to come. Dad was a clinical pharmacist back home, and Momma had just finished nursing school. They were reasonably established, so I don’t really understand why we left, to be honest. I think the job market just wasn’t great in Ghana, and they were hoping for something new.”
“And so they leapt at the chance to move to the Land of Opportunity,” Ricky said drolly.
I chuckled, closing my eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “Either way, those first several years were . . . tough. Tabs doesn’t remember much, but I do.” I could picture our first home in the States like I still lived in it, a one-bedroom apartment in Bronzeville, smaller than the space I shared with Nia now. Momma, unable to transfer most of her credits over, had signed with a home health agency and worked as a caretaker for three elderly clients. She left for work before I went to school on most days, and so I quickly learned to care for myself, laying out my school clothes, chasing Tabatha down the halls in the morning to force her to brush her teeth. Dad, on the other hand, had taken a job as a pharmacy technician while waiting for his credentials from the United Kingdom to be approved, working the night shift at a twenty-four-hour Walgreens because the pay was fifteen cents an hour better than working days. Their lives had seemed like a constant grind; I couldn’t remember a single moment of indulgence between the two of them.