Shut Up, This Is Serious: Chapters 18-20

When my parents told me and Avas about them immigrating to this country, they described it as a curtain that divided their lives into a before and an after, change nestled somewhere at the center of that partition.

I know whatever empathy the Barragóns gained crossing the border will find its limit when they learn Quentin is the father of this baby.

Even if their racism is plainly clear, Leti’s parents believe all the harm they faced in their migration somehow makes them exempt from inflicting harm on others.

How could they make someone feel unwelcome when they were still undocumented?

I try to dig my nails into the fabric of the couch, but they bend against the thick plastic covering, searing pain through my palms.

I look around the living room, at the knitted doilies Señora Barragón has placed on every imaginable surface of the house.

Back when I used to pay attention in school, one of the only lessons that really absorbed into my memory was one on Spanish false cognates.

We lay stomach-down on my bed, watching all sorts of movies about teen pregnancy, predicting the formulaic nature of the telling-the-parents scene: expressed disappointment, a brief lecture, always followed by concern and care—sometimes even love.

He gasps for air like a fish lunging out of water, calling Quentin a mayate, calling him and “his kind” disgusting, and damns his own lack of money for never pulling his family out of an area crawling with so many people like him to prevent this from happening.

Those movies missed all the intricacies.

But then he begins pointing his finger right at Quentin’s father’s face with this enraged look in his eye that only comes when someone is going to do something irreparable.

The decibel of his voice, the candor of his yelling, the magnitude of his force reminded me so much of my pa.

They only relented when Quentin compromised, saying they could supervise from their car across the street.

“I think they think they’ve had it bad. And they have, I’m not saying it’s easy for them. But I think people like Leti’s family, like my family sometimes, think people treat us like shit, so we can’t treat other people like shit. If people discriminate against us, we can’t discriminate against anyone else. It’s not true, though,” I say.

I open it and see the array of pan that Quentin selected stacked in heaps, disorganized.

It’s pale yellow, a lopsided smiling face piped atop the surface with red gel icing.

With his head craning low, I watch his chest heave up and down, weeping into the relentless sunshine.

I’d only written them a few weeks ago, but none of them resonated with me today.

I glance behind her, at her framed diplomas from Berkeley, at the gilded font Leti is always talking about.

Besides all their hypocrisy, it’s the most Catholic thing the Barragóns do.

I point out the irony in it this year, but she says I’m being offensive.

“Why does Señora Hernández hyphenate her last name? If your last name is already Hernández, why make it Hernández twice?”

I lay there, euphoric, waiting for Alexis to reciprocate, wondering how much better I’d feel after.

I found them after painstakingly rummaging through five other boxes full of my pa’s things.

I ask, imagining the humiliation of going to a drugstore to buy condoms myself.