Help Wanted (17 page)

"I was at the dance," he told his mother. "And yeah, I wiped my feet," he lied.

"You better," his mother said. Her face was smeared
with night cream. Some of it was clotted in her bangs. Her eyes were raw-looking against the rest of her face. She looked like a clown but was anything but funny.

"I was at the dance," he repeated, and plucked a potato chip from the bowl on the kitchen counter. "You said I could go. Didn't you get my message?"

His mother was stirring a cup of dark tea. She raised it to her face, and when she sipped, the night cream around her mouth began to crack, showing fissures. She sipped two more times before she said, "Your grandmother is in trouble."

Daniel stopped rolling his tongue over his back molars. He stared at the calendar on the refrigerator, stared in that direction because he couldn't look at his mother. He waited for her to add more. He dropped another potato chip into his mouth.

"The police are going to come for her," she stated coldly. Her face tilted upward to the clock on the wall. "It's ten-thirty, and they said they should be here by eleven." Suddenly tears leaked from his mother's face. The tears cut grooves and melted some of the night cream on her cheeks.

"I know," Daniel said.

"What do you know? You don't know nothing!"

With that burst of anger, Daniel made his escape to his bedroom, where he threw himself on his unmade bed. "She's so mean," he muttered about his mother, whose footsteps he heard propelling her toward the
bathroom. He heard the groan of plumbing in the wall—his mother must have been washing off her night cream.

"My life is stupid," he moaned. He tried with all his might to re-create the kiss he had experienced only a few hours before. He saw a girl's face raise toward his. He puckered up his lips, and then parted them as he recalled that was how he had caught the kiss of that strange unknown girl. He licked his lips, but the minty taste of lip gloss was gone. He turned onto his elbow and squeezed his pillow.
Who is she?
he wondered.
Who? Who? Who?

There was a knock on his door, followed by a shout. "You better get up and say good-bye, Mr. Know-It-All!"

"I'm not Mr. Know-It-All!" he screamed back.

To his surprise his mother didn't come down on him with her usual fist-clenching threats. He pushed himself up from his bed. His grandmother was headed for a night in jail, possibly longer if it was true that she had been passing bad checks.

"
Mi'jo!
" Daniel's grandmother called while dabbing on lipstick in front of the small mirror in the dining room. She turned after she had finished and said, "They said I did it, but I didn't do it." She pouted, as she expected her grandson to come to her defense.

Daniel only stared at his grandmother.

Suddenly they heard a car stop in front of the
house. Two doors opened and closed, one clicking closed softer than the other.

Daniel's mother began to cry and heave her shoulders in an eruption of emotion that he had never witnessed before. He watched his mother hug his grandmother, saying, "Mom, don't worry. You're going to be out tomorrow. I'll call Junior."

Junior was his mother's half brother.

Mother and daughter hugged and kissed. Daniel could only watch and pushed back into his mind the awful thought that maybe his grandmother was guilty and deserved to be led away.

His mother and grandmother parted but held hands, both sniffling and allowing tears to run down their faces. It was, Daniel thought, a race of tears—he noticed that the long teary trail was longer on his mother's face than on his grandmother's.

She really did it,
he concluded.
She really passed bad checks.

When a knock rapped at the door, mother and daughter let go of each other.

Grandmother turned to her grandson. "I'm going now," she said with a sniffle. Her eyes were moist with tears, her face long from the gravity called age.

"Don't just stand there! Give your grandmother a kiss good-bye!" his mother scolded.

Daniel stepped obediently toward his grandmother and spread his arms. He held her for a few seconds,
and for half of those seconds he thought of the girl outside the gym. That was the first girl he had ever kissed, and the kiss had come unexpectedly. He realized there would be other times when he might duplicate such happiness. In his grandmother's arms, it was not one of those times.

They parted.

"You be good," his grandmother instructed. "I didn't do it. That man is a liar."

"I know you didn't," Daniel lied.

"This man turned me in,
mi'jo,
because I don't like him. He's married and that's why I don't like him."

"I know," Daniel found himself saying as she confessed that she had liked the man—
Who was he?
—for a month and then stopped returning his calls.

Daniel's mother stomped to the front door when the knock sounded again, harder.

"All right! All right already!" his mother snarled. She squeegeed tears from her face with her thumb. She primped her hair.

His grandmother quickly gave Daniel a kiss on the cheek, which seemed to burn. He touched that cheek and offered up a remote "Bye, Grandma."

His grandmother turned and hurried to the front door, where she hugged her daughter one last time and closed the door behind her.

Daniel's mother sat on the couch, lowered her face into her palms, and sobbed. He considered sitting next
to his mother to comfort her but decided he should return to his bedroom. There he sat on the edge of his bed but couldn't locate the tears inside himself to cry for his grandmother. "What's wrong with me?" he asked himself. "You're cold! You can't even cry for your grandmother. You're hateful! Hateful! Hateful."

But he sensed it was an untrue outburst. It was something to say at a moment when he should have been crying. He stood up and looked in the mirror. He touched his hot cheek and realized there were different kinds of kisses—sweet and mysterious ones like from the girl who suctioned his breath outside the school gym. Then there were kisses—he swallowed hard and turned away from the mirror—like those from his grandmother, one that left a red lipstick stain like a small bloody wound.

Adan's father, Ramiro Islas, was born in Del Rey, California, on a Sunday in March when his town of nine hundred had experienced an unexpected blessing. A wind had snapped through the valley and shook a flurry of blossoms from the plum and almond trees that circled the town. Some said the blossoms covered the street like snow. They whitened lawns and cars parked in driveways and sent children, arms flapping like wings, outside to catch them in their mouths. It was certain that the blossoms that covered the ground were responsible for Dona Lilia Marquez slipping and wrenching not only her two knees but also her back. She had complained about it that day and up till the hour of her death.

That had been thirty-two years ago, when Ramiro was brought into the world on a quiet day. He was quiet, too, all his life. His family was surprised, then, when he fell in love. He married Gloria Mesa, a part-time seamstress who was equally quiet. They ate their meals in silence, or near silence. When he wished to perk up his steak or roast chicken, he would ask, "Salsa and pepper, please," or, in Spanish, "
La salsa y pimienta, mi cielo.
" For him, Spanish was softer in tone than guttural-sounding English.

In their third year of marriage, they had a son, whom they named Adan in honor of Ramiro's maternal grandfather. Adan was born unexpectedly at 5:00
P.M.
on a Friday. Ramiro's father had said that those born on Sunday, especially in spring, were meant to live quiet lives. Those born on Friday or Saturday would be outgoing and possibly rowdy. Ramiro's own father had been born on a Monday, the first day of the workweek. And work he did, up until the moment he died, falling from a scaffold while painting a house for a friend.

"He looks like you!" Gloria said proudly when she and the baby came home from the hospital. The baby's features were beginning to take shape.

Ramiro agreed that Adan looked like him, but the baby's temperament was nothing like his. Within a week of his birth, Adan was screaming and kicking. Face
furrowed from anger, he looked like a little old man in his new blankets. He was hot tempered and stubborn, and was already swinging his fists everywhere.

"He's so loud," Ramiro said. He recalled his father's wisdom about babies born on Friday or Saturday. Maybe they were destined to be rowdy after all.

Gloria could only smile. "He's going to test us,
mi vida
"

Years passed, and the prophecy came true. Adan did test his parents. His father worked as a security guard at a fruit-processing plant and would sometimes bring home a bag of almonds or dried apricots. Little Adan would make a face and mutter, "Yeah, thanks." His father, in a near hush, would read the comics to little Adan, who after listening would ask, "What's so funny about that?"

"Why is he like this?" the boy's mother would cry. "What did we do?"

Adan began to fight, to tag walls with graffiti, and to use bad language. The family's grief deepened when Adan was caught sifting through boxes in a neighbor's garage. The neighbor had collared the ten-year-old boy and walked him roughly to his father's house. The neighbor pounded on the front door.

"Your boy was in my garage, stealing!" the neighbor had roared.

Ramiro could only blink. He lacked the words to express his disappointment. After all, he was a security
guard and had taught and warned his son about gangs and crimes and such. But stealing at such a young age? And from a neighbor?

"You sure?" Ramiro had asked. He had great respect for his neighbor, who was an elder at the Mexican Baptist church. He was a man who kept his house tidy and his lawn mowed and green as money. A ragweed didn't last more than a day in his flower bed. And snails? They marched to their death under his command.

"I'm sure!" the neighbor had roared even louder. He was not a kindly Baptist at that moment. He was a man who expected his neighbor to correct his son.

Gloria had come to the front door. She wrung her hands as her eyes filled and cascaded tears down her face.

"
¡Chale!
I wasn't stealing nothing!" Adan argued. He shook off the neighbor's hand from his neck. "What you got to steal that I want? You think I want your push mower or your broom? And I saw you got a box of
Playboys
back there."

The tears on his mother's cheeks dripped like diamonds. Indeed, they were as priceless as her love for her son. Her shoulders began to jerk from a deep and painful crying. "Oh, Adan ... Oh, Adan." That had been two years ago. At twelve, Adan exasperated his parents, who trembled when the telephone rang. They would look at that instrument attached to the kitchen
wall. Was it the principal calling once again? A manager from a store, red-faced with anger about their son shoplifting? Or worse, the police? Maybe their son had broken into a house.

Then a marvelous piece of luck happened. Adan was beaten up by an older boy. Adan came home one evening while Ramiro was playing solitaire at the kitchen table and Gloria was balancing the checkbook. He presented his swollen face to his parents. Ramiro let the cards fly into the air, and the pen danced from Gloria's fingers. Their son was wounded! They bathed his face and set ice cubes wrapped in a washcloth onto his swollen jaw. They gently fit cotton balls into his nostrils and wiped blood from behind his ears. Their son had little to say that evening, and the next day after the swelling had subsided, he had even less to say.

"What happened, son?" his father had asked when he returned home from work.

Adan could only say, "I was wrong."

"Who was the boy who did this?" his father asked.

"A friend."

A friend?
His father had to wonder what kind of friend beats you up.

"I was a fool, Papi." Adan wept. "I stole some money from my friend." For the first time in years, tears leaked not only from the son's face but also from the father's lined face. Adan leaned his head against his
father's shoulder, and that evening father and son became friends.

Not long after that incident, Ramiro realized that he should have spoken up more over the years when his son had been growing up. He should have told him, "No, you can't do that!" Or, "Listen to me! I'm your father." Moreover, he sensed that he should have signed up his son for soccer or Little League Baseball or maybe even football, a sport that made Ramiro squint with pain when he saw teams clashing on television. He didn't care about that rough sport. It was just too loud for him. Occasionally he would catch a glimpse of a football game at his wife's brother's house. He couldn't help it. His brother-in-law had TVs in every room, including—Ramiro was aghast when he first encountered it—the bathroom.

"Adan, we're going to do things together," Ramiro had told his son. He made that promise in September, when the first leaves were falling calmly onto lawns and the pavement. It was football season in a small town. Ramiro signed up Adan for a football league that included mostly religious schools—Baptist, Methodist, and Catholic. He couldn't imagine his son getting hurt on the field. After all, weren't the players the sons of religious people?

Adan was excited, but worried about his jaw, which pained him when he had to speak more than six words in a row. But he made the cut, and soon Adan was
stringing six and seven words together without pause. He was on the mend, and his body appeared to change as well. He put on muscle that filled his T-shirts. He could run for miles without breathing hard. He went to practice twice a week, and his father, still dressed in his security guard uniform, would arrive after work to watch his son.

"Don't worry,
mi'jo,
" Ramiro said as he helped suit up Adan for the first game. "You have your helmet." Logic had him once again arguing that most of the opponents were Christians and, therefore, not as vicious as teams in nonreligious leagues.

Secretly, before their league's first game, Ramiro had tried on his son's helmet. He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and bared his teeth. He growled, "I'm like a Chicago Bear," and chuckled to himself.