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My father, I’m told, was an engineer at a nuclear power plant.
One night, my pregnant mother came home from the hotel, fingernails blue with cleaning solution, to find her boyfriend swearing under his breath, an open suitcase of shirts and slacks on the kitchen floor of their apartment. At times my mother tells of screams, other times kisses on her swollen belly. In any case, my father had been selected by a government agency for confidential work — he would try to help her citizenship case but he had no clue when he would be back. Mid-sentence, he left.
My mother dumped his ashtray onto the conveyor belt he had invented for trash. She laid, on the sofa he had upholstered to change colors based on occupant’s mood, and sobbed into the purple-black pillow, its voice box asking if she would like to make a call to a loved one. She called her sister Mona, who in minutes was filling countless bags with my father’s inventions and tossing them into the alley, including one prototype my mother had never seen — a metal box with a big red button, the words ‘for my son’ printed on it.
My tía Mona tells me to this day that my father was a liar who left because of cowardice, not a silly job. When I say he might still be in deep cover, she groans into the phone and says her favorite phrase: “no inventes.” Don’t lie — literally, do not invent. If that were true, her sister would have her papers by now. My mother still works the skin of her hands to leather for less than minimum wage.
The last time I stopped by my mom’s place for coffee, she asked how my writing was going. I meant to ask her permission to pull from the secrets of my father’s that she’d told me growing up, but as usual, we talked for hours, carried away with stories and tangents of stories. So — hi, Mom! Hola, Mona!
Perdón, Papa.
I’m sorry to tell the world you were a deadbeat, but I had to invent a big red button of my own.
