Then I spot them on their way out. The first thing I think is that they look like family. Mike’s mother is hunched, just a little bit, and he’s rolling her suitcase behind her. For a while, they saw each other annually—she’d fly down just to visit—but the past few years have been rocky. The visits stopped once I moved in with Mike.
The least I can do is pop the trunk. I’d like to be the guy who doesn’t, but I’m not.
Mike helps his mother adjust the back seat as she gets in, and she doesn’t even look at me. Her hair’s in a bun. She’s got on this bright blue windbreaker, with a sickness mask, and the faintest trace of makeup.
Ma, says Mike, you hungry?
She mumbles something in Japanese. Shrugs.
Ma, says Mike.
He glances at me. Asks again. Then he switches over, too.
She says something, and then he says something, and then another guy directing traffic walks up to my window. He’s Latino, husky in his vest. Shaved head like he’s in the army. He mouths at us through the glass, and I let down the window, and he asks if anything’s wrong.
I tell him we’re moving.
Then move, says this man.
The next words leave my mouth before I can taste them. It’s a little like gravity. I say, Okay, motherfucker, we’re gone.
And the Latino guy just frowns at me. Before he says anything else, there’s a bout of honking behind us. He looks at me again, and then he wanders away, scratching at his chest, wincing back at our car.
* * *
When I roll up the window, Mike’s staring. His mother is, too. She says something, shaking her head, and I pull the car into traffic.
I turn on the radio, and it’s Meek Mill.
I flip the channel, and it’s Migos.
I turn the damn thing off. Eventually we’re on the highway.
All of a sudden, we’re just one more soap opera among way too many, but that’s when Mike’s mother laughs, shaking her head.
She says something in Japanese.
Mike thumps the glove compartment, says, Ma.
* * *
• • •
My parents pretend I’m not gay. It’s easier for them than it sounds. My father lives in Katy, just west of Houston, and my mother stayed in Bellaire, even after she remarried. Before that, we took most of our family dinners downtown. My father was a meteorologist. It was a status thing. He’d pick up my sister and my mother and me from the house, ferrying us along I-45 just to eat with his coworkers, and he always ordered our table the largest dish on the menu—basted pigs spilling from platters, pounds of steamed crab sizzling over bok choy—and he called this Work, because he was always Working.
A question he used to ask us was, How many niggas do you see out here telling the weather?
* * *
My mother never debated him or cussed him out or anything like that. She’d repeat exactly what he said. Inflect his voice. That was her thing. She’d make him sound important, like some kind of boss, but my father’s a little man, and her tactics did exactly what you’d think they might do.
Big job today, she’d say, in the car, stuck on the 10.
This forecast’s impressive, she’d say, moments after my father shattered a wineglass on the kitchen wall.
I swear it’s the last one, she’d say, looking him dead in the eyes, as he floundered, drunk, grabbing at her knees, swearing that he’d never touch another single beer.
* * *
Eventually, she left. Lydia went with our mother, switching high schools. I stayed in the suburbs, at my old junior high, and my father kept drinking. He lived off his savings once he got fired from the station for being wasted on-air. Sometimes, he’d sub high school science classes, but he mostly stayed on the sofa, booing at the hourly prognoses from KHOU.
Occasionally, in blips of sobriety, I’d come home to him grading papers. Some kid had called precipitation anticipation. Another kid, instead of defining cumulus clouds, drew little fluffs all over the page. One time my father laid three tests on an already too-cluttered end table, all with identical handwriting, with only the names changed.
He waved them at me, asked why everything had to be so fucking hard.
* * *
• • •
A few months in, Mike said we could be whatever we wanted to be. Whatever that looked like.
I’m so easy, he said.
I’m not, I told him.
You will be, he said. Just give me a little time.
* * *
• • •
It’s past midnight when we pull onto our block. Most of the lights are out. Some kids are huddled by the curb, smoking pot, fucking around with firecrackers.
When a pop explodes behind us, the kids take off. That’s their latest thing. Mike’s mother doesn’t even flinch.
Ma, says Mike, this is home.
We live in the Third Ward, a historically Black part of Houston. Our apartment’s entirely too large. It doesn’t make any sense. At one point, the neighborhood had money, but then crack happened and the money took off, and occasionally you’ll hear gunshots or fistfights or motherfuckers driving way too fast. But the block has recently been invaded by fraternities from the college up the block. And a scattering of professor types. With pockets of rich kids playing at poverty. The Black folks who’ve lived here for decades let them do it, happy for the scientific fact that white kids keep the cops away.
Our immediate neighbors are Venezuelan. They’ve got like nine kids. Our other neighbors are these Black grandparents who’ve lived on the property forever. Every few weeks, Mike cooks for both families, sopa de pescado and yams and macaroni and rice. He’s never made a big deal about it; he just wakes up and does it, and after the first few times I asked Mike if that wasn’t patronizing.
But, after a little while, I noticed people let him linger on their porches. He’d poke at their kids, leaning all over the wood. Sometimes the Black folks invited him inside, showed him pictures of their daughter’s daughters.
Mike’s lived here for years. I left my father’s place for his. On my first night in the apartment, I couldn’t fall asleep for the noise, and Mike said I’d get used to it, but honestly I didn’t want to.
* * *
Now Mike’s mother drops her shoes by our door. She runs her hand along the wall. She taps at the counter, toeing the wood. When she steps into the foyer, Mike grins my way, the first smile in what feels like months, and that’s when we hear it: slow at first, after some hiccups, before Mike’s mother begins to cry.