“I didn’tflounce,” he mutters. “My dad came over without telling me, and we don’t get along.” He swallows hard, his throat working, then props the bottom of one foot on the bumper of his car. “Felt like time to make myself scarce.”
I’ve heard enough about Javier’s dad—I think his name is Raul—to dislike him. His divorce from Paloma sounds like it was ugly at times, and it can’t have been easy for their kids. And I wasn’t particularly nice to Javier last night, and shouldn’t I let bygones be bygones? If I say my feelings aren’t hurt, I don’t get to act like my feelings are hurt.
“If you want to talk, I don’t mind,” I’m saying, and wow, that’s not selling it. “I mean—do you want to go grab dinner or something? You can wait for rush hour to die down while you eat.”
Javier looks at me for a minute, a few strands of black floating around his face as he breathes, his chest expandingagainst the white T-shirt he’s wearing. The thumb and fingers of one hand tap a rhythm against the trunk of his car.
“Yeah,” he finally says, and now his voice is low and so quiet it’s a little hard to hear over the noise of a city at rush hour. Even though it’s eighty-five degrees and humid, a shiver works its way down my spine. “I could do dinner.”
CHAPTER TEN
MADELINE
“How can I help?”he asks, thirty minutes later, in my kitchen.
I really meant to go out to dinner somewhere.Anywherebesides here, really; it could have been Chipotle or McDonald’s or Sad Sam’s Suspicious Seafood Shack—it didn’t matter. But we decided to drive to my apartment first, since it was nearby, and take one car from there. And then we couldn’t decide on a place, and then I casually saidI was going to make dinner anyway. And now we’re here and I have to pretend like it wasn’t in the back of my mind the whole time.
“Stay out of the way and keep me company,” I say.
“Sothen,”he says, slicing a carrot with a bit too much force, “she called both my siblings and wanted them to talk sense into me.”
“She called them about a fight the two of you were having?” I ask, and Javier just sighs. “Is that…normal?”
My parents were divorced by the time I started preschool, so I’ve never really experienced the allegedly standard two-parents-and-their-children nuclear family. I can’t say I think I missed out.
“I have no idea,” he admits. “According to my cousins, her sisters also do it, so I guess it’s normal for us. Why? Gerald doesn’t rope all your family members into each conflict?”
“He does not,” I confirm, swiping a strand of spaghetti from the pot. Javier laughs. “I can’t believe your mom did any of that.”
I slurp the noodle into my mouth—it needs aboutonemore minute—and fight the urge to offer advice, likeTalk to her!orMake sure you firmly establish boundaries before you visit the next time!He doesn’t want my advice; he just wants to complain.
“I shouldn’t have been surprised,” he admits, scraping the carrot slices off the cutting board and into the salad I had him make since he was too fidgety to stand still. “She’s been telling me that I should at least listen to what he’s got to say. If there’s anything surprising, it’s that she ever divorced him in the first place.”
“I thought she was pretty Catholic,” I admit.
“She is. It took a lot for her to leave him and then to make it legal. It was because of me actually.”
“I doubt that,” I say before I can stop myself. I’m not exactly a relationship expert, but I’ve got twenty-odd years ofit wasn’t your faulttherapy under my belt.
There’s silence while I pour spaghetti through a strainer, and when I look up, he’s staring right at me.
“You know I used to be a junkie, right?” he says, like it’s a challenge. “Am still a junkie, will always be a junkie, whatever.”
I put the empty pot back on the stove, look into it for a moment, and wipe my sweaty palms on my pants. Is this fucker testing me?
“I’m almost positive that’s not the preferred terminology,” I say after a moment.
“For some reason, saying it nicely has never made me feel better.”
“You could always try it,” I suggest, even though I’m not giving advice. “But yeah, I knew. You mentioned rehab last time we talked.”
“Right. Well. My dad’s pretty old school. His parents were farm workers who came here from Mexico before he was born. He barely talks about his childhood, but when he does, he makes it sound like it was the eighteen hundreds. He shipped off to basic training the day after he graduated high school. And he’s pretty sure that getting addicted to Oxy is a moral failing—and needing to go to rehab for it is even worse.”
I nod because that’s too much to unpack right now.
“So he thought rehab was stupid the first time. And then when I relapsed and wentbackto rehab, he was really not on board,” Javier goes on. “And then I came back and I was living at home when I relapsedagain, so he waited until my mom was gone one day and kicked me out of the house.”
That’s—I try to imagine it, but it’s not really computing.
