I planted my palm against my forehead, rubbing it to clear the thought from my mind. “Yeah, I think you did.”
When we were freshened up and dressed, we strolled down a few blocks to where there was an open-air market. Andre told me more about why he’d skipped town.
“My dad hates the gays. One day he came home early from work and caught me in my bedroom with a guy. Smacked me around some and kicked me out. I pretty much had nowhere to go. My brother Demarcus gave me some money for the bus. It was San Francisco or Miami. Miami was a cheaper ticket.”
If he’d had another hundred bucks, we might never have crossed paths.
“You got any other family?”
“Just my brothers. Demarcus is going to play ball for Alabama next year. Jayden is still coming up.”
“You guys get along?”
“Me and Demarcus get along fine. Jayden’s a punk ass, but he’s young, so….” He knocked his hands together. He was always in motion, moving his hands or jiggling his legs, like he had too much energy and didn’t know what to do with it. It seemed like he didn’t want to talk too much about his family, or where he’d come from. I didn’t ask about his mother, but I got the impression she wasn’t with them anymore.
“What about you?” he asked. “You from Miami?”
“Yeah, I was born and raised here by my grandfather.” I told him how my parents were killed in a car crash when I was young. They were crossing the Glades when a Mack truck blew right through a stop sign. They died on impact, which was some kind of blessing at least.
“You and your granddad. You guys get along?” Andre asked.
“Yeah, he was the coolest, man. He used to drag my paintings out to markets like this one and sell them, or trade them. He’d like, haggle with people over the price too. He was an incredible businessman.” I told Andre how he’d set me up in the brightest room of our apartment, where the light shone in through all the windows, how he’d describe Cuban landscapes to me, show me pictures, watch me paint, say stuff like “no, that’s not the right orange.” Then he’d bring me whichever flower it was he wanted me to paint so I could see it up close.
“He was one of a kind,” I said.
“He’s not around anymore?”
“No, he passed while I was in art school.” Right around the time I met Melissa, actually. I told Andre how he’d left me with enough money to cover what my scholarship wouldn’t, and the car, but not much more. He came from Cuba with nothing. He worked crap jobs until retirement. All the money he’d ever made he put toward my schooling, art classes, paints, and canvas. We took a trip to Spain once, but never to Cuba. Not until thehijo del Diablowas rotting in hell would my grandfather go back to his homeland. Castro, the wormy bastard, outlived him.
“It’s all right, though,” I said because Andre looked a little down, like he felt bad for me. “I’ve got my friends and work.”
“No family, though. You ever get lonely, Martin?”
I paused, surprised at the honesty of his question. “You should be a reporter, Andre. You ask the hard questions.”
“Well? Do you?”
I liked that about him. He wasn’t afraid to get personal, to penetrate the surface. Most of the people I knew only skimmed along the top. “Yeah, I get lonely sometimes.”
He nodded. “Sometimes, I feel like, if I could spread my arms wide enough, I could catch on to something, but then it seems like everything just falls right through.”
I pictured it exactly as he described it, that sense of losing something you were meant to have, without even knowing what it was. I was ruminating on this when we came upon a fruit seller. Andre’s eyes lit up. “Man, ya’ll got so much weird stuff down here. I just want to eat it all.”
I told him to pick out whatever he wanted, so he got a mango, a papaya, a star fruit, and two kiwis, which he said he’d seen before but was too afraid to try. “Kind of looks like my balls,” he remarked, which made me laugh. When we got back to the apartment, he laid them all on the counter and began cutting into them with a knife, sampling a little from each like he was taste testing, offering some to me. Then he devoured them all in one sitting.
“You’re going to get the runs,” I said.
He smiled and rubbed his flat stomach. “Worth it.”
I had to get ready for work, and he was off that night. I gave him one of my old phones with minutes already on it. He asked me if there was a skate park nearby, so I offered to drop him off on my way. I sat in the parking lot for a few minutes and watched him acquaint himself with the local skater punks. After a few minutes someone offered him a deck and helmet. Andre took to the half-pipe, and he was like a swallow in flight, carving it up, jumping higher than seemed humanly possible, kickflipping and grinding the rail and whatever those crazy twisty moves are called. He must have spent a lot of time skateboarding back home. When time grew short, I pulled away. Andre turned and gave me a thumbs-up. I didn’t think he knew I was still there.
Toward the end of my shift that night, I asked Melissa if she wanted to go dancing. Her one eyebrow arched. “Sounds like fun.”
“Andre might come with us.”
“Who?” She knew exactly who I was talking about.
“The new dishwasher.” Her eyes narrowed. “What?” I asked innocently.
