Did he suspect when he watched me shoot hoops in the park? Or when he told me, a million times, to pull up my baggy jeans? Or when he caught me kissing la vecina’s daughter when we were both twelve? I was grateful that he’d never told my parents. Never told anyone.
Pero la vecina’s daughter? She confessed to her mother when she got caught skipping school. Confessed everything she’d ever done, including all the kissing (it had been more than once), and all the cigarettes we’d stolen from our mothers to smoke behind our building. La vecina told Mami, and together, they confronted us both.
I denied everything. There had been no kissing, no cigarettes, none of that. No way.
My mother turned to la vecina’s daughter. “Tell me the truth,” she said, her nostrils flaring.
La vecina’s daughter got so spooked she cracked. Took back some of what she’d said.
“I made up the thing about the cigarettes. But the kissing, that was real. I swear on Jesucristo.”
I wanted to scream! She had a chance to take something back, and she went with the cigarettes? And on top of that, she’d used Jesucristo against me! I would not be kissing her again. Ever.
Mami gave me a whooping I will remember until my dying day. Took a skinny belt to the back of my legs, and I cried so much I threw up.
After my tío Junior died, I wondered what it meant that he’d never said anything. I resented what it implied: that I had done something so wrong, so shameful, he took the secret to his grave. Eventually, I realized he’d been protecting me. How he’d been more than my tío—the one person who believed I could do anything, my accomplice, keeper of my secrets.
