The Distance Between Us: Book Two: Chapter 12–Epilogue

Their utilities were always getting shut off when they didn’t pay their bills on time.

Mago and I were in the living room watching our favorite soap opera, Quinceañera, and we were so engrossed in the TV we didn’t pay much attention to the noises.

All his talk about education, about the importance of school, seemed to mean so much more when I saw him full of determination to learn. My father’s desire for a better life was palpable. It was contagious.

He told us that Abuela Evila was ill and frail, and somehow my aunt had managed to coerce my grandmother into deeding her the property.

But in my short story, when the twins were very little, they were separated when their parents divorced. The mother kept Beverly, and the father took Kimberly. One day when they were teenagers, the twins were reunited by chance, and they had to struggle to recoup all that lost time and find a way to overcome the separation.

I thought of us standing on the deck as the ship pulled away from the harbor. I pictured us holding hands, and not letting go as we became surrounded in azure.

“Um, you do know what the Queen Mary is, right?” my teacher asked, interrupting my reverie.

“I don’t have to live under your roof if I don’t want to,” I said defiantly, thinking about the kiss. In my euphoria, all I could think was that he couldn’t treat me like a little girl anymore.

Through all his talks of the future, my father had instilled in me something I could not put a name to in English, but in Spanish it was called “ganas.”

And the three of us clutched our green cards in our hands, imagining the possibilities. The first one to take advantage of our new status was, of course, Mago. It was just in time for her to be able to attend college and be eligible for financial aid.

Finally, I managed to convince her, but when she told Papi about it, he was even more skeptical than me.

Even to this day, people still misinterpret my shyness for arrogance.

The only ones who weren’t mean to me were the guys, but that was because they only wanted one thing from me, and that was something kids at school called “a scam.” It meant making out with someone, but when I looked it up in the dictionary the definition was different, more appropriate to what was really happening—I was being swindled, cheated, tricked. When the kissing was over, the boys would go on their merry way without another glance.

Mago had accrued too much debt from all the pretty clothes and shoes she was buying.

Even then Mago had still continued to look out for us, give us the things our parents could not or would not provide, like the year before when Carlos had had his heart set on a graduation ring to commemorate his accomplishment of being the second in the Grande-Rodríguez family to graduate from high school.

She was his first official girlfriend, and Carlos was crazy about her. Mago and I thought it was because Griselda didn’t seem to care about Carlos’s crooked teeth, which were the bane of his existence.

I felt awful about having to miss school. I could count the times I had missed on one hand: in fifth grade when I had lice, seventh grade when I had the chicken pox, eighth grade when we had to go to the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana to process our paperwork for our legal residency, and now, a visit home in my senior year.

It was no longer much of a river but a dumping ground for trash.
"That’s gross!” Mago said as we got hit with the smell of stagnant, putrid water.

I’d gotten used to him ignoring me. And honestly, I preferred that to the times when he did pay attention, because when he did, it was only to insult me or reprimand me for something or other.

When he didn’t open the door, I mustered the nerve to open it myself.

I waited and waited, trying not to think of the way my stomach seemed to chew on itself to appease its hunger.

A couple of weeks into the summer semester, Dr. Savas assigned us an expository essay about the groups to which we belonged (racial, economic, religious, and so on).

For the first time since I’d become an avid reader, I found myself reading about characters that lived in a world similar to my own, characters with the same color skin as mine.

She had no family in Los Angeles and she had forged her way alone.

Diana graded papers, and I did my homework while we listened to melancholy Greek music.

"He’s never needed anyone,” I said. The thought that my father actually needed me was preposterous to me.

I didn’t want to go up north with a guilty conscience. I wanted to go up there and not have to take any baggage with me except for the things I had packed in my suitcase.

I was shocked at seeing him so thin, so haggard, although nothing like what he would look like later when he was dying of liver cancer.

Edwin had given my father something that neither I nor my siblings could give him—an unbiased ear.

Mago reconciled with my father, too, and she started coming by on the weekends with her little boy, Aidan.

Also, my father had always told us that we needed to be grateful to Mila for everything she had done for us, especially about the fact that it was through her that we’d gotten our legal residency, although even if she hadn’t helped us, eventually we would have gotten it once my father was given amnesty.
"You guys are leeches,” Mila said to us.

Despite all the altercations with Mila, my father was no longer as depressed as he had been when I’d first arrived.

I told him about my stint as a staff writer for the PCC newspaper, The Courier, and about the time they had published my article “PCC in the Making,” which had taken up the whole page, and how after it had been published, the PCC president had even sent me a note to congratulate me on it.

I spotted a family of deer, and I stopped and looked at them as they foraged for food.

I had to leave my emotions at the door—anger, resentment, bitterness, sadness, frustration, regret—before I could step inside the room and be able to look him in the eye and feel nothing but concern for his well-being.