I… “What?”
María’s mouth opened but my phone rang.
“Hold on, this could be Miami.” I fished the device out of my purse and saw my father’s name on the screen. My father never called. Hope flickered in my chest. Maybe they’d realized I was needed in the office. Maybe I wasn’t all that disposable. “María, how about you go back to the girls and do some warm-up drills while I get this? Maybe… make a line with some cones and try to jog the ball between them? I’ll be watching from here.”
She turned around with a cheery “Okay!” and dashed back to the group that had gathered in the middle of the field.
I looked back at the ringing phone for an instant, then picked up.
“Dad—”
“Ay mi, Adalyn,” was immediately bellowed.
“Mom?”
“Adalyn, mi amor, dime que estás bien,” my mother all but screamed into the phone.
I stumbled back into the bleachers. “Mom, what are you doing in Dad’s office?”
“Don’t Mom me,” she warned in that thick accent that she’d never lost. “You know how much I don’t like that. Mom this, Mom that.” A dramatic huff. “That’s all I get after I find out that your father has kidnapped you.”
“Maricela,” I heard my father say in the back. “I haven’t kidnapped her, Jesus. I merely—”
But Maricela Reyes was angry, and when she was, there was one thing you couldn’t bring up.
“Do not bring Jesus into this!” she spat at my father. “Are you telling me you’re not keeping my only daughter somewhere against her will?” she continued, and I swore, I could perfectly see her clutching her chest in outrage. “Es mi única hija, Andrew. Mi sangre. Si mi santa abuela viera esto, nunca te lo perdonaría. Si…”
And so my mother went on and on about how my father didn’t know anything about the real values of blood and family. In Spanish, of course, which was my mother’s default when she was upset.
“Maricela,” my father pleaded on the other side of the line. “English, please. I don’t understand you when you get like that.”
I had to bite back the urge to defend my mother. But after years, I’d learned to stay quiet when they argued like this.
“And whose fault is that, huh?” she spat back. “Maybe if you’d ever made the effort, but no. Nunca. Porque tú…”
And so she went on again.
I exhaled long and deep, blocking out an argument I knew well. This was exactly what my father had wanted to avoid by keeping my mother in the dark. A conflict. One that always managed to find me in the middle, which was why I had agreed to his demand. It didn’t matter that my parents had never been married; on occasions like this, I knew what having divorced parents was like.
“Mom,” I said after a few moments. And when it went unacknowledged, I said, in Spanish, just like she always encouraged me, “Mami, por favor.”
As expected, that got me her attention. “I’m sorry. I just worry about you, Adalyn,” she said, her voice softening and my father immediately forgotten. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I am,” I lied. And because there was no point in burdening my mother with things she couldn’t help with, I added, “I promise. I’m perfectly fine.”
“No mientas, Adalyn.”
Ugh. She knew me too well. “I’m not lying,” I insisted, brightening my tone and feeling like a total fraud. “This is just a work trip.” I had to swallow before continuing, and even that way, my voice wavered. “Everything’s going great and there’s nothing for you to worry about.”
A thick silence followed my statement.
“See?” I heard my father tell her. “She’s okay. She’s also an adult, for crying out loud. You’re smothering her.”
I heard another of my mother’s gasps, followed by rushed steps and a door closing.
“Hello?” I asked into the phone. “Mami?”
“Your father is being annoying,” my mother announced. “Like always. That’s why I never married him.” She clicked her tongue. “I went into the bathroom of his office because I don’t want you saying things you don’t mean because he is listening.”
That… stung. But I didn’t think I had the heart to argue it. “It would mean a lot if you could trust me.”
“Trust,” she huffed, but it wasn’t with malice. “Then why didn’t you say anything? And why is your father not telling me where you are? Why did I have to come here to find out that you had left Miami?”