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

night. His nieces were in their bedrooms finishing their homework, and Paul was in the garage trying to fix the edger Mario had taken apart with the intention to reassemble but never did. The boy had only left it a mess.

Shoe carefully set his new boots inside by the front door. They were still caked in mud. There had been plenty of time for the mud to dry on his walk back, but it hadn’t. It was his luck. He wished he had his old shoes, but the foreman had thrown them away.

In floppy socks, Shoe scooted into the kitchen, and his frame stooped more so as he looked over the wrapped plates shelved in the fridge. Finding the one that must have been intended for him, he brought it out and did not bother heating it up but sat, instead, at the kitchen table and peeled back the plastic wrapping. He began to spoon the food in quickly. He had forgotten to pack a lunch.

“Exequiel, slow down before you kill yourself,” his brother’s wife said.

She’d walked in with a basket of clothes fresh from the dryer. He could smell and feel it, their heat. She sat across from him at the table and started folding. As he ate, he looked up every now and then. There were his shirts, his underwear. A stacked tower of his future days before him. He watched her hands smooth the legs of his pants, pulling on the crotch before finishing.

“Aren’t you going to ask me how my first day was?” Shoe said.

“If I was your wife, yes,” she said.

They sat there for a moment.

He envied Paul’s life. Mariposa was a good woman for allowing him into her home. He knew this. As soon as he could save enough for a deposit, he would find a room elsewhere. He would give her back her routine.

“You and Paul should go out one night this week,” he said. “I’ll watch the kids.”

“We could get dressed up and go dancing.”

“Yes!” The thought of helping her was exciting.

She looked at him.

“What?” he said.

“You really think I’d leave you alone with my girls?”

The directness of the question shocked him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to recover. “That is a nice offer. Thank you.”

He looked down at his plate. He had scooped a sizable pit out of the mound of mashed potatoes. The middle was gone. All of the cold gravy he now tasted on the back of his tongue. Mariposa was a good cook, but he would never go so far as to tell her so.

Paul came into the kitchen with his hands raised before him. He was a small man, smaller than Shoe, but more muscular. He looked like a surgeon preparing for a procedure. His forearms were streaked with dark lines of grease that ran down from his hands. The creases in his fingers were just as filthy. Seeing this, Mary jumped up and turned on the hot water in the sink, the entire time scolding her husband for thinking he could clean his hands where she had to wash dishes.

“Where would you have me rinse them, Mariposa?” Paul asked. He was being serious. Shoe snickered and shoveled more mashed potatoes into his mouth. His brother could be funny. For Shoe, it was like watching a show.

“The spigot outside might be one place I’d try,” she said.

“You can’t loosen it. I need to fix the stem,” Paul said. “Mano, maybe you could help me with that this weekend?”

Shoe glanced at his brother and nodded.

“Good,” Paul said. “See, Mariposa?”

“I see,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean anything.”

Tom sat in his bedroom and put his ear to the wall. He was trying to make out what his father was saying in the other room. Manny Serafino had called the police, and now two officers, greatly staggered in height and looking like odd twins in matching dark-blue uniforms, were sitting in the living room and taking notes. His mother had given them Teagan’s school picture from last year. Tom heard one of the officers stupidly say, “Don’t worry, Mr. and Mrs. Serafino, we’ll find her.”

When they left the house, the officers turned on the squad car lights. They didn’t turn on the siren, as Tom thought they might have done. Instead, the numbered car drove off quietly in the flashing of colors. The street was suddenly dark, filled only with parked cars belonging to those who lived there.

A few neighbors were standing on their front porches watching the house. Some came over and asked what had happened. Soon after, the husbands left with Tom’s father in a caravan of cars.

Tom’s mother knocked on his bedroom door and stepped inside to find him shirtless, sitting on the floor beside his dresser, knees bunched up to his chest and body slightly rocking back and forth. He wanted to go back to that moment with Teagan by the fence. He wanted nothing more than to see her twirl the red windbreaker, its transformation into a fireball.

“I shouldn’t have told her,” he said.

“Told her what, Tommy?” his mother said, taking a seat on the floor next to him.

“It was just so stupid.”

“Do you want to tell me?”

Tom shook his head.

“Okay,” his mother said.

She was looking around the room, taking it in.

Above his bed was a replica P-51 Mustang he and his father had glued together and painted not long ago. The airplane hung from a single piece of clear fishing line. It gave the appearance of floating in the air.

“I shouldn’t have said it.”

“What, Tommy? You shouldn’t have said what?”

There were the signature decals of its razor-like teeth near the propeller. She realized the airplane was slowly turning on its own.

“We were playing football,” Tom said. “She kept bugging us.”

“Okay,” his mother said. She slipped her fingers into his black hair.

“I told her to get out of my life.”

He dropped his head and cried.

His mother’s hand made its way to his back. She rubbed small circles over his skin.

“You