CHAPTER TWELVE
Layla
On Thursday afternoon, I’m standing nervously on a corner in Hell’s Kitchen. For the rest of the week, Nico and I haven’t been able to see each other much. He was busy with family stuff on Tuesday and Wednesday while I finished a few midterm papers on top of my normal coursework, but we’ve been able to grab dinner together (okay, and a bit more than that in my room) once. But that’s about it.
My roommates all left for their various holiday destinations last night, and Nico is staying with me tonight before he goes back to LA tomorrow morning. After dropping his stuff off at my dorm, we left for Thanksgiving dinner. At his mother’s place.
Even in the cold, his palm is a little sweaty as he holds my hand tightly. He’s nervous too.
“Have you ever brought a girl home with you before?” I wonder as we walk down Forty-Ninth Street. Nico stops in front of an ordinary brick apartment building.
I’ve heard about this place a few times. You wouldn’t know by looking at it that it’s breaking down from the ground up because the landlord doesn’t bother to do any maintenance, forcing the residents to fix their own broken pipes or electrical problems...or not. Nico doesn’t talk much about his childhood, but I know it was hard. I know that his mother moved here when she was young and raised her kids, four of them from three different fathers, in a tiny apartment in an expensive city. I can imagine how hard it was for a single working mother to keep track of her kids in a city like this. There’s a reason why Nico got into enough trouble as a teenager to land himself in a detention center.
He squeezes my hand again.
“You’re the first,” he admits as he looks at the building.
I haven’t been around this part of the city much. Times Square is only a few blocks east, but once you cross Eighth Avenue, it’s a completely different world. Hell’s Kitchen is a neighborhood that’s changing fast. The street we’re on is an even mix of fancy new restaurants and mom-and-pop shops that you know have been there forever. A tapas bar next to a barbershop. A cigar store next to a boutique. Across the street from Nico’s building looms the red-brick walls of the local church, along with a fenced parish school.
“Did you go there?” I ask, nodding at the playground equipment locked on a blacktop behind a chain-link fence.
Nico follows my gaze and shakes his head. “Private school? Oh no, we couldn’t afford that, NYU. My school was about six blocks from here.”
Oh. Of course. I want to smack myself for even asking.
“We’d go to church there, though,” he says, nodding at a sign for a Spanish Mass posted next to the church doors. “Every damn Sunday.” He winks at me. “You better be careful. If my mother likes you enough, she’ll start dragging you with her.”
I smile. Is it weird that doesn’t sound so terrible? I’m no fan of Mass, but I spent enough time kneeling with my parents at St. Anne’s at home that the familiarity sounds...nice. Maybe even nicer if Nico were with me.
“Don’t forget,” Nico says as he leads me up the steps of his building. “Every bite on your plate.”
“Got it. You’ll have to roll me out of here.” I bare my teeth in a silly grin.
That finally earns me a smile. Nico smacks a loud kiss on my cheek and nuzzles me. “Come on, baby. Let’s go eat.”
~
The apartment is at the top of a third flight of narrow stairs, and the building has no elevator. It’s not nice by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not as bad as I thought, considering the way he’s referred to it. The white walls are dingy, sure, littered with scrapes and stains, and the bottom floor bears more than a few graffiti tags, but it’s not like the walls are literally coming down around us or anything.
Even though it’s not as loud as the street, the building is far from quiet. Music vibrates from several doors we pass, and beyond one comes the sound of shouting voices. The halls are narrow, and privately I wonder if Nico’s mother, whom he said has had some back problems, has trouble walking up and down these stairs every day. Managing them with four squirrely kids...eesh.
We stop at an unassuming door, and with another shy smile, Nico unlocks it.
Despite only having six or seven people in it, the apartment feels packed. The front door opens directly into a room that’s maybe four hundred square feet. In one corner, an open door peeks into what I assume is the bedroom; through another clamors the sounds of pots and pans.
This is it: the place where Nico became Nico. The furniture has been pushed to the walls to make room for two card tables that take up most of the center, covered in a white lace tablecloth and surrounded by folding chairs. There’s barely enough space to fit the setup in front of a faded orange couch, which is covered with plastic. The walls, which look like they haven’t been painted in a long time, are littered with posters and paraphernalia: postcards of saints and other Catholic iconography, a few framed, yellowing photos of what looks like Nico and his siblings when they were kids, an ornate, bronze-framed mirror above the sofa. An open closet to my right reveals a stowed murphy bed and some shelves covered by thin curtains.
Even my dorm room, which I share with Quinn, is clearly split between the two of us. She has her half, which she decorates the way she wants, and I do the same with mine. Things are separate. Neat. This room is completely different. I don’t know this family, but I can tell that all of them are scattered throughout the small space. I doubt that anyone but Gabe is a J. Lo fan, just like I’m pretty sure that a poster of an unfamiliar male singer on the opposite wall probably belongs to one of his sisters. I’m guessing that the signed Yankees baseball in the tiny curio shelf by the door belongs to Nico. This apartment isn’t just his mother’s––it belongs to everyone who was raised here.
“Tío!” A loud shriek erupts through the chatter, and a tiny, black-haired girl shoots out from under the table, smack into Nico’s legs, which she proceeds to climb like a tree.
Laughing, Nico helps her into his arms and peppers her face with kisses until she falls apart laughing.
“Stop!” she cries, giggling helplessly. “Keep going! Stop! Keep going!”
With one last smack on her cheek, Nico turns the little girl toward me. They look alike. She has his same latte-colored skin and sparkling black eyes. He gazes at her with obvious adoration.
“Mamita,” he addresses her, “this is my friend, Layla. Layla, this is Allie, my niece. She’s my sister Maggie’s daughter.” Looking up, he scans the room for Maggie, who raises her hand from the couch. Her face is hard, but it softens a little as she looks at her daughter.
I wave back shyly, then turn to Allie. “Encantada,” I say to her.
Her entire tiny face grins, and she addresses her uncle. “Ella habla español?”
I can barely understand her, but Nico turns to me with a half-grin that brings out one of his dimples. “You speak Spanish now, baby?”
I flush. “Um, a little. I’m trying.”
The half-grin turns to a full one, both dimples puckering his cheeks, and I blush. Across the room, Maggie’s eyebrows pop up. Gabe stands up from his seat at the table and sidles around to us.
“Hey, NYU,” he greets me with the same nickname his brother sometimes uses. He looks at me knowingly. I wonder again if he’s said anything about our awkward meeting.
He kisses me lightly on both cheeks, and I relax into the familiar gesture. My mom’s family never does this––they barely touch anyone––but my dad’s family does. When I visited them a few years ago, I thought I’d never get all the lipstick off my cheeks.
I think of my dad then, and wonder where he is right now. What he’s doing. If he’s happy now that he’s home.
Nico jokes a little more with Allie before he puts her down and pulls out a chair for me at one of the tables.
“You want a drink, baby?” he asks, holding up the paper bag of beverages he brought.
I shake my head. “I want to give your mother the appetizers I picked up. Also, I need to use the restroom.”
Nico gives me a funny look and points at the kitchen. “Just through there.”
I walk into the kitchen, where two women who could be sisters are arguing in Spanish as they lean over a sauce pan full of rice and a cooked half-turkey. They both are short and slight, barely clearing five feet tall, and with identically pulled-back hair that flies out around their temples. The younger, whom I’m guessing is Selena, Nico’s youngest sister, speaks in rapid, irritable Spanish with the other, waving around her long, painted fingernails and making the costume earrings that hang almost to her neck swing wildly. The older woman, obviously Nico’s mother, listens stolidly, occasionally clicking her tongue and shaking her head at her daughter’s opinions.
They silence immediately when I walk in.
“Hello-hola,” I venture, holding out a hand. “Um, yo soy Layla. Un amigo de Nico.”
“It’s una amiga. You’re a girl,” Selena says as she shakes my hand. “And I speak English.”
I flush. “Oh, um, I know. Nico just told me that your mom doesn’t.” This is weird. I don’t like talking about the woman as if she’s not right there.
Selena smirks. “She can speak a little. And she understands everything, so you don’t have to worry.”
I flush. “Oh. Right. Okay.”
I turn to Nico’s mother and hold out my hand. She looks at it for a moment, then shakes it lightly, her hand barely moving.
“Carmen,” she says, continuing quietly in heavily accented English. “Nice to meet you.”
I nod shyly and hold out the food I brought. I am Cheryl Barros’s daughter; I know better than to visit someone’s house empty-handed.
Carmen accepts the bag and pulls out the selection of French cheese and baguettes that cost me about half of my budget for the week. I didn’t know what to bring, so I just bought the kinds of things my mother would. Carmen takes out a Saran-wrapped lump of bleu, then looks at Selena and says something in Spanish that I can’t understand.
Selena examines it. “It’s cheese, Mami. The good kind.” She looks at me, and there’s a little kindness in her brown eyes.
“Oh. Thank you,” Carmen says to me. She holds up the cheese, and then hands it and the bag to her daughter, who moves around the tiny kitchen looking for a plate.
“Of course,” I say. “Thanks for having me.”
We stand awkwardly until I remember the other reason I came in.
“Um, could you tell me where the bathroom is?” I ask quietly as I look around and see nothing like it. “El baño?”
Both women look at me strangely, echoing that same expression I just got from Nico. Okay, I know my Spanish is bad, but is it really that bad?
“Over there,” Selena says, pointing to the corner.
I follow her gesture and immediately realize why I missed it. The door to the “bathroom” looks like a cabinet, a flimsy stall made of painted plywood that surrounds a toilet installed in the middle of the kitchen. No sink, unless you count the one in the kitchen. A door that would only provide privacy if you’re sitting down. That’s it.
I swallow and meet both Carmen and Selena’s faces straight on. I know then what they’re expecting––what they’ve all been expecting since I walked in. I’m the rich white girl, someone who should think she’s too good for this place, for them.
But it’s just a bathroom. It’s just an apartment. And ultimately, the only things that matter are the people inside it.
So I meet both of their gazes and smile.
“Gracias,” I say and push the door open.
~
In the end, it’s a pretty normal Thanksgiving. The only difference is that I only understand about ten percent of what’s said. All of the Solteros fall in and out of torrents of Spanish that are very different from the stiff, formal version I’m learning. I’m quiet for most of the meal, trying to understand what I can, listening intently whenever Nico leans over to translate.
But besides that, it’s the same, just dished out on a mixed set of dishes instead of my mother’s china. The half-turkey is just as moist, and they put marshmallows on the pan of sweet potatoes too. There are a few dishes that are unfamiliar, Puerto Rican-style foods that are clearly favorites of Nico’s and his siblings’. I make sure to take a second serving of the arroz con gandules, the yellow rice dish with peas and peppers. It’s not hard––it’s freaking delicious.
After a while, the family lapses comfortably into raucous conversation with each other, appearing to forget that I’m even there. Nico and his sisters throw insults at each other over the pumpkin pie, Gabe gets in trouble for talking with his mouth full, and Allie breaks every awkward silence with some adorable phrase. I try to smile when, every so often, I catch Carmen openly examining me, but for the most part, I eat my food and feel thankful that I’ve been included.
At the end, after Nico and Gabe have finished clearing the dishes away, Carmen looks around the table with a contented expression, in that same way any parent looks when all their kids have come home together.
“Listos?” asks Carmen. Her kids stop talking, and like a wave, everyone stands up.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
It’s very abrupt. One minute, we’re sitting around, laughing, but also talking kind of awkwardly, and the next, everyone is getting ready to go. Most Thanksgivings I’ve been to usually end when people migrate to a living room to watch football and loosen their pants while they sink into a food coma. Except, I realize, the television in the corner is maybe big enough for one or two people to watch. And there aren’t enough comfortable seats for everyone to relax.
Nico winks as he hands me my coat. “We’re going to Tía Alba’s place,” he says. “K.C.’s mom. It’s where we always go after the meal at Thanksgiving and Christmas. She puts on a party for all the family.”
I cover up, trying and failing to swallow the newly formed lump in my throat. Party? Family?
“Come on, baby,” Nico says, taking my hand in his as we follow his family out the door. “Let’s go.”
~