ON THE HIGHWAY north toward home, Yolanda speeds, trying to outrun Anthony, but he’s there with her, vivid and insistent.
After she made him move out, he came back just once. Yolanda arrived home from work to find him screaming at the children, drunk. Amadeo’s lunch box was splayed on the kitchen floor, the plastic cracked. Sticky wrappings scattered, and a juice box leaked onto the linoleum.
“Daddy, stop.” Valerie put an arm around her father, and Anthony pushed her off him roughly. Amadeo stood frozen by the door. “It’s our fault,” Valerie told Yolanda. “We were fighting. Dodo wouldn’t put his lunch box away.”
“Take your brother to your room,” said Yolanda, and dutifully, chin trembling, Valerie led him away.
Anthony slid to the floor against the cabinet, his cries getting quieter and quieter.
Yolanda stood over him, still holding her purse. “Did you hurt them?”
“No.” His voice was injured, bleary.
“You need to leave.”
“Please, Yo. Let me come home.” The silence dilated between them, punctuated by his sniffles. Finally he said, “I loved Elwin.”
Yolanda was exhausted, wrung. “We all loved Elwin,” she said coldly. “That was thirteen years ago.”
“I really loved Elwin,” he said. When he looked up, his eyes were red and swimming and imploring. “Yolanda, I’m gay.”
The words skewered her. “No you’re not. You’re a selfish, mean drunk.”
How she wishes, now, she had responded differently. How she wishes she hadn’t been so hurt and afraid and furious. Poor Anthony, a kid crushed under longing he didn’t know what to do with, in the claustrophobia of those times and this village, of the church and his parents’ home, suffering from the loss of the first boy he’d ever loved. No wonder he sought every escape he could; no wonder he turned his desire from gold into straw, transformed it into an open-mawed chemical hunger that devoured them all.
By the time he finally showed himself to Yolanda, it was too late. She didn’t know how to tell him, then, that she could, eventually, accept that part of him, but not the rages and drunkenness and certainly not the heroin. At the time, she needed to clear him from her life entirely. It took all her strength to make him leave.
Now, as she drives, she rewrites the scene, says the things she wishes she’d said: I don’t mind that you are gay. We are family and you are our children’s father and they need you. Maybe that acceptance would have been enough to pull him back from the edge.
Just beyond Pojoaque, her breath still short, Yolanda sees the blue-red flash in her rearview mirror. “Shit,” she says, yanked back to the present. She slows, and the car vibrates over the corrugated edge of asphalt.
She watches through the side mirror as the cruiser pulls smoothly behind her.
“License and registration.” Ernie Montoya, his name tag says. He shows her his badge, which, even though she knows it’s part of the procedure, knows it’s the law, strikes her as a courteous gesture.
Ernie Montoya is in his early forties, a few silver hairs gleaming in his buzz cut. He has a smooth moon-shaped face, a shadow of whiskers above his upper lip. “That was a forty-five zone,” he says, examining her license. “You were going seventy.” He nudges his chin back up the road. “Right through town, ma’am. Little kids could be crossing the road there.”
She nearly argues that no little kids cross the road there, that it’s clearly a highway, and that if little kids are crossing the road, then their parents are the ones who should be arrested.
You hear about women getting off for flirting, for crying. Yolanda crafts her defense: I’ve never had a speeding ticket. Not once since I was sixteen! I follow rules! I’m the one always telling people to slow down. She could say, I have cancer.