Free Drown by Junot Díaz

pulled a nail from our wall and punched a dozen holes in each pair, until Rafa cuffed me and said, Enough, you little puto.
    Mami spent a lot of time out of the house, at work or down by the Malecón, where she could watch the waves shred themselves against the rocks, where men offered cigarettes that she smoked quietly. I don’t know how long this went on. Months, maybe three. Then, one morning in early spring, when the amapolas were flushed with their flame leaves, I woke up and found Abuelo alone in the house.
    She’s gone, he said. So cry all you want, malcriado.
    I learned later from Rafa that she was in Ocoa with our tíos.
    Mami’s time away was never discussed, then or now. When she returned to us, five weeks later, she was thinner and darker and her hands were heavy with calluses. She looked younger, like the girl who had arrived in Santo Domingo fifteen years before, burning to be married. Her friends came and sat and talked and when Papi’s name was mentioned her eyes dimmed and when his name left, the darkness of her ojos returned and she would laugh, a small personal thunder that cleared the air.
    She didn’t treat me badly on her return but we were no longer as close; she did not call me her Prieto or bring me chocolates from her work. That seemed to suit her fine. And I was young enough to grow out of her rejection. I still had baseball and my brother. I still had trees to climb and lizards to tear apart.
     
    5.
     
    The week after the letter came I watched her from my trees. She ironed cheese sandwiches in paper bags for our lunch, boiled platanos for our dinner. Our dirty clothes were pounded clean in the concrete trough on the side of the outhouse. Every time she thought I was scrabbling too high in the branches she called me back to the ground. You ain’t Spiderman, you know, she said, rapping the top of my head with her knuckles. On the afternoons that Wilfredo’s father came over to play dominos and talk politics, she sat with him and Abuelo and laughed at their campo stories. She seemed more normal to me but I was careful not to provoke her. There was still something volcanic about the way she held herself.
    On Saturday a late hurricane passed close to the Capital and the next day folks were talking about how high the waves were down by the Malecón. Some children had been lost, swept out to sea and Abuelo shook his head when he heard the news. You’d think the sea would be sick of us by now, he said.
    That Sunday Mami gathered us on the back patio. We’re taking a day off, she announced. A day for us as a family.
    We don’t need a day off, I said and Rafa hit me harder than normal.
    Shut up, OK?
    I tried to hit him back but Abuelo grabbed us both by the arm. Don’t make me have to crack your heads open, he said.
    She dressed and put her hair up and even paid for a concho instead of crowding us into an autobus. The driver actually wiped the seats down with a towel while we waited and I said to him, It don’t look dirty, and he said, Believe me, muchacho, it is. Mami looked beautiful and many of the men she passed wanted to know where she was heading. We couldn’t afford it but she paid for a movie anyway. The Five Deadly Venoms. Kung fu movies were the only ones the theaters played in those days. I sat between Mami and Abuelo. Rafa moved to the back, joining a group of boys who were smoking, and arguing with them about some baseball player on Licey.
    After the show Mami bought us flavored ices and while we ate them we watched the salamanders crawling around on the searocks. The waves were tremendous and some parts of George Washington were flooded and cars were churning through the water slowly.
    A man in a red guayabera stopped by us. He lit a cigarette and turned to my mother, his collar turned up by the wind. So where are you from?
    Santiago, she answered.
    Rafa snorted.
    You must be visiting relatives then.
    Yes, she said. My husband’s family.
    He nodded. He was dark-skinned, with