Lot

by Bryan Washington

His father’d left for Houston first, until he could send for the rest of them too, and when I asked Roberto about Mexico he said everything in Texas tasted like sand.

Ma told her to wait it out. That’s just what America did to you. They’d learn to adjust, she’d crack the code, but what she had to do was believe in it.

Once, I asked Roberto if he liked it in Texas. He looked at me forever. Called it another place with a name. Could be worse, I said. You could be back home. Home’s wherever you are at the time, said Roberto.

The morning before, Roberto’d shown me this crease on my palms. When you folded them a certain way, your hands looked like a star. Some lady on the bus from San Antonio had shown him how, and he’d called her loco then but now he was thinking he’d just missed the point.

His parents were out. We huddled in his closet. His shorts sat piled on mine, they were the only pair left in the house. He didn’t tell me he was disappearing. He just felt my chin. Rubbed my palms. Then he cupped his hands between us, asked if I’d found the milagro in mine. I couldn’t see shit, just the outline of his shadow, but we squeezed our palms together and I called it amazing anyways.

We watched them bloom like an opera, a telenovela, the sunrise.

The whiteboy wanted to know what brought her to Texas, what the sand from home felt like on her toes. Whether she missed that feeling once she’d made her place in the city. He wanted to know if the air tasted the same.

We’re the ones who opened our mouths. But not all at once. We’re better than that. Denise whispered it from the lot. Harold mumbled it in the hallway. Gonzalo belched it and Neesha sang it and Marilyn prayed for a flash of intuition.

Then the four of us sat around bowls full of whatever’d been left in the kitchen—pots of chicken and chorizo and beans on the burners—and we’d stare at the plastic with our hands in our laps like they’d show us whoever kept Ma’s man out in the world.

My father was a handsome man. Wore his skin like a sunburnt peach.

but tell someone they want an impossible thing and they’ll act like you’ve put out the sun.

When her laughter finally came, it drenched the crowd. Some vendors on break clapped along with the bass. I sat on the clay, waiting for her to look back, and when the song came to an end she did.

Ma only shrugged when I asked her where it went. She said everything left eventually.

We filled the corners with our silence. It leaked into the hallway. If you didn’t know us better you might call us content.

Gloria blew through our lives on a Wednesday, and our mother told us to treat her like pottery, to not ask questions, to creep around the house like ants before their queen.

Our mother, who returned grape bunches over single sourings; who’d shipped my sister, Nikki, to Tech with a knife in her pillowcase; who’d slipped into this country, this home, her life, on the whim of a fortune-teller, from the eastern coast of Port Antonio, after she’d told her, peasant to peasant, that good things came to women who looked to the shore.

One thing my sister hadn’t forgotten in Lubbock was the kitchen—how to bring a grouper back to life on the stove—and we smelled the ocean from the driveway, and we moved a little quicker for it.

She took her first steps on paperbacks lining the rugs—on the face of Javier Marías, on the back of Derek Walcott—and even as Jamaica’s knees began to buckle, under narcotics, under voodoo politics, and the sidewalks began to choke with the homeless, the drugged, and the cracked out, her parents held her close, filled her ears with what comfort they could. She grew up loved. She never forgot that.

Going into the summer, I’d had my own plans: we’d entered that part of July where the days begin to swallow themselves.

Gloria asked me for highlighters and underlined everything. She read beautifully, deeply. I don’t know how else to describe it.

Something important had happened. Something had changed. But I didn’t know what, so I tore a can from the plastic.

Her place sat behind what were basically cardboard houses, leaning against the wind like a baby’d scribbled them in,

It didn’t take long to see that there’s the world you live in, and then there are the constellations around it, and you’ll never know you’re missing them if you don’t even know to look up.

Everybody out here looking, he said. And don’t know when to open their eyes.

Demetrius Quinto was no good for catching, and no good for hitting, just trash at movement in general, until one day we had him bunting and he couldn’t do that either and now he runs a parlor on the corner of Montrose.

They’ll show you a man worth walking out on your whole fucking life for, a man who will leave you with three kids and a half-rotting lot, but because your eyes are your eyes and you know what you know, you won’t see the train until it finally hits you.

Poke didn’t think about Rod. He didn’t think about Emil. He thought about cheeseburgers from M&M Grill and getting fucked up and watching Your Name at the theater on Greenway Plaza and the way the flowers on Elgin blossomed beside the town houses.

A long horn went off in the lane below. A sliver of Spanish slipped out of an open window. Poke raised his eyebrows very high, and then sent them very low, and he thought about how you only felt so much in your face.

He wore an unfamiliar expression, something Poke couldn’t quite put his finger on, and then he realized the look wasn’t new or unfamiliar at all, he’d just never seen it on Rod’s face.

East End in the evening is a bottle of noise, with the strays scaling the fences and the viejos garbling on porches, and their wives talking shit in their kitchens on Wayland, sucking up all the air, swallowing everyone’s voices whole, bubbling under the bass booming halfway down Dowling.

all feels impossible to me, this shit no one I know could afford, but Ma called it cyclical. She said you have things and then you don’t.

Mostly that’s how it goes. A half-story, and they’re out. I don’t know what happens to these people or where the hell they end up afterwards. So with this one, I smile. Roll a hand through his hair. He’s got these scars flaking up his neck like a sure thing gone wrong.

With Ma gone, the house is an album. A literal Greatest Hits.

Here’s where Javi got bopped for talking big. Here’s where I took my first steps and busted my ass.

He told me I was lucky, I was living in a piece of history, and I said if I was so fucking blessed he should’ve grown up here himself.

The cooks are huddled around a TV. Some busted box from the nineties. Soccer’s on and everyone’s tossed their change onto the table. No matter where you put them, niggas hold on to their vices. Thousands of miles, a whole new climate, and a language away from home, but here they were, dropping scratch for a ball in the grass of some mold-smothered stadium.

But all I ever saw those motherfuckers do is smile, always waving my way like we came up together, and they had this kid, this little fucking boy, and one time he kicked me a ball, on some nothing day in the summer, and before I knew what was happening I was kicking it back, just me and this kid and his mom by the window, and for a second it was nice but after a minute I took off because there’s only so much of that shit that can make sense at one time.

One of our waitresses finds us on the steps. She asks if everything’s all right and I tell her all’s well in the jungle. She looks at Miguel, and then at me, and says, Better out here than in there.

We sit on the curb a little longer. The street cleaners come through. They wait until the city’s at its most quiet, right before the first patch of dawn, and they walk from Dallas to Hamilton sweeping at all of the concrete under them. Shit’s actually pretty beautiful if you think about it—all the convicts and baseheads and fuckups giving the city a clean slate—but before I tell Miguel he’s already fallen asleep. Dude’s on my shoulder, arms crossed like he’s deliberating.

Ma spent the first week we sold the house in bed. She didn’t care how much we were pulling from the sale. She hadn’t grown up in the place, and of course it’d kicked her ass, but even if it’s a bag of shit everyone wants their name on something.

And I fold the whole thing onto the tortillas, above some slices of avocado, with shredded cheese, and when I tell Miguel that he’s SOL for salsa, he doesn’t say a word. He’s just got this look on his face.

He could still go. Miguel could leave tomorrow. He could pack a suitcase and catch a flight, and I know that I could too. I could pack my shit and ghost. It’d cost nothing at all. But the same way that I know this I know that I probably won’t.

I know that even if we don’t always do the things that need to be done, we do the things that we need to.

Javi told me no one ever went anywhere they didn’t need to.

Javi chewed it, quiet as shit. Didn’t have any bruises, no scuff marks. He asked if I’d ever thought about leaving Houston and what I did was blink at him. People think about things all the time, he said. All people fucking do is think. But really, he said, you do things or you don’t.

don’t feel like he’s something I have to get rid of.

You bring yourself wherever you go. You are the one thing you can never run out on.

Or I’m getting a little closer. Close to enough to trust him and just give it a go. And, honestly, I wonder how anyone ever gets away from all that. I used to think that you could.