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"Not interested at all, huh, Dad?" she asked, turning around and flouncing away in a blur of brown curls and self-righteousness.
I couldn't even call her on it either.
Because that strange, unsteady sensation in my chest?
It sure felt a hell of a lot like interest.TWOEvaStarting over was never easy.
I had to remind myself of that at least a thousand times a day.
Everything was new.
The neighborhood, the house, the school, my commute to work.
It was just going to take some time to adjust.
At least, that was what I wanted to believe. I wanted to blame the very sudden move for Jacob's behavior issues. But if I were being honest with myself, they had been a problem on and off for the past year.
I thought getting him into a better environment would help. Shake up the school, the friend group, everything. But if anything, things seemed to be getting worse.
When I was home, I kept him under control. He wasn't a bad kid. And he generally didn't even backtalk me all that much. But I had to leave. I had to work. And that was when the trouble always seemed to start.
"I don't know what to do, Ma," I said, dropping down the bedrail, so I could sit at her side on the bed. She wouldn't respond to me. When she did speak these days, it was either complete nonsense or memories from her twenties. Everything else seemed to be gone or going. All the memories from Jacob's life. Hell, all of them from mine. Some days—maybe even most days lately—she didn't recognize me as her daughter, thinking instead that I was one of her sisters.
The oldest memories are the last to go the doctor had told me once at the beginning when I didn't understand why she kept regaling me with the story of her wedding as though it happened just a few months before.
"I know what you did when my brother started acting out at his age," I went on, needing someone to talk to, and my Mom had always been that person for me, even if she could no longer be an active participant in the conversation. "And doubling down on the discipline only seemed to push Miguel further away."
He had been utterly uncontrollable by the time he hit seventeen. Loud and mean and aggressive, but my mother refused to kick him out, but didn't send out a search party when he decided to stop coming home anymore.
We saw him over the years. Sometimes he would drop-over for Thanksgiving like there was no bad blood between us. And for the sake of family, my mother and I would pretend that we didn't see the gun in his waistband, or the massive number three tattooed on his forearm.
Third Street.
It didn't surprise me that he chose that family over ours when he was young, and stupid, and looking for a thrill, and easy money. What did surprise me, though, was that he stayed. Even through all the changes in leadership, even through all the arrests and the drugs and the in-fighting.
I guess a part of me had naively always thought of gangs as a young guy's game. For some, to get away from shitty home lives. For others, to get the thrill of doing something illegal, the bragging rights for having a nicer car and better clothes than everyone else they went to school with.
I always figured that Miguel would get tired of it at some point, see that there was really no future in that kind of life, and come back to the family, start over, build a normal life.
I stopped wishing for that a couple of years ago, though.
In fact, Miguel was really what had finally pushed me to bite the bullet, take all my savings, and get us this new place.
Because we had still been living in the old neighborhood. Sure, there were shitty areas, streets I didn't want to walk down at night, but for the most part, the apartment where we lived was full of people just like us. Young families, multi-generational families, everyone just trying to get by in life.
The schools weren't the best, but they weren't awful either. And keeping our overhead low allowed me to build a savings in the first place.
But when I noticed Miguel and Jacob starting to kick around together, when I saw the strange way Miguel looked at his nephew, almost like he was waiting for him, and then, in turn, the same way Jacob looked at Miguel, with a bit of wonder, I realized what was starting to happen.
Jacob was starting to see the lure of the streets. And Miguel was helping him.
That was the final straw.
I would be damned if I let my son follow on the misguided path of his uncle.
Did I understand? Christ, yeah, I actually did. I, too, wanted to know what it was like to food shop with wild abandon, spring for the expensive cereal and the name brand pasta sauce. I would have liked to invest in a new wardrobe or get myself a pair of earrings that didn't turn my earlobes green. And I knew that Jacob wanted some of the finer things in life too. I couldn't even begrudge him for it. But getting it by selling drugs or pimping out down-on-their-luck women? Yeah, no, that was not going to happen. Not on my watch.
