“Now?”
“No, I mean when you run, dumbass.”
“Yeah,” I say. I haven’t been running that much or doing any of the drills he set up for me, but he’s been working late and Mom’s been teaching summer school so they don’t know. Stick and me have just been hanging out, every day since summer break, sometimes with Sammy but mostly on our own, wandering the streets of Avenel on our bikes, avoiding our families.
“Well, make sure you bring them to camp with your brace in case you need it. I already talked to the coach and he said they’re going to see how you respond to a full workload.”
“Are you sure I should go? I mean if I hurt my ankle again it would cost me the fall season. Maybe I should rest.”
“You’ve rested long enough.”
He finishes his beer and surveys the lawn, the tables askew and the chairs haphazardly placed, the tent sagging in the middle. We’re not known for exacting standards in my family.
“I was just thinking of the cost of the camp and all the hours it’ll take and maybe I should work instead.”
“What the hell are you talking about? You don’t want to go?”
“I told you that.”
“When?”
I told him two days ago, with the Yankees game blaring, but I guess he didn’t listen, or maybe he didn’t want to hear. He was on a baseball scholarship when he was in college, before he busted up his knee and gained a lot of weight and never made it back to the team.
“It doesn’t matter, you’re going. There’s a deposit down already and we’re not losing it.”
“What if I pay you back the deposit from my summer job? It still saves you money in the long run.”
That’s my only hope to get out of this—to appeal to his aversion to spending money, and I should have thought of this before he signed me up, but it wasn’t like he asked if I wanted to play. And that was before I spent three straight weeks alone with Stick. Before we kissed.
“What summer job? You got a job all of a sudden?”
Stick started working as a busboy and I thought I could join him, spend more time with him, skip baseball camp to rest my ankle and spend every waking moment with Stick. Okay that might be a little sick.
“No,” I say. “Not yet.”
“Are you afraid of playing now or something? That you’re going to get hurt again?”
His tone doesn’t waver but he’s looking right at me, into my eyes, like it’s some kind of sympathy, and maybe I should agree because the money thing isn’t working and I don’t know how to answer, it’s not about my ankle and it’s not about baseball, not really, I just want to be around for Stick. And I can’t tell him that.
“I don’t know.”
“Well you have to try sometime,” he says, stepping forward to reach out, about to tussle my hair like I’m a little kid but he stops and shakes my shoulder, which feels as awkward as it sounds. “You’ve got a shitload of ground to make up for this season. The only way you’ll be a starter in the spring is to do the work now.”
I feel a sudden swelling in my throat like I’m about to cry, I don’t know why, it’s real all of a sudden that the next four weeks will be all about baseball and not about Stick—after the very first kiss with the only boy I’ve ever liked, before he ran away and hasn’t texted all day and maybe after camp he won’t even speak to me.
“I have to take your brother to practice,” Dad says, heading up the walkway toward the house. “And don’t you dare help your mother move this goddamned tent.”
THREE
“TE HE ECHADO DE MENOS, MI HIJO.”
I don’t speak much Spanish. I know I should and I know a little, but I don’t speak it in any normal situations and my parents don’t either—they were both born here, the United States I mean, New Jersey for my mom and Long Island for my dad, which has its own unique way to communicate but it isn’t Puerto Rican. I took Spanish in school this year but it’s different than the way my relatives speak, it’s more formal and less natural and we spent half the semester on accents instead of common phrases that would help me understand my nana’s sister when she hugs me to death and pours out her love in a foreign language.
“How are you, Auntie?”
“Ah you know,” she says, no attempt to hide the fatigue in her pause. “Sin quejas sin quejas. Did you eat?”
The party has started, but none of the food is out—my family practices Puerto Rican time for meal preparation as well. The main courses get cooked all day in pots and pans simmering on the stove and in high-backed dishes crowded into ovens and when it’s finally ready you wait three more hours because all the adults are too busy drinking or talking to remember the eating and I get so starved at our parties I can literally feel my stomach clawing at my spine.
“No, I’m okay.”
“You should eat something un pequito.” She used to call me her “little one” when I was younger but when I got older she started to call me un pequito, which means “a little” I think, or maybe I’m misunderstanding. “Let me get you a hamburger.”
Our front lawn is packed with my aunts and uncles and cousins and some of the neighbor’s guests—somehow our house is the most crowded on the block, maybe because of the tent. My uncle is manning the grill, prepping burgers and hot dogs to keep the masses from starving while the main courses simmer in the kitchen. There’s a table by the stairs set up with wire frames to hold the dishes. They won’t be filled for hours.
Auntie hands me the burger and finds another relative to smother so I head into the house past my cousins—some of them officially related and some just friends but we call everyone our cousin for shorthand in my family and this is who I grew up around, at holiday parties and trips to New York state, these cabins by the lake we used to visit every summer. One time all the aunts and uncles who still live in Puerto Rico flew in for a reunion and I got smothered in hugs by strangers speaking Spanish, with intense fragrances covering their faces and plates of pernil popping out of the kitchen at all hours of the evening. I didn’t want to sleep, intoxicated by the smells and the tastes and the sounds of celebration, the salsa music blaring. I used to complain about the length of the drive upstate, but I sort of miss those family vacations.
I finish my burger in three hearty bites and move past Nico and a couple cousins watching baseball in the next room. Dad must have picked up fireworks on the way home with Nico because I caught them setting some off at the side of the house and Nico’s still dressed in his baseball clothes. I thought about biking over to Stick’s to catch him before he went to work, but I didn’t want to scare him. I think I already scared him. I’m thinking too much and this is way too tough and I can’t believe we haven’t talked since the kiss.
“Matty!” Titi shouts from the kitchen, fighting with my mother over the stove, because all their conversations drift into screaming and she gives me a hug around the waist. I smile and move over to greet my grandmother, looking on amused.
“Hi Nana.” I hug her gingerly. “How you feeling?”
“Hi sweetie,” she says, rocking her slur. She had a stroke last summer and lost all sensation on the left side of her body, but she made it through, she “scared the shit out of death,” Uncle Willie said, and she sounds better every time I see her.