And let me tell you something more, Gabe. Your mother has been talking to me. Her brother, Betino—your uncle—has been nagging her to send you and your brother to the Philippines. To stay with him and go to school over there. You know what that place is like—the soot, the crime, the crowds, the people, the kidnappings, the humidity? Do you remember? How old were you when you came over here—eight, nine? He wants you to live in his house where he can watch over you. And why do you think he’s offering to do this, Gabe? Do you think it’s because he wants your company? To take you away from your mother? No. He says all this because he believes you are not turning out right, and the reason he thinks that? Well, he talks to your mother, and he can hear in her voice how worried she is. How much it hurts her. Are you listening to me, Gabe? Gabe? Do you understand? He can hear on a phone from five thousand miles away on a bad connection that your mother is in pain and lonely and disappointed and scared. Behind a curtain of expensive static. You and Tomas are everything to her. You think she has dreams of her own? What, to open up a shoemaking business? To become a millionaire? To remarry or something, go dancing, live it up, have a good time? Like some young, happy-go-lucky single mother? Come on. You know what she’s like. She came to this country in the first place, Gabe, even back then, because she had dreams that her kids could have a better life than that caste-driven slum you come from.

Aunt Jessica takes a breath. She lights a cigarette and takes a puff and her heel taps the sidewalk restlessly, as if impatient to stomp a stub out.

Gabe. She’s even thinking of taking up his advice and actually sending you there to that humid country where the kids would know each other already and be chattering away in a strange language. That’s how worried she is. Would you enjoy that? But she doesn’t want to do that if she doesn’t have to, to live in that country that wasn’t kind to her during her childhood, and so I’m trying to get you into Westward.

She glances at the school library, glass and steel modern. Do you have anything to say to me, Gabe?

Her eyes fix on me. I scrape my callused, bitten knuckles against my jeans. I stop myself. Down the street, wind rakes a few withered leaves free from the coral trees and tumbles them across the boulevard and its cars.

It was six years.

What?

I was six years old when I came here.