This Is How You Lose Her(22)

Dude was figureando hard. Had always been a papi chulo, so of course he dove right back into the grip of his old sucias, snuck them down into the basement whether my mother was home or not. Once, right in the middle of one of Mami’s prayer sessions, he strolled in with this Parkwood girl who had the hugest donkey on the planet, and later I said, Rafa, un chín de respeto. He shrugged. Can’t let them think I’m slipping. He’d hang out at Honda Hill and come home so garbled that he sounded as if he was speaking Aramaic. Anybody who didn’t know better would have thought homeboy was on the mend. I’ll put the weight back on, you’ll see, was what he told folks. Had my mother making him all these nasty protein shakes.

Mami tried to keep his ass home. Remember what your doctor said, hijo. But he just said, Ta to, Mom, ta to, and danced right out the door. She never could control him. With me she yelled and cursed and hit, but with him she sounded as if she was auditioning for a role in a Mexican novela. Ay mi hijito, ay mi tesoro. I was all focused on this little whitegirl in Cheesequake but I tried to get him to slow his roll, too — Yo, shouldn’t you be convalescing or something? — but he just stared at me with his dead eyes.

Anyway, after a few weeks on overdrive motherfucker hit a wall. Developed this dynamite cough from being out all night and ended up back at the hospital for two days — which after his last stint (eight months) didn’t really count as nothing — and when he got out you could see the change. Stopped breaking night and drinking until he puked. Stopped with the Iceberg Slim thing, too. No more chicks crying over him on the couch or gobbling the rabo downstairs. The only one who hung tough was this ex of his, Tammy Franco, whom he’d pretty much physically abused their whole relationship. Bad, too. A two-year-long public-service announcement. He’d get so mad at her sometimes that he dragged her around the parking lot by her hair. Once her pants came unbuttoned and got yanked down to her ankles, and we could all see her toto and everything. That was the image I still had of her. After my brother, she had hopped on a whiteboy and gotten married faster than you can say I do. A beautiful girl. You remember that José Chinga jam “Fly Tetas”? That was Tammy. Married and beautiful and still after my brother. What was strange was that on the days she dropped by she wouldn’t come into the apartment, not at all. She’d pull her Camry up in front and he would go out and sit with her in the bitch seat. I’d just started summer vacation and while I waited for the whitegirl to answer my phone calls, I’d watch them from the kitchen window, waiting for him to palm her head down into his lap, but nothing like that ever happened. It didn’t even look like they were talking. After fifteen, twenty minutes, he’d climb out and she’d drive away and that would be that.

What the fuck you guys doing? Trading brain waves?

He was fingering his molars — the radiation had cost him two already.

Ain’t she, like, married to some Polack? Doesn’t she have, like, two kids?

He looked at me. What the fuck do you know?

Nothing.

Nothing at all. Entonces cállate la fucking boca.

So this was where he should have been from the start: taking it easy, hanging around the crib, smoking all my weed (I had to hide my puffing, while he twisted his joints right in the living room), watching the tube, sleeping. Mami was ecstatic. She even beamed every now and then. Told her group that Dios Santísimo had answered her prayers.

Alabanza, Doña Rosie said, her eyes rolling around like marbles.

I sat with him sometimes when the Mets were playing, and he wouldn’t say a word about how he was feeling, what he was expecting to happen. It was only when he was in bed, dizzy or nauseous, that I’d hear him groaning: What the hell is happening? What do I do? What do I do?

—

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN it was the calm before the storm. Not two weeks after he recovered from the cough, he disappeared for almost the whole day, then rolled into the apartment and announced that he had scored himself a part-time job.

A part-time job? I asked. Are you fucking nuts?

A man has to stay busy. He grinned, showed us all the gaps. Got to make myself useful.

It was at the Yarn Barn, of all places. At first my mom pretended to wash her hands of him. You want to kill yourself, kill yourself. But later I heard her trying to talk to him in the kitchen, a low monotonous appeal until my brother said: Ma, how about you leave me alone, yeah?

Talk about a total mystery. Wasn’t like my brother had some incredible work ethic that needed exercising. The only job Rafa had ever had was pumping to the Old Bridge whitekids, and even on that front he’d been super chill. If he wanted to keep busy he could have gone back to that — it would have been easy, and I told him so. We still knew a lot of whitekids over in Cliffwood Beach and Laurence Harbor, a whole dirtbag clientele, but he wouldn’t do it. What kind of legacy is that?