Able Abe
Commercial and Residential Heating and Cooling
Robert “Bob” Gropper
Director of Sales and Marketing
There was a telephone number and an e-mail address below that.
“Bob Gropper? This is you?”
“The same.”
I could not restrain a chuckle.
“I changed my name after I met Nancy. I didn’t have a permanent visa then. It just made things easier for everyone.”
“Okay.” I handed the card back to my father. Bob Gropper. I tried out the name silently. It was hard to believe. Why would anyone in their right mind exchange Roberto Zapata for Bob Gropper?
“Keep it,” my father said. “It has my cell phone number.”
I dropped the card into my backpack. My father reached up to adjust the rearview mirror and I noticed his disfigured pinky finger. I was ten years old when I saw a cement block fall on my father’s hand. It was a Saturday and my father had taken me to the construction site where he worked. After the block smashed his finger, my father had a coworker pull the finger as close to its former shape as possible and then went back to work. That crooked finger now belonged to someone named Bob Gropper.
“A penny for your thoughts.”
“What’s the name of your son?”
“Which one? One of them is named Emiliano.” I remembered my father’s old charm. Only it wasn’t working on me right then.
“The other one.”
“Trevor,” my father said. “He’s been asking a lot of questions about you. You’re going to like him. He’s super smart.”
There was something odd about my father’s words, but I had no time to find out what because I was suddenly filled with an emptiness as barren and desolate as the view outside my window.
“I told Abe I’d be there tomorrow at noon. Nancy’s been filling in at the office while I’m away, but she’s got her own job at the firm. She does all the books. And, of course, there is Trevor.” My father began to tap the screen of his phone. He was glancing at a GPS map, making mental calculations. “Springfield, Missouri, is about twelve hours. We can get there around eleven tonight. Get up at four a.m. We could be in Aurora by noon tomorrow.”
“I can drive,” I suggested, not eagerly.
“Yeah? When did you learn?”
“Brother Patricio showed me.” I hadn’t meant it to come out the way it did, as in since you weren’t around.
“Maybe.” Then he added, “But if you have an accident, Abe will kill me. Our insurance only covers employees of the company.”
My father took out a phone charger from the console between the seats. He tried to connect the charger to the phone and the van swerved again. I took the charger and the phone and finished the task. I wasn’t quite ready to give up on my miserable life.
“We should talk about what you’re going to do,” he said, fiddling with the radio.
“In Chicago?” Of course, in Chicago, where else?
“Actually, like I said, we’re going to Aurora. Our house and the company are located there. It’s next to Chicago, a suburb, but a separate city. Aurorians don’t like to be lumped in together with Chicago.” He spoke like a proud Aurorian.
“Aurora. Sounds Mexican.”
“The first immigrants in Aurora were Irish, but there’s lots of Mexicans living there now, all right. About a third of the people who live there are Hispanic. Mostly of Mexican descent but more and more from Central America. Guatemala, El Salvador. Honduras.” My father didn’t sound all that happy about these last migrations. “Part of my job at the company is getting the Latino business.”
“Fixing air conditioners.”
My father coughed into his hand. “When I started with the company five years ago, I fixed air conditioners and furnaces. Now I’m an officer in the company. The equivalent of a vice president, only we don’t have titles like that.”
“Vice president,” I repeated, impressed. Not bad for a man who had been building brick houses back in Juárez. There was no doubt that I got my love for work and hustle, my wheeling and dealing, from him.
“We have a fleet of eighteen vans. Sixty-two employees. Abe wants to retire next year, so he’s giving me more and more responsibility. I pretty much run the place now. When he retires …” He stopped himself. The van slowed down abruptly. Ahead of us, in the middle of the road, stood a jackrabbit with ears as big as a mule’s. My father honked, and the rabbit scampered out of the van’s path in the nick of time.
“Jesus,” my father said. “That’s one big rabbit.”
Brother Patricio called those rabbits black-tails and said they were the golden eagle’s favorite snack. The eagle glides five thousand feet and then silently swoops down on the unsuspecting jackrabbit. The image made me grab my backpack with Hinojosa’s cell phone and put it on my lap.
My father was speaking again. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure we can get you into school this year. Nancy made some calls while I’ve been here. It’s going to take us a while to get the necessary paperwork. Vaccinations, transcripts from Colegio México. You don’t have to be … documented … with a visa … to go to school in Aurora, but … maybe it would be better to wait until next fall.”
It came to me that I had not given any thought to what I would do all day in Chicago. How would I spend the hours, minutes, and seconds of each day? The only thing I knew was that I would call Yoya as soon as I got there and get the phone to people who could help us. But then?
My father continued. “I wanted you to work at Able Abe’s. Go out with the guys on their daily rounds, learn how to install cooling systems. It’s just that the laws against employers hiring undocumented workers are … they’re cracking down. ICE is coming down hard on businesses. With raids and everything.”
“I don’t have to work in your company,” I said, trying not to sound hurt. “I can work in other places. I will find work.”
“Nancy and I thought that you might want to take care of Trevor in the afternoons, after he comes home from … kindergarten.”
My first instinct was to say no. Actually, I wanted to shout no. Babysitting was not in the cards. Then it hit me. “How old is Trevor?”
My father hesitated. Then spoke softly, the way one speaks when the question you’ve been dreading is finally asked.
“Six.”
He kept on speaking, but I had stopped listening. I was doing the math in my head. My father left for the United States five years before. Trevor was six. “Trevor is not your son?”
My father slowed the van to sixty. “My adopted son. Nancy was married for a brief time and then divorced. She got divorced before Trevor was born.”
I crossed my arms, tucked my hands in my armpits to keep them from shaking. Why should it make a difference that my father chose to adopt a son rather than come back to the one he already had? Why all the old anger rising up again?
“You all right? You look kind of pale. Want me to stop?”
“Did Mami know? Sara?”
“Know what?”
“That you married a woman who had a son?”
“Not at first. I told your mother later, after I married Nancy. I told you about Trevor … in my letters.”