Xhenet Aliu - Brass

Up until now, you’ve been mostly annoyed with your mother, thinking she believed you too fragile to handle the truth about your father. You’ve believed she’s been trying to protect you from him, this creature who, like a male grizzly emerging from hibernation, might tear you apart to sustain himself. Now, though, it’s becoming clear: she is the one who’s sustained herself on you. He’d never even gotten a taste before she scuttled away with you, claiming you as hers alone. Her what, though? Her cub? Her trophy? Her prey?

“Texas,” you say, trying to get the word to sound natural in your mouth.

“Yes, Houston,” Yllka says.

“Texas,” you repeat. It seems as far away to you as the Balkans, and slightly more oppressive. Texas is to you a land of giant pickup trucks, tiny trailer homes, and evil oil tycoons, just like the television would have you believe. Their toast is good, though, that frozen Pepperidge Farm stuff you’d add to every meal if you could.

“Is he a cowboy?” you ask.

“Cowboy? No, no,” Yllka says, confused. She pauses a moment, then says, “He opened a little pizza shop. Amici’s.”

“Pizza?”

“Yes, pizza.”

“Pizza? Like Italian pizza?”

“Albanians are very good at pizza,” Yllka answers, almost defensively. “Half of us lived in Italy before we came here.”

“Who’s Amici?”

“It’s just a name,” Yllka says. “You can’t put Hasani on a sign for pizza. It’s not good for business.”

Business. Not only had your father actually been excited about you at one time, but he actually has the means to care for you now the way he didn’t then. You never imagined that someone with your own blood would be able to run anything, let alone an entire business. That would make him a businessman, right, and—don’t think it, don’t even dare think it—but there it is anyway: aren’t businessmen rich? Sure, Yllka owns the Ross and still lives in a triple-decker in Waterbury just like you, but that’s because immigrants do that, save every penny under their mattresses and then make their kids millionaires when they die. It’s so, so inappropriate to think it and so, so impossible not to, but maybe your father is doing the same for you. Maybe there’s some savings account in your name that you’ll find out about at precisely the right moment, say, when it’s time to cut the cord to your mother, when it’s time to pay your own rent in a dope loft far from these triple-deckers, and generally live a life that others will envy.

Then you remember that you were not the offspring that was chosen to thrive.

“He has kids, my father?” you ask. You want to know who’s the beneficiary of that savings account. “I mean real ones?”

“Three. Two boys and a girl. Adnan is the oldest, just a couple of years younger than you.”

“Adnan? Is that a boy or girl?”

“Boy. Golden boy, the oldest child, a son.”

You don’t point out that Adnan isn’t really the oldest child.

“Do they know about me?” you ask.

Yllka shakes her head. “I don’t know. I really don’t. I get into trouble, talking so much, but I have not brought it up with them. They’re just kids, and anyway it’s not my place. Maybe it’s your place,” she says, suddenly hopeful. “Maybe someday you could tell them.”

“I have no idea what my place is,” you say.

“You have to make your own place, i dashur.”

“Is that true?” you ask. “Is that really true?”

Yllka starts to nod, but her neck freezes when she lowers her head, and it stays there, seemingly unmoving, until you detect a tiny little quake. She reaches over and clutches your hand and squeezes it until it almost hurts, and she dabs her eyes with a napkin she’d crushed in her other hand, as if she was trying to make a diamond out of it.

“This is hard. This is very hard. There is so much to tell you and now I can’t come up with any more words,” she says.

Yllka mistakes your dead-eyed automaton stare for stoicism, like the kind your envied classmate Aisha showed throughout her bouts of diabetic ketoacidosis.

“Look at me falling apart and you being the brave one,” she says. “You must be strong like your mother.”

At that moment, being compared to your mother doesn’t seem terribly complimentary. Strong—that’s one way to put it. Margarita is strong. Margarita could beat any member of the football team in arm wrestling, and she doesn’t deserve admiration for it.

“Maybe,” Yllka says, then pauses. “I would like to see her, too. I miss her. I hope she’s not angry with me. I hope that’s not why she’s stayed away.”

“Why would she be mad at you?”

“Oh, who knows how these things work. I hope she’s not. And will you…Will you make sure she understands that I’m not angry with her? That I understand why it might have been too hard to stay in touch with me?”

You understand that you’re supposed to nod, but you just look straight ahead with your dull Aisha stare. A few minutes ago you’d felt like you were getting somewhere, but suddenly you’re right back to where you started, understanding nothing.

“Never mind,” Yllka says. “That’s too much to ask of you. I’ll tell her myself, if you can just get her to visit next time. Do you think, maybe, she would?”

“I don’t know,” you say. “I doubt it.”

“Oh,” she says. She finds your eyes again, and cups her arms around your shoulders. “Well, in any case, you will come back? I can’t tell you how I’ve missed you.”

“But,” you say.

“But what, love?”

For the first time, you’re beginning to feel annoyed with this woman for making you say everything out loud. “But what about my father?”

Silence. Yllka doesn’t seem like a big fan of it, but it’s what she offers in response to your question.

“So he doesn’t want to see me,” you say.

“It’s not that,” she says.

“That’s what it sounds like,” you say.

“But it’s not right,” she says, dropping her head into her hands. “I just don’t know what to say. Maybe this is what we talk about next time? You’ll come back next weekend, maybe?”

“Maybe,” you answer. It’s a response that seems to both encourage and devastate her, but it’s at least gentler than what you’re really thinking, which is that she’s perfectly nice, this Teto Yllka, and you could maybe make room for her someday, but you didn’t come here looking for another maternal figure, a great-aunt to supplement your mother and Greta and Mamie, even if Yllka can at least offer magical pastries and photos of people you sort of resemble. The little morsels she fed you, those pieces of sweet fried dough, don’t have the kind of sustenance you’re hungry for. There’s a whole feast for you somewhere in Texas, and like a hunter, you have to track it.

The year before, a girl in an uppity town just down the highway from Waterbury had kept her pregnancy a secret for nine months, delivered the kid in her bathroom, left it bundled in a Starter sweatshirt outside the volunteer fire department, and went to a varsity football game that same night. That kind of denial was nuts. Me, I wasn’t nuts. I was just waiting for a good time to make my condition known. It was just that good times were so hard to come by.

In the meantime I told Mamie that I’d be moving out. I thought she’d finally be happy to be rid of one of her two beasts of burden, but instead she looked worried, even a little sad.

“What?” she said. “How are you going to do that? You have the money for that kind of thing?”

“It’s not going to be much more than you charge me,” I said. “And anyway, it’s time I grow up.”