Diego shook his head, his eyes still glued to his plate. Then he took a deep breath and looked up and caught Brody’s eye, almost defiantly. “Okay, let’s talk. You really don’t know anything that happened to me or my family after your parents caught us in your room?”
“Nothing. I got dropped off in Tennessee without a word from anyone. No computer at my grandparents’ house, no cell phone, barely any internet at our little high school. I graduated a couple months later, and I enlisted the next week and—” Brody went silent. This was Diego’s story right now. “What happened to you?”
Diego wrung his hands, twisting his fingers against each other. “Your uncle Kyle, that’s what happened. He called the INS and had my parents picked up. They didn’t have a green card or any immigration paperwork, so they got deported.”
Brody’s stomach tightened into a knot. Kyle, his dad’s brother, prided himself on keeping crime down in their small town in his role as county sheriff, but it was no secret that certain ‘kinds of folks’ were more likely to be arrested than others. A real piece of shit, Brody remembered, and when he’d learned about Kyle’s death, he hadn’t mourned the man. “Where are they now?”
“Saltillo. That’s where my mom’s family is from. They’ve got Donna with them.”
“Are they okay?”
Diego shrugged. “They’re good. They opened up another panderia down there that’s doing well. They’ve got a nice house with a pool in a good community. But after it happened, we were all scared. The judge let Diana and I stay because we were citizens, but since we were both still in high school, we had to move here to stay with our aunt, who was legal.”
“Diego, I’m so sorry.” Brody hadn’t been surprised at the level of shock and anger that his parents had directed at him when they discovered that he was gay. But to find out that they’d targeted Diego’s family and punished them as well? Brody took a long swallow from his glass of beer as he tried to find words, any words, to make this better. “You must hate me.”
But Diego shook his head. “It wasn’t your fault. You got caught up in this, just like I did. The adults around us didn’t handle it well, but you… you only ever showed me love and kindness. You respected me, and that changed how a lot of kids at school treated me and Diana.”
“That can’t make up for what happened.”
Diego’s lips curled into a crooked smile. “Sometimes the universe takes care of that. Did you hear what happened to your uncle?”
“I haven’t had any contact with any of them since I left. Hell, I only knew about my parents and the car crash from my grandmother. But I was stationed overseas at the time and couldn’t come to the funeral.” Not that Brody had wanted to. He took another sip. “What happened to Uncle Kyle?”
“Diana kept in touch with some of her friends from Cielo Springs. Running my parents out of town touched off a nerve in the Hispanic community. Lots of undocumented workers in Cielo Springs, and everyone knows about them. All the farms and ranches hire them as cheap labor. Families use them for childcare. Who do you think cooks and cleans at all the restaurants and hotels?” Diego snorted at and ate another piece of bread. “The undocumented population grumbled loudly to their employers. And my parents’ bakery was pretty popular around town, so what happened to them shocked a lot of people, and at the next election for county sheriff, Uncle Kyle lost. I heard he went back to working as the manager of a hardware store.”
Brody sat stunned. How had he not known any of this? “I had no idea.” The server arrived and brought their meals; two ribeye steaks—well-done for Diego and medium rare for Brody.
“Yeah.” Diego picked up his knife and stabbed it into his steak. “And I handled it… badly.”
“What do you mean?” Brody asked, as he began to eat his own meal.
“Once Diana and I got to Houston, I started to really fuck up. We only had two months until graduation, but I started drinking… a lot, then graduated to some harder drugs to numb all the anger that built up inside me. One night, I broke into an elementary school and started a fire. Vandalized the place.” Diego raised his hand. “Don’t ask me why. I’ve got no idea what I was thinking. Anyway, my dumb ass got caught, and they sent me to a juvenile detention center. That’s where I finished out my high school career.
Listening to this was like a punch to Brody’s stomach. “So, no scholarship?” he asked, devastated at how Diego’s future slipped away.
“Nope.” Diego took another sip from his drink. “After that, college just seemed like a dream, something that other people did. But not me. I drifted for a few months once I was released. Stopped drinking, stopped doing drugs. One day, my cousin Felipe offered me a job at his tattoo parlor. I just cleaned up at first, but eventually I picked up a gun and started inking people.
Brody’s eyes darted down toward Diego’s arms. “I noticed some of the work on your arms when we passed off the dogs.”
Diego grinned again and pushed a sleeve up his right arm. “Yeah. Can’t really hang out too long in a place like that and not end up inked all over.”
The intricate images and tribal designs on Diego’s arms intrigued Brody. “They look cool.”
Diego responded with a half-shrug, but his face relaxed into a warm expression. “It pays the bills, and I can make my own hours. It gives me time to play with the band whenever we catch gigs.”
“You play guitar?”
“Bass guitar, yeah.” Diego pulled his sleeve down as he looked over at Brody. “Your turn. What happened to you?”
Brody’s fingers tapped against his drink, the condensation making his fingertips wet. “You heard a lot if it earlier. After I graduated from high school, I enlisted as fast as I could. No offence against my grandparents, but they didn’t know what to do with me and I just had to get out of Tennessee. Honestly, I don’t think my parents even told them why they dumped me on them, on account of me being a fag. They thought I got caught smoking weed or some other drugs, I reckon.”
“Jesus,” Diego muttered.
“Yeah. Anyway, I’d made it to Staff Sergeant after a few years in the army, which was pretty good for someone my age. I got to see some cool parts of the world during my training, and I was good at what I did. I had a decent shot at Sergeant First Class, which would’ve been a big step up, right before I got hurt.”
“You said it was a bomb?”
Brody nodded. “It hit our barracks. Two killed, sixteen injured, including me. I was sent to Landstuhl, the military hospital in Germany, at first, then back to San Antonio to recover. Total coincidence that it was practically my hometown, but it worked out. I was still there recuperating when my Aunt Kelly came by to tell me about the property that my parents left.”
