She would have left you, Arlenny says. Believe it.
The rest of the semester ends up being a super-duper clusterfuck. Lowest evaluations in your six years as a professor. Your only student of color for that semester writes: He claims that we don’t know anything but doesn’t show us any way to address these deficiencies. One night you call your ex and when the voice mail clicks on you say: We should have had a kid. And then you hang up, ashamed. Why did you say that? you ask yourself. Now she’ll definitely never speak to you again.
I don’t think the phone call is the problem, Arlenny says.
Check it out. Elvis produces a picture of Elvis Jr. holding a bat. This kid is going to be a monster.
On winter break you fly to the DR with Elvis. What the hell else are you going to do? You ain’t got shit going on, outside of waving your arms around every time they go numb.
Elvis is beyond excited. He has three suitcases of shit for the boy, including his first glove, his first ball, his first Bosox jersey. About eighty kilos of clothes and shit for the baby mama. Hid them all in your apartment, too. You are at his house when he bids his wife and mother-in-law and daughter goodbye. His daughter doesn’t seem to understand what’s happening but when the door shuts she lets out a wail that coils about you like constantine wire. Elvis stays cool as fuck. This used to be me, you’re thinking. Me me me.
Of course you look for her on the flight. You can’t help yourself.
You assume that the baby mama will live somewhere poor like Capotillo or Los Alcarrizos but you didn’t imagine she would live in the Nadalands. You’ve been to the Nadalands a couple of times before; shit, your family came up out of those spaces. Squatter chawls where there are no roads, no lights, no running water, no grid, no anything, where everybody’s slapdash house is on top of everybody else’s, where it’s all mud and shanties and motos and grind and thin smiling motherfuckers everywhere without end, like falling off the rim of civilization. You have to leave the rental jípeta on the last bit of paved road and jump on the back of motoconchos with all the luggage balanced on your backs. Nobody stares because those ain’t real loads you’re carrying: You’ve seen a single moto carry a family of five and their pig.
You finally pull up to a tiny little house and out comes Baby Mama — cue happy homecoming. You wish you could say you remember Baby Mama from that long-ago trip, but you do not. She is tall and very thick, exactly how Elvis always likes them. She is no older than twenty-one, twenty-two, with an irresistible Georgina Duluc smile, and when she sees you she gives you a huge abrazo. So the padrino finally decides to visit, she declaims in one of those loud ronca campesina voices. You also meet her mother, her grandmother, her brother, her sister, her three uncles. Seems like everybody is missing teeth.
Elvis picks up the boy. Mi hijo, he sings. Mi hijo.
The boy starts crying.
Baby Mama’s place is barely two rooms, one bed, one chair, a little table, a single bulb overhead. More mosquitoes than a refugee camp. Raw sewage in the back. You look at Elvis like what the fuck. The few family fotos hanging on the walls are water-stained. When it rains — Baby Mama lifts up her hands — everything goes.
Don’t worry, Elvis says, I’m moving them out this month, if I can get the loot together.
The happy couple leaves you with the family and Elvis Jr. while they visit various negocios to settle accounts and to pick up some necessaries. Baby Mama also wants to show off Elvis, natch.
You sit on a plastic chair in front of the house with the kid in your lap. The neighbors admire you with cheerful avidity. A domino game breaks out and you team up with Baby Mama’s brooding brother. Takes him less than five seconds to talk you into ordering a couple of grandes and a bottle of Brugal from the nearby colmado. Also three boxes of cigarettes, a tube of salami, and some cough syrup for a neighbor lady with a congested daughter. Ta muy mal, she says. Of course everybody has a sister or a prima they want you to meet. Que tan mas buena que el Diablo, they guarantee. You all barely finish the first bottle of romo before some of the sisters and primas actually start coming around. They look rough but you got to give it to them for trying. You invite them all to sit down, order more beer and some bad pica pollo.
Just let me know which one you like, a neighbor whispers, and I’ll make it happen.
Elvis Jr. watches you with considerable gravitas. He is a piercingly cute carajito. He has all these mosquito bites on his legs and an old scab on his head no one can explain to you. You are suddenly overcome with the urge to cover him with your arms, with your whole body.
Later, Elvis Sr. fills you in on the Plan. I’ll bring him over to the States in a few years. I’ll tell the wife he was an accident, a one-time thing when I was drunk and I didn’t find out about it until now.