Apology by Jon Pineda (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

by both of them, Wendell and Marsha, and so he tried to say things that could have multiple meanings, multiple lives.

Spaces of silence became the spaces in the boy’s smile. The teeth coming in at last had forced others out of their way. He was a good kid. Exequiel felt that even though the father had not been a part of the boy’s life—Wendell confessing once to him that he wouldn’t know his father if the man fell from the sky and landed on the house—he would grow up to be good person. Already the boy would not speak ill of the man who had abandoned him and his mother. The man who, Elle later explained, had left in the middle of the night—going to the store for cigarettes and bacon, of all things—and never come back.

To her disgust, Joshua still called the house, but only to ask how the boy was doing. Marsha would speak with him. She was pleasant the entire time. Afterward Elle and her mother would argue. The boy knew each time that it was his father calling the house. It was his father who continued to cause trouble.

Arecent fight had come about because Exequiel had answered the phone. It was supposed to be a joke. He was trying to make Wendell laugh, especially with the way he spoke into the receiver, disguising his accent and sounding, he thought, like someone from England.

When the voice on the other end asked for Marsha, Exequiel paused.

Elle stood in front of him holding out her hand for the phone. He cupped it and told her the call was for her mother.

“Who is it?” Elle said. “Let me talk to him.”

“Hold on,” Exequiel said to her.

Wendell watched from the table. He started smirking and stabbing into the mound of macaroni and cheese on his plate.

“Who is it, do I say, is calling this house?” Exequiel said. He knew he was making a mess of this attempt.

“Who is this?” the voice said.

“Who is this?” Exequiel countered.

He didn’t like this person’s tone.

“Give me the phone,” Elle said. She reached for the phone, but Exequiel dodged her grasp. The voice said something that Exequiel couldn’t make out.

“I’m sorry,” Exequiel said. “What did you say?”

“I said I’m your worst fucking nightmare, you spic motherfucker,” the voice said.

Wendell was laughing now. It was a funny expression on Exequiel’s face.

Elle looked at her son. She yelled for him to stop egging him on, as if Exequiel were a child. A boy again.

The voice on the other end only said, “I know you’re still there. I can hear you breathing.”

Months later, she wouldn’t tell him where she got the camera. A gift was all she said it was and played it off until he stopped inquiring. Some nights she had to get away, to get out of her head. She left him at the house with the boy and her mother, who stayed in the back room unless there was a show on that she liked and only then would she come out into the living room to talk with Exequiel, keeping her Bible close, tucked under her arm.

Days when Exequiel could sleep in, he didn’t. He would wake before they did and would walk outside and water the plants in the backyard. There were a few Elle kept in large terra-cotta pots.

Inside the kitchen, along the window where he had set aside a coffee can filled with dirt and planted coriander, he plucked fan-shaped leaves of cilantro and ran them under water and patted them dry. There were eggs in the refrigerator and a large overripe tomato on the counter that he would dice and mix along with the fresh herb for an omelet. He had lit the gas burner and was bringing a pan down onto the palm of blue flames when he felt a flash of light against the side of his face.

Elle stood there with the new camera. A small card of papered film started rolling out like a robotic tongue. She grabbed it by the bottom border and shook it out in front of him. She laughed when she looked at it. She said she had never seen a man cook for anyone other than himself.

“You think this is for you?” Exequiel joked.

She walked up close to him and set the camera and the picture down together and slipped her hands under his T-shirt and started rubbing him, making sure not to go anywhere near the smooth pits of flesh above his chest and behind the same shoulder. Making sure not to insinuate, with her fingertips, that direction in the least.

She had done so once by mistake and heard him gasp, but just barely.

She realized, when she had finally seen his body in the light, that his scars were old and long a part of him in the same way her father’s fingers had melted together, fused within her memory.

Exequiel reached for the camera. He asked her if she would smile for him. It was a question she found endearing, that he would put it this way, asking for permission. When she smiled, he hesitated, suddenly surprised. He slowly brought down the camera. There was her body in full view. And happiness that was wholly their own. He would take more pictures of her, of course, but it was this one moment that would never quite fade for him. The way her mouth eventually fell into an evenness. An expression between a kind of joy and regret.

He had kissed her fingertips and tried not to drag his foot as he walked over to the cupboard and took out some plates and spooned portions for the two of them, covering what was left in the pan for the boy and for the grandmother, both of them still asleep.

“I heard some guys at the store the other day,” she said between bites. “They were talking about an opening at the phone