B0061QB04W EBOK (53 page)

23

A
YEAR AND
a half later, when Mila finally decided to leave my father, it came as a surprise. I was beginning to think she was one of those women who stays with a man despite the abuse. She changed in my eyes, and I found myself respecting her for her decision. However, a day after she left my father, she walked into the bank and withdrew a large portion of their savings from their bank account, leaving him with hardly anything. Then, to make matters worse, when my father went to look for her at her mother’s house, my father was advised that Mila had called the police and had also filed a restraining order against him.

Carlos said, “Reyna, you have to go back home. He needs you.”

“He’s never needed anyone,” I said. The thought that my father
actually needed me was preposterous to me. The thought of going back there made me ill.

A few days later, Carlos called me again. “He tried to kill himself,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” I said. I didn’t believe for a second that my father would hurt himself just because a woman had left him. Besides, did he even love Mila?
A man doesn’t hurt and beat the woman he loves, does he?

Carlos told me that the day before, he had gone to see our father at his new house. While I was away, he and Mila had sold the fourplex and bought the house next door, the one that belonged to the family of gang members. Carlos found him holding his gun. “He says he was cleaning it, but I don’t believe it,” Carlos said. He told me that our father insisted that he was cleaning the gun, but then Carlos noticed the bullet hole on the wall right behind where he’d been sitting. “You can’t be cleaning a gun when it’s loaded. What were you thinking?” he asked. My father didn’t say anything.

“He needs someone there to keep an eye on him,” he told me. “I can’t do it. Mago can’t do it either. We both work. You have to go back.”

By then, Carlos had divorced Griselda and was in a relationship with another woman, the mother of his second son. Mago was living with Victor and their two-year-old son in West Covina. I hung up the phone, and for the rest of the day I couldn’t stop thinking about my father. In my mind I saw him on the floor with a bullet hole in his head. What if Carlos was right? What if he was trying to hurt himself? What if, for the first time, he really did need me?

I returned to my father’s side because I felt obligated to do so. The spring semester at PCC had ended, graduation had passed, and at the end of that summer, I would be heading north to study at UC Santa Cruz, the school I had chosen based on Diana’s recommendation. I didn’t want to go up north with a guilty conscience. I wanted to go up there and not have to take any baggage with me except for the things I had packed in my suitcase. I wanted a fresh start.

When I got there, my father was sitting at the dining table by himself. It was dinnertime now, but he was sitting at the table in the dark as if waiting for his meal, as if he’d forgotten that Mila was no
longer there to cook for him as she had always done. He played with his empty beer can and looked up when I came in. I was shocked at seeing him so thin, so haggard, although nothing like what he would look like later when he was dying of liver cancer.

“Ya llegué,” I said. He looked surprised, and I wondered if Carlos had even told him I was coming back. I asked him if he was hungry, if he wanted me to cook something. He didn’t answer me. I opened the refrigerator, but it was almost empty, and my heart started to race because I didn’t know how to cook. All those years, Mila had ruled the kitchen and would not allow Mago or me to help her, the way daughters are supposed to help their mothers. It was another way she kept us at a distance. While I lived with Diana, it was she who did most of the cooking. She was a wonderful cook, and although I did help her in the kitchen, I didn’t learn enough to feel confident about cooking a meal for my father now, for the first time. Besides, my favorite dish that Diana made was sliced tomatoes sprinkled with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and dried oregano. Not the typical Mexican dish. What was I going to do? There was no way I could feed sliced tomatoes to my father.

I turned to look at him and found him staring at me. I didn’t know if he could see how scared I was of cooking, but he said, “Come on, Chata, let’s get out of here.” He pulled his chair back and stood up.

“Where to?” I asked.

“El Pollo Loco,” he said. I didn’t know what to say. He hated eating out. I loved El Pollo Loco, especially the BRC Burrito, so I followed him out the door without complaining. I breathed a sigh of relief knowing that I wouldn’t have to cook for him. When we got to his car, he held up the keys to me.

“Here, you drive.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said. I had recently been learning to drive. Carlos sometimes would take me to practice on weekends. Mago had tried, but she wasn’t patient with me, and one time I had bumped her Tercel on a fence and left a dent. She gave me no more lessons after that. I didn’t think I was yet good enough to drive my father’s car. He would criticize my every move. I just knew it. He would probably yell at me and call me a good-for-nothing. “No, you should drive.”

“Here, take the keys. I want you to drive,” he said.

I reluctantly took the keys and opened the door. I sat at the wheel, started the car, and then we headed down Granada Street and turned right on Avenue 52. I drove slowly, carefully, but at the intersection of Avenue 52 and Figueroa, I turned too late and ran the red light. Cars honked at me. Tires screeched. I glanced at my father from the corner of my eye. He was staring straight ahead but said nothing. Thankfully, we got to El Pollo Loco with the car still in one piece.

“I’m sorry,” I told him as I gave him back the keys.

“That wasn’t bad, Chata,” he said.

I didn’t know what it was that Mila’s departure had done to my father, but he wasn’t the same man he was before. Edwin, my boyfriend of three months whom I had met at PCC, started to come over in the evenings. Sometimes the three of us would sit in the backyard where my father showed us the zucchini, corn, and carrots he had planted. This was one of the ties he still had to his country—the love for planting and harvesting. Later, I would learn to love gardening as well. During my visits to the hospital, this would be the safest thing to talk about—our vegetable gardens.

Sometimes, we would sit in the living room watching the Lakers game. Edwin was a psychology major, and he was transferring to Cal State, Monterey Bay, which was about an hour south of Santa Cruz. We were going up there together. He had chosen the right field to study. Edwin was a great listener. My father discovered this soon enough, and there were nights when the two of them would stay up talking after I had gone to bed. Edwin had given my father something that neither I nor my siblings could give him—an unbiased ear.

Mago reconciled with my father, too, and she started coming by on the weekends with her little boy, Aidan. Even Betty would sometimes come over when one of us picked her up, which was not as often as we should have. Betty was now having unprotected sex, and not too long before, she’d asked me to drive her to a clinic to take a pregnancy test. Luckily, it had been negative. But I didn’t know how long that would be the case. My fourteen-year-old sister was heading down the wrong path, and my mother didn’t seem to care.

Mago, Carlos, and I would tell our father to forget Mila. Betty stayed out of it. When he wanted to talk about Mila, we would immediately interrupt him and tell him to move on, that things were better this way. For all those years of having to play tug-of-war with Mila over our father’s attention, what else could we do but celebrate their separation? Finally, we had access to our father in a way we had never had. Finally, the wall had come down.

Also, their separation had forced us to take sides, and of course we had to side with our father. When Mila came over to the house to pick up her belongings, she brought along the police, who forced my father to lie down on the floor with his hands behind his back, while Mila went into their bedroom to gather her things. Carlos said, “You can’t do that to my father. He isn’t a criminal.” But the police didn’t listen and so my father had to stay on the floor until Mila was done. Carlos and Mila got into an argument over the money she had taken out of their bank account. Carlos said, “How can you leave him with nothing?”

“That’s none of your business,” Mila said. “This is between me and your father.”

I was glad the police were there to keep the peace. Carlos was so angry that he started to cuss at her, and the police had to warn him to calm down. I just stood near my father, and as soon as the police left, I helped him to his feet.

At a court hearing, another argument erupted between us and Mila. Mago and Carlos cussed and insulted her. Like a child caught in a messy divorce, my allegiances were torn. We had never disrespected Mila in any way. We were taught as children to be respectful of adults, no matter what they did to us. Also, my father had always told us that we needed to be grateful to Mila for everything she had done for us, especially about the fact that it was through her that we’d gotten our legal residency, although even if she hadn’t helped us, eventually we would have gotten it once my father was given amnesty.

“You guys are leeches,” Mila said to us. “If it weren’t for me, you would still be wetbacks.”

I didn’t know how to tell her that we cared about her, but we
loved our father more than anything. I didn’t know how to make her see that our place was with him. We had wanted to have a father ever since I could remember, and now without her in the picture, we would finally have him back. I wanted to tell her that I thought her children were probably glad to finally have their mother back, as well. But she was like my mother when my father had cheated on her—angry, bitter, hurt. She was blind to everything but her pain.

Despite all the altercations with Mila, my father was no longer as depressed as he had been when I’d first arrived. He was a different father than the one I had come to know. He didn’t criticize me. He didn’t yell at me. He didn’t hit me. He didn’t look at me as if I didn’t exist. For the first time, my father liked having me around. We continued our trips to El Pollo Loco, although sometimes I would cook for him, and he would eat my food without complaining. I would drive him around the city after work. We would go hiking by the Observatory. We would go to Sycamore Park and jog around the park until dark. I was so hungry to share with him all the things I had done since I’d moved out of his house. I told him about the English tutoring job I’d gotten at the PCC Learning Center. I told him about joining the Lancer Marching Band and marching in the Rose Parade for the third time. I told him about my stint as a staff writer for the PCC newspaper,
The Courier,
and about the time they had published my article “PCC in the Making,” which had taken up the whole page, and how after it had been published, the PCC president had even sent me a note to congratulate me on it. I told him about the Townsend Press essay competition, and also the time I had placed in a journalism competition. I told him about the scholarships I had gotten to help me pay for UCSC, like the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the La Raza Scholarship, the Minority Talent Scholarship, the Huang Future Teachers Scholarship, and the Phi Delta Kappa Scholarship Grant. I wanted him to know that even though I had been apart from him, I still valued what he had taught me.