To my surprise, Papi wasn’t angry with me. Instead, he spent the rest of the afternoon parting my hair and looking for lice, removing the white nits very carefully so as not to pull out the hair strands. My father, the one who inflicted pain with his belt or his words, the one who had shown little tenderness toward us, who had hands hardened and callused from so many years of hard manual labor, was very gentle when delousing my hair. For the first time since I’d been in this country, Papi devoted a full two hours to me. Only me.
