His mother met his eyes. “She will stay here. Not taking care of you kids will give the break she needs for a couple of months.”
“What’s going to happen when we come back? Will you still be working double shifts?” Delores asked her mother.
Mariana shook her head. “No. I will go back to my regular schedule, and so will your father. It is only during the summers that we will work overtime. Hopefully by the time you are ready to graduate high school, we’ll be living in our new home.”
Delores huffed. “Will I have my own bedroom?”
“Yes,” Enrique, confirmed. “As the oldest girl—and Ramon, as the oldest boy—you will have your own bedrooms. Juan and Carlos will share a room, and Bianca and Elena will share another.”
Ray quickly counted in his head the number of bedrooms needed for the entire family. “You’re going to need to find a house with five or six bedrooms because where isabuelagoing to sleep?”
Enrique smiled for the first time. “If the house has a basement, then we’ll convert a portion of it into a bedroom for your grandmother. That’s why we have to save enough money to find a house big enough for everyone. And that’s why I want a two-family. We can rent it to another family and use that money to offset the mortgage, utilities, and repairs.”
“Papi, will we have to share our house with the new people?” ten-year-old Elena asked.
“No,mija,” Enrique said, shaking his head. “They will have their own home.”
Ray looked at Delores, and they shared a smile. Both had complained to each other that nine people living in a three-bedroom apartment where no one had any privacy was a problem. He’d had to wait for everyone to go to bed to sit up in the kitchen and do homework, or study for an exam. There were times when it was past midnight before he got into bed, and once the alarm clock went off, he’d felt as if he hadn’t gotten any sleep. If his parents had been arguing, it was about wanting better for their children.
“Okay, Papi. Let me know what you need me to do to help us move to a house,” Ray told his father.
“The only thing you need to concern yourself with is staying in school and out of trouble. And I don’t want to repeat myself when I say I don’t want to find out that you were smoking, drinking, and messing around with girls. One slipup, and I’ll send you to my cousin Pedro who lives in the mountains, and he will work you like a slave.”
Ray felt a rush of heat in his face, and he knew his father wasn’t issuing an idle threat. Pedro owned a banana plantation and had earned the reputation of mistreating his workers for the least infraction.
“I know, Papi.”
Enrique glared at him. “As long as you know, then everything is okay. It’s getting late, so it’s time some of you kids need to go to bed, because there’s school tomorrow.”
Ray sat on the sofa long after his parents and siblings leftthe living room. He knew his mother and father worked hard to pay rent, buy food and clothes for their children. They’d also preached relentlessly about them doing the right thing so they could stay out of trouble. And by trouble, his father meant staying away from drugs.
Ray didn’t understand all that was going on in the world, because his social studies textbook hadn’t caught up with what was being reported by television news journalists or in daily newspapers. The wordscountercultureandanti-establishmentwere just words that hinted of some upheaval that had nothing to do with him. He knew there was a war going on in the jungles in a country called Vietnam and that American soldiers were being sent there to fight, yet he remained unaffected because no one he knew had been drafted or sent overseas. He just wanted to finish high school, go to college, then onto medical school so he would become the first in his family to become a doctor.
He got up every morning, went to school, then came home to do homework, eat, then prepared to go to bed in the bedroom he shared with his two brothers. He went to mass with his family on Sundays and served as an altar boy every other Sunday. He also went to confession every Saturday to tell the priest what he’d done wrong and said the prayers he needed for absolution. Ray would occasionally admit to fighting with his younger brothers, but he was reluctant to tell the priest that he liked masturbating. That was a secret he would keep to himself. Even when Frankie and Ray had mentioned they engaged in the practice, Ray had lied and told them it was something he wouldn’t do because it was a sin. They would laugh and call him Father Torres, because they said he was better suited for the priesthood than medicine.
Ray waited until he knew his younger brothers would be asleep in their bunk beds before going into the bedroom and readying himself for bed. He lay in the darkened room, his mind filled with memories of his first visit to the Caribbean island. He recalled his mother telling him she was taking himand Delores to Puerto Rico because she’d wanted them to experience their ancestral roots. Ray had believed she was talking about a plant until she opened an old family bible to a page listing the names, births, and deaths of people in her family going back four generations. It wasn’t until he was much older that Ray realized he’d come from a long line of people who had survived slavery, being targeted for death or imprisonment from political opponents; although many of his relatives still lived in Puerto Rico, they were American citizens.
Inasmuch as he wanted to spend the summer on a tropical island, Ray was disappointed about the plans he, Kenny, and Frankie had made for themselves. They’d made a promise to see one science fiction, horror, western, and the latest James Bond movie that summer. They’d also talked about going to Times Square, but then dismissed the idea, because they knew the consequences if their parents found out they were going there to see if they could get into some of the peep shows.
He finally fell asleep, and when he saw Kenny and Frankie the next day, he would have to tell them of the plans his parents had made for their family.
“Are you really going to spend July and August in Puerto Rico?” Frankie asked Ray, as he and Kenny shared a table in the school’s cafeteria during lunch.
“Yeah. We’re leaving the first week in July and coming back the last week in August.”
“Did you guys do something for your parents to punish you by sending y’all away?” Kenny questioned.
Ray shook his head and met Kenny’s eyes. “No. Why would you say that?”
“Because my mother said when she was growing up, if Black kids acted up, then their parents would send them down South as punishment.”
“We’re not being punished,” Ray told Kenny. He explained why the Torres kids had to stay on the island for the next twosummers. He’d felt a measure of pride when his best friends appeared surprised that his parents were planning to buy a house. “Once we move in, you guys can come over whenever you want.”
Frankie combed his fingers through his thick black hair. “Even if you weren’t going away for the summer, we still wouldn’t be able to do all of the things we planned, because I told my father that I’m willing to work in the store with him this summer.”
Kenny set down his milk container. “What did he say?”
“I think I shocked him, because he didn’t say anything. It was my mother who thanked me for helping him. My dad is a proud man who would never ask anyone for help, and that includes asking Nonna if we could move into one of the apartments in her brownstone so he could have more space for his family. But my mother refused to live under the same roof with a man who controlled the very lives of those who went along with rejecting her because she’s Irish.”
