Because You're Different ✔

69. Letters [Part 1]

June

The sun had tricked me. With her shining so brightly today, even the bare piece of land called Soundview Park had looked like the most beautiful Californian garden. The waving leaves on the trees, the birds flying about, kids running and playing on the new grass — for a blissful thirty minutes, all of my worries had disappeared, taken away by the first genuinely warm day of the year. Filled up with energy I wasn't supposed to have, I'd decided to walk the long way home.

Right now, I thoroughly regretted that. My feet hurt, and a muscle in my upper leg protested loudly with every step forward. A friend of Leonita, who was a physical therapist, had told me I needed insoles to correct my gait, or the pain would just get worse in the future. All very well, but those things cost a sweet two hundred to eight hundred dollars a pair — money I didn't have, and would rather spend on something else if I did somehow manage to get my hands on it. If only I would've known this when we'd still been insured, it wouldn't have been a problem.

A soft cry from below me caught my attention, and I allowed myself a break to look at the little human who'd produced it. Pushing a buggy with a baby that weighed as much as a Thanksgiving turkey was no small feat, after all. "Yeah, yeah, we're gonna be home soon, alright? Just a little longer."

Luis raised his fist at me, his large brown eyes blinking haughtily. He blabbered something, probably not believing me anymore. With good reason: I was panting heavily. "Oh," I managed to say between breaths, "you think you can do better? Well, mister, I can't wait till the day you have to push old me around in a wheelchair. Let's see how you'll like that, hey?"

He kicked in response, then focused on the toy dangling above him. Ever since he was born, I'd been wondering what was going on in that big head of his. I had the feeling he understood far more than we could ever guess.

When I reached the apartment at last, closing the door behind me, I breathed out deeply. Everything was a mess: piles of dirty dishes cluttered the sink, food crumbs covered the table, and drying laundry took up most of the living space we had. Add to that Luis' toys, Valentina's course books, and David's random shit, and you had me longing to jump into bed and sleep for a thousand years.

Relax, June. It was only stuff. Nothing to stress out over. Since leaving California, I had developed a new appreciation for Agnieszka the cleaning lady — maintaining a house was hard. Especially with a nine-month-old baby crawling about. In the beginning, I had given all to keep the place spotless, until I realized my cousins didn't exactly care, and I was sick of dying every day. I simply did not have the energy to do it all, not with the websites I had to build and Luis constantly screaming for attention.

"Hey there, little man," I said to him, as I wrapped my arms around him tightly, hoisting him up before quickly getting down on my knees and putting him on the floor. It'd taken me some time to get confident enough to carry him. He wasn't a bowl of cereal after all — if I dropped him, I'd never forgive myself. Slowly, I'd learned to recognize when I could and couldn't pick him up, and somehow, my body just knew he was something I absolutely could not lose my grip on.

Luis happily crawled away, then started licking the leg of a chair. I laughed. Weird boy. I hoped he hadn't inherited the brains of his mother. She had named him Luzo, convinced that was how you spelled Lucho. Who the hell would give their son a name like Lucho anyway? That was a nickname, not a first name. When she'd dumped the kid on our doorstep and vanished from Soundview, we'd decided to call him Luis, after my dad. David really needed to raise his standards if he was going to go around sleeping with women without any form of protection.

With a sigh, I picked up the pile of letters on the dinner table, scanning the names on them one by one. David, David, Valentina, me —

Me.