When Mauri went back to guarding cars, he found someone else had taken his place. And so as to leave no doubt that the spot no longer belonged to Mauri, the new guy stuck a knife in my brother’s heel. He spent a few days in the hospital, but then he skipped out, and we didn’t see him again until he turned up in San José Hospital, where they amputated his foot.

That event was an inflection point for my grandmother, and with my aunt Veronica’s help she started the process of filing a complaint against my mother in family court. She wanted to get custody. Of me, not of Mauri, who they already considered a lost cause. With my mother’s extensive record, it wouldn’t take long for me to be placed in my grandmother’s care. My aunt committed to helping her financially.

My grandmother explained her plans with a care and tenderness I’d never known in her, but I replied violently that if she separated me from my mother, if she forced me to live with her and my grandfather, I was going to run away, I’d run away just like Mauri. I’d leave a thousand times if I had to.

My grandmother knew I had her between a rock and a hard place. If she reported me for running away, the police would put me in a group home; that was what the law stipulated if the new guardian was unable to take responsibility. And she also knew that being sent to a group home was an even worse fate than staying with my mom. So the whole thing went nowhere and I kept living more or less as before, except that for Christmas I received two new gifts: clothes from my aunt and a book from Javiera.