“Please use your words, Frankie,” I whisper down at her.
“Nice to meet you, too,” she mumbles.
Lina and I look at one another again. Her eyes flick down to my mouth.Fuck. I clear my throat. “I’ll be in touch about that back to school stuff, AP Sanchez. Have a great rest of your summer.”
She smiles. “Lina. Please.”
“Lina,” I amend, but it’s more like a prayer.
* * *
Get your fucking ass in your fucking room right fucking now, you little shit, is what I want to say to my daughter, who is currently screaming like she is the Queen of the Demon Rat Banshees. Because I didn’t let her watch five more minutes of YouTube before bed.
Instead, because I am the Gentlest Parent of the Year, I force my face into an unaffected mask and continue tidying up the living room. “It’s time for bed,” I say neutrally. “Please go brush your teeth.”
“NO!” she cries through ugly tears. “I just want five more minutes!” she screams, taking the stray socks I’ve already picked up and hurling them back on the floor.
You little fucking…“I understand you’re upset, but I don’t understand you when you scream like that,” I say to her for what may be the ten thousandth time in her five years. “I’m here and ready to listen once you calm down.”Fuck this fucking gentle parenting bullshit?—
The little doorbell on our front door rings. I sigh, walking over to answer it. This only means one thing.
“Hey, Tita Gloria,” I say to my aunt—Oliver’s mom. I can barely be heard over Frankie’s raging.
She shoves me aside unceremoniously. I let her, because I’m just so fucking tired. “Hoy, anak,” she croons at my daughter, wrapping her into her arms. “What’s wrong?”
As with all her tantrums, Frankie’s amped up, adrenaline-fueled anger screeching eventually vacates her body, leaving her a heaving, sloppy, crying husk of a child.
I leave the room, needing a second, while Frankie cries in her pseudo-grandma’s arms. Just one second, though, before I feel the need to resume my fatherly duties.
“Let’s start our bedtime routine, Frankie,” I tell her upon my walk back into the living room.
“I can do it with her, Domy,” Tita Gloria tells me.
I shake my head. “It’s fine, Tita?—”
“I wanna do it with Lola,” Frankie sniffles, toeing that line again, the one between passive compliance and World War III.
Not wanting to negotiate with terrorists, I start, “Frankie?—”
“Let’s go, Frankie,” Tita Gloria tells her, picking her up like she’s a toddler and carrying her to the bathroom.
Defeated, I collapse onto the couch and resist the urge to curl into a ball.
* * *
“I can do it myself, Tita,” I tell her, once Frankie is down. “I don’t want you to step in whenever she has a tantrum. I want her to learn the concept of boundaries.”
“I know you can do it yourself,anak,” she says crossly. “That doesn’t mean you have to. Take the help when you can get it.”
“But I don’t wantorneed your?—”
“What youneedis a vacation,hah,” she cuts in. “I think you should leave her with me and Ben and go somewhere on your own, or with friends, but…” She holds up a hand when she sees me start to retort. “I know you would never do that. So I think you and Frankie need to go somewhere with other people… where she can run around and you can relax and let others watch her for a second. Have you been on vacation since she was born? That’s a rhetorical question,” she says, when she sees me freeze.
I wanted to say “we don’t have any time for vacation” but I knew this would further prove her point.
“You look tired,hija,” she tells me, which roughly translates to ‘you look like shit.’ “It’s starting to show, and it’s rubbing off on Frankie. Your fuses are growing shorter and shorter,” she says, with the confidence of a retired elementary school teacher.
“Maybe the two of us can get a house in the Catskills or something next weekend. Or go camping. Or maybe the beach,” I concede, scrubbing my face.
