I needed to quit sex work. It was November, and I had plans with my dad to drive four hours from Denver to Alamosa, Colorado, where my abuela Corina had recently moved into an independent living community. I’d accepted the invitation to join my dad for the weekend, in part because I wanted to see my family, but also because I’d just conceived an exit plan from sugar babying. My new idea was reliant on my dad’s help, or rather, his participation. I needed his approval to buy a life insurance policy on him, something I understood as relative to investing money in the stock market or real estate, except without the risk, and—seeing as life insurance policies were broken down into low monthly payments—something I could afford.
I’d been in the sugaring business for two years, almost exactly. It hadn’t been a bad gig at the start—at twenty-four years old, I’d gone from earning $11 an hour at Whole Foods to making $1,200 for the simple task of giving a man named Jack, my fifty-year-old sugar daddy, weekly blow jobs. But, six months prior, Jack had moved to D.C. for work, and while my pay increased to $5,000 a month (a two-hundred-dollar raise), our hourly motel romps also transformed into whole pilgrimages. I’d fly to D.C. for four long-ass-days, and Jack would pack our afternoons with activities: most to do with national landmarks. This generally meant holding hands in temperatures upwards of 90 degrees, while running out of ways to express just how-fucking-big everything was. In the evenings Jack expected me to have sex with him whenever the urge hit—typically around 8 PM.
However, since the move, Jack had stopped treating our arrangement like, well, the arrangement it was, and instead like a real relationship. In Denver I’d become indifferent to the occasional ‘I love you’ he’d slip in during our motel sessions (usually as he came), but in D.C. he had started to dial the frequency knob all the way up, muttering ‘I love you’ so often I’d made a game of counting how many times Jack said it a day (the record being 64). In the tiny windows between each of these proclamations the room would feel tense, as if even the walls were asking, ‘Well, aren’t you going to say it back?’
At the time of our road trip, my dad lived an hour south from me in Colorado Springs. We’d mapped out the route beforehand. I would drive to pick him up in my gently-used Ford Fiesta, then we’d drive the rest of the way to Alamosa together. My Fiesta was lime green, adorable, had impeccable mileage, and was also the first car I’d owned which started each time I’d turn the key. This was all thanks to Jack.
When I pulled into the driveway of his single-story house, my father was waiting out front. A camo backpack, two sleeping bags, and a share-size bag of early stocked Christmas candies at his feet.
“Are you planning on eating two pounds of chocolate over the weekend?” I asked him, hopping out of my car and popping the trunk.
My dad’s black hair was combed back and set in place with water. Even in his late 50s, his hair had never grayed. Allegedly this had been a cause for concern on his Match.com profile. ‘Every time I have a date, women think I’m lying about dying my hair,’ he’d told me once. ‘Why would I lie about my hair? If I was going to lie about anything, I’d say I was rich.’ His jeans were being held up by a belt that was a shoe string.
“The candies are for Cora,” he said, tossing the bags in the trunk. “She loves sugar.”
We climbed into the car. I settled into the passenger side, while my dad shoved the driver’s seat back, and adjusted all my mirrors, leaving a smudge from his thumb on the rearview. My dad made a living driving trucks, and refused to be a ride along passenger. ‘Let the professional handle it,’ he’d say. Before turning the engine, my dad stopped himself. “I feel like I’m forgetting something.” I watched him pat at his jacket. Something crinkled. “Ah-ha.” He pulled a baggie of salted sunflower seeds and two loose oatmeal raisin cookies from his pocket. After flicking off a piece of lint, he handed me the smaller one, saying, “Uno para ti, uno para mi.”
While my father and I spoke on the phone nearly every day, we only saw one another in person about once a month. Whenever I was around him, his charisma would swoon me and I’d swell with a kind of love that felt childish. As if my affection itself were a toddler on a swing set, flailing its arms, ‘look at me, papa! look at me!’
“I’ve decided to quit sugar babying,” I said, as my dad merged onto the highway.
My dad had known about Jack from the start—my whole family had. Ours was not the kind of family that kept secrets. Nor were we the kind of family that had boundaries. My parents’ version of raising children was making ‘legal guardian’ synonymous with ‘friend’ and that above all else, I had my own free will. When I’d first told my dad about sugar babying his questions were simple: So, you’re really going to be a prostitute? How much money are you making? Are you still gay? This mirrored the frankness and simplicity of the questions he’d asked me when I first came out to him: Is scissoring real?
While my dad settled into the flow of traffic, I told him about a new development in my arrangement: Jack’s repeat marriage proposals. Proposals sounds more romantic than they were; these were more like business deals. The first time Jack made his offer, we were sat on a restaurant patio, tearing off corners of thick pita bread and running them through a saucer of hummus. The café was tucked inside one of those outdoor shopping centers; shrieking children tossed pennies into a mammoth water fountain. ‘Our marriage,’ Jack said, ‘would be full of perks, and not only for you, but for your whole family.’ He listed off the possibilities like a game show host: Just imagine—your own house! (‘if you don’t want to share with me.’) And a house where your family would be permitted to live, too! And let’s not forget yearly vacations—anywhere you want to go! Five-star hotels, daily excursions, couples’ massages!
I’d said no, but, to Jack, this only registered as, ‘convince me.’ Every time the wheels of my Southwest flight touched the tarmac in D.C., Jack’s marriage deal would have ripened: he would pay me an extra salary to write my stories; he’d open up a college fund for my nephew; he’d cover the tuition for my sister to go to a trade school; my mother could actually retire.
Earlier that year, in April, I’d mentioned to Jack that my mom’s retirement plan was to die at work. I’d sold Jack the sob-story just hoping he might offer to treat my family to dinner at Red Robin for my mom’s birthday.
She’s sad, I’d texted Jack; my mom sitting beside me on the couch. She’d granted permission to milk him at her expense. Anyone else turning fifty-eight could mark one year closer to retirement, but for her it only marks one day closer to the grave. : (
While I’d gotten used to trying to manipulate Jack with mine and my family’s poverty, I was unprepared for his using my mother’s status to manipulate me, too. The last time I boarded a plane out of D.C.—two weeks before the trip with my dad—I no longer knew whether or not I could keep saying no. As the carrots Jack dangled grew more and more generous, I was beginning to feel guilty. Wouldn’t I be doing a disservice to my entire family by saying no? Even if it meant I could never have real love or build a life for myself. On the flight home, I sensed I had two options: I either walked away from sugar babying while I still had my senses, or I’d eventually succumb to Jack’s offer.
Jack never roped my dad into his marriage proposals. I speculated this was because my father was the most financially secure of my family. While my dad resided in his own one-bedroom home, I slept on the couch in my mom’s two-bedroom apartment (where my sister and nephew lived too). My father paid a mortgage, whereas my mom paid rent. But even in a better financial situation than the rest of us, my dad earned a living driving goods for Walgreens. While he’d avoided living in debt, he didn’t have any money to spare.
“Have you told your mom about any of this?” my dad asked.
I shook my head, no.
My dad’s finical stability was also what allowed me to speak openly with him about my arrangement. I’d evaded telling my mom about Jack’s all-inclusive marriage proposals because they had been specifically crafted to benefit her.
“Just imagine the look on her face if I’d said the words: big house, retirement, college funds!” I said. My mother’s green eyes would light up like the tail end of a firefly, just to dim down again when I crushed the only realistic dream she could have of property ownership and escaping her front desk job.
“Your mom is a grown woman,” my dad said. “She’s been getting AARP subscriptions for years. She can take care of herself.”
I nodded, but couldn’t escape the sensation that my family’s life trajectory was the Titanic and, while helping myself to a lifeboat, I was flipping them the bird.
“Shell, listen, I spent twenty-seven years trying to help your mom grow up,” my dad said. This was at least partially true. He had tried helping my mother learn how to budget; how to live within her means; how to file her taxes. But even with his guidance, two issues prevailed: my mom’s hourly wage was half that of my dad’s, and she had a full-blown addiction to food and especially McDonalds: one she’d had to support with high-interest credit cards. My father learned the depth of my mom’s fast-food spending right before their divorce, after stumbling upon her Target and Discover card statements. My mother had nothing to show for her debt aside from twenty or so spare pounds, stored mostly around the midsection.
“You’re doing the right thing,” my dad said. “Bueno, Shell. Muy bueno.”
“So, what’re you gonna do now?” my dad asked, meaning what kind of job did I plan on getting.
“I’m glad you asked,” I said, turning my body in my seat so I could really look at him. “I was wondering if I could take out a life insurance policy on you?”
At the start of my sugar babying arrangement I’d prepared a list of financial goals: fill my cavities, get an eye exam and glasses, buy a car that had less than 245,000 miles on it, pay off my student loan debt, and save $10,000 for my future, which I had felt, at the time, was enough to stretch across my whole future. Over two years I’d been a sex worker, I’d checked every objective off. But now that I’d had the ten thousand dollars, I needed to figure out what to do with it.
Early on, Jack told me that the best way to make-money-from-money was either investing in the stock market or real estate. While owning property sounded simple enough, I couldn’t buy a house without first being approved for a loan. This would’ve required my having held down a job for at least two years, and, though I had, sugar babying wasn’t exactly observed by the IRS. Even if a loan could’ve been worked out, there still would’ve been potential risks: what if the house had a leaky ceiling? Or the furnace went out? How would I afford to fix anything? With my ten thousand dollars allocated and spent, my bank account would quickly return to zero.
The stock market, too, proved problematic. I knew nothing about how it worked, and couldn’t seem to grasp the rules even after Jack tried over and over again to explain them to me. Once in D.C., he’d set up our laptops at his kitchen table and walked me through opening a Vanguard account. ‘What will happen to the money?’ I’d asked Jack. ‘It’ll accrue value over the years,’ he said. ‘You have to just put it in there and forget about it.’ Jack didn’t understand that what he often referred to as my ‘nest egg’ was everything I had. Not only the building blocks for my future, but also my safety net. What I needed was a way to grow my money, while never losing access to it.
The life insurance swindle wasn’t all my idea. I’d been inspired by Dr. C, my English professor. Dr. C had made an off-hand remark in lecture that when he died, his son would inherit one million dollars from life insurance policies.
Policies, as in plural. One through the University, he explained, and the other two he’d purchased through private companies. After class I hovered around until everyone left, so I could ask Dr. C if these million-dollar policies were something anyone could sign up for.
“My parents don’t have the money to do this for me,” I’d said. “But, what if I just bought policies myself?”
“Well, you can ask your parents if they’d be nice enough to let you buy a policy on them,” he explained. “But they’ve got to know about it. They’ll have to pretend they’re the ones who got it on themselves.”
What made life insurance policies the best option was that monthly premium. I’d be able to allocate my ‘nest egg’ to a separate account, and set up recurrent payments for X-amount of years. I wouldn’t lose the lump sum, meaning I could always access what remained of my savings. I only had to hope, that by the time my account sank to zero, someone would’ve died to replenish it.
My dad took no pause at all. He spit out a sunflower shell and said, “Sure, but you know I’m not going to die anytime soon.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s not for now anyway. It’s like my retirement fund.”
My dad’s own retirement plan was bleak, not as bleak as my mom’s, but still, bleak. It involved trusting he never fell ill, so he could live twenty-plus-years without health insurance, and that his truck would run for roughly 325,000 more miles.
I mentioned Dr. C, and his son’s impending one million. My dad’s already-big eyes widened. I imagined if I saw him head on, he’d look fucking nuts.
“Holy smokes,” my dad said, then retreated into himself like a turtle. He was thinking.
All around us was pastureland. All of it the color of sand. We passed two horses, and then two more.
“Mira, caballos,” I said. I’d been practicing Spanish on my Duolingo app.
“It’s the right word,” my dad said, “but you sound white when you say it.”
“I am white,” I reminded him. I didn’t inherit my dad’s black hair or tan skin, and upon first glance, we didn't look like we belonged to one another. When I was younger I would use my pale skin to hurt his feelings, crying, ‘I’m probably not even your kid.’ The last time I said this I was ten. ‘You really think you’re not mine?’ he asked. The corners of his lips drooped. I would learn much later in life that my abuelo suspected my father wasn’t his son, and that he’d punished my dad for it growing up: with silence, with making him work harder, with never loving him enough. In the car I added, “Just as much as I’m Chicana.” Of course, I was his.
“You know, Shell, I’ve been thinking.” My dad sounded like he’d been gnawing over his proposition for a few days rather than just a few minutes. “Life insurance policies aren’t cheap. ‘Specially if you want a high payout.”
I nodded. I didn’t know this. I hadn’t done any research.
“I think you need a partner. Someone to split the costs with.”
My plan had always been to get two policies. One on my dad, the other on my mom, who I saw as an exceptional candidate. Her fast food addiction had resulted in her having a cocktail of diseases: type two diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
“You want to split a policy on Mom?”
“Well, yeah, but not right now,” he said. “Your mom isn’t in the best health, but she’s only, what, 58? I bet she’s got more than 20 years still left on her. Just think about Shirley.”
Shirley was my maternal grandmother. She had survived six heart attacks and four strokes, even legally dying once before doctors brought her back to life. Grandma Shirley had all the same diseases my mom, plus dementia, and she lived until nearly 80.
“People don’t just die from being sick anymore,” my dad said. “Modern day medicine prevents it. By the time me or your mom dies you’re going to be an old woman yourself.”
“What are you trying to say?” I asked.
“I think we should start with a policy on Corina.”
What we didn’t know then, but should’ve been able to guess, was that Cora was already too old to qualify for a life insurance policy. She’d surpassed the cutoff six birthdays prior. But, at first mention, I’d thought it ingenious. As we drove further and further south, my dad and I developed a plan: we would go half-sies on a moderate policy for my abuela. After she died and the check arrived in the mail, we’d use the money to invest in a larger policy on my mom (presuming she’d die first), and then I would use the profit from my mom’s passing to buy a million-dollar policy on my father.
For the next hour of the drive, my dad and I played a game called: How I’ll Spend the Money I Made Off My Dead Mother.
“I’m going to get a little piece of land in San Luis,” my dad said. This was where he’d grown up. “And I’m going to get miniature goats and pigs to live there with me.”
“I’m going to buy a nice condo with mom’s policy, and then when you die, I’ll rent the condo out and buy a house with a yard,” I said. “Do you think Cora will agree to it?”
“I don’t see why not,” my dad said. “Everyone has to die. It won’t even affect her.”
I shrugged. “I guess you’re right. I just don’t want to hurt her feelings.”
My dad turned his face to me. “Do you think Cora is made of sugar?”
Saying someone was made of sugar was calling them a weak, little crybaby. Growing up, my dad often insinuated that I must’ve been made out of sugar myself. ‘I don’t want to go to school tomorrow!’ I’d once said in elementary school. It was a Sunday night. My dad and I were staying up to watch the X-Files. ‘My throat hurts.’
‘Since when has a sore throat ever gotten in the way of doing school work? You don’t read with your throat,’ he’d said. ‘Unless you’re made out of sugar.’
‘Look, if you don’t make me go to school tomorrow, I can watch TV with you all night.’
This turned into a familiar lecture. ‘When I was your age I begged my dad to let me go to school, but you know what I had to do instead?’
‘Work,’ I said. I was nine years old, and threw my head back into the couch cushions. I’d heard this a million times.
‘Not just work, Shell, pick goddamn potatoes. I wish I could’ve gone to school.’ As a child and eventually a teen, my dad worked alongside his five siblings and parents on migrant farms in Idaho. His father would pluck all the kids from school as soon as harvesting season began, and they wouldn’t return until the work was done. Once, the principal had even pleaded with my grandfather not to take them out of school. He replied they needed the money. ‘All my report cards had I’s on them,’ my dad would tell me.
Like my dad, my abuela Corina was not made out of sugar. In fact, sugar wasn’t even an ingredient. Cora didn’t give hugs or bake cookies or say much of anything other than, ‘tu es gordita,’ but this was nothing personal, my dad had told me—as she’d never said she loved him either, nor happy birthday—even as a little girl, her nickname had been ‘media Corina.’ Mean Corina.
‘It’s not even inventive,’ my dad had said. ‘That’s how you know it’s the truth.’
All this to justify that my grandma wasn’t someone who’d feel sorry for herself for having to die. Plus, it wouldn’t be a sensitive subject, my dad assured. “She’s not dying anytime soon,” he said. “Cora is mean as a snake, but healthy as a horse.”
A few hours later my Grandma Cora opened the front door of her new apartment. “Tu estas muy gordita, Mom,” my dad said, as he pushed the door open with his shoulder. His hands full of our luggage, while I carried both sleeping bags. “Are you just sitting around eating all day, or what?”
Stepping aside, my grandma started to laugh. “Ee, no se. I’m never hungry.” Her mouth was full of an ice cream sandwich. I tottered inside to find all the furniture from the old ranch had been packed up and unloaded in her new living room: two chairs, with wooden armrests that my cousins and I’d carved our names into, sat on either side of her sunken sofa. My dad chucked everything onto the living room floor, where we’d be sleeping.
“Well, Cora,” he said, “Aren’t you gonna give us a tour?”
My grandma’s apartment comprised 600 square feet. It held a bedroom, a bathroom, a little kitchenette and a living room. As she walked us the five steps from her bedroom to the kitchen, I took stock of her: my grandma was chubby, but not too chubby. Her lips and nails were both painted fire-truck red. It occurred to me that I’d never seen her without lipstick. In the years to come—after she would suffer a stroke, rendering her unable to apply makeup herself—someone, either my aunts or cousins, would color her lips red first thing in the morning. It was a part of who she was.
In the kitchen, my dad opened the freezer. We both poked our heads inside to find nothing but stacked boxes of ice cream sandwiches. The fridge was crammed with canned sodas, chiles, beans, eggs, a brick of cheese, and a cling-film wrapped plate of Thanksgiving leftovers.
My grandma offered us Cokes before we took seats in her living room. The TV was switched on to Telemundo, but no one was watching.
“Vinny was here yesterday,” Cora said. “He has a gringa girlfriend and he told me she has big titties,” Cora mimicked large breasts with her carpal tunneled hands. Vinny was my cousin. “He didn't know how to say, ‘boobs’ in Spanish and I told him, ‘titties.’”
I whispered over to my dad, “Is that correct Spanish?” He shook his head, no.
“Big titties, huh? She sounds awesome.”
“Do you remember his old novia?” Cora asked, “She was short and had big tits tambien. She dances at a club now.”
“Which club?” my dad asked.
It was quiet long enough that we all started watching TV. My grandma stared at the living room floor in deep thought. I assumed she was trying to recall the name of the strip club.
“I'm ready to die,” she said. “I don't care if it happens tonight or tomorrow.”
“Oh Dios mío,” my dad said. “Are you bored here or what?”
“I don’t like it aquí.”
“You don't like running water? And a heater? And being able to use the toilet inside the house?” This was a swing at the home my grandma had to leave. The single-story ranch house had been built in the late 1960s on my family’s land by the hands of my late abuelo himself. My abuela had been forced out of the ranch home after the roof caved and a family of raccoons settled underneath the flooring.
‘My dad found these two white boys in town,’ my dad once told me, ‘at the gas station or the bar or something. They’d told him they were carpenters, but they were just traveling drunks.’ My dad swore that my grandpa and the two men built the whole thing with a beer in one hand and a hammer in the other. ‘That house only stood up for 50-some years,’ my dad said. ‘Carpenters, my ass.’
“I don’t want to die,” my abuela said. “Pero, when it happens, I’m ready.”
“What’s the difference?”
My grandma shrugged then took another swig of her Coke.
My dad looked over at me. He gave me a ‘what the hell’ eyebrow raise.
“Well, Cora, since we’re on the subject of you dying, can I get a life insurance policy on you?” Adding, “I’ll pay for everything.”
My grandma’s face didn’t waver. “Sure, as long as you’re paying, what do I care?”
“Exactly, Corina,” my dad said. “Exactly.”
That night, my dad and I camped out in our sleeping bags in the living room. We ate ice cream sandwiches and watched episode after episode of Ancient Aliens. On a commercial break I asked my dad about his relationship with his own father. “I don’t think he liked me very much,” my dad told me. “He never talked to me.” I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought of my abuelo’s resistance to my father like a sling shot: where I felt the release of all the love he’d held back. Every now and again I’d start to doze off, only to be jolted awake by my dad’s musings: Do you think Antarctica is just a big frozen UFO? My belly hurts, I hope that ice cream wasn’t expired. I think aliens have been on Earth longer than we have. Are we bad people for doing this? If aliens didn’t build the pyramids then who did? Are you sleeping. Okay, I’ll stop talking. I love you, Shell. Goodnight.
My dad and I spent the rest of the weekend giggly like we were stoned. One evening, while eating supper at my aunt’s house, my phone lit up to a text from Jack. He was asking for dates to book my next flight to D.C. My life as a sugar baby moved like clockwork. Arriving home from Washington, my bank account would feel pregnant: laborious and about to burst. My days laid before me like desert highways: vast and uncluttered. My life became a synonym for freedom. Two weeks would pass like this, and then a text would arrive from Jack: I’m going to book your flight, what dates work? :) And within minutes I’d have a notification on my phone. A flight itinerary from Southwest Airlines. My respite suddenly a countdown. Before boarding my flight east, I’d medicate at airport bars; I’d pack shooters in my luggage; I’d swallow Xanax. Upon arrival, each day served as a waiting room before it was time to strip myself bare and lay down in Jack’s bed. The nights nothing more than the illuminating blue of my laptop screen, and Netflix’s gentle nudge, Are you still watching? Checking in for my return flight felt like popping a pill that I didn’t come down from until the time came to go back. In my aunt’s living room, my dinner plate on my lap, I texted Jack back: Can I let you know later? I felt my life changing seasons: Spring had arrived to turn everything pink and airy and new. I looked over at my dad—his mouth full of pumpkin bread—and we both smirked. My aunt asked what we were so happy about. “Nada, Elaine,” my dad said, shooing his hand. “Mind your own business.” I wanted to tell her: ‘I’m never going to see Jack again.’
Before heading home that Sunday, my dad and I made a pit stop at my abuelo’s grave. He died when I was five. The single memory I could conjure of him was at his wake: the smell of embalming fluid, two faceless little boys standing at his casket beside me; ‘How’d you know him?’ I asked them; ‘A family friend, what about you?’; ‘He was my grandpa,’ I said; I wanted to claim him, this man I did not know, that I couldn’t have truly loved; we had the same blood, connected through my father. He was mine.
In San Luis, the graveyard is tended to by the community, which often means it’s left to collect tumble weeds inside its black iron gate like a basket. There is no grass, only dirt and weeds. Everything is the color of khaki. The only upside is that it’s free for locals to be buried, and the county will even dig the hole. The shovel was so my dad could repack the dirt, which always washed away after hard rains and snowy winters.
When we arrived at the cemetery, I could barely see the tombstones through the weeds. I had no choice but to follow along in my dad’s footsteps, as he cleared a path with the shovel as he went. Burrs buried themselves into the laces of our shoes and the legs of our pants.
The lightness that had trailed after my dad and I all weekend had vanished. I watched as he wedged the shovel into the dusty earth; as he pulled weeds from their roots; as he swept tumble weeds away from my grandpa’s headstone; watched as he packed the earth six feet above his own dad’s casket, trying to make it look nice.
“What a sad life,” my dad said. He wasn’t speaking to me. “For nobody to care enough to just keep it tidy. No flowers. Nada.”
I observed his face. The sunlight shone harsh behind him, making me squint. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that he was crying. Something inside of my chest scuttled around, as if my heart became a rabbit. The wind was suddenly cooler on my cheeks.
My father kneeled down, placing a dirty palm on top of the tombstone, saying, “I love you, dad.” He cried harder after. My being there felt intrusive.
I wondered if I’d just witnessed my father’s first time saying he loved my abuelo. Maybe not. Maybe my dad had said it to him as a child, maybe he’d wrote it in a letter, maybe whispered it on the phone, maybe my dad had stood in front of my grandpa and proclaimed it to his face. All I knew for certain was that now it was too late for my dad to ever hear it back. I wanted the earth to open up. I wanted my grandpa to rise from his grave. I wanted him to look his son in the eye and love him the way I did.
On the drive home my dad told me his theory on how the world was going to end. “It’ll be aliens,” he said. “They’re going to wipe out the electrical grid, and everyone is going to freak the hell out.”
“What do these aliens look like?” I asked.
“Well, they look like all sorts of things,” he said. “Some look like people. The guy I listen to on the radio says they’re already impregnating women, and all over the world are half alien babies.”
The winter sun hung low, and the glare off a highway sign triggered my having an ocular migraine. Little kaleidoscopes of colors danced in my peripheral vision. Sometimes they looked like static, and other times like sparkling diamonds. This day it was a little rainbow spinning so fast I went dizzy.
“Those so-called ‘migraines’ might be alien activity,” my dad said, not a lick of sarcasm in his voice. “Not everyone communicates with words, you know.”
Back at my dad’s house, we sat down at his kitchen table and opened up his laptop. On Globe Life’s homepage we discovered within seconds that my grandmother was too old to be eligible for a life insurance policy.
“Well I’ll be damned,” my dad said. “There go my mini goats.”
It was like waking up from a dream: one second you’re a millionaire blueprinting a ranch house and the next, poof!--you’re back in your bedroom, or in my case, my mom’s couch.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We can still get a cheap policy on your mom, but we should wait until a few months before the cut off for her, so we don’t pay extra over the years.”
I sighed. My ten thousand dollars wouldn’t survive a decade. Plus, there would be inflation to consider. My nest egg was essentially a dud.
Closing the laptop, I moved my attention to my dad. I saw our futures roll out before us like a red carpet. They were the same paths we’d been on only a few days prior, but suddenly they seemed worse: almost too harsh to look at, like remerging into a sunny afternoon after holing up in a movie theatre.
“What are you going to do now?” my dad asked. He meant about Jack.
I’d spent four blissful days thinking I’d never have to board another plane to D.C., but that, too, felt like a dream now. I flashed my palm: a sign for ‘no se.’
“I’ll just do what grandpa did, and what Cora, and you and mom are all going to do. Die poor.”
If I could’ve peered into the future I would’ve told my dad that I’d keep seeing Jack for six more months; the marriage deal would grow more and more ridiculous with each visit: leased BMWs for all involved; a second house, one for my family and one just for me; but I would never take Jack up on anything. When I called the arrangement off, I would do so also knowing that my mom would not ever own a home, nor afford to retire; my nephew would pay for college with loans; my sister would continue her life without trade school. I would, however, walk away knowing that for those years with Jack, I caught a break in the weather: I paid off my debts; I’d walk away with 40 thousand dollars to my name. This ‘nest egg’ would prove to be more of a Band-Aid than an actual solution, but it helped.
Ready to head home, my dad walked me out.
“I still think there’s a chance aliens are going to come and make money irrelevant, anyway,” he said. “Maybe you should invest in a gold bar.”
At the trunk of my Ford, my father hugged me tight and kissed the crown of my head.
I’d been in the sugaring business for two years, almost exactly. It hadn’t been a bad gig at the start—at twenty-four years old, I’d gone from earning $11 an hour at Whole Foods to making $1,200 for the simple task of giving a man named Jack, my fifty-year-old sugar daddy, weekly blow jobs. But, six months prior, Jack had moved to D.C. for work, and while my pay increased to $5,000 a month (a two-hundred-dollar raise), our hourly motel romps also transformed into whole pilgrimages. I’d fly to D.C. for four long-ass-days, and Jack would pack our afternoons with activities: most to do with national landmarks. This generally meant holding hands in temperatures upwards of 90 degrees, while running out of ways to express just how-fucking-big everything was. In the evenings Jack expected me to have sex with him whenever the urge hit—typically around 8 PM.
However, since the move, Jack had stopped treating our arrangement like, well, the arrangement it was, and instead like a real relationship. In Denver I’d become indifferent to the occasional ‘I love you’ he’d slip in during our motel sessions (usually as he came), but in D.C. he had started to dial the frequency knob all the way up, muttering ‘I love you’ so often I’d made a game of counting how many times Jack said it a day (the record being 64). In the tiny windows between each of these proclamations the room would feel tense, as if even the walls were asking, ‘Well, aren’t you going to say it back?’
At the time of our road trip, my dad lived an hour south from me in Colorado Springs. We’d mapped out the route beforehand. I would drive to pick him up in my gently-used Ford Fiesta, then we’d drive the rest of the way to Alamosa together. My Fiesta was lime green, adorable, had impeccable mileage, and was also the first car I’d owned which started each time I’d turn the key. This was all thanks to Jack.
When I pulled into the driveway of his single-story house, my father was waiting out front. A camo backpack, two sleeping bags, and a share-size bag of early stocked Christmas candies at his feet.
“Are you planning on eating two pounds of chocolate over the weekend?” I asked him, hopping out of my car and popping the trunk.
My dad’s black hair was combed back and set in place with water. Even in his late 50s, his hair had never grayed. Allegedly this had been a cause for concern on his Match.com profile. ‘Every time I have a date, women think I’m lying about dying my hair,’ he’d told me once. ‘Why would I lie about my hair? If I was going to lie about anything, I’d say I was rich.’ His jeans were being held up by a belt that was a shoe string.
“The candies are for Cora,” he said, tossing the bags in the trunk. “She loves sugar.”
We climbed into the car. I settled into the passenger side, while my dad shoved the driver’s seat back, and adjusted all my mirrors, leaving a smudge from his thumb on the rearview. My dad made a living driving trucks, and refused to be a ride along passenger. ‘Let the professional handle it,’ he’d say. Before turning the engine, my dad stopped himself. “I feel like I’m forgetting something.” I watched him pat at his jacket. Something crinkled. “Ah-ha.” He pulled a baggie of salted sunflower seeds and two loose oatmeal raisin cookies from his pocket. After flicking off a piece of lint, he handed me the smaller one, saying, “Uno para ti, uno para mi.”
While my father and I spoke on the phone nearly every day, we only saw one another in person about once a month. Whenever I was around him, his charisma would swoon me and I’d swell with a kind of love that felt childish. As if my affection itself were a toddler on a swing set, flailing its arms, ‘look at me, papa! look at me!’
“I’ve decided to quit sugar babying,” I said, as my dad merged onto the highway.
My dad had known about Jack from the start—my whole family had. Ours was not the kind of family that kept secrets. Nor were we the kind of family that had boundaries. My parents’ version of raising children was making ‘legal guardian’ synonymous with ‘friend’ and that above all else, I had my own free will. When I’d first told my dad about sugar babying his questions were simple: So, you’re really going to be a prostitute? How much money are you making? Are you still gay? This mirrored the frankness and simplicity of the questions he’d asked me when I first came out to him: Is scissoring real?
While my dad settled into the flow of traffic, I told him about a new development in my arrangement: Jack’s repeat marriage proposals. Proposals sounds more romantic than they were; these were more like business deals. The first time Jack made his offer, we were sat on a restaurant patio, tearing off corners of thick pita bread and running them through a saucer of hummus. The café was tucked inside one of those outdoor shopping centers; shrieking children tossed pennies into a mammoth water fountain. ‘Our marriage,’ Jack said, ‘would be full of perks, and not only for you, but for your whole family.’ He listed off the possibilities like a game show host: Just imagine—your own house! (‘if you don’t want to share with me.’) And a house where your family would be permitted to live, too! And let’s not forget yearly vacations—anywhere you want to go! Five-star hotels, daily excursions, couples’ massages!
I’d said no, but, to Jack, this only registered as, ‘convince me.’ Every time the wheels of my Southwest flight touched the tarmac in D.C., Jack’s marriage deal would have ripened: he would pay me an extra salary to write my stories; he’d open up a college fund for my nephew; he’d cover the tuition for my sister to go to a trade school; my mother could actually retire.
Earlier that year, in April, I’d mentioned to Jack that my mom’s retirement plan was to die at work. I’d sold Jack the sob-story just hoping he might offer to treat my family to dinner at Red Robin for my mom’s birthday.
She’s sad, I’d texted Jack; my mom sitting beside me on the couch. She’d granted permission to milk him at her expense. Anyone else turning fifty-eight could mark one year closer to retirement, but for her it only marks one day closer to the grave. : (
While I’d gotten used to trying to manipulate Jack with mine and my family’s poverty, I was unprepared for his using my mother’s status to manipulate me, too. The last time I boarded a plane out of D.C.—two weeks before the trip with my dad—I no longer knew whether or not I could keep saying no. As the carrots Jack dangled grew more and more generous, I was beginning to feel guilty. Wouldn’t I be doing a disservice to my entire family by saying no? Even if it meant I could never have real love or build a life for myself. On the flight home, I sensed I had two options: I either walked away from sugar babying while I still had my senses, or I’d eventually succumb to Jack’s offer.
Jack never roped my dad into his marriage proposals. I speculated this was because my father was the most financially secure of my family. While my dad resided in his own one-bedroom home, I slept on the couch in my mom’s two-bedroom apartment (where my sister and nephew lived too). My father paid a mortgage, whereas my mom paid rent. But even in a better financial situation than the rest of us, my dad earned a living driving goods for Walgreens. While he’d avoided living in debt, he didn’t have any money to spare.
“Have you told your mom about any of this?” my dad asked.
I shook my head, no.
My dad’s finical stability was also what allowed me to speak openly with him about my arrangement. I’d evaded telling my mom about Jack’s all-inclusive marriage proposals because they had been specifically crafted to benefit her.
“Just imagine the look on her face if I’d said the words: big house, retirement, college funds!” I said. My mother’s green eyes would light up like the tail end of a firefly, just to dim down again when I crushed the only realistic dream she could have of property ownership and escaping her front desk job.
“Your mom is a grown woman,” my dad said. “She’s been getting AARP subscriptions for years. She can take care of herself.”
I nodded, but couldn’t escape the sensation that my family’s life trajectory was the Titanic and, while helping myself to a lifeboat, I was flipping them the bird.
“Shell, listen, I spent twenty-seven years trying to help your mom grow up,” my dad said. This was at least partially true. He had tried helping my mother learn how to budget; how to live within her means; how to file her taxes. But even with his guidance, two issues prevailed: my mom’s hourly wage was half that of my dad’s, and she had a full-blown addiction to food and especially McDonalds: one she’d had to support with high-interest credit cards. My father learned the depth of my mom’s fast-food spending right before their divorce, after stumbling upon her Target and Discover card statements. My mother had nothing to show for her debt aside from twenty or so spare pounds, stored mostly around the midsection.
“You’re doing the right thing,” my dad said. “Bueno, Shell. Muy bueno.”
“So, what’re you gonna do now?” my dad asked, meaning what kind of job did I plan on getting.
“I’m glad you asked,” I said, turning my body in my seat so I could really look at him. “I was wondering if I could take out a life insurance policy on you?”
At the start of my sugar babying arrangement I’d prepared a list of financial goals: fill my cavities, get an eye exam and glasses, buy a car that had less than 245,000 miles on it, pay off my student loan debt, and save $10,000 for my future, which I had felt, at the time, was enough to stretch across my whole future. Over two years I’d been a sex worker, I’d checked every objective off. But now that I’d had the ten thousand dollars, I needed to figure out what to do with it.
Early on, Jack told me that the best way to make-money-from-money was either investing in the stock market or real estate. While owning property sounded simple enough, I couldn’t buy a house without first being approved for a loan. This would’ve required my having held down a job for at least two years, and, though I had, sugar babying wasn’t exactly observed by the IRS. Even if a loan could’ve been worked out, there still would’ve been potential risks: what if the house had a leaky ceiling? Or the furnace went out? How would I afford to fix anything? With my ten thousand dollars allocated and spent, my bank account would quickly return to zero.
The stock market, too, proved problematic. I knew nothing about how it worked, and couldn’t seem to grasp the rules even after Jack tried over and over again to explain them to me. Once in D.C., he’d set up our laptops at his kitchen table and walked me through opening a Vanguard account. ‘What will happen to the money?’ I’d asked Jack. ‘It’ll accrue value over the years,’ he said. ‘You have to just put it in there and forget about it.’ Jack didn’t understand that what he often referred to as my ‘nest egg’ was everything I had. Not only the building blocks for my future, but also my safety net. What I needed was a way to grow my money, while never losing access to it.
The life insurance swindle wasn’t all my idea. I’d been inspired by Dr. C, my English professor. Dr. C had made an off-hand remark in lecture that when he died, his son would inherit one million dollars from life insurance policies.
Policies, as in plural. One through the University, he explained, and the other two he’d purchased through private companies. After class I hovered around until everyone left, so I could ask Dr. C if these million-dollar policies were something anyone could sign up for.
“My parents don’t have the money to do this for me,” I’d said. “But, what if I just bought policies myself?”
“Well, you can ask your parents if they’d be nice enough to let you buy a policy on them,” he explained. “But they’ve got to know about it. They’ll have to pretend they’re the ones who got it on themselves.”
What made life insurance policies the best option was that monthly premium. I’d be able to allocate my ‘nest egg’ to a separate account, and set up recurrent payments for X-amount of years. I wouldn’t lose the lump sum, meaning I could always access what remained of my savings. I only had to hope, that by the time my account sank to zero, someone would’ve died to replenish it.
My dad took no pause at all. He spit out a sunflower shell and said, “Sure, but you know I’m not going to die anytime soon.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s not for now anyway. It’s like my retirement fund.”
My dad’s own retirement plan was bleak, not as bleak as my mom’s, but still, bleak. It involved trusting he never fell ill, so he could live twenty-plus-years without health insurance, and that his truck would run for roughly 325,000 more miles.
I mentioned Dr. C, and his son’s impending one million. My dad’s already-big eyes widened. I imagined if I saw him head on, he’d look fucking nuts.
“Holy smokes,” my dad said, then retreated into himself like a turtle. He was thinking.
All around us was pastureland. All of it the color of sand. We passed two horses, and then two more.
“Mira, caballos,” I said. I’d been practicing Spanish on my Duolingo app.
“It’s the right word,” my dad said, “but you sound white when you say it.”
“I am white,” I reminded him. I didn’t inherit my dad’s black hair or tan skin, and upon first glance, we didn't look like we belonged to one another. When I was younger I would use my pale skin to hurt his feelings, crying, ‘I’m probably not even your kid.’ The last time I said this I was ten. ‘You really think you’re not mine?’ he asked. The corners of his lips drooped. I would learn much later in life that my abuelo suspected my father wasn’t his son, and that he’d punished my dad for it growing up: with silence, with making him work harder, with never loving him enough. In the car I added, “Just as much as I’m Chicana.” Of course, I was his.
“You know, Shell, I’ve been thinking.” My dad sounded like he’d been gnawing over his proposition for a few days rather than just a few minutes. “Life insurance policies aren’t cheap. ‘Specially if you want a high payout.”
I nodded. I didn’t know this. I hadn’t done any research.
“I think you need a partner. Someone to split the costs with.”
My plan had always been to get two policies. One on my dad, the other on my mom, who I saw as an exceptional candidate. Her fast food addiction had resulted in her having a cocktail of diseases: type two diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.
“You want to split a policy on Mom?”
“Well, yeah, but not right now,” he said. “Your mom isn’t in the best health, but she’s only, what, 58? I bet she’s got more than 20 years still left on her. Just think about Shirley.”
Shirley was my maternal grandmother. She had survived six heart attacks and four strokes, even legally dying once before doctors brought her back to life. Grandma Shirley had all the same diseases my mom, plus dementia, and she lived until nearly 80.
“People don’t just die from being sick anymore,” my dad said. “Modern day medicine prevents it. By the time me or your mom dies you’re going to be an old woman yourself.”
“What are you trying to say?” I asked.
“I think we should start with a policy on Corina.”
What we didn’t know then, but should’ve been able to guess, was that Cora was already too old to qualify for a life insurance policy. She’d surpassed the cutoff six birthdays prior. But, at first mention, I’d thought it ingenious. As we drove further and further south, my dad and I developed a plan: we would go half-sies on a moderate policy for my abuela. After she died and the check arrived in the mail, we’d use the money to invest in a larger policy on my mom (presuming she’d die first), and then I would use the profit from my mom’s passing to buy a million-dollar policy on my father.
For the next hour of the drive, my dad and I played a game called: How I’ll Spend the Money I Made Off My Dead Mother.
“I’m going to get a little piece of land in San Luis,” my dad said. This was where he’d grown up. “And I’m going to get miniature goats and pigs to live there with me.”
“I’m going to buy a nice condo with mom’s policy, and then when you die, I’ll rent the condo out and buy a house with a yard,” I said. “Do you think Cora will agree to it?”
“I don’t see why not,” my dad said. “Everyone has to die. It won’t even affect her.”
I shrugged. “I guess you’re right. I just don’t want to hurt her feelings.”
My dad turned his face to me. “Do you think Cora is made of sugar?”
Saying someone was made of sugar was calling them a weak, little crybaby. Growing up, my dad often insinuated that I must’ve been made out of sugar myself. ‘I don’t want to go to school tomorrow!’ I’d once said in elementary school. It was a Sunday night. My dad and I were staying up to watch the X-Files. ‘My throat hurts.’
‘Since when has a sore throat ever gotten in the way of doing school work? You don’t read with your throat,’ he’d said. ‘Unless you’re made out of sugar.’
‘Look, if you don’t make me go to school tomorrow, I can watch TV with you all night.’
This turned into a familiar lecture. ‘When I was your age I begged my dad to let me go to school, but you know what I had to do instead?’
‘Work,’ I said. I was nine years old, and threw my head back into the couch cushions. I’d heard this a million times.
‘Not just work, Shell, pick goddamn potatoes. I wish I could’ve gone to school.’ As a child and eventually a teen, my dad worked alongside his five siblings and parents on migrant farms in Idaho. His father would pluck all the kids from school as soon as harvesting season began, and they wouldn’t return until the work was done. Once, the principal had even pleaded with my grandfather not to take them out of school. He replied they needed the money. ‘All my report cards had I’s on them,’ my dad would tell me.
Like my dad, my abuela Corina was not made out of sugar. In fact, sugar wasn’t even an ingredient. Cora didn’t give hugs or bake cookies or say much of anything other than, ‘tu es gordita,’ but this was nothing personal, my dad had told me—as she’d never said she loved him either, nor happy birthday—even as a little girl, her nickname had been ‘media Corina.’ Mean Corina.
‘It’s not even inventive,’ my dad had said. ‘That’s how you know it’s the truth.’
All this to justify that my grandma wasn’t someone who’d feel sorry for herself for having to die. Plus, it wouldn’t be a sensitive subject, my dad assured. “She’s not dying anytime soon,” he said. “Cora is mean as a snake, but healthy as a horse.”
A few hours later my Grandma Cora opened the front door of her new apartment. “Tu estas muy gordita, Mom,” my dad said, as he pushed the door open with his shoulder. His hands full of our luggage, while I carried both sleeping bags. “Are you just sitting around eating all day, or what?”
Stepping aside, my grandma started to laugh. “Ee, no se. I’m never hungry.” Her mouth was full of an ice cream sandwich. I tottered inside to find all the furniture from the old ranch had been packed up and unloaded in her new living room: two chairs, with wooden armrests that my cousins and I’d carved our names into, sat on either side of her sunken sofa. My dad chucked everything onto the living room floor, where we’d be sleeping.
“Well, Cora,” he said, “Aren’t you gonna give us a tour?”
My grandma’s apartment comprised 600 square feet. It held a bedroom, a bathroom, a little kitchenette and a living room. As she walked us the five steps from her bedroom to the kitchen, I took stock of her: my grandma was chubby, but not too chubby. Her lips and nails were both painted fire-truck red. It occurred to me that I’d never seen her without lipstick. In the years to come—after she would suffer a stroke, rendering her unable to apply makeup herself—someone, either my aunts or cousins, would color her lips red first thing in the morning. It was a part of who she was.
In the kitchen, my dad opened the freezer. We both poked our heads inside to find nothing but stacked boxes of ice cream sandwiches. The fridge was crammed with canned sodas, chiles, beans, eggs, a brick of cheese, and a cling-film wrapped plate of Thanksgiving leftovers.
My grandma offered us Cokes before we took seats in her living room. The TV was switched on to Telemundo, but no one was watching.
“Vinny was here yesterday,” Cora said. “He has a gringa girlfriend and he told me she has big titties,” Cora mimicked large breasts with her carpal tunneled hands. Vinny was my cousin. “He didn't know how to say, ‘boobs’ in Spanish and I told him, ‘titties.’”
I whispered over to my dad, “Is that correct Spanish?” He shook his head, no.
“Big titties, huh? She sounds awesome.”
“Do you remember his old novia?” Cora asked, “She was short and had big tits tambien. She dances at a club now.”
“Which club?” my dad asked.
It was quiet long enough that we all started watching TV. My grandma stared at the living room floor in deep thought. I assumed she was trying to recall the name of the strip club.
“I'm ready to die,” she said. “I don't care if it happens tonight or tomorrow.”
“Oh Dios mío,” my dad said. “Are you bored here or what?”
“I don’t like it aquí.”
“You don't like running water? And a heater? And being able to use the toilet inside the house?” This was a swing at the home my grandma had to leave. The single-story ranch house had been built in the late 1960s on my family’s land by the hands of my late abuelo himself. My abuela had been forced out of the ranch home after the roof caved and a family of raccoons settled underneath the flooring.
‘My dad found these two white boys in town,’ my dad once told me, ‘at the gas station or the bar or something. They’d told him they were carpenters, but they were just traveling drunks.’ My dad swore that my grandpa and the two men built the whole thing with a beer in one hand and a hammer in the other. ‘That house only stood up for 50-some years,’ my dad said. ‘Carpenters, my ass.’
“I don’t want to die,” my abuela said. “Pero, when it happens, I’m ready.”
“What’s the difference?”
My grandma shrugged then took another swig of her Coke.
My dad looked over at me. He gave me a ‘what the hell’ eyebrow raise.
“Well, Cora, since we’re on the subject of you dying, can I get a life insurance policy on you?” Adding, “I’ll pay for everything.”
My grandma’s face didn’t waver. “Sure, as long as you’re paying, what do I care?”
“Exactly, Corina,” my dad said. “Exactly.”
That night, my dad and I camped out in our sleeping bags in the living room. We ate ice cream sandwiches and watched episode after episode of Ancient Aliens. On a commercial break I asked my dad about his relationship with his own father. “I don’t think he liked me very much,” my dad told me. “He never talked to me.” I didn’t say it out loud, but I thought of my abuelo’s resistance to my father like a sling shot: where I felt the release of all the love he’d held back. Every now and again I’d start to doze off, only to be jolted awake by my dad’s musings: Do you think Antarctica is just a big frozen UFO? My belly hurts, I hope that ice cream wasn’t expired. I think aliens have been on Earth longer than we have. Are we bad people for doing this? If aliens didn’t build the pyramids then who did? Are you sleeping. Okay, I’ll stop talking. I love you, Shell. Goodnight.
My dad and I spent the rest of the weekend giggly like we were stoned. One evening, while eating supper at my aunt’s house, my phone lit up to a text from Jack. He was asking for dates to book my next flight to D.C. My life as a sugar baby moved like clockwork. Arriving home from Washington, my bank account would feel pregnant: laborious and about to burst. My days laid before me like desert highways: vast and uncluttered. My life became a synonym for freedom. Two weeks would pass like this, and then a text would arrive from Jack: I’m going to book your flight, what dates work? :) And within minutes I’d have a notification on my phone. A flight itinerary from Southwest Airlines. My respite suddenly a countdown. Before boarding my flight east, I’d medicate at airport bars; I’d pack shooters in my luggage; I’d swallow Xanax. Upon arrival, each day served as a waiting room before it was time to strip myself bare and lay down in Jack’s bed. The nights nothing more than the illuminating blue of my laptop screen, and Netflix’s gentle nudge, Are you still watching? Checking in for my return flight felt like popping a pill that I didn’t come down from until the time came to go back. In my aunt’s living room, my dinner plate on my lap, I texted Jack back: Can I let you know later? I felt my life changing seasons: Spring had arrived to turn everything pink and airy and new. I looked over at my dad—his mouth full of pumpkin bread—and we both smirked. My aunt asked what we were so happy about. “Nada, Elaine,” my dad said, shooing his hand. “Mind your own business.” I wanted to tell her: ‘I’m never going to see Jack again.’
Before heading home that Sunday, my dad and I made a pit stop at my abuelo’s grave. He died when I was five. The single memory I could conjure of him was at his wake: the smell of embalming fluid, two faceless little boys standing at his casket beside me; ‘How’d you know him?’ I asked them; ‘A family friend, what about you?’; ‘He was my grandpa,’ I said; I wanted to claim him, this man I did not know, that I couldn’t have truly loved; we had the same blood, connected through my father. He was mine.
In San Luis, the graveyard is tended to by the community, which often means it’s left to collect tumble weeds inside its black iron gate like a basket. There is no grass, only dirt and weeds. Everything is the color of khaki. The only upside is that it’s free for locals to be buried, and the county will even dig the hole. The shovel was so my dad could repack the dirt, which always washed away after hard rains and snowy winters.
When we arrived at the cemetery, I could barely see the tombstones through the weeds. I had no choice but to follow along in my dad’s footsteps, as he cleared a path with the shovel as he went. Burrs buried themselves into the laces of our shoes and the legs of our pants.
The lightness that had trailed after my dad and I all weekend had vanished. I watched as he wedged the shovel into the dusty earth; as he pulled weeds from their roots; as he swept tumble weeds away from my grandpa’s headstone; watched as he packed the earth six feet above his own dad’s casket, trying to make it look nice.
“What a sad life,” my dad said. He wasn’t speaking to me. “For nobody to care enough to just keep it tidy. No flowers. Nada.”
I observed his face. The sunlight shone harsh behind him, making me squint. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that he was crying. Something inside of my chest scuttled around, as if my heart became a rabbit. The wind was suddenly cooler on my cheeks.
My father kneeled down, placing a dirty palm on top of the tombstone, saying, “I love you, dad.” He cried harder after. My being there felt intrusive.
I wondered if I’d just witnessed my father’s first time saying he loved my abuelo. Maybe not. Maybe my dad had said it to him as a child, maybe he’d wrote it in a letter, maybe whispered it on the phone, maybe my dad had stood in front of my grandpa and proclaimed it to his face. All I knew for certain was that now it was too late for my dad to ever hear it back. I wanted the earth to open up. I wanted my grandpa to rise from his grave. I wanted him to look his son in the eye and love him the way I did.
On the drive home my dad told me his theory on how the world was going to end. “It’ll be aliens,” he said. “They’re going to wipe out the electrical grid, and everyone is going to freak the hell out.”
“What do these aliens look like?” I asked.
“Well, they look like all sorts of things,” he said. “Some look like people. The guy I listen to on the radio says they’re already impregnating women, and all over the world are half alien babies.”
The winter sun hung low, and the glare off a highway sign triggered my having an ocular migraine. Little kaleidoscopes of colors danced in my peripheral vision. Sometimes they looked like static, and other times like sparkling diamonds. This day it was a little rainbow spinning so fast I went dizzy.
“Those so-called ‘migraines’ might be alien activity,” my dad said, not a lick of sarcasm in his voice. “Not everyone communicates with words, you know.”
Back at my dad’s house, we sat down at his kitchen table and opened up his laptop. On Globe Life’s homepage we discovered within seconds that my grandmother was too old to be eligible for a life insurance policy.
“Well I’ll be damned,” my dad said. “There go my mini goats.”
It was like waking up from a dream: one second you’re a millionaire blueprinting a ranch house and the next, poof!--you’re back in your bedroom, or in my case, my mom’s couch.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We can still get a cheap policy on your mom, but we should wait until a few months before the cut off for her, so we don’t pay extra over the years.”
I sighed. My ten thousand dollars wouldn’t survive a decade. Plus, there would be inflation to consider. My nest egg was essentially a dud.
Closing the laptop, I moved my attention to my dad. I saw our futures roll out before us like a red carpet. They were the same paths we’d been on only a few days prior, but suddenly they seemed worse: almost too harsh to look at, like remerging into a sunny afternoon after holing up in a movie theatre.
“What are you going to do now?” my dad asked. He meant about Jack.
I’d spent four blissful days thinking I’d never have to board another plane to D.C., but that, too, felt like a dream now. I flashed my palm: a sign for ‘no se.’
“I’ll just do what grandpa did, and what Cora, and you and mom are all going to do. Die poor.”
If I could’ve peered into the future I would’ve told my dad that I’d keep seeing Jack for six more months; the marriage deal would grow more and more ridiculous with each visit: leased BMWs for all involved; a second house, one for my family and one just for me; but I would never take Jack up on anything. When I called the arrangement off, I would do so also knowing that my mom would not ever own a home, nor afford to retire; my nephew would pay for college with loans; my sister would continue her life without trade school. I would, however, walk away knowing that for those years with Jack, I caught a break in the weather: I paid off my debts; I’d walk away with 40 thousand dollars to my name. This ‘nest egg’ would prove to be more of a Band-Aid than an actual solution, but it helped.
Ready to head home, my dad walked me out.
“I still think there’s a chance aliens are going to come and make money irrelevant, anyway,” he said. “Maybe you should invest in a gold bar.”
At the trunk of my Ford, my father hugged me tight and kissed the crown of my head.