Five Boroughs 01 - Sutphin Boulevard (12 page)

I left the bathroom with the world swathed in shades of gray. The positivity I’d felt mere moments before had vanished. To make matters worse, the other teachers in the lounge stared at me with wide, inquisitive eyes. Undoubtedly, they had heard every word. I regretted not keeping the conversation in Spanish.

Grinding my teeth together, I hurried to David’s room and was instantly on the shit end of his disapproving glare.

“I don’t want to call you out,” he started, “but I thought we all talked about how imperative it is to start these meetings on time. We’ve already gotten through the first part of the agenda.”

Danielle frowned, but Erica and Kimberly pointedly avoided looking at me.

“Look, something came up,” I said without taking the gruffness out of my tone. “I need to step out again and make a call.”

“Michael, that’s not setting a good tone. I’d appreciate it if you would stay.”

“I’m telling you I need to step out and make a few calls. It’s not bullshit. I have something going on. A family emergency.”

He looked away but not before I caught the glimmer of annoyed skepticism. I’d expected that reaction, but it still set me off.

“You know what, kid? You’re not my boss. If I say I have to make a call, I have to make a call. There’s nothing on your agenda that can’t be relayed to me in an e-mail. You don’t need to assert yourself by making a spectacle of me. If you want to think about setting tones, keep that in mind.”

Once again, I was ranting without the ability to stop, but this time I could see the person on the receiving end. David’s cheeks were flaming as he stared down at his agenda.

I sighed and cursed myself, my father, my brother, and David for being such an easy target. The door shut harder than I’d intended when I returned to the hall.

U
PON
ENTERING
the house, I was greeted by the sound of Héctor Lavoe singing “Aguanilé” with a backbeat of caldero-inspired percussion. The music took me back almost two decades, and this time when I was hit by nostalgia, it wasn’t a cause for melancholy. My father listening to salsa while using my mother’s rice pot as a conga drum was a fonder memory than most.

I found him in the living room, pounding on the bottom of the pot in perfect unison with the rhythm of the song. I couldn’t help but smile. Joseph’s shiny black and silver hair was slicked back and damp with sweat, eyes half-shut, and lips moving with the lyrics as if he was in a trance. He didn’t notice me until I wandered closer and sat on the arm of the sofa. He jumped, face crinkling in a deep-lined frown. The resounding thumps came to an abrupt stop.

“Did it ever occur to you to get a real drum?”

Joseph set the caldero on the coffee table and reached back to hit the stop button on the stereo. I stared at the device with a hint of disbelief—it had sat unused for so long I’d almost forgotten it worked, and he was using an honest-to-God cassette tape.

“Why are you home so early?” Joseph grumbled, standing.

“Because Raymond called me having a fit. I left since I had a prep seventh period, anyway.” I received a blank stare and waved him off, not bothering to explain what a prep period was. The smidgen of fondness diminished when I noticed an empty bottle of rotgut on the shelf next to the stereo. “What’s the problem with you and Ray?”

“Your brother is a piece of shit.”

The fondness may as well have been nonexistent, because the urge to deck him almost swallowed me whole. “Don’t talk about my brother like that.”

“You tell your brother to have some respect,” he said with a fierce glare. In the past, his flashing eyes had instilled fear and commanded authority, but now they were cloudy and tinged with yellow, telltale signs of disease. “Even you have more respect than he does, and you—”

I raised an eyebrow.

“—are the one who dealt with all of the problems between me and your mother.”

“The ‘problems’? Is that what we’re calling it?”

“Whatever the fuck you want to call it.”

“You beating my ass every time you got drunk, arguing with Mami, trashing the house, cops being called—”

Joseph sliced his hand through the air to cut me off. “Enough already. That wasn’t my point.”

I got his point, but I knew he was going to totally miss mine. Sidestepping him, I grabbed the empty bottle by the neck. I almost expected him to look away with a measure of guilt at how blatantly he was disregarding the wishes of his doctor, siblings, and me by drinking, but he didn’t seem to register that anything was wrong. For all that he had changed over the years in some ways, his lack of empathy was the same.

“That’s your problem,” I said. “You think he doesn’t have the right to be angry about anything because he was so young. Okay, fine, fair. He didn’t go through the worst of it. But by the time he was old enough to know what the hell was going on, you had stopped living with us and all he knew about his dad was that your rare visits always ended in a fight.”

I bristled at the sound of his disgusted sigh.

“You sound like him, making excuses and psychoanalyzing because you watch too much TV. My parents raised me the same way I raised you,” he said. “Do you know how many black eyes and busted lips I got from both my mother and father when I got out of line? But I had
respect
, something your mother didn’t teach you or that lazy piece of shit you let lay around this house.”

“I’m going to say it once more.” I squared my shoulders and didn’t back down even when he tensed. I didn’t step forward, but I also didn’t look away from his challenging stare. “Don’t talk about my brother like that. It’s you and Mami’s fault that he is the way he is.”

“My fault?” The volume of his voice went from zero to surround sound in two syllables. “I wasn’t here all the time, but Vanessa spoiled him rotten. He thinks he doesn’t have to work? What will he do when the life insurance runs out?” Joseph turned away with a suck of his teeth and ripped a battered pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “At least you went to school and made something of yourself. When you became a schoolteacher, I was proud. But him? He’s going to be a bum like the rest of his friends that stand around in King’s Park and smoke marijuana.”

“He’s young—”

“At his age you were teaching!”

“It’s different!”

The smell of the cigarette activated my own craving for nicotine, but I was not about to bum a smoke from him. I strode across the room and looked out the window. Joseph wasn’t saying anything that I hadn’t told Raymond before, but it sounded different coming out of his mouth—harsher, meaner—and as far as I was concerned, the man who had refused to raise us had no room to judge.

“Growing up the way I did made me want to run as far away as fast as I could, and I knew the only way to make it happen was to work my ass off. But Raymond….”

My eyes slit against the glint of sunlight as I peered through the crisscrossed metal of the screen. I thought I could vaguely make out Raymond’s lanky form on the handball court across the street, but I wasn’t positive.

“She felt so guilty over my childhood, and was so afraid of Raymond upping and leaving the way I did, that she babied him to prevent it from happening again. She never had the same expectations for him, and he had no fucking motivation to do anything else as long as she was enabling him. And then she was gone.”

“So you admit it was your mother.”

“No, it was both of you!” I turned and jutted a finger at him. “She let him think it was okay to stay in his room and smoke weed and play video games as long as he was her baby, and you were never here to teach him how to be anything else.”

“He had you—”

“An older brother is not the same as a father. I was out of the house before he was even in junior high.”

Joseph said nothing to that, but it didn’t seem like any of my words were breaking through the invisible barrier he wore to reflect responsibility. His posture was rigid when he picked up his empty glass, gripping it so tight I expected it to shatter and slice through his skin. But it didn’t, and when he spoke, the undercurrent in his voice was more weariness than anger.

“I’m proud of you, Michael. I wish your brother was more like you.”

“Then act like it. Try to show him how to be a man—help him look for jobs, ask your friends if they know anyone with an opening—do something to help him instead of just cutting him down. Do what you should have fucking done years ago, and maybe he might care about respecting you.” I pulled the curtains shut. “Be his father and stop being a burden.”

“I’ll be dead soon, and then you won’t be burdened anymore.”

He looked at me, waiting for a reaction, but I kept my face impassive and hard—unwilling to show him how the words twisted my guts and made the bottle feel heavier in my hand. I’d forgotten I was holding it.

I dropped it to the coffee table and shrugged like it didn’t matter, like he didn’t matter. It was easier to wrap myself in the stubborn resentment than to show him how deeply unprepared I was to lose another parent.

The silence between us grew longer, punctuated only by the distant
thunk
of a ball hitting concrete, before Joseph turned away with damp eyes.

I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself apologizing and watched him leave the room with his head down.

October

“M
ICHAEL
?”

I halted my examination of the crystal statue on Price’s desk and looked up. I hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

“Are you listening?”

I straightened my back and did my best to look professional and alert. It was hard when I’d rolled into work in a scraggly pair of jeans and a blazer thrown over a black T-shirt to try to make the outfit seem respectable. She didn’t have to give me the passive-aggressive lip-purse to let me know I looked like hell; Nunzio did it for her every morning on our way to work.

“Yeah, of course. Sorry.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

I clenched my teeth and nodded again, wishing she’d move on and stop dwelling on my obvious inattentiveness. “Yeah, you were talking about the rubric.”

Price looked down at the evaluation rubric and the annotations she’d made. I had no idea what she’d been annotating because I’d zoned out as soon as words like “productive struggle” and “rigor” had become repetitive in the conversation.

Post-observation conferences were always the worst. No matter how much we talked about the lesson they’d come in to see, she or the AP would ultimately rate me whatever they wanted.

“Let’s put this aside for now,” she said in what was supposed to be a gentle tone.

“Why? I want to know how it’s going to look before it lands in my mailbox.”

“Yes, but first—how do you think the lesson went?”

“I think it was fine. They met their objective, they participated, it catered to multiple types of learners, etcetera.”

Her eyebrow arched at the etcetera. “Michael, are you being sarcastic?”

“No. I just didn’t think I needed to continue to elaborate when you have your own up-to-the-minute notes.”

“I see.” Price steepled her fingers together and peered at me, not looking anywhere near the same fifty-yard line as pleased. “You’ve been having problems lately.”

I had been, but my tendency to end each night locked in my room with a bottle of whiskey had nothing to do with Price or her rubric.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I’ve been told that you’ve been having problems.”

It was hard not to get sarcastic this time, so I stayed silent and waited for the lecture that was ultimately heading my way.

“You’ve been late, you called out once already and it’s only October. I’ve been told that you haven’t been doing your part to notify parents about the parent-teacher conferences, and that you’ve been inconsistent during common planning.”

Everything rang true except the last part, and I wondered what David was whining about to give her that idea.

“Oh really? Who told you that?”

“It’s irrelevant.”

“No, it’s not. If my new grade team leader is telling you things, he should tell you the reason why I’ve been somewhat off.”

When she said nothing, I didn’t fight the scowl that had already earned me a reputation for being scary among the new tenth graders.

“Did he tell you that my father is ill? I understand that I shouldn’t bring my personal problems into work, but there is a lot going on. Sometimes my brother calls me, and I have to rush home. I’ve explained this to David.”

It was a pale shade of the truth. The only phone calls I got from my brother were the kind where he was bitching about our father.

“Perhaps he questions things because of the hostility that exists between the two of you.”

My head jerked back. “Hostility?”

“That was the word used.”

“That’s a pretty radical retelling of the conversations we’ve had.”

Price pressed her palms flat across her desk as if the wood was giving her the strength to deal with me. “You’re being defensive.”

“Of course I’m defensive. Ms. Price, you’re telling me—Never mind.”

I had no real way to judge whether she believed my additions to the story, but she picked up the rubric between two fingers and pursed her lips again.

“Forget grade team for a moment. Whether you and David get along, whether you resent him for being grade team leader, or he resents you for not agreeing with his every suggestion is irrelevant to the real problem I have been identifying in your performance since the start of the school year. The heart of the matter is that whatever is going on in your personal life has affected your instruction.”

“
How
?”

“You lack energy in the classroom. The rapport between you and the students is not what it has been in the past. They were engaged in this task, but why? Was it because the content was high interest or because of your delivery of the lesson?”

“They met the objectives,” I repeated. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, they met the objectives,” Price replied, a measure of impatience in her voice. “But will they meet the objectives when the subject matter is not as interesting as religion versus science and Giordano Bruno being tortured to death? With your enthusiasm at an all-time low, I wonder how this will affect their performance when you’re discussing Enlightenment philosophes and not radical scientists. Which, by the way, you should have been up to by now.”