Chapter 2 - What Belonging Costs

The bill sat on the table through the morning.

The ConEd envelope remained exactly where Fernando had left it, the red stamp facing the door. Fernando was asleep on the couch with one hand hanging off the cushion and his glasses crooked on his face. The rice pot sat on the stove with the spoon still in it, the top layer of grain gone stiff.

Teo looked at the bill once.
He had two hundred and fourteen for the bill, forty-seven under his bed, and twenty-three in his account. It wasn't enough. The numbers were the same as they had been last night.

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, making the delivery bag stick to his shoulder before the first block. He had trays of pastelitos wrapped in foil and a coffee carrier leaking through the cardboard. A receipt was 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 handed him three singles. "Your uncle good?"

She was asking the way a neighbor asks, leaving a gap for an answer she likely already knew.

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 kept the thought to himself.

Outside, he folded the three dollars into his pocket and shifted the bag higher. The strap found the same sore place. It could stay there. While he was walking deliveries, he was still the delivery kid. The delivery kid had a route with stops. Stops had receipts and signatures. There was cash if somebody was decent and nothing if they were not.

He didn't have to think about his other shift yet.

He kept moving.

At the tax office on 149th, the receptionist came in late and signed without looking at him. There was no tip. In the hall, the building super mopped around Teo's shoes and told him to move left. Teo stepped aside. The mop water smelled like bleach over old urine. From outside came the grind of a garbage truck working Courtlandt, the compressor drowning out the men yelling as they threw black bags into the metal mouth.

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. 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. It was burnt and bitter, but it was strong. The coffee cost a dollar. Don Félix had kept the price the same since before Teo was old enough to drink it.

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?"

He skipped the greeting and went straight to the point.

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 crowd didn't slow down for his problems.

"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."

The word mijo hit first. Don Félix didn't throw it; he placed it on the counter between them.

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 took a seat on the stoop.

He walked without asking himself why. His feet had brought him here after the corner, past two other places he could have sat. This place meant before. It was before Fernando's couch, the ConEd envelope, and his mother becoming a voice from Florida.

The concrete was warm through his jeans.

He took out his phone.

The contact was under L. Using a full name like Luis Guzmán was too much of a risk, and Machete would have been worse. The single letter meant nothing to anyone else, but it was everything if he 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 palm was cold despite the heat.

He looked at the split in the third step and the purple flowers in the window. He looked at the door where he used to wait for his mother, before he realized that waiting in this lobby just taught him how to go without.

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.