I didn’t know he was still in there. Thought you got him out a long time ago.
I quit mourning real fast, but that was because I was so angry and hurt by what he did.
Anthony stretched his arms out over his head. He didn’t have much yet in the way of biceps, but his chest looked fuller and less boyish than it did before he started training. You wouldn’t feel hurt if you didn’t still care about him, he said. It’s the way we were created. Everyone wants to be loved by their fathers and by God. Can’t fight the human condition.
I can harden my heart, I said. Same as how you’re working to make your body tougher.
Yeah, I guess you could.
I’ve already made progress. When we first met, I could hardly stand to look at you, because you have his eyes. Now they don’t bother me a bit.
His arms fell down at his sides. He looked at me and seemed on the verge of laughing, though his lips never cracked a full smile. I really do, don’t I? Have his eyes?
Of course you do. Why would you think otherwise?
Dad never said they looked the same, and mom’s color blind so she can’t tell. I always thought we had the same eyes ever since I was little, but no one ever came out and said it, so I wasn’t sure if I was right. I used to look at myself in the mirror and try to remember what he looked like. That was when I was eight or nine. Six months felt like forever then.
They always felt long. His away stretches.
That’s why even now I don’t mind the winter, or the hottest days of summer. Because he used to come home in January and July. We always had new clothes, toys, and Chinese food around those times.
As I listened, I tried not to show how this new bit of information made me feel. I must not have been doing a very good job, cause right away he shot me a concerned look. January and July, I said. Funny. We usually saw him around March and September. Right as the cold was dying off, and right as the heat was fading.
I never thought about that, he said. Guess he must’ve had a whole schedule mapped out for when he would visit each family.
It’s time to be honest with ourselves, I said. His being on the road all the time was never about making money or improving our lives. He just had a lot of families and farms to manage, and needed to ration the time he spent with us.
Anthony put his heels up on the bench and stared down at the soggied laces of his wrestling sneakers. He didn’t say anything for a while, and neither did I, and in our silence the steady thumping of feet on the track seemed amplified to an absurd degree. I thought you weren’t angry at him anymore, he said finally. What happened to getting him out of your head?
I don’t feel anything about it either way, I lied. I’m just stating a fact.
Yeah, well, let’s see how you feel come March. This’ll be your first spring without anything to look forward to.
I’ll be fine. He gave terrible presents anyway.
Anthony smiled and nodded his head, and just like that I had confirmation that Daddy had been as thoughtless with his other kids’ gifts as he’d been with ours. The more stuff I found in common between me and my siblings, the sadder I felt for us all. What Anthony was going through was enough to break your heart all on its own. He really seemed to believe that, somewhere up there, God was looking down and taking stock of everything he did. And even if he believed, as Claudia did, that our father had been damned to the flames of hell, I’m sure there was a part of him that believed Daddy was somehow able to sit in judgment of him as well.
When the PE class had finished, Anthony bolted upright and commenced to sprinting around the track in full gear as a warm-up for his practice. I stayed and watched him as long as I could, until the clouds broke open and a cold rain began to fall. He was still running when I left.
As expected, March came and went without any of the fanfare of previous years, without any of the cooking, cleaning, and anticipation that Daddy’s arrival had provoked in our old way of life. I warned Jessie and Gracie not to let their disappointment show, lest they make Mama and the other mothers feel bad. Forget about how things used to be, I told them. We’ve got new things to worry about now. Which was true. The worst frost on record had left Tulare County bleak and neglected. The last of our neighbors finally cashed out, and we found ourselves with unoccupied parcels bordering three of the four sides of our property. We joked that, if we wanted to, we could buy up more and more land until our cooperative had consumed the entire county. Then we could rename the towns and landmarks any way we liked. Temple City. Mount Dawn. The Gracie River. We joked about it, but there was no money for land, or even to begin construction on the third house like we planned. Until the summer harvest came in, money would continue to go out, and the vastest empire we could hope for was a full dinner table.
Day by day the weather turned hotter, and slowly the state laborers returned to the area. Dale cut the scabs down to a skeleton crew and prepared for the blossom season and the constant irrigation and pesticide spraying that would accompany it. All across the valley things were starting to pick up even as rumors began to fly from the mouths of farmer and worker alike, whispers of trouble on the coast and big changes in Sacramento. Anyone with any connection at all to the ag bureau suddenly became an expert on California farming politics. They all claimed that something big was coming down the pipeline in Congress, though not a one of them was clear on the details. The TV news, meanwhile, started carrying reports of strange insects from Asia contaminating local orchards, forcing already struggling parcelites to quarantine and destroy hundreds of acres of trees before the first nectarine could begin to swell. Other stations pointed to low levels at the national aquifers and prophesized a summer of water rationing and withered fruit left to rot on branches. The county slashed prices on parcels for the first time in over a decade, and still the neighboring plots remained unoccupied.
Not even my classmates were oblivious to the fear in the air. To the contrary, we all seemed to internalize our parents’ worries, filling the corridors at school with a morose and nervous atmosphere that made our already stressful days positively nerve-wracking. Most of us found ways to cope with the added anxiety. Others reached their breaking points and never looked back. It seemed like every other day a fight broke out on the quad during lunchtime. The siren would go off and the attendants would usher the whole student body into the classrooms for lockdown. One time we heard police cars coming up the road and by the next day eleven members of the freshman class had been expelled. Another time, on the morning of the national standards test, one of the boys in my exam room started trembling all through his body ten minutes into the first math section. The girl sitting next to him told him to quit it, at which point the boy stood and threw his chair against the wall so hard it left a ten-inch crack in the dry erase board. The proctor ordered us outside, and while we waited for the attendants to contain the boy’s outburst, the sky itself burst open and commenced to pummeling the campus with hail pellets the size of cherry stones. They fell off and on for over an hour, after which the sun came out and the temperature rose to the mid-seventies.
I started playing hooky sometime after Easter vacation. It wasn’t like how it was with the other kids who ditched, who took their cars out for lunch or free period and never came back for the rest of the day. On mornings when I didn’t feel like putting on a show of being alive, I slept late and asked Anthony to pick up my homework. Mama trusted me to do what I needed to do, and anyway, she was the last person to judge someone else for staying in bed all day. I always knew there was a chance I’d start experiencing sad stretches of my own. Fortunately, they didn’t come anywhere close to Mama’s. Most hooky days, in fact, I was up and around before noon, and after lunch I’d head out to the field office to check with Dale on how the spraying and pruning were going. Crazy weather aside, the blossoms were coming in on time, full and fragrant. It was that time of year when the whole valley was in pastels, with mile after mile of trees sporting tiny pink, white, and yellow buds like colored popcorn exploding off the branches. The bees emerged from their winter dormancy and hay fever spread like the plague. That was also the only time of year we saw anything like tourists in the valley, weekend visitors driving in from the coast to gawk at all the pretty flowers, tipping dollar bills to the laborers in exchange for access to the orchards. They wore enormous cameras on straps around their necks and spent hours out there alternating between different sizes of lens. One spring Ruby Mendes and me stumbled upon a pregnant lady standing half-naked between two rows of blooming nectarine trees. She kept one hand over her breasts and held her giant belly with the other as her husband took photos of her from every conceivable angle. Eventually they noticed us spying on them. The lady pulled up her dress and staggered through the soft earth in her flip-flops. The man told us to thank our parents for him, handed us each a stick of gum, and followed his wife to the car.