Keeping On

I actually have a pretty huge family. Most of the time it’s just me and my dad, but our family tree is spread across the east coast, which is a little odd. My dad has two older brothers, Carlos and Miguel Olayos, and they live over in Indianapolis. For Thanksgiving in 2009, we drove there and spent a few nights in a hotel. Dad’s parents even flew up from Orlando, and I don’t think I’d ever seen so many people crammed into one house.

I was fifteen at the time, and I still didn’t quite know how to act in crowds without Tegan. If we were at a concert or a packed school event, she was always by my side, but in this situation, I was isolated. Even my dad was sucked into a bilingual conversation with his brothers, who seemed to be joking around with him like we lived right down the road from each other.

Being fifteen and an only child, I was one of the youngest people in the house. My dad’s brothers were at least seven years older than him, so their kids were already college-aged. In fact, one of them already had a kid: a four-year-old girl named Adela, who was definitely the youngest person there.

But her parents were sitting and drinking in the living room, and I was stuck on a sofa, twiddling my thumbs and dodging questions from people I barely knew. Naturally, toddlers look all over for someone to latch onto.

That someone was me, eventually. She walked right up to me and asked who I was, I said I was her second cousin, she tilted her head and blinked. Then she asked me if I wanted to play.

I didn’t know what “play” meant to a four-year-old girl, but eventually I got the idea.

She dragged me into her room, since her parents lived there with my uncle, and then she brought out a box of dolls. She picked one, an old Barbie doll that was going bald; I grabbed a knockoff Ken doll. And I didn’t know her for a hole in the ground, but she didn’t care, since we just played with the dolls for a good half an hour.

Adela laughed at my stupid kid-friendly jokes long after we ate dinner, and after downing too much turkey, she tugged me back into her room.

She put away the dolls, though, and then after digging through her closet, she brought out another box that was filled with cheap nail polish. Grabbing an electric blue bottle, she looked up at me and asked, “Do you wanna paint nails?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I can paint yours, if you want.”

“No, that’s not what I mean, tonto,” she stuck her tongue out. “I wanna paint your nails. I’m real good at it.”

I scrambled for an excuse; I was already stuffing myself into skinny jeans and wearing headbands. The last thing I needed was a manicure to make myself an even bigger target for snickers in the hallway. “But I’m a boy,” I bargained.

“So? Boys can paint their nails too,” Adela shrugged. “Mi mamá told me so.”

Resistance was futile. I gave in, and then eventually I had bright blue fingernails that would stand out from a mile away. I just figured that I could scrub it all off when I got home after quickly explaining to my dad what had happened; he’d chalk it up to Adela being a little kid. Nothing would happen. Smooth sailing.

Well, at least until Adela’s grandpa – Dad’s brother Carlos – swung the door open to tell Adela to get ready for bed. It was nearing ten at night, after all.

He took a look at what we were doing, glancing at my hands, and you’d think I was teaching her every swear word under the sun with the way he glared at me.

“Adela, go to bed,” he said through narrow lips. With his furrowed brow, he looked nothing like my dad. “Oshie, come out here.”

Even though it was just a few words, I took them to heart and jumped off Adela’s bed, not even looking back. Carlos was several steps in front of me, already racing over to my dad, and when I saw the living room again, I saw Carlos towering over him.

“I didn’t know you were raising a little puto, Joshua!” he hissed, a cackle in his beer-soaked throat.

I clenched my fists – not out of violence, but to hide the color in my fingernails. Eyes were turning to me instead of the scene happening right outside the living room. All the attention on me, the only child of Joshua, the Olayos widow and the youngest of his generation. I could see it. They knew something wasn’t “right” with me.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dad said back firmly, clutching a Coke bottle in his dry hands. The anger returned to his stance, the same anger I saw just a few years ago when I spilled the Legos on the floor.

Miguel, his other brother, peeked his head up over the back of the couch to look at me. I could feel everybody trying to pick out one specific thing that made me stand out then of all times, and then I realized that I didn’t tuck my thumb into my fist. Miguel saw the electric blue that shocked everybody in the room.

“He let Adela paint his nails!” Miguel laughed rudely, slapping a hand over his eyes. “He can’t stand up to a little girl, and he lets her do that!”

“Well, what would you have liked him to do in that situation, huh?” Dad pressed on, glaring at the family that was now hiding their laughter. “Would you rather him say no and crush her? Or maybe he should have yelled at her for suggesting such a thing. Would that be better?”

“God didn’t leave you here to raise a faggot son, hermano,” Carlos grimaced.

The words slapped Dad so hard that even I felt it. Suddenly, things got way more serious, and me and him locked eyes for the first time during that exchange. There was fire behind the mask.

“Listen,” he began, adjusting his stance to seem taller. “Letting Adela do that does not make Oshie gay. And even if it did, who fucking cares? I do not care, and neither should you! Why does it matter?”

The silence after he said it all was too eerie to put into words.

Nobody spoke up, nobody objected, and nobody agreed. Dad took a look around the room, at the house where we were supposed to feel welcome. We were meant to be among family, the same people who mourned my mother with us, the same people who sent us gifts every Christmas because they knew that there was only two of us.

At that moment, I just then realized how desolate it was to just have two of us.

We were not welcome. Not that night, at least, not that Thanksgiving.

Dad stormed out of the house after motioning for me to come along, and we drove back to our hotel in complete silence, save for a Fleetwood Mac song low on the radio. And as we turned into the parking lot, I finally said, “You didn’t have to do that, Dad.”

He turned red for a second and sighed heavily. “I did. I had to stand up to them eventually, mijo. They can make fun of me all they want, but the second they aim for you, I will not stand for it.”

I bit my lip, my braces hooking against my dry skin and peeling a little bit off. “Thanks, papá.”

“Just know that it will never matter to me, who you like. That kind of thing is not important. What matters is that you are happy,” he repeated, patting my shoulder with a genuine smile.

I smiled back, just as he turned the car off and the cold air was starting to billow in through the cracks. We rushed back into our hotel room, back into our little makeshift save haven for the moment, thankful to be away from so much stress, if only for a night.

At around midnight, my grandma called Dad to apologize on behalf of his brothers.

It was a Spanish phone call that I didn’t completely understand, but he told me that we could come back that next day and hang out with the family for a little while longer before everybody had to go home. He asked me if I was up for it, and I shrugged. Ultimately it was my choice, according to him.

We ended up going, but there was definitely some tension in the air. I don’t think my dad even spoke to his brothers, though we had a decent time shooting the breeze with our cousins and grandparents. You can’t pick your family, and you can’t always pick your friends, but sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.