Broken Families, Dreams and Hopes

By B. Patrick Conley

Two families, one solidly middle-class American and the other undocumented Mexican immigrants, face an uncertain future. No ones job is safe, and no paycheck is ever guaranteed. They both live in a maelstrom of uncertainty. The rule of law has yielded to the flux of opportunism. While the OConnell family struggles with an arrogant boss and adolescent upheavals, the Riveras cope with fear of the cartels and worries over deportation and teenage missteps. Despite initial misgivings and differences, the two families unite at least for a while, but how long will that while last?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524686291

B. Patrick Conley

Patrick Conley enjoys living with his family, teaching his students, and writing an occasional novella. Some of his more recent works include the following: A Cool Mist Rising; The Grail: Sacra Moneta; May the Better Team; Public Schools, Private Scandals; 2044; Tales of Youth and Age; Conversations with the Living and the Dead; and Playing with Chaos.

Book preview

A DEDICATION & A THANKS

I am grateful to my wife, children, and grandchildren who allow me to indulge myself in my avocation: writing books that few people read (perhaps for good reason).

I dedicate this work to the millions who every day struggle to keep their families intact.

CHAPTER ONE

PRE-THANKSGIVING THOUGHTS

Car Thefts Up over Ten Percent read the headlines as I skimmed through the headlines of the local news. There was a reason I was sitting in my car on a cool, overcast Sunday afternoon in November. The neighborhood was changing. Hell, it had changed, and there wasn’t much I could do about it, not with college tuition looming for my two kids. At least we’ve been spared carjackings, I burst out surprising myself with my outburst as I spoke to no one in particular but to the universe of unresponsive ears. I mumbled something about sitting here for over twenty minutes, looked at my watch, and realized it had been a little less than five minutes. I wanted to get back to my Sunday routine: a little football, maybe a beer or two, some brats on the grill, and some downtime before the mind numbing workweek. Work was no longer back breaking, just heart, soul, and brain stifling. That’s why Marianne, my better half, got us into this mess. We’ve got to do something, she said, and I guess she was right. But I just didn’t feel comfortable about dropping off Thanksgiving turkeys in the Mexican barrio even on a quiet Sunday afternoon. I let Marianne and Alex, our thirteen year old son, drop off the turkeys our church donated to needy families in our parish bounds. I stayed in the car with the motor running. The previous drop offs had been quick: just ring the doorbell, say we’re from St. Patrick’s, and drop off the donated turkey and fixings. But this, our last stop, was different. We knew the family, at least our children did. Alex played on the same soccer team, as did the fourteen year old boy who lived here. I had thought that everything was safe, but now I was beginning to worry. "What the hell is keeping them?’ I nervously bellowed.

An Hispanic man, swarthy, lean and wiry, strolling by, fixated on his cell phone, as if he were pressing it indelibly into his brain, glanced over, not annoyed but nonchalantly bemused by the stranger gringo who spoke to no one but himself. For a moment, he eyed me, then shrugged his shoulders, stopped as if exasperated, and then glared as he spit out, He estado enviando dinero durante diez y siete años. My high school Spanish, I’m sure, probably didn’t even rival his English, but I gathered he said something about sending money for seventeen years. Then he spat, picked up his stride and marched on.

I had just turned the ignition on when Marianne and Alex came back, beaming. Maria was so happy to get her Thanksgiving turkey, Marianne was implicitly rebuking me for grumbling so much about dropping off the food and interrupting my Sunday routine The families were glad to get some help for the Holidays. We should really go to the seven pm Spanish mass sometimes on Sunday.

Well, Roberto’s dad didn’t seem all too happy, countered Alex, our sometimes precocious thirteen year old. He didn’t say much, just turned away as if he were mad or something. Then he stepped outside and said he had to make a call.

No one, especially no husband, likes to accept charity, I added.

Well, Thomas, you weren’t above accepting that loan from my mother so we could make the down payment on our house. Marianne had a good memory for those matters. She was right. I didn’t.

Yeah, but that was different, I argued as we drove back onto Main Street.

How? Marianne countered. Is this some stupid machismo thing?

That help came from family.

Well, what about families that don’t have any family here to help them out?

Alex, who up to now had been biding his time in the back seat, decided to break in, long accustomed to getting both parents and teachers off topic—sometimes for their own good. You should have seen Roberto’s goal, Mom. It was awesome.

You delivered him a cross so good it was like serving up a goal, I answered.

C’mon, Dad, Roberto had to head fake the defender into going right when he slipped the ball over to his left foot and then sent a screaming shot into the upper corner of the goal. It was a solo effort.

Yeah, Alex, but you had the assist. Now that I was sounding like the thirteen year old, whining his way out instead of conceding defeat, I decided to keep my foot out of my mouth and stay quiet.

Marianne, though, added some more spice to the pumpkin pie, so to speak. Tom, the Riveras family are just stuffed into that apartment tighter than that turkey will be in their tiny oven. I hope it doesn’t catch fire.

Later I would learn just how crammed their apartment was. Originally designed as a one bedroom space, the Riveras place had expanded into two bedrooms with the family / living room doubling as a bedroom. Two mattresses were standing upright against the wall with brightly colored red, white, and green blankets draped over the faded grey-blue-white of the mattresses. At night Roberto and his dad slept here. In the officially designated bedroom mother and daughter shared the same bed but not together. Maria worked six nights a week while Rosita went to school by day. I never learned what the arrangements were on the one night a week that Maria had off. Days off were few as Maria worked jobs with no benefits. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s stood as the only exceptions.

I almost threw in some grease to the fire with the comment, No good deed goes unpunished, but I checked myself. Instead I just said softly, almost in a whisper, Yeah, it must be tough. What else could I say, what else could we do?

By then, we had arrived home without a scratch. I’m ashamed to admit that while I had sat in the car I had harbored Walter Mitty dreams of heroically jumping in and rescuing wife and son from some assault by anonymous Spanish speaking assailants. Such daydream fantasies were the stuff of pure fiction not because of the lack of crime in the area but because of my own bad knees and flabby muscles and probable cowardice. Even on a Sunday afternoon with mild temperatures outside, most people had stayed inside, distant from the gaudy, spray-painted graffiti that demarcated gang territories or maybe just lent a little life to the drab greys and browns and yellows of the buildings.

OK, Tom, now you can exhale, Marianne joked (but really wasn’t joking) as we pulled into our driveway, hit the remote garage door opener, and tried to seal ourselves off once again within the confines of our bungalow. Amanda, our sixteen year old daughter had stayed home to act as sentinel but more likely to text her friends. What they tap out to each other I have no idea and, perhaps, it’s better that I don’t. In a rare display of leaking adolescent classified information, Amanda momentarily put her phone and thumbs down to tell me, Rosita thanks you and Mom for the food drop off even though her dad didn’t like it. I guess he doesn’t like turkey.

He doesn’t like charity, Amanda. No man does. I tried to explain.

Are you implying that women do like charity, Dad?

Maybe women regard charity as networking, I lamely countered.

Then Alex broke in, Hey, Dad, do you like tamales?

Yeah, sure, when I was a kid we had a hot tamale man on a pushcart go through the neighborhood on evenings and Saturdays, sort of like those food trucks we’ve got now. The tamales were great. We’d save up our money so we could buy a few on Saturdays.

Well, Roberto said his mom was making a batch of tamales and would give us twenty or so on Wednesday.

When does she have time to cook? Marianne added. She mustn’t sleep. Anyway, Alex, thank her for us and tell her we’d be delighted to have the tamales. Tom, what are we having tonight?

The Sunday special, your choice of brats or barbequed chicken. I’m firing up the charcoal as soon as we get home In the back of my mind, I knew that Roberto’s family was converting charity into a respectful gift exchange, a type of shared meal even if we weren’t sitting at the same table. We had our usual Sunday dinner, with Amanda grudgingly taking a bite or two of chicken or salad in between glances at her phone, which she kept semi-hidden in her lap. Alex downed two brats and a generous helping of chicken along with salad and mashed potatoes. He inhaled every edible item on the table except for the broccoli. Marianne and I marveled at his gargantuan accomplishments and still lanky frame. Marianne had sensible portions of salad (no dressing) chicken and broccoli. As for me, since it was Sunday dinner, I indulged myself with a second brat. That small act of gluttony would haunt me most of the night.

All night I kept getting up almost every hour on the hour but not with any intestinal issues. My brain kept whirring in a kaleidoscopic tangle of past images and present fears. I envisioned my grandmother whisking towards me, closely cropped white holding a yellowed and tattered newspaper clipping about the Egan Rats, an Eastside gang at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was an Egan, but of no relation to the thugs described in the paper. Or so she claimed maybe a little too loudly. She always wore a white ankle length dress with a flowered design. I think the flowers were blue; at least that’s what I saw in my mind’s eye. Grandma loved the Saturday tamales, I recalled. She towered over her husband a full six inches. Then came Grandpa, holding court in his overstuffed chair, the cheap pine stained to resemble cherry wood, stoking his omnipresent pipe, the smoke encircling his face. He had come to this country as a nine year old under some illegal but all too common labor contract and worked in the coal mines from age nine until he turned twelve and then ran off to work for the railroad, three years for the Union Pacific and then fifty more for the Frisco line. He claimed the years in the closed quarters of the coalmines had stunted his growth. Maybe he was right. Then the rest was a jumble, the tamale man calling out tamales, get your hot tamales, pushing his two-wheeled reddish-brown cart slowly pas each house as he trudged his way. I don’t remember his face only his hand raised high with an order of four tamales wrapped in light brown cornhusks. Simultaneously, my mind slipped back to our family’s Thanksgiving dinner, with my father carving and distributing out measured slices of white meat to each of the twelve of us at the table: my grandparents seated at either end, my two aunts and their families, and my father and I on the sides. My mother was never seated but always bustling to and from the kitchen, and calling out almost in a litany, Do you have enough to eat? She must have lost weight on Thanksgiving, rushing back and forth in a frenzy. For the most part, traditions dominated although my one aunt had broken an unwritten and, for that matter unspoken family rule, and married an Italian. After the Thanksgiving gorging, my grandfather would sit in his favorite chair and light his pipe and then fume a bit about how The next you know we’ll all be eating lasagna or some other confounded Italian concoction instead of turkey and potato stuffing. Then spray painted images of blacks and reds and yellows and whites swept through my mind in grand yard long swirls, gradually coalescing into a the face of an old bearded man with red skin, black trousers, and a yellow tunic, almost the length of a priest’s cassock, swallowing the black pants. Then the headlines roared past me like a freight train: break-ins, thefts, crime on the rise.

CHAPTER TWO

POST-THANKSGIVING

Only a few of us trudged into work that Friday after Thanksgiving either out of dire necessity or reluctance to swarm in the feeding frenzy of Black Friday shopping. Marianne used to shop the bargains and Amanda was still game. She took off at midnight to sit in line with a few of her friends to buy what I haven’t a clue—probably something she wouldn’t need or even want a few months from now. Alex would be sleeping in, partially because of some arcane