Never Too Real (15 page)

“Yeah, but the business . . .”

“Fuck the business. You know that you’ll do great at anything you lay your hands on.” Luz found the anger in her against Bert grow, and her desire to protect and love Gabi and her lovely little Maximo took top shelf in her mind. She hated to come down so hard on such a huge decision—which was to be Gabi’s and Gabi’s alone—but she didn’t want her and Max to be exposed to this selfish, entitled “bro” another moment.

“Sweetness, I do not have a safety net.” Gabi paused before adding, “Like you do.” The net was money.

“I know.” Luz acknowledged with her eyes what was hanging in the air. She had a husband who had sold a start-up for millions and a father with a sizable inheritance. Gabi was the first and only in her family to get into six figures, and she had neither an inheritance nor a husband with earning potential.

“Look, I don’t want to make you feel bad here, Luz. I love what I do, but if this were to fall apart, I don’t know . . . I’m exhausted.”

Luz nodded gently. “Will you please bring Max and stay at the Vineyard for the weekend? Please?”

“Ah, thanks, Luzita. That’s nice. I’ve got TV bookings all weekend, though.”

“How about two weekends from now?” Luz asked. She wouldn’t let Gabi off the hook so easily. Her friend was a workaholic, admittedly both out of necessity and out of drive, and could barely stand to give herself the time for a twenty-minute bubble bath (which may have happened most recently ten years ago).

Gabi knew she needed it. But even more, she knew Maximo needed it.

“Yes? Great. I’ll make sure we don’t drive you nuts with the kids—and who knows, by then I might even have to bring along my new
hermana
.” Luz curled her lip as she said “sister.”

Gabi brightened at the mention of her, the opportunity to assist Luz in return. “Maybe I can help with that one.”

“Yes, yes! Lord only knows, I have no clue what to do with this girl.”

“Just do me a favor?” Gabi asked. “Try to have a forgiving heart with your mom. Families have secrets, and though we may not agree with why they’re kept, I’m sure this secret wasn’t kept out of a lack of love for you.” Gabi placed her hand over Luz’s and squeezed gently.

Luz smiled sweetly, her brow furrowed. She took those wise words in as she thought in return,
But, my dear Gabi, someone is keeping a lot of secrets from you, and it’s definitely not out of love.

Chapter 15

T
he doorbell chimed a second time.

Fine,
Luz thought.
I’m fucking coming.
She knew who was on the other side of that door. She’d tried to avoid her brother, Tomas, for a day, but with a sullen teen from the ’hood occupying his living room, and a female one at that, Luz had known that he wouldn’t be able to stand it long. It was all too weird.

“Whaaaaat?” she mock-whined as she opened the door.

From the inside it was an aged, ornate wooden
entrada
bolted to the back of the building’s own fireproof, condo-approved door, which was seen from the outside. She’d found the door-upon-a-door on her last trip to Mexico—in the town of Xochimilco, a tourist spot where you could board elaborately painted wooden boats to float lazily along the river that surrounded Mexico City. It was the route the ancients had used millennia ago to ferry goods. It had been magical for Luz. Now, the waterway was a colorful way to drink beer on a boat and wave to local children on the riverbanks along the way. Daily the door would transport Luz back in time to imagine those who had ridden the river before her. The door was very unlike her mother’s Dominican culture and their African history—Ma had made a face when Luz showed it to her and told her where it came from.
Ay,
such nationalism, Luz had thought at the time.

“Hey, you.” Tomas cheek-pecked her and moved in quickly.

“Hi. Whassup?”

“I’ve been cal-ling youuuuu . . .” he singsonged, deflecting her annoyance with his charms. As always, Tomas looked well put-together. Not as preppy as their dad, Luz thought. But definitely reducing his odds, in that button-down, of being pulled over while driving black.

Luz knew she was in the wrong for delaying her brother’s needs passive-aggressively, so she had trouble looking him in the eyes. “Listen, I’ve been on the phone with Chris for, like, hours. He’s trying to manage the kids on his own and figure out if they should come back now or wait this out a bit.”

In some families you’d expect a younger male sibling to head right for the fridge, pull out a cold one without asking, and plop himself down in a comfortable spot. Not Tomas. He and Luz were playful, but he had been trained to respect her authority and especially her personal space. Luz was big on personal space. When they were children, he remembered how she’d become tense if people were over, particularly if anyone wanted to go into her bedroom or dared to touch anything of hers. When sent by his parents to wake Luz up on lazy weekend mornings when she was a teen, Tomas would practically tremble at her doorway and call out her name in a whisper. She was a golden child to their mother and was also treated with kid gloves by their father. Now he felt he had more insight into the why.

“You want a drink, a
cafecito
or something?” Luz asked.

“Nah, I’m okay.” But Tomas’s stomach was growling.

Luz raised a brow. “Ya know you can help yourself, okay? I’m not going to bite your head off.”

“All right. I’ll have a coffee.” He sat down at the Saarinen marble table, all art-directed by Luz, in a chair at the end. Controlled.

“How do you take it, again?”

“Uh, light and sweet, like my—”

“Ladies. How could I forget!” She rolled her eyes.

They chuckled. As the chrome espresso machine churned out an overpriced Ethiopian blend and the milk foamed, Luz took in the small pleasure of creating this coffee. But a cloud soon rolled in over the milk foam as she noticed her brother was clearly tense. After her night with Gabi, Luz felt much softer, less judgmental. It was such a surprise to hear all that was going on with Gabi, all that Luz hadn’t known about. It made her realize that maybe there was something about her, all perfect and wealthy and put-together that maybe turned people off from being open with her. Cutting her off from what was really happening with those she really loved.
How sad
.
I’m a jerk,
she thought. Luz remembered yelling at Tomas to get out of her room when they were kids, sometimes smacking him in the back of the head if he didn’t move fast enough.
I’m the same as I was then, without the hitting. Is that why I’m terrified of this girl being in my space? I’ve always not wanted people in my space. Unless I chose them, like Chris, or made them, like my children. But even the kids are afraid to get into my stuff.
Luz set down Tomas’s perfect coffee and sat perpendicular to him. She sighed. He slurped.

“So,” Luz began, “how’s she doing?”

“Fine. Fine.” He still couldn’t look at her. Withholding again. “Lots of TV-watchin’.” Luz assumed she got her overbearingness from her mother and so her brother was much more like their (
his?
) father; he was passive-aggressive. Luz had always thought it was just an annoying personality trait, a black-blue-blood stock feature, the need to saunter around things, to avoid making waves—to get things done, at times, in such a way that you didn’t even know he’d done them. But now she realized that it could just as much be the fault of her and her mother. Two in-your-face ladies made of tungsten.

“Okay, so, I talked to Chris.” Her neck bent, Luz’s head hung almost to her knees. She was exhausted. “This is going to be a big deal for the kids.”

“I know,” Tomas responded, looking at Luz directly for the first time.

“But are you sure she’s related to us? I really have to ask.”

Now her brother raised a brow.

“I mean, related to me, in full?” Luz clarified.

“I talked to Cookie’s sister. She corroborates the story.” Cookie was Luz’s godmother, her own mother’s dearest friend and neighbor during their teen years, saddled with her childhood nickname all through adulthood. Cookie had lived down the hall, before she moved back to the Dominican Republic, and was a very Spaniard-looking, book-smart Dominicana, a few years older than Luz’s mom. Luz was named after her—her real name, Luz, meaning “light.” Cookie had been taking classes at the local Ivy university and that was how Luz’s mother had met her father. Though Luz’s mother’s education had stopped in her teens, when the family moved to the city from Santo Domingo, Cookie made sure to connect her mother with someone who could help her move on up.
To dee top—a dee-luxe apartment in dee sky.

“You talked to Cookie’s sister? How’s she doin’?”

Tomas pulled himself forward in the chair to lean in closer. “Good. But yeah, she says that she knew, and Cookie knew, but they were sworn to secrecy.”

“Knew what? About me?”

“Who your father was. I mean, is. So, yeah, it seems that this is his only kid besides you and that her mother, Emeli’s, had not been doing good health-wise for a while. And ya know, he’d been, like, moving around, like with other women and stuff, but always kinda kept in her life.”

“Well, I hope so.” A chance at self-righteousness: Luz would take it. “But had Mom been keeping in touch with them, with Cookie and her sister?”

“Gladys is still there, in the same apartment. So I just looked up her number and it was listed.”

Luz sat back, nudged by the mounting evidence, and effort. “Wow. Thanks for doing that.”

They sat and breathed while Tomas’s coffee steamed. So much truth in the air. Huge truths sat in the room with them, big enough to be their own entities.
Pull up a chair!
A family secret. A new father. A new sister. A new kid in the family. Parents withholding. Class lines blurring, overlapping. There sits a big, fat brown mess.

But at this moment, something else aside of all these things was bothering Luz the most. Like the nasty itch of a healing burn, Luz mulled the realization that her brother was only, technically, biologically, her half brother. Sure, Luz was lighter, her eyes not brown, her nose more refined, but all black families were blended families to some extent. Except she’d always thought most of the blending happened generations ago. Not in this generation, in her bloodline. It made her ache with some sort of mourning. As big of a bully she could be with him, she loved her little brother above and beyond anyone except her own children. And now these children had another grandfather. In prison. And another
tía,
an aunt closer to their age than to hers. Her head began spinning again from the implications of one monster of an afternoon, just a few days ago, that began with a pretty teen version of herself, sitting in her brother’s living room.

“I just can’t help being pissed off, ya know?” Luz stood so she could pace away some of the negative vibrations she felt running through her body, an anger buzz rising. “I mean, who does that? Who lies about who your father is?”

Her brother stared into his cup, recognizing this tone.

“And Dad, too. He knew! Like, what the fuck . . .”

Tomas stated firmly, “I don’t think you should talk to Mom and Dad just yet.”

“What?” Luz’s eyes narrowed.

“Just hear me out, okay?”

Luz sat back down. It was time for her to listen.

“Dad’s blood pressure has been an issue, right? And this is really just going to hurt them both—Mom and Dad. So let’s just take care of the Emeli situation first ourselves, okay?”

Luz looked up at his pleading eyes.

“I mean, she’s too young to be going through this, and there’s probably going to be some logistical things with adoption, or maybe legal stuff to get her emancipated—”

“Okay, just stop.” Tomas straightened for an onslaught, but this time, it wasn’t Luz’s anger running the show, it was her realization that they had to manage this lock-step for the best results. “Before we get to that stuff, what’s the situation with her father? Damage control here, okay?”

“Uh, what damage?”

“Well, he’s in prison, right? This guy?”

“You mean, her, your father . . .”

“Yes, her father.”
Don’t you dare call him my father again, so help me
Dios, Luz thought.

“I spoke to him after you left yesterday.”

Her stomach lurched. She felt disgust. The idea of this . . . convict . . . just made her sick. “You . . . you spoke to him? In prison?” Her eyes went wide. In apprehension but also in awe of her brother’s management of what was essentially not his problem.
The divorce toughened him up a bit. Wow.

“He’d like to meet you.”

Luz blanched as much as her cinnamon skin would allow.

“I mean, not right now, of course! Just, eventually,” Tomas assured her.

Luz’s head hurt. She pinched the bridge of her nose.

“But he did ask if you could please take care of her. She doesn’t have a lot of family around—good family—and he knows that she’ll do so much better with you.”

At the mention of “good family,” Luz stood back up again, bristling. “Oh, he knows, huh.” She started biting her nails. “He knows shit. That’s what he knows.”

“Okay, forget about him. Right now, we need to focus on Emeli, okay? We gotta keep her in school and out of trouble. Assuming she is one of us, a sister, we have to take care of her, Luz. With all that we’ve been given . . . I mean, that could have been us, right?”

Luz sat down for a third time, spreading her arms wider and wider until her hands grasped the sides of the table at either end as far as she could reach. She looked at her wingspan and laid her head, right cheek down, on the table, like a child. As she spoke her voice was muffled as the side of her lips touched the tabletop.

“
Mira
. Look. Just give me until tonight, okay?”

Tomas perked up, his body language shifting, communicating to Luz his relief. She then realized just how much this load was weighing on him—how scared he must be, even as a young, strapping man.
Poor guy,
she thought.
Bad me. Again, I suck.

“Great. Great.” Tomas smiled.

Luz noted his verbal tic of repeating words twice. He’d had it since grade school. When he was a kid it had sounded like a stutter. But as an adult, it sounded charming, an eccentric quirk. Not a bad thing in their family circle.
Family. Huh.
Luz righted herself.

“I just don’t think I can manage being alone with her yet—but, and thank you, by the way, for taking the controls there . . .” She trailed off, allowing her appreciation to be heard first. “So, the kids are on their way back with Chris and will be here by like, five—how about you bring her by around six? With her stuff.”

“Okay, six. Six is good.” Luz saw a hint of a smile on his face.
Poor kid—I mean, kids.
And the stress of his divorce. Which had been a big blow to him. But it wasn’t a failure. It was just a mistake. And, Luz noted, he had come out of it a better person. Obviously. So there.

“And, Luz, you’re saving me because I swear my doormen are all thinkin’ I’m having a post-divorce crisis with some uptown hoochie.”

“Ha! Okay, that’s funny, but . . . that’s no hoochie,” Luz teased, “that’s my sister! I mean, our sister,
Dios
. . .”

“Yeah, no, your sister first!”

“Shut up, fo’ reals, yo.” Luz was already starting to accept the situation as just another event in her never-dull life. Just another challenge for her to manage, just another problem to solve. At the same time, she was panicking at the thought that some unrefined “hoochie” was gonna make house at her house—with her own kids. Because Emeli was Luz’s sister. From her real father. Who was a drug dealer, in jail.

Coño,
she thought. This was some crazy shit.

 

“Are you sitting down?” Luz answered the phone as Cat called right after Tomas left.

“Yeeeees . . .”

“Girl. Shit. So, my brother just left.”

“Wait—what happened to the Vineyard, ’cause I’ve been texting you and I just called there and Chris said you’d gone home early to take care of some family business, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was all about, and then all Gabi would say is ‘Talk to Luz.’”