It's Not Love, It's Just Paris Read Free Page A

of telenovela escandaloso, but they fell in love and my mother became pregnant. She didn’t have the nerve to tell the nuns, so she just ran away with my father, whose name is Beto, leaving a note for the nuns confessing everything. He had a dream to get them both to the United States, where he heard poor people had more of a chance. It took them a while to find a way out of the country, but a rich guy whose window bars he installed had prize Doberman puppies that needed escorts for their emigration to New York. My father begged for the job. The rich guy had friends in high places who could take care of the passports, but neither of my parents had last names, so my father went back to the church where he’d spent his urchin years and a young priest agreed to marry him and my mother and sign a document vouching for their existence. That’s when my parents picked out their own last name: del Cielo, because they figured the only father they had now was God.
    The only sad part is that their baby was born dead. They called her Eden. Years later, my parents took us back to Colombia to visit the nuns and show them their young family. Mami had been writing them for years, first about her new life in Los Estados and the three children that were born there. We went out to the convent garden where my parents met and had an improvised funeral for Eden. I was only five and didn’t realize what was going on until the MotherSuperior put a thin gold chain around my neck that she said had been meant for Eden, who was now my spirit sister. I wore it until it broke off a few years ago and my mother placed it in a special rosewood box beside her bed, next to her altar of favorite saints.
    I can tell you all about the Great American Crossover because my parents never shut up about the early days. How they made it to JFK Airport, delivered the puppies, and Papi called a Jackson Heights connection provided by Santiago who found him a job sweeping in a warehouse, and one for Mami cleaning bathrooms at an elementary school. She’d been teaching my father to read Spanish, but now they had to start from nothing and learn English together. You’d never know it, because my father hardly has an accent now. Of course it wasn’t always this way. As Papi says, all of us are living many lives at once.
    My father also says that every person gets a vision once in their life that holds the key to their future. I know it sounds like Disney talk but he swears by it and says that after a year as a Queens janitor he dreamed about the day his father left him at the park, saw his weathered crying face, and heard him sob, “Perdoname, hijo, perdoname,” because his father had six other kids and was ashamed he couldn’t afford to feed them all. He handed Papi the pack of arepas saying, “This will help you fight the hunger for a while.”
    Papi shook my mother awake.
    “Caridad, we’re going to start an arepa factory!”
    It sounds funny now. And when business magazines do articles on my father because he’s now known as the King of Latin Foods, they always get a kick out of that anecdote. But it’s true. Papi says arepas, just white corn flour, peasant food, are the heart of any Colombian diet. So my mother started making them and my father started selling them on the streets of Queens during the daylighthours, working the nightshift sweeping. A year later he had enough cash to open a kiosk, and a few years after that, when Papi’s English was good enough, he managed to convince a young banker to give him a loan. With it, they opened their first bakery and then the first factory, which eventually grew to national and now global distribution of all the cornerstones of Latin American household cuisine.
    And my mother? They don’t call her Our Lady of New Jersey for nothing. Since she and my father had it so rough when they landed in the United States, my mother was determined to help out as many new arrivals as she could and word got around. When someone