“I get it.”
And I do.
My dad, theposer, grew up in the exact opposite of the gated community where I did—with twenty-four-hour armed guards, pool houses beside the pools, and housekeepers who cleaned up around us.
“I didn’t even know Madrid had shanty towns,” I admit into the silence growing between us.
“That’s because I never wanted you to know.”
I jolt when the sound of a collision hits my ear drums, like a fist into a filing cabinet.
“Did you just punch something?”
“Why did you have to go there, dammit?” he thunders.
“Abuelaused to talk about back home,” I ruminate, toying with the petal of a daisy I dropped into the brooch Zach bought me. “I wanted to see it for myself.”
I hoped to find something of her back here. A connection to the woman I didn’t know well enough. Who, like any child that didn’t understand the concept of death, wasted the time I could have spent with her.
But there are no memories to peruse, no nostalgia to appreciate.
“Home,” he sneers. “Like that drug den was fucking home. Please, Denver, leave that place. It isn’t safe. Especially at this time of day. It must be, what? Going on six?”
“It’s mostly cleared and I have a ride waiting for me.”
“Get away from there,” he shouts. “It’ll be dark within the hour and it’s a drug dealers’ paradise. I read in the news about how they were clearing the slum away, but obviously they weren’t!”
As I stare at busted planks of wood, litter and trash and, randomly, an abandoned guitar, amid piles and piles of other detritus that is proof of this part of the shanty town being dismantled by the authorities, I answer, “No. It’s all barren stretches of land now. It’s really sad, Dad.”
“Why did you have to go there?”
That he keeps saying that tells me he’s lost for words.
Skewering my toe into the dirt of thousands of broken homes for thousands of displaced people, I think back to the past couple years. How everything twisted. Got yanked out of joint.
BeforeAbueladied, life was normal.
Then, of course, I look at this place and I recognize that nothing about this fucked-up world we live in isnormal.
“Before the divorce, I felt like I knew you, Dad,” I say eventually. “We didn’t get along. Not always. But we… Our family made sense. We were connected. Linked.
"Then you and Mom split and that shattered. I-I guess I was looking for that. The connection to past you. The dad thatdidmake sense to me.” I clench my fingers into a fist. “Maybe I was just looking for justification. I’m not sure I found it, but if you’d let me take Psychology 101, then I probably would.”
Okay, it’s a low blow… I don’t have it in me to care.
“Ouch.” It’s the first time he’s sounded anything close to mild.
“Truth stings.”
I peer at the sky overhead. It’s gray and dark, clouds rumbling over me with the promise of an incoming storm, and it makes this place all the bleaker. I googled it before I came, wanting to make sure I was heading to the right area, and it’s nothing like the town I imagined.
Valdemingómez.
A word that was part of a single sentence I heard my grandmother say on her deathbed—time to go home to Valdemingómez. She’d even spoken it in Spanish and she rarely used that around us kids.
“They say that people had to use tin cans instead of toilets here. No running water, no paved streets. Just mud and damp and cold in the winter. Then insects and unbearable heat in the summer…”
Did you live like that?
