Chapter 2 - What Belonging Costs

Morning did not fix the bill.

The ConEd envelope was still on the table when Teo left, red stamp facing the door. Fernando was asleep on the couch with one hand hanging off the cushion, mouth open, glasses crooked on his face. The rice pot sat on the stove with the spoon still in it. The top had gone stiff.

Teo looked at the bill once.

Two-fourteen on the bill. Forty-seven under the bed. Twenty-three in the account.

Same numbers in different light.

He shut the apartment door soft because waking Fernando would only make a conversation, and a conversation would not pay anything.

Courtlandt Avenue was already warm. Seven in the morning and the sidewalk had heat coming up through it, the kind that made the delivery bag stick to his shoulder before the first block. He had two trays of pastelitos wrapped in foil, a coffee carrier leaking through the cardboard, and a receipt stapled crooked to the plastic bag.

The first drop was the beauty supply on East 143rd. Marisol lifted the gate halfway and made him duck under it.

"Early today," she said.

"Yeah."

She signed with the pen tied to the counter by a dirty string and gave him three dollars cash. "Your uncle good?"

There it was.

His fingers closed around the singles. "He's good."

Marisol looked at him over her glasses. She had known him since he was stealing mango slices from the cup by the register and pretending he was not. That meant she knew enough to ask and not enough to stop.

"Tell him I said hello."

"I will."

He would not.

Outside, he folded the three dollars into his pocket and shifted the bag higher. The strap found the same sore place. Good. Let it. While he was walking deliveries, he was still the delivery kid. The delivery kid had a route. A route had stops. Stops had receipts, signatures, stairs, cash if somebody was decent and nothing if they were not.

The delivery kid did not have to look at nine o'clock yet.

He kept moving.

At the tax office on 149th, the receptionist came in late and signed without looking at him. No tip. Fine. Guilt did not pay the swipe. In the hall, the building super mopped around Teo's shoes and told him to move left. Teo moved left. The mop water smelled like bleach over old piss. From outside came the grind of a garbage truck working Courtlandt, men yelling over the compressor, black bags going into the metal mouth two at a time.

Those were real things: bleach, hot pastry grease, the bag strap eating his shoulder.

His body knew what to do with those.

By seven-thirty he was at La Bodega de Papi with a dollar in his hand.

The gray cat sat on the plastic crate by the door, fat and unimpressed. The plantain rack was chained to the wall. A bucket of carnations leaned under the awning, already tired at the edges. Inside, a salsa station played low from the radio under the counter, and Don Félix stood behind the register stacking Goya cans with the labels turned out.

The bell over the door gave Teo up.

"Mateo."

"Don Félix."

Teo poured coffee from the machine at the back. Burnt, bitter, strong enough. It cost a dollar. Don Félix had kept it a dollar since before Teo was old enough to drink it, which made him stubborn or kind or both.

At the counter, Teo set the cup down and dug out the single.

Don Félix rang it up. His thumb paused on the key. "How is your uncle?"

Not how are you. Not good morning. Straight to it.

Teo's jaw moved before he found words. "Fine."

Don Félix looked at him.

The bodega smelled like coffee and ripe bananas. Outside, someone cursed at a cab on East 149th. The morning kept going like it had no manners.

"He made rice," Teo said.

He hated it as soon as it came out. Like a kid trying to get credit for half the homework. "Last night. Had it on the stove."

"He used to make good rice." Don Félix slid the dollar into the drawer. "Your abuela's way. From when you were all on Lincoln."

Teo had not known that.

For half a second he saw Fernando younger, standing over a pot in a kitchen Teo barely remembered. His mother at the table. His grandmother saying too much salt. A whole room that had happened before he was old enough to keep it.

He picked up the coffee. "Yeah."

Don Félix wiped the counter with a damp rag. Once. Twice. Then he folded the rag into a square and kept his eyes on it.

"Tu tío hizo lo que pudo, mijo. Eso no es lo mismo que hacer suficiente."

Mijo.

The word hit first. Not thrown. Placed.

Teo looked down at the coffee lid. A little bead of brown had leaked from the drinking hole and settled there.

Don't.

Then the sentence caught up.

Fernando had done what he could. That did not mean he had done enough.

Something ugly rose behind Teo's teeth. Easy to say from behind a counter. Easy with cans in straight rows and a register drawer that opened when you pushed the button. Don Félix was not the one coming home with a shutoff notice squared to the table corner.

The ugly thing stayed where it was.

Because the sentence was true.

Rice did not pay ConEd. Trying did not keep the lights on.

Teo set the cup down before the lid bent under his fingers.

"Yeah," he said.

Don Félix's eyes went to the scratch-off display by the register. Fernando bought two five-dollar cards there when the check came. Teo knew it. Don Félix knew it. Neither of them put a hand on that.

The old man straightened one row of tickets. "I had a son."

Teo stayed still.

The refrigerator motor came on behind him. The radio shifted into an ad for mattresses out on Fordham.

"Good kid." Don Félix tapped two fingers against his temple. "Fast up here. Too fast for this place, he thought." His mouth tightened at one side. "Fifteen years ago, he left with boys who had cars. Clean sneakers. He calls at Christmas sometimes. From different numbers."

Teo looked at the old man's hands. They had found the scratch-offs and stayed there, thumb smoothing the same corner flat again and again.

"You know where he is?"

Don Félix shook his head.

Christmas calls meant alive.

That was where Teo's mind went. He knew it was the wrong place because Don Félix looked at him after and did not soften. Alive was not a son behind the counter helping with boxes. Alive was a phone ringing once a year from a number you could not call back.

Still.

Alive was something.

Don Félix picked up the rag again. The conversation was over. "Go. Before your boss starts calling."

Teo lifted the bag. "Gracias."

Outside, the cat opened one eye and closed it again.

Teo drank the coffee walking. It had already gone lukewarm. He swallowed anyway.

Four blocks on Third Avenue brought him to the corner.

East side of Third, just north of 151st, the bus stop sign leaned a little and nobody waited there unless they had business not looking like business. Teo had passed that corner since he was eleven. First with his mother holding his wrist too tight. Then alone with a backpack. Then with delivery bags, milk crates, restaurant boxes, whatever somebody paid him five dollars to carry.

Los Reyes had the corner now.

Everyone knew. Nobody needed the name painted on the wall.

Teo stopped on the far sidewalk with his coffee in one hand and the delivery bag on his shoulder.

The man by the bodega door wore a Yankees cap low and did not go in. The boy at the bus stop had one earbud in and his hands empty. Across the street, a black Honda sat in a hydrant spot with the engine running. Tinted windows. Too clean for the block before eight in the morning.

The corner was the show. The car was the hand.

Teo saw it, and his chest lifted, small and wrong.

He was good at this.

The thought came bright and shameful. Who stood where. Who moved first. Who kept talking because silence made him nervous. Who never had to look up because everyone else looked for him. The block had taught Teo, and delivery work had sharpened it, and nobody had ever paid him for knowing.

Tonight, somebody could.

His fingers tightened around the coffee until the paper cup bent.

Don Félix's son had left with boys who had cars and clean sneakers. Fifteen years later, Christmas calls from numbers nobody could call back.

That's not this.

He crossed at the light and did not look back at the Honda.

The building where he had grown up sat four blocks from Fernando's apartment. Six stories of dark brick, front door painted red over old red, buzzer panel half broken. Eleven steps on the stoop. The third step still had the long split down the left side. He had known every crack in those steps when he was eight.

On the second-floor windowsill someone kept a plant with purple flowers.

His mother would have liked that, back when she liked things where he could see.

Teo sat on the stoop.

He did not tell himself why. His feet had brought him here after the corner, past two other places he could have sat. Here meant before. Before Fernando's couch, before the ConEd envelope, before his mother became a voice from Florida on birthdays she sometimes remembered.

The concrete was warm through his jeans.

He took out his phone.

The contact was under L. Just L. Luis Guzmán would have been too much in the phone. Machete would have been worse. L was nothing if someone saw it and everything if Teo pressed it.

Twenty-two days of looking. Twenty-two days of putting the phone away.

His thumb hovered over the name.

A woman came out of the building with a toddler on one hip and a backpack over the other shoulder. Teo moved his knees aside. She glanced at the delivery bag and went down the steps without asking anything. The toddler stared at him solemnly over her shoulder.

When the door shut behind them, the stoop went quiet.

His hand was cold. The rest of him was sweating.

He looked at the split in the third step. At the purple flowers. At the door where he used to wait for his mother to come back from work, before he understood some kinds of waiting trained you to accept less than you needed.

Don't.

He pressed the name before the thought could get bigger.

One ring.

Two.

"Mijo," Machete said.

Teo's shoulders dropped.

He hated that they did.

"I've been waiting."

Teo's mouth went dry.

"Tonight," Machete said. "Sleep if you can. I'll come get you."

"What time?"

"When it's time."

The call ended.