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ever said to either of us about sex was that waiting until marriage was stupid and just don’t “get pregnant,” while her only comment about my being gay was that it gave her one less thing to worry about, one less potential disgrace for the family—I wouldn’t bring home a bastard.
    Otherwise, my mom didn’t care about anything. When I was tiny we’d moved to South America, and there, she and my father had split. She brought us back here when I was seven or eight.
    And then? My mom just…broke like a fucking porcelain doll—arms and legs in place, head shattered, only she said it was her heart. I’d always thought it was because my father had remarried and wanted nothing to do with his “old family.” Fuckhead.
    We had moved into her sister’s, my aunt Carolina’s, home, where she and her husband had created an apartment out of the basement for us so we could have our own family unity.
    It was a beautiful place. They’d constructed stairs so we could have our own entrance, enlarged the windows so we’d have plenty of light, and really, we treated the rest of the house as if it was ours too. In fact, my aunt gave us girls our cousin’s old bedroom—but it wasn’t ours, not really, as my mom reminded me and Elena every day.
    “This is not your home, girls,” she’d cry from the sofa as tears streamed down her cheeks, “this is not your station in life.” She’d sob, then sob some more about how one day someone would lift the curse they’d placed on her life.
    And despite the light and the room and the unconditional and unquestioning love that my aunt and uncle and cousins gave us, all my mom did was lie on the sofa all day with the shades drawn. Some days she didn’t bother to dress at all because she had headaches, her chest hurt, she had “too many troubles.”
    Oh, she had her moments, great ones, like when Elena broke her ankle playing in the schoolyard and my mother not only made sure Elena was well taken care of, but also somehow managed to convince the board to replace the old steel climbers with newer, safer construction and to lay rubber tiles on the tarmac. And the time a teacher unjustly gave me a detention and then lied to my mother, who pulled me out of school until he was removed from teaching.
    She even belonged to some international legal association that asked her to come and speak from time to time, and on those days my mother shone. But really, all she wanted was to be brought back to her “place in life,” her proper station, back to the respect she’d had as a prosecuting attorney, then later as a judge, and the inheritance that waited for the family back in South America.
    She hated that I was becoming an emergency medical technician. Why couldn’t I be more like my cousin who had gotten scholarships everywhere? Why couldn’t I just go straight to medical school? My cousin could have if she had wanted to, or so my mom had told me more times than I could count, but instead, she’d started a very successful record label. At least, my mom said, my cousin knew her place in life, what she should be.
    I sighed and shook my head. If I didn’t work, who’d support my mom and my sister? And yeah, my grades were decent enough, but not enough for a scholarship—how could I get a scholarship if I didn’t have time to study because I had to work? I was trying, that was for sure…
    Fuck that for now, though, I thought as I checked myself in the hall mirror one last time. Everyone, the whole family, would be there tonight, and for at least one night, my mom would feel okay. She was great at these social occasions, situations where she felt she was again in “her place,” the guest of honor. I suppose it reminded her of who she’d been in South America—known to the politicians, feared by drug cartels, and loved by the poor and the underclass.

    *

    The car was waiting for us when we came out of the apartment building—nothing ostentatious, but definitely a nice black sedan