“No, I’ll give him your regards. I think he’s in shock right now.”
“I’m sure.”
“He has a younger sister whom he now has guardianship over. She’s in eighth grade.”
I wince, imagining being that age and without parents. “How devastating.”
“And,” my brother adds pointedly, “she’s Deaf.”
“She’s in public school?” I ask, my mind immediately spinning with questions and ways to solve problems. “How does she do?”
“I don’t know much about her, but I guess he’ll be moving her here.”
While I’m sure Camden is grieving hard for his parents, the changes his sister will have to go through will make it exponentially worse. I ache for her, knowing how difficult it will be.
“Please let me know if I can do anything.”
“I will,” he says, then calls out to his wife Molly, explaining to her that I’ll be staying with them for the summer, to which she responds happily.
Molly started dating my brother when they were only sixteen, and they’ve been together nearly fifteen years now. She’s more than my sister-in-law; she’s one of my best friends. So when she pops on-screen, her voice immediately changes, “Oh Nan, what’s wrong?”
I shake my head, unable to talk about it again, so Erik takes over. “She’s burned out from school.”
Molly makes an understanding sound. “I’m so sorry, but we’ll get you feeling better. I can’t wait for you to come. You know you can text or call whenever you want.”
I blink a few times, clearing my vision before making a right at a red light. “I know, but I don’t want to bother you with Kai.”
My brother dismisses that idea. “You wouldn’t be bothering us. He doesn’t do much right now besides sleep and poop. And there is no way you can bother us more than Mom and Dad already do.”
Molly agrees. “Your mom won’t stop sending us onesies.”
Kai is the first grandchild, and when he was first born, Erik had to physically remove my parents from the house so he and Molly could get some peace. I love them dearly, but they are both overbearing in their own ways.
Mom was born in East Germany before the Wall fell, and while we don’t know much about her early childhood, she was somehow smuggled out and placed into an orphanage in West Berlin, and she was adopted by my grandparents in the US a few years later. She is quite literally a miracle, born deaf in a time and place where disabled children did not have a high chance of surviving. But she did, and she made it all the way to New York City during college, where she met my father, newly arrived from Puerto Rico to find fame in the boxing ring. But that fateful night in a dance club, they learned they didn’t have to speak each other’s languages to fall in love.
A few years later, they married and started having half-German, half-Puerto-Rican babies whose first language was ASL and who were raised to be thebestin our chosen fields. Mom had earned her PhD in psychology after overcoming so much adversity, and there is no excuse for us not to. Not to mention Dad, who won himself a silver medal at the Olympics before opening a string of successful gyms throughout New York and New Jersey.
Felix, my oldest brother, is almost done with his oncology fellowship.
Then there is Erik, one of the best quarterbacks in the league right now.
My younger sister, Emmaline, is about to graduate law school, and the baby, Benedict, is at Harvard on a full sports scholarship for football.
The Riveras donotquit.
Except me. The middle child who can’t hack being a public school teacher.
Because Molly knows me well enough, she can see it before it happens. “Don’t cry, Nan. It may not feel like it, but it will get better.”
I glance down to the screen at another red light to find my brother back on it. “Focus on finishing out the year. That’s all you need to do. Take it one day at a time, and then you can come here and relax.”
Sure. Easier said than done.
CHAPTER 3
CAMDEN
“Hey, man.”Erik, my best friend and teammate, smiles when I clap hands with him after opening the door to my penthouse in Center City. “How’s it going?”
