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grocery.
    Hernan finished his call and came over and gave me a hug. He was stocky and a couple of inches shorter than I was, with a constant five o’clock shadow. “How you doing, bro?” he asked.
    “Wiped out. It’s hell working for a living. Don’t see how you do it.”
    He laughed. “Welcome to the real world.”
    He lit a cigarette, offered me a Hatuey beer from a cooler beside the back door, and took one for himself. Hatuey was an old-time Cuban brand, and the only beer my father drank. We stood around and talked for a while until my mother opened the back door and saw me there.
    “Manuelito! Why do you hide back here?” She kissed me on both cheeks and dragged me inside. My father was sitting at the dining room table, a half-empty bottle of Hatuey in his hand, gesturing wildly with the other. He was broad-shouldered, with rough hands, and his nose twisted to the right from a long-ago break back in Cuba.
    “You don’t understand!” he was saying in Spanish to Abuelo, who sat across from him with his typical sour look on his face. “The Republicans got this country into the trash, and Obama has had to dig it out.”
    “Not politics again, Papi.” I leaned down to kiss his cheek. We Cubans are a demonstrative bunch, and I’d grown up kissing and hugging every relative and every visitor. When I was an awkward teenager, starting to come to terms with my sexuality, I tried to back away from it, but my parents wouldn’t let me.
    Abuelo was an accounting clerk at the Flagler dog track, a skinny old man in a white guayabera, the Cuban pocketed shirt. Hairs sprouted from his ears and his nose, but his head was completely bald. “The Democrats are too good to Fidel,” he said. “I tell you, Emilio, we need to get rid of them and crack down on the Castros once and for all.”
    “All right, enough,” my mother said. “Dinner is ready. Where is Beatriz?”
    My youngest sister had graduated from high school in June, and spent her time either working at a beauty supply store or hiding in her room with her earphones on, listening to music and texting her friends at the same time.
    She clomped down the stairs as Maria del Carmen and Hernan came in. Beatriz had a beautiful heart-shaped face with deep dark eyes and a purse-shaped mouth. But she inherited our father’s stocky build, and all the pork and fried food in the Cuban diet had blown her up like a beach ball.
    Abuela came in from the kitchen, carrying a platter of roast pork, and placed it in front of her husband. Her favorite color was lavender, and she must have had a dozen dresses in different styles in various shades. Today’s looked like a sixties cocktail dress in some kind of manmade fabric that had gone out of style with the space shuttle, with big lavender buttons down the center and a hemline that would have been too short on anyone over five feet tall.
    Del placed Fabiola in a swingy thing, and she, Beatriz, and I sat down in the chairs we’d always occupied. Hernan had to pull a folding chair up and squeeze himself in.
    There was way too much food, as usual, and too much loud conversation. Papi and Abuelo tried to talk about politics, but Mami shut them down. Abuela was full of gossip from the beauty parlor where she got her hair done every Saturday. Del was busy with Fabiola, and Hernan zoned out.
    I noticed that Beatriz was wearing a crucifix on a thin gold chain around her neck—Jesus twisting in pain on the cross.
    “That’s new,” I said, pointing.
    “Beatriz has gotten religion,” Del said, looking up from spoon-feeding the baby yellow mush.
    “We have always had religion,” Mami said. “Didn’t you all receive holy communion at San Lazaro? Don’t we still go to church for Easter and Christmas Mass?”
    I looked at Beatriz. I’d been out of the house so much I hadn’t paid much attention to her over the last four years, when she’d developed from a dumpy little kid to a young woman. She had gone through a Goth phase, all black