Xhenet Aliu - Brass

He throws his hands in the air. “I have my break from school, and maybe I miss a few days afterwards.”

“But your job. Your father,” you say.

“My sister will take over. She’s grounded anyway, she won’t be having any fun for a little while.”

“No, that’s crazy. I can’t. You can’t do that,” you say, almost panicking now, because his plan is indeed more practical than yours.

“I don’t want you to go alone. I can’t believe your mother would want you to go alone. I mean, no.” He shakes his head. “I won’t let you do that. I’m coming. I’ve never been to Texas, anyway.”

“You have no reason to go to Texas. You only go to Texas if you have a reason,” you argue.

“My reason is to protect you. Your mother should want that, she shouldn’t want you to go alone. I’m going to talk to her, actually. She’s as crazy as the bus people if she lets you take a Greyhound to Texas.”

“No! No,” you say. You close your eyes and take a moment to think things through. On the one hand, you’d be sharing a few cubic feet for several days with a guy you had never even kissed. On the other hand, with two of you, there would be someone to help with the driving, and you could just pretend to sleep during your turns in the passenger seat. Plus he knows Yllka, so he has some connection to your family in some distant way, just like all Albanians seem to have some connection to all other Albanians in some distant way. He would be the adhesive between the odd American mutt and her purebred Albanian siblings. He could provide enough white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies to get you through a couple thousand miles.

You exhale slowly. Ahmet wasn’t a part of the plan, but then again, look how far you’d come so quickly by not thinking anything all the way through.

“Okay,” you say. “But we’re leaving on Friday. Ten A.M. sharp.”

Does your mother really think it’s fine that you’re going to Texas? Does she really understand your need to be part of a family that isn’t composed exclusively of her?

She doesn’t think anything. She’s as aware of your plan as you recently were of the existence of your siblings, which is to say, not at all. She knows something is up, because she’s noticed that you’ve been talking to her less and less and to your phone more and more. When she asks, you tell her it’s Teena on the other end, and you make sure to clear out your call log after every conversation. She knows; she’s checked, just like she checks your text messages, for which you’ve kept only a strategic, boring few that reveal nothing other than the due date of your history paper (already passed) and a brief recap of the previous week’s Scandal, which Teena had missed on account of her three-week anniversary with the new Burlington Coat Factory security guard. Ahmet exists only as a contact named Matt in your phone, and Yllka is renamed Yvonne, which just happens to be the name of the woman for whose drippy children you occasionally babysit. Everything checks out, but still, she knows you’re up to something. You don’t have proof, but you’re sure that your mother has scoured your room looking for drug paraphernalia or condoms, and you wonder which would have been worse for her to find.

And what if she had been brave enough to ask you outright, and you had been brave enough to explain why you have to go? How would you have summarized it?

She lied to you. Your father wasn’t a ghost in the Balkans, he was a man waiting to be discovered right here in your own native land. It doesn’t matter why she lied, even if it was to protect you from whatever she thought you needed protection from. She made decisions for you that weren’t hers to make. Yes, she made them on your behalf at a time when you had no capacity for language and freely shat all over yourself every few hours, but the number of words in your vocabulary is now an above-average seventeen thousand or so, thanks to the books you read for pleasure when television and even the entire Internet grow too boring, and you have been potty-trained for a good fifteen years. She’s had plenty of time to come clean, and plenty of time to have convinced you that she made the right decision all those years ago. She could have explained to you that your father had managed to love you only while you were still an abstract thing, a thing that only loved back and cooed and did not repeatedly shit itself all night and then cry about it. She could have explained that he was a frightened man, and a frightened man, like a frightened dog, was a potentially dangerous thing. She could have said those things instead of repeating, if the topic ever came up, that your father was simply an asshole, the same term she applies to people who don’t matter at all, like guys who cut her off in traffic and Bill O’Reilly.

But if she lied about where he was, who’s to say she wasn’t lying about what he was? What if he wasn’t just some asshole, and you weren’t better off without him?

To be fair, you acknowledge that you’ve been lying right back to your mother, and there’s nothing in the Don’t Lie kindergarten code that says it’s okay to do it if it’s been done to you first. And also, if you really, really think about it—if you choose not to lie even to yourself—you aren’t sure if your anger can be distilled down to the fact that your mother has told you that it was an immigration paperwork snafu that kept your father away instead of the truth, which is that it was either her or him or some combination thereof. What you learned from Yllka, for example, doesn’t explain all the nights you had quivered with rage in your bed before you even knew of the existence of the rest of your family. That rage has no clearly identified source or target. Maybe what you had gotten from Yllka isn’t the origin of your rage but an end point, a bull’s-eye.

And let’s say you go through with this trip. Let’s say you find yourself eating dinner with a brand-new family, leaving your mother to accompany Mamie to her nightly meetings in church basements and Skype with Greta when Greta could get a signal on a neighbor’s unprotected wireless network. What makes you think that adding members to your family will somehow lead to conclusions instead of exponentially adding to the questions?

You think about those things in your bed the night before your departure, and there you are again, quivering and cold, full of rage and fear and a new ingredient in this toxic stew, something along the lines of a preemptive regret, which some wise old people might call foresight but which a seventeen-year-old would call superfreaking annoying. Maybe you are, after all, a shitty person who’s just bored and doesn’t care about spiting those who have loved and reared and sacrificed for you. You hope not—something a truly shitty person would likely not do—but you suppose you will find out when you depart in twelve or so hours.

“Don’t come up,” you tell Ahmet when he arrives Friday morning. “The neighbors will notice.”

You think about the houses that sandwich the one you live in, a single-family commune of old people on one side and a triple-decker filled with four generations of the same Puerto Rican family on the other. All these years in the same place and you don’t know anybody by name, except for Hector, with whom you’ve shared a bus stop since kindergarten but never a conversation. That’s exactly the kind of thing that should’ve made getting into Ahmet’s Honda easy.

What made it not easy was the one single person who did give a shit. This morning she almost ruined everything by giving a shit, or rather leaving a shit in the form of a new blank journal on the table with your lunch, trying to make what she thought was just a random day special, like when you were younger and she’d get up extra early to get some of those Pillsbury cinnamon buns in the oven, leaving the extra white goo out for you to slurp up. She didn’t bother to write a note to go along with the journal, because it’s pretty clear what the gift is supposed to say. Cheer up . Write out your feelings, especially if it means we won’t have to talk about them later.