Father comes home with the news, and the words cause my heart to freeze. —We’re going home.
Father had a big fight with Marcelino Ordóñez of Mars Tacos To Went that ended with Father cursing his old friend Mars of long ago, cursing all Chicanos for acting like Chicanos and giving Mexico a bad name, cursing the borrowed fifty dollars, the Second World War, the savage border, this rinky-dink stinky calcetín of a Texas town, then heaving into a flash flood of tears at the memory of his mother.
—I curse you and the mother who bore you, Father said. Well, not exactly. What he really said was a little stronger, but, since he is my father, I can’t repeat it without some disrespect.
I curse you and the mother who bore you. At the word “mother,” Father remembers the wheeze in his heart. —¡Ay! madrecita, if you’d lived to be a thousand years, it would not be enough! And it’s as if at that very moment his mother is putting a pin through his heart to see if he’s still alive, as if his mother is holding him again in her soft, fleshy arms. Mother with her smell of food fried in lard, and that smell the smell of home and comfort and safety.
Mars raised the rent on Father’s shop again.
—I’m losing money. Building needs repairs. See that crack? Whole damn foundation’s about to buckle, I kid you not. And the roof is leaking. And taxes. What else can I do? Ain’t rich, you know.
Father picks on a tack on the bottom of his shoe. A whole lot of nothing, Father thinks, to explain who knows what.
—You it was who called la Migra!
—What’chu talking about, man?
—You it was. You called la Migra. Explain. How is it the Immigration only came to my shop that day, and not yours, eh?
—Man, estás zafado. You shitty chilangos always think you know everything!
—Baboso. Can’t even speak your mother tongue!
—I can speak my mother tongue all right, but you can bet it ain’t Spanish.
The words turn from bad to ugly to worse until how it ends is this.
Father has to move.
We pack up the compressor, the sawhorses, the pegboard of hammers and scissors and tack strippers and clamps, the rolls of cotton batting and bolts of fabric, the webbing, coil springs, Italian twine, yardsticks, chalk, staples, and tacks, disassemble the homemade cutting tables and shelves, the slouched books of fabric samples in ring binders, the prize Singer one-eleven W fifty-five.
When the shop is almost empty, Father tugs at his mustache and looks out at the street, past the red and yellow letters of KING UPHOLSTERY, to something beyond that we can’t see.
—Estoy cansado. Sick and tired, Father mutters in his funny English. —Make me sick.
Nogalitos. Old Highway 90. Father remembers too clearly the route south, and it’s like a tide that tugs and pulls him when the dust rises and the cedar pollen makes him sneeze and regret he moved us all to San Antonio, a town halfway between here and there, in the middle of nowhere.
That terrible ache and nostalgia for home when home is gone, and this isn’t it. And the sun so white like an onion. And who the hell thought of placing a city here with no large body of water anyway! In less than three hours we could be at the border, but where’s the border to the past, I ask you, where?
—Home. I want to go home already, Father says.
—Home? Where’s that? North? South? Mexico? San Antonio? Chicago? Where, Father?
—All I want is my kids, Father says. —That’s the only country I need.