Like Son by Felicia Luna Lemus Read Free Book Online Page A

misunderstood? Was that what my dad wanted me to know?
    I gently stacked the letters in the order I’d found them and put them back in the box. They’d be safe there. I didn’t trust myself with them. And I didn’t want their weight in my possession—but, of course, it already was.
    I found the security guard. He called the manager. The manager took the box from me and situated it back in its place. Jagged long key looped back on my keychain, I was released. I got in my car. Turned on the ignition. Music blasted. Bikini Kill. Tobi Vail’s atonal loveliness:
… take out a piece of paper, write everything down. Then you can read it back to me and maybe you can hurt me, you can read it back to me, maybe you could know something—about me. About me …
    In search of the woman I’d met in the safe deposit letters, hoping she still existed somehow, I drove. To my mother’s.

CHAPTER FIVE
    W ho are you?”
    These were my mother’s very words as I stood at her doorstep holding the box of my father’s ashes.
    I hadn’t called to see if she’d be home. In fact, my mother and I hadn’t talked in nearly five years. But—from the bank, through miles of flatland tract housing, up curving Laguna Hills roads, past increasingly wealthier homes—I’d driven to her house with absolute certainty it was the right thing to do. When I’d reached her property, I’d worried my car would have trouble making it up her absurdly steep, long, private driveway. So I’d parked my car on the street, brought the box of ashes with me, and walked up. Relieved to see her vehicle parked in the carport, I’d rung the doorbell. A long wait later, my mother finally came to the door.
    “Who are you?” she asked.
    Classic. This was vintage insane behavior for her. Five years apart or not, of course she knew damn well who I was. I had wanted to tell her about the letters I’d read at the bank, to tell her they’d been so special to my father that he’d kept them all these years, to ask if maybe she wanted to keep the ones she’d written, but then she said what she said, and I decided she didn’t deserve such generosity. Fuck her. She probably wouldn’t want the letters anyway. Instead of sentimental niceties, I stuck to the obvious.
    “My dad died.” I sort of tapped the box of ashes.
    She just stared at me through the still-closed screen door, mounting frustration only slightly visible under the unnaturally smooth façade of her face. Seduced by even the less prestigious perks of being an Ivy League–educated doctor, my mother wore, as she did whenever she was home, one of the endless oversized and tacky T-shirts pharmaceutical companies sent her as promotional gifts. That day’s poly/ cotton knee-grazing T-shirt housedress was emblazoned with a prescription anti-inflammatory pill’s logo. Knowing my mother as I did, she most likely wore a threadbare pair of old cotton granny-style panties under the T-shirt, and, although I couldn’t see them through the screen door, I was certain she had on one of her pairs of tan vinyl Velcro-flapped acupressure sandals, plastic insole peeling up from rubber heel.
    A word of caution:
    Anything and everything I say about my mother will most likely seem unbelievable. You might think I’m exaggerating or lying outright. I’m used to this. I’ve spent an entire life not being believed when I talk about my mother. But I swear to you, each and every word I say is true.
    My mother. Even in her freebie T-shirt, she imagined herself a glorious phoenix risen to elite hills out of barrio chaos. As stoically elegant an image as it was, she’d never considered that being a firebird inevitably meant you’d singe both your nest and baby chick along the way. Still, as much as she’d done me wrong over the years, and damn how she’d done me wrong, I knew that from a public view—not as I saw her—she did seem quite the Wonder Woman. Presumed bluecollar girl from the ’hood, my mother was the first