Twelve boxes.
It's enough,I told myself.It's a start.
"You know," my best friend Daniela said from her position on the kitchen counter, where she was eating the last of my cereal directly from the box because I'd already packed the bowls, "when you told me you were moving in with a man you met at a fertility clinic I said a lot of things."
"You said it was insane."
"I said it was insane, I said you'd lost your mind, I said?—"
"You also saidgo for it."
"I said go for itlast," she said. "The insane part came first. That's important."
She crunched a handful of cereal and looked at me with the expression she used when she was being supportive and entertained simultaneously, which was most of the time. Daniela was in a sports bra and bike shorts because it was June and she had been doing outdoor theatre in this heat since she was nineteen and had long since made her peace with sweating in public. Her braids were up off her neck and she still looked like she was about to audition for something.
I was in a tank top and cutoffs and felt like a wet paper towel.
"You look good," she said.
"I look like I've been outside."
"You look like a woman who made a decision." She hopped off the counter. "That's attractive."
From the other room, in Spanish: "Mija, where do you want this?"
My mom appeared in the doorway holding a dish towel. She was in a sleeveless blouse with her hair up and the expression she'd been wearing for two weeks—the expression of a woman feeling many things and expressing them primarily through helpfulness.
She'd cried when I told her. Happy tears, she said.A man,she'd said.A real man.I had not mentioned the fertility clinic. I had not mentioned the contract. I had said:I met someone, it's fast, he has a ranch, I'm moving.She had cried and called my dad and called my tía Rosa and presumably texted Saint Anthony directly.
"Just put it with the boxes, Mamá."
She set it down carefully. Looked around the empty apartment with the expression of a woman filing it away.
"It's a good thing," she said, to the room more than to me.
"It is," I agreed.
She looked at me with her eyes doing the thing they did where she was seeing me at every age simultaneously. "You're happy?"
"I think I'm going to be."
She nodded once, satisfied, and went back to the other room where my dad was doing something I'd asked him not to do, which was rearrange the boxes by size.
"Robert," she said.
"I'm just?—"
"Leave them."
"They'll stack better if?—"
"Robert."
Daniela caught my eye. I caught hers. We both laughed under our breath.
My dad appeared in the doorway. He was in a polo shirt that was now as damp with sweat as the rest of us, pretending to be casual, which was his least convincing setting. He was a tall white guy who had married into a Tejano family thirty years ago and tried valiantly to fit in—even if he still looked like a software developer who’d accidentally found himself at a quinceañera.
"I just want to make sure everything travels well," he said.
