Free Every Step You Take by Jock Soto

that Pop had never told Grandma Margo and Don Lolo that I was gay. It was the first time they had seen me since I was a young kid, and they kept asking me why I didn’t have a family yet. I kept waiting for Pop to explain—but he never said a thing.
    Another topic that was never discussed in our house during my Paradise Valley years was where my father disappeared to every Saturday night. Almost every week during the years when I was ages five to ten, in the late afternoon or early evening on Saturdays, my father would start his weekly ritual. He would shower and shave and put on his nicest clothes, whistling and singing all the while, and then dab a little fragrant cologne on his cheeks. Throughout these ablutions my mother and Kiko and I would snuggle together on the sofa, watching Pop get himself all snappy, and getting ready for our own evening of watching television together. Sometimes, after he had dressed but before putting his shoes and socks on, my father would call my mother over and she would kneel down and clip his toenails for him. When he was all dressed and groomed, Pop would say good-bye and leave. This was the ritual every weekend, and to Kiko and me it seemed to be a pretty happy ritual, especially since every Sunday when Pop came home again we would all pile into his 1965 white Cadillac convertible with the ruby-red interior and go on a big family picnic. We would head out into the desert with the top down and the wind blowing through our hair. Kiko and I would sip Cokes in the backseat and sing along to the Eagles at top volume when it was our turn to pick the music, while Mom and Pop drank their tomato-juice-and-beer in the front seat. Pop would salsa dance with the steering wheel when it was his turn; Mom, seated beside him and wearing her trademark scarf and wide-brimmed hat and oversize sunglasses, resembled a Native American Audrey Hepburn. We would cruise across the hot desert toward Oak Creek Canyon, where we would pick a roadside picnic spot at random—it didn’t really matter where we stopped. The point was the four of us were all there together, on a Sunday family picnic adventure.
    As far as I knew, every pop in Arizona left home on Saturday night and then came home on Sunday to take his family on a splendid picnic. At the time it would never have occurred to me that my father was going to spend the night with another woman, and even now, as I write this I can’t understand how my mother could abide such behavior for as many years as she did. The whole situation came to an ugly head one Christmas Day when I was ten. Kiko and I were out riding our bicycles around Paradise Valley when we saw our father’s Cadillac cruising toward us. Everyone in our neighborhood knew his car—Pop was so proud of it, and we were always proud, too, whenever he drove up in it to pick us up from school. Now he was approaching us in his fabulous car, and as he came to a stop we peered inside.
    â€œSay hello to your brother Charles,” my father said as he pointed to a little boy sitting next to him. Kiko and I looked at each other. We both knew about our half brother Mac Joe from Philadelphia, because he had come to stay with us briefly a few years earlier. He was a strange boy who one day during his visit had wrapped his arms around me and sucked on my neck in order, I now understand, to give me a hickey. But the boy in the car was not Mac Joe. “That’s not our brother,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief. And then Pop took off, heading for our house.
    Kiko and I sped home as fast as we could on our bikes, and got there just in time to see Pop and the boy called Charles getting back into the car. It had been only a couple of minutes. As they drove off, we ran in to find our mother, but she wasn’t in the house. We started racing around the neighborhood, shouting her name, desperate to find her. After searching and searching, we finally found Mom. She was sitting,