Merci Suárez Changes Gears Read online

  Was Abuela right about something bad happening to him after all? The idea sets my heart racing again.

  “No, ma’am. We’ve just had a little confusion during dismissal time for kindergarten at the elementary school — that’s all. I thought it best to bring your sons and their grandfather home.”

  “That is my son,” Mami says, pointing back at Roli, who stands up a little straighter and waves. “If you mean the twins, they’re my nephews.”

  Good move, Mami, I think. Cute as they are, it’s never safe to claim those two until you have the full report. Even the friendly librarians downtown have banned them from storytime unless they come with two escorts — and harnesses.

  Still, I don’t see how this could involve Lolo — or why he’s in the cop car. What could have gone wrong on a walk home from school? It’s only five blocks. If you stand at the end of the driveway, you can even see the flagpole. Plus, for as long as I can remember, Lolo has been in charge of walking us home. He did it for Roli and for me. In fact, it used to be my favorite part of the day when I was still at Manatee Elementary. We’d stroll, nice and slow, so I could tell him all that had happened each day, especially the highlights from recess. Then we’d stop to get a snack, even though Mami said it ruined my appetite. I only quit walking home with him in the third grade because that’s when everyone in my class started to ride bikes to school. Only babies were walkers after that.

  “You think Lolo’s taking the rap for something the twins did?” I whisper to Roli. I crane my neck for a better look. It’s not that far-fetched. Lolo loves all of us grandkids like crazy. He calls me preciosa — precious one — and Roli and the twins his compadres del alma. Lolo would never let anything happen to the twins. A full day of school would have given my cousins plenty of time to unleash trouble, as everyone around here knows. Maybe he’s trying to save them from starting their careers in the state penitentiary early.

  “Shh,” Roli says, giving me a sharp look. That’s what everybody says around here when I ask too many question, like I’m still a little kid.

  The cop checks his clipboard and looks up and down the pebble walkway that connects all three of our houses. “But your nephews live here, with you?”

  “Yes . . . well, no,” Mami says.

  How we live confuses some people, so Mami starts her usual explanation. Our three flat-top houses are exact pink triplets, and they sit side by side here on Sixth Street. The one on the left, with the Sol Painting van parked out front, is ours. The one in the middle, with the flower beds, is where Abuela and Lolo live. The one on the right, with the explosion of toys in the dirt, belongs to Tía Inés and the twins. Roli calls it the Suárez Compound, but Mami hates that name. She says it sounds like we’re the kind of people who collect canned food and wait for the end of the world any minute. She’s named it Las Casitas instead. The little houses. I just call it home.

  I creep closer to the cruiser as Mami talks, being careful not to make any sudden moves the whole way. Cops are community helpers and all that, but a billy club and gun don’t ever look very friendly. In fact, they make me feel prickly all over.

  He spots me, though, and I freeze, my eyes darting over to Lolo, who still hasn’t gotten out of the car. Whatever it is, he needs my help.

  “Can we have a word in private?” the policeman says to Mami, motioning her to join him and Abuela in the shade. I lean toward them, trying to listen, but Mami turns and gives me that stone-cold look.

  “Merci, this is an adult conversation,” she says. “Keep an eye on the twins, please. They’ve gone inside. I’ll be right there.”

  I feel my cheeks turn the color of my blazer. I’m in the sixth grade, am I not? I’m old enough to babysit the twins, clean Abuela’s sewing room, start dinner, and save up for stuff that I want. But suddenly I’m too young to know why my own grandfather has been busted? Go figure.

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” Roli whispers importantly as I walk past.

  “Seventeen is not adult,” I say, but he pretends he can’t hear and doesn’t respond.

  I know I should go check on the twins, but I walk around the cruiser instead. I lean in the open door. Lolo’s hands are folded in his lap, and his white hair is sticking up funny, the way it does on a windy day.

  “What did they do, Lolo?” I whisper. “You can tell me. Did they pull a fire alarm? Start a food fight? Tie up the teacher?”

  Lolo looks at me and shakes his head. “Merci. Such ideas! Those angelitos are innocent,” he says. “I swear it.”

  Love is blind, as they say, but why argue? I study the blinking contraptions that are bolted to the dashboard, my mind racing. “Then why are you sitting in a cop car?”

  There’s a long pause. “Nada,” he says finally. “It was a little misunderstanding.”

  Nada? Everybody knows the police are like teachers. They don’t call your family about misunderstandings or to say what a great job you’re doing.

  “Lolo,” I say.

  He pulls off his wire-frame glasses and wipes them on his T-shirt. “Fine. It’s these glasses!” he says in disgust. “They’re terrible! I’ve been telling Abuela to schedule me another appointment with the optometrist. Maybe now she’ll listen.”

  “What do glasses have to do with anything?” I say. “You’re not making any sense!”

  Lolo looks at me sheepishly. “No, I suppose I’m not.” He turns his head away from me to stare out the window. “That’s the trouble,” he mumbles.

  I peer over the roof of the squad car. Mami and Abuela are still talking to the officer; Roli is standing nearby, quietly observing like the scientist he is. Abuela, on the other hand, is glaring at our neighbors who’ve come into their yards to stare. This is her worst nightmare — gossip about us. Lolo’s going to be in trouble with her later, for sure. Maybe that’s why he’s not budging from this spot. Last week Abuela made a fuss because Lolo lost his wallet again. He was sure he’d been pickpocketed at the bakery, and even called Tía Inés to warn her about common criminals eating at the luncheonette where she works. “Keep an eye out for thieves,” he told her. “The world has changed; trust no one!” Turns out, he wasn’t pickpocketed at all. When Abuela found his billfold in the bed of lantana he’d been weeding that afternoon —¡Ay-ay-ay! ¡Qué escándalo! Her volume button got stuck on high, and the whole block could hear her yelling about how he had to pay more attention.

  The twins barrel out the back door just then in their play clothes. In a flash, they’re pressing their noses against the steamed window of the cruiser to make twin pig snouts. Son la candela, as usual. Tomás is also eyeing the mobile radio system on the dashboard. I stop him just as he yanks open the door to make a grab for the transmitter.

  “Quit it,” I say, pulling him out by the waist, “and tell me what happened.”

  He shrugs me off as soon as I put him back on the ground. “We rode in the police car!” he says.

  “So I hear. But why?”

  Axel butts in with the rest. “Lolo tried to take the other twins home by accident, the ones in Miss Henderson’s class. They didn’t like it. They yelled loud like we’re supposed to.”

  “No! Go! Yell! Tell!” Tomás shouts at the top of his voice.

  I recognize that chant right away. It’s what our old teachers taught us to do if ever someone tried to snatch us. We had assemblies about it and everything.

  “Shhh,” I hiss, but too late. Abuela and Mami have already heard them.

  “Merci, I told you to watch the boys. We’re busy here,” Mami snaps. “Just a few more minutes.”

  I turn back to Lolo. “Is that true? You took the wrong twins at dismissal?” I know exactly who those kids are, of course. They were in the same preschool as Axel and Tomás and were generally known as “the good ones.” They’re also Vietnamese. How could he mistake them for ours? I stare at Lolo’s glasses, wondering if he’s right about the prescription.

  Lolo won’t meet my eye. He stares out the other window, his cheek
s bright red. “All that yelling for a simple mistake,” he mutters. “And then the parents were pointing and pulling them from me as if I were a criminal. There’s no respect for an anciano anymore. What’s this country coming to?”

  “They called the cops!” Tomás adds excitedly. “Eric’s mom took a movie with her phone!”

  The air is thick and hot, and I realize that I’m sweating again in this silly uniform, even with my blazer tied at my waist. Overhead, the afternoon clouds are gathering into their usual black popcorn. Any minute, we’ll have our daily rainstorm, which will cool off exactly nothing.

  “Why don’t you come inside for a snack with us, Lolo?” I say. “Your head is getting shiny with sweat.” I lower my voice. “I want to tell you how school went. You’re not the only one who had a tough go. It was picture day today.”

  If anyone can make me feel better, it will be him. Lolo and I always talk after school. We share Danish cookies from the tin he keeps hidden in the toolshed. And when I talk, Lolo isn’t like Mami, who says things like give it a chance or look on the bright side or learn to ignore small things and all that basura that makes me feel like it’s my fault that my day was a hunk of smelly cheese.

  But right now, Lolo doesn’t seem that interested in what happened to me today. Instead, he shakes his head. “I’m not very hungry, Merci. You go on, preciosa.”

  “Merci!” Mami calls again. She tosses me an exasperated look and points at the twins, who are poking a fire-ant mound with a stick, practically begging to get swarmed.

  I go off in their direction, and they race away from me so I chase them, pretending everything is OK.

  When I get to our screen door, I turn around, hoping Lolo has changed his mind. Maybe he’ll say, “Wait, Merci,” and ask me to share my pudding at the kitchen table, tell me how he made such a strange mistake, ask about my day the way he’s supposed to so that I can breathe easy again.

  But no. Maybe talking in the afternoon is something we won’t do anymore, like when we stopped walking to school.

  A rumble of thunder shakes the ground, and a gust rattles the palm fronds like shells. Inside, Tuerto is up on the counter, meowing for his food. The twins are shrieking with fear and fun, doing God-knows-what. As the first drops of rain start to fall, Roli jogs toward our car to roll up the windows.

  And even as Mami and Abuela coax him, Lolo still sits in the hot cruiser, his eyes fixed on something in the distance that I can’t see.

  SEAWARD PINES ACADEMY, established MCMLVII, has always reminded me of a cemetery, even though it’s a fancy private school. It was the first thing I noticed about the place when I started here last year in the fifth grade. Seaward has a big stone entrance and all those perfectly planted begonias like the ones at Our Lady Queen of Peace on Southern Boulevard. And there’s always that big vase with fresh flowers in the front office, too, with a smell that gives me the creeps. It’s just like the scent of Doña Rosa’s funeral, where it was wall-to-wall with stinky carnation wreaths all over the place. Doña Rosa died in her house across the street from us, watching Wheel of Fortune, like she did every night. Abuela and I used to go over and watch with her sometimes to keep her company, since her niece lived down in Miami and didn’t visit much. Doña Rosa didn’t speak enough English to be good at solving the puzzles; mostly, she just liked Vanna White’s gowns and the prizes. Anyway, I guess we were busy that week and didn’t think to go. It was three whole days before anyone called the police and found her in her chair. To this day, Abuela makes the sign of the cross when we go by the condo, just in case Doña Rosa is still mad that it took us so long to notice. Papi repainted her place for nothing so her niece could sell it, but you never know. “Rosa was always one for grudges,” Abuela says.

  Roli drives slowly past the entrance gate, waving at his science teacher, who’s on duty directing traffic.

  “Good morning,” she calls out to us.

  Roli swivels around to smile in a classic display of distracted driving, which is his downfall every time. Mami dives for the wheel (again), this time to spare the lady’s feet from being flattened by our tires. The crutches and orthopedic boots Mami keeps for her rehab patients clatter to the car floor, along with her file folders that were stacked beside me. I don’t know why she let him have the wheel this morning. Practice makes perfect, Mami always says, but I can see this is going to take a while.

  “Can you step on it, please?” I say, pointing at the speedometer. The needle is hovering at seven miles per hour. “I can walk faster than this.”

  “False,” he says, glancing at the dash. “The average human walks at about 3.5 miles per hour.”

  My phone says it’s 7:41 a.m. My message reminder keeps blinking that my meeting with Miss McDaniels is in exactly four minutes. I can’t be late; her number-one peeve is tardiness. Not that it stops there. Uniform length, gum chewing, loudness of your voice — you name it, she monitors it better than our headmaster, Dr. Newman. I should know. Last year, when I didn’t know any better, Miss McDaniels gave me a detention for wearing my lucky sneakers instead of the regulation loafers.

  “Hurry, Roli. I’m going to be late!”

  Roli glares at me in the rearview mirror. “Talk to Tía about it. It was her idea that we drop off the twins,” he says. “And take that thing off your head, will you please? You look stupid.”

  “Absolutely not.” He doesn’t like that I’m wearing my bike helmet in the car with him, but you just can’t be too careful.

  “Enough, both of you,” Mami says. “We’re trying to work out other morning arrangements for the twins, but you’ll need to be patient until then.”

  I roll my eyes without letting her see. Since the mess with Lolo yesterday — and all the time it took to get Abuela calmed down — Mami’s been a little crabby and impatient, too. This morning I asked her for my consent form for soccer tryouts and she didn’t have it, even though I put it right on the refrigerator so she wouldn’t miss it.

  “I can’t think about that right now,” she said, shooing me out of the room.

  Mami turns to me now and frowns as she changes the subject. “And why didn’t you mention your meeting with Miss McDaniels, anyway?” She narrows her eyes in suspicion, probably thinking back to my contraband footwear incident. Since that day, I have been forbidden from causing any more phone calls home unless I am burning alive with a fever or projectile vomiting.

  I shrug. “We have some business to discuss,” I say vaguely.

  “Business.”

  “Yes.”

  “About?”

  “She gave out our community service assignments yesterday.”

  “And?”

  I slouch in the back seat. We have a strict policy in our family about always telling the truth, so I have no choice but to say it. “And my assignment is the Sunshine Buddies Club.”

  Roli meets my eye in the rearview mirror and snorts. “Friends of the friendless!” he says.

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” Mami says. “It was useful for you last year, wasn’t it?”

  I stare out the window. Mami’s blind enthusiasm is one of her more predictable and annoying qualities.

  “Not really,” I say. The truth is, I hated it, but only Roli knows that. Mami was so excited that I’d been accepted at Seaward, she wouldn’t have listened to my complaints. Instead, I would have gotten pep talks.

  Like now.

  Mami sighs. “You know, Merci, a good attitude goes a long way. Half my patients would never walk again if they didn’t think positive.” She turns back around. “And this family could really use some upbeat thinking these days.”

  “Why?” I say. “What’s wrong with our thinking?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  Instead, she points to the sign for the drop-off loop. “That way, Roli,” she says. “And watch for the younger kids.”

  I lean back and look out the window as we roll past the lower school. I wonder when Seaward is going to start to feel like home? A lot of ki
ds in my class started school here in kindergarten, like these little kids, but not Roli and me. He came when he started middle school, and I joined him last year because a spot finally opened up in the fifth-grade class when a kid moved away over the summer. Mami almost fainted with joy when the office called to tell us. She is all about getting a good education, no matter what. She wants Roli to apply to the best colleges and for every scholarship. And when I complain about homework — even a little bit — she reminds me how Papi took on extra lawn jobs so she could go to college at night. She went for three extra years while I was a baby so she could become a physical therapist. Because of her job, we were able to buy Las Casitas, even when Papi’s paint business wasn’t doing so great. That’s why I have a new phone and Roli has a laptop. That’s why we can help Tía or Abuela and Lolo if they need a little extra money sometimes, too.

  Which all means that Mami doesn’t think community service is a big deal at all if it means I get to attend Seaward. She’s the one who agreed to the scholarship without even asking me if I minded. “It’s a golden opportunity!” she said, and inked her name without reading the fine print. It turns out Roli and I have to do sixty whole hours of free labor every year, while keeping up a B-plus average. That’s twenty hours more than the other kids. Plus, it makes it hard to do all your homework, which was one of the hardest parts of coming here last year. There was suddenly a lot more work than I’d ever had at my old school, and no matter how much I studied, I wasn’t quick enough. I didn’t have the answer to the math problem as fast as the kid next to me, or I hadn’t read as far as everyone else in the book we were reading in class. “Be patient,” Miss Miller told me when I got teary after I got a D on a quiz. “You’re settling in.” And I did settle in, I guess, because I didn’t get kicked out. But this year, with new teachers and changing classes, it’s all supposed to get even harder.

  Roli doesn’t have this problem, of course. He’s never seen a B stain his spotless report card in his whole life, not even here at Seaward, where we get worked to death. That kind of genius status means that he gets a cushy job working in the science lab as a teacher’s assistant for his community service. He may be a terrible driver, but I can’t deny that he’s a brain — a very, very big brain — which is why he’s been getting invitations to apply to colleges for years. In fact, he’s probably smarter than anyone in Seaward’s history. Just check out the glass display case outside the front office. The biggest trophy in there is for the science fair project he did in his freshman year. It was about how to make plastic from banana peels instead of petroleum. You can practically smell the future Nobel Prize on him.