The Secret Side of Empty by Maria E. Andreu

Author:Maria E. Andreu [Andreu, Maria E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2014-01-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I go down to the strip, pumping my legs hard, feeling the cold air on my face. I look at the lit-up giant candy canes and wreaths hanging from the streetlights.

I’m making the loop to go back home when I see a man who looks like my father sitting in the coffee shop, reading a book. It can’t be my father, because he’s working. But the resemblance is so strong I go around the block to do another pass. As I ride by more slowly and closer, I make out my father’s jacket hanging over the sidearm of the puffy chair. The ratty one I snatch singles out of.

My heart starts pounding. What is he doing? I park my bike out of his line of sight and watch him from an angle. I crouch that way for ten minutes, heart pounding, my breath condensing in the cold air.

Finally, I can’t take it anymore. I march across the street and push the door to the coffee shop so hard that it slams against the wall.

My father looks up, shocked, and closes his book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Reading,” he says.

“I can see you’re reading. I mean, why aren’t you working?”

“I . . . I couldn’t go.”

“What does that mean, you couldn’t go? Did you get fired or something?”

“No, I didn’t get fired. I just couldn’t make myself . . . I couldn’t go.”

“I don’t understand what that means.” I can’t believe he’s speaking so softly.

He glances sideways at the floor. “No, you wouldn’t understand.”

“How can you just not go to work?”

“I go. I just couldn’t go today. I just wanted to . . .”

“You wanted to what?”

“I don’t know how to explain it to you.”

“Explain what? Explain that you’re lazy? And selfish? Jose needs clothes besides those hideous hand-me-downs that people give us. I need money for school. We need food besides lentils.”

“Your mother seems to be figuring all that out.”

“Is that what this is? Because she’s working? Or have you been doing this for a long time? Is this why we’re always getting kicked out of our apartments?” I point to his book like it’s dirty. I notice it’s from the library. He probably couldn’t afford to buy it if he wanted to.

Normally if I talked to him like this we’d be three smacks in by now. But I’m towering over him and he looks tired.

“Are you going to tell your mother?” he asks.

“Am I going to tell her what? That you’re a coward? That you’re sitting here in a coffee shop reading instead of hustling and building a future for us?”

“That’s all done now. You’ve got to figure out your own future.”

It knocks the wind out of me—not that I’m on my own, but that he knows it, too.

I fish around for the most hurtful thing I can think of. I don’t come up with much. “I wish you’d had the imagination to at least be at a bar. But you’re sitting here .

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