AIDEN
“Are you sure this is something you want to do?” Ricky asks me.
“I’m positive,” I say, taking his hand in mine. In front of us is a set of signed contracts. “Thank you, Ricky. I mean it. I won’t let you down.”
He squeezes my hand. “I don’t give second chances easily, my boy.”
I tense as the force of his shake threatens to break my bones. I smile and slap his arm. “I know. Believe me. It’s good to be back. I need this. But first . . .”
“You’re going to go get your girl?”
“Actually, I have to go to New York.”
Ricky smooths his beard with his index finger and thumb. “What for?”
“I haven’t seen my mom in a while,” I say. “Actually, in five years.”
“We have a show in two weeks,” Ricky says.
“I’ll be there.” I point to the contracts. “You already signed. No backsies. Don’t worry. You won’t even know I’m gone.”
I grab my bags, head to the front desk, and check out.
* * *
New York feels different because I’m different. The wind is too cold. I should’ve worn a jacket. I should’ve shaved.
But my mother wouldn’t have cared if I shaved.
“It’s okay, papito,” my tía Ceci says, holding my hand as we walk into St. Mary’s cemetery in Queens.
She’s exactly as I remember. Same shoulder-length hair she dyes blond every three weeks. Same bright top showing more cleavage than I was comfortable with as a teenage boy. Her heeled boots barely bring her to my shoulder, but somehow it feels like she’s holding me up.
I get up to the headstone for Amada Helena Rios, querida madre y hermana. The grass is well taken care of and there’s an old bunch of roses Tía Ceci must have brought last month. She always comes on the third of every month to visit her sister without fail.
I remember the day when I stopped coming. It was the first time I got punched in the face by somebody’s husband. My head was full of my mother’s face—disappointed, disheartened, disillusioned with me—and I just stopped visiting.
My chest hurts with the cold air, car exhaust thick even within these rows of dead. Cemeteries even feel different than they do down in New Orleans.
Tía Ceci stands back while I talk to her. My mother’s English was never very good, so I speak in Spanish. I place my hand on the headstone and it takes me three tries before I can say, “Pues, Mamá. Ya pasó. La conocí.”
Well, Mamá. It happened. I met her.
* * *
“That was a good thing you did, papito,” Tía Ceci tells me as we get on the train and go back to her apartment in Forest Hills.
“I should have done it sooner,” I say.
She purses her metallic pink lips and holds her hand up, like she’s agreeing with me but not. “Ya pues, it would have saved me two hours standing in the cold.”
I told my mother everything. About Ginny. About Faith. About meeting Daria Charles and how we talked all night. I told Daria everything I could remember of my mother, even that I hadn’t visited in five years. I promised Daria two things, and this is the one that was the most pressing.
“I can’t wait to meet her,” Tía Ceci says.
“I don’t know, Tía. There’s so much that I can’t take back.”
“Don’t take it back. Keep moving forward. Your heart is too big, papito. You have to leave some room in there for yourself.”
* * *
In her house, she unwraps all of her shot glasses. Some of her neighbors and her latest boyfriend are over to watch Real Madrid play Manchester United. She lines up ten of the glasses I’ve brought her. Three from New Orleans, a couple from Vegas, one each from Miami, Houston, Ireland, Jamaica, and Kansas City. Gaudy, shiny little pieces of the places I’ve been.
We take a couple of shots with the others, but the cold tequila does not go down as smoothly as before.
“You know,” I say, biting into a slice of lime, “Faith drinks whiskey.”
“She misses you.” Tía Ceci holds her shot the way a fancy woman might hold her teacup, with her pinky up.
“You can’t know that.”
“Of course, I do. How can she not miss you?” She goes off into her room, and I can hear rummaging from her dresser.
Rodolfo, Tía Ceci’s boyfriend and a former marine, shouts at the television, though I can’t tell if he’s happy or crying. Is that what I look like when my team is losing?
“Here,” she says, setting a small red velvet pouch in front of me, the kind Colombian people use to keep trinkets and rings and even finger bones in (seriously).
I shake my head. “No.”
“Your mother told you. She told you what to do.”
I drop the necklace in my hand. The last time I held this, I was bloody, and I’d just snatched it off that woman’s neck. My father called me a thief, but by some miracle, the woman told the police that it belonged to my dying mother. My dad never dropped the assault charge, and the judge felt pity for me, so all she gave me was a month.
The gem might be the size of a dime, but it has the weight of the world to me.
I drop it in the front pocket of my shirt. “Thank you, Tía.”
“Make sure she knows, Aiden.”
* * *
In the morning, I take the first flight to New Orleans to go get my Faith back.