Make Your Home Among Strangers Read Online Free PDF Page B

the ceiling, my too-long hair fanned around my head like a dark cloud, amazed at where my own planning had landed me.
    Leidy paced around the living room with Dante in her arms, bouncing him in an effort to make him fall asleep but shouting questions at the TV at the same time: But this Ariel kid, why is he famous? So okay, he just got here but so what , take a number, bro. I mean, what makes him so special?
    â€”His mother died, my mother said, then kept saying: a new chant, this one to the TV, to the bare walls of her apartment.
    She grabbed the remote and scanned up a few channels, but every one of them ran the same footage on a loop, my mom engaging with it through a one-sided call-and-response that reminded me of the very few times we’d gone to Mass. They’d show the shot of the inner tube, and she’d whisper, His mother died. The snippet from an interview with the fisherman who’d first spotted him: His mother died. The beachside reporter (why was he even on the beach when they’d brought Ariel in hours earlier?), foam-topped microphone in hand: His. Mother. DIED .
    When the Spanish-language news showed, for the eighth time, Ariel’s hand being waved for him by his uncle’s grip as they left the hospital that afternoon, I asked my mom if she was trying to tell me something. She said to the TV, Tell you what? and so I stood up and walked away—she yelled to my back, Well I’m glad you’re home even though you lied to me!—and went to what I thought of as my sister’s room. It was technically our room, but I hadn’t slept there enough nights to really feel that, and I didn’t have a real bed; we had left it in our house, knowing it wouldn’t fit in the new room. I’d be sleeping on the pull-out sofa that separated Dante’s crib from my sister’s mattress.
    I pushed a pile of blue and white baby clothes and blankets to one side of the sofa and lugged my suitcase up onto the other, unzipping it just as Leidy came in behind me.
    â€”We could’ve cleaned if we knew you were gonna be here.
    â€”No, I know, don’t even worry about it, I said. Did you guys do Thanksgiving dinner?
    She lowered Dante into the crib and handed him a stuffed bunny, the long ear of which he shoved in his mouth. I opened the top drawer of the dresser and tried to make space for my stuff.
    â€”Sort of. It’s Dante’s first Thanksgiving so yeah, we made like a chicken and some mashed potatoes or whatever, and Mom said grace.
    She sat down on the floor next to the pile of baby stuff and pulled a shirt loose from it, then folded the shirt into a tiny square.
    â€”But this stupid kid on the news! Mami couldn’t stop watching it, and so I was like hello? So in the end dinner sucked.
    I should’ve asked for details about the day then, for more about Ariel Hernandez, or about Dante’s dad—if he’d called or been over—or about our own dad (same questions), but I thought I already knew the answers. As recent as the end of our parents’ marriage was, Leidy and I were not at all shocked that they were no longer together. They got married a couple months after Mami found out she was pregnant with Leidy, and they each blamed the other for having to drop out of high school so close to finishing. They should’ve left each other dozens of times before that summer, maybe right after my dad refused to buy Mami a plane ticket to Cuba to see the dying mother she hated for disowning her from afar after getting pregnant before marriage; or later, when I started middle school and Mami became a Jehovah’s Witness for a few intense months and bullied my dad to convert or else she’d take us away and go live with my tía Zoila. Because my parents married as teenagers, their relationship sort of froze there, stuck at that age where every fight is The End and probably should be. We were known on our Hialeah block as the family whose