Canta y no llores

Francisco and Papa Francisco at Francisco’s Carniceria were identical except Francisco had fewer gray hairs and fewer wrinkles and he had only two fingers, his thumb and pointer, on his left hand while his papa had only those two fingers on his right. They both had big bellies, big mustaches instead of upper lips, and they both wore their button-ups buttoned a quarter of the way because the rest of the buttons had popped off. They’d even greet me the same when, after the door sensor announced my presence, I’d shout into the store, “Francisco, Papa Francisco, what’s the special today?”

Papa Francisco would reply from behind the front counter, waving his two-fingered hand, “What’s happening, muchacho? What can we get you?” And just like an echo, his son’s voice would travel from behind the display fridges with the meat at the back of the store, “What’s happening, muchacho? What can we get you?”

Oh, the usual, I’d say, marching in, excited for the only meal Papa and I would have all week that wasn’t beans or a cup of noodles.

“Para usted, lo mejor precio,” Papa Francisco would say, giving me a right-handed thumbs up. I’d respond with a drive-by thumbs up as I headed toward the back.

Francisco would follow, “Yeah, for you, we got the best price.” He’d give me a left-handed thumbs up from over the display fridges, and by then I’d be grinning and giving two thumbs up.

Francisco would wave my order and start counting down. “Hurry, muchacho,” he’d say, and I’d bolt up the aisle before he tossed it. He’d always toss the order as soon as I exited the aisle, even if he had reached four or three in the countdown. I’d either catch it cleanly or juggle it, but I’d always catch it somehow. We’d laugh, he’d give a thumbs up for my catch, and I’d be on my way back to the front.

As Papa Francisco rang me up, he’d wink and zip his lips as he discounted fifty cents from the total. He’d remove a bag of chicharrones from under the counter and snack on them while he waited for me to pick a candy with the fifty cents. He’d remove a small ledger from the register, lick the crumbs from his fingers, and I’d climb onto the counter to watch him pencil in the total, the date, and the items in the order, which would just be the meat because he’d never include the candy. Or the discount.

Before I’d hop off the counter, Papa Francisco would say, his voice hushed, and his two-fingered hand covering his mouth, “You ready, muchacho?”

I’d stretch my neck as high as I could to see over the aisles at Francisco in the back who’d be busy with the meat. I’d nod my head as if shaking a soda, and Papa Francisco would roll his chair, press a button, and crank up a dial, causing the speakers in the ceiling to blare the bawling trumpets in a Mariachi cover of a classic Mexican song. We’d sway our bodies to the strums of the vihuela, stirring up the pains that started to well from our souls for our favorite moment in the song. Following Papa Francisco's lead, I’d hold my hand over my heart when the refrain began and belt the grito: "Ay, ay, ay, ay." Then we’d reach out to the ceiling, he with his two-fingered hand, and sing, “Canta y no llores.” By the time the refrain came on for the last time, all three of us would be singing to the music, and when it was time to do the grito, together we’d reach as high as we could to tear down the heavens as we yelled from the depths of our aching hearts.

Rain or shine, every Wednesday I stopped on my way home from school at Francisco’s Carniceria for four pounds of beef shank so Papa could make something that wasn’t beans, something like carne con chile verde or cocido. That was the only meal we ate together after Mama left. Papa would get sick most days of the week, but he usually found it in him to make something special on Wednesdays when I came in with the meat. I believed those Wednesday meals reminded Papa of our weekly family dinner that we had when Mama was still there, the meal he cooked to surprise her with when she worked the long Wednesday shift. Those Wednesday meals, with just me and Papa, meant a lot to him because it got him up from his sickness. They meant a lot to me, too, so every Wednesday I went to Francisco’s Carniceria. I could always count on them being open, no matter the time, even if Wednesday landed on Christmas or New Year's or Cinco de Mayo. Well, every Wednesday except the one after the night Papa Francisco was taken from their apartment on a stretcher.

They lived on the first floor as I did. But the two of them lived in an apartment on the other side of the courtyard, on the side opposite of mine in our rectangle-shaped building. That night, I sat outside of my apartment, dangling my legs over the edge of the walkway, staring down at the ground floor below, wondering if Papa would be able to make anything with the meat tomorrow since he had been sick all day. I watched the paramedics scale the stairs up to the first floor. I watched from across the courtyard as Francisco, in chonies and an undershirt, opened his door, motioning them to hurry inside. I watched as they tried to remove Papa Francisco from the apartment. They had some difficulty getting him out. It looked like the sheet covering Papa Francisco's stiff, bulky body was going to slip off when they tilted the stretcher to angle it through the doorway. I gripped the railing balusters, pressing my head into them, and luckily closed my eyes before I heard a thud and a heart-tearing cry.

That Wednesday we didn’t have meat. As I sat on the carpet in the living room, slurping the last drops of broth from my cup of noodles, I stared at the second cup on the table opposite me. A fork lay across its lid to keep the heat in. “Papa,” I whispered, but he didn’t respond. He snored on the carpet, his breath soaked in sickness. “It’s getting cold,” I said before I went off to bed, leaving the cup there, just in case.

The following Wednesday when Francisco’s Carniceria was open again, I shouted when the door sensor went off, “Francisco, Papa Francisco, what’s the special today?”

At the edge of the store, I heard it like a lost echo, “It’s just me, muchacho.”

My heart felt heavy with guilt for forgetting. It felt so heavy I could barely drag my feet past the empty counter.

Francisco met me in an aisle before I reached the display fridges in the back, waving my usual order of meat as he came down. He nodded, closing his eyes. I nodded, leaned against the shelves to let him pass, and followed him to the counter.

He rang me up at full price. I didn’t have it in me to mention that his papa always gave me a discount so I could get a candy. But as he stood there, looking down at me, waiting for the money, I had to tell him that his papa always put me down in his book so I could owe him and pay him on the first Wednesday of the month.

“I don’t know,” fussed Francisco. “I don’t know.” His papa had always managed the front counter and the finances, he said, so he didn’t know anything about a book and he couldn’t give me the meat without the money, which I really needed because Papa had been extra sick lately and I knew cocido would make him feel better.

If he could just check the book, I said, then I’d explain all about the debt. But he didn’t look like he wanted to fetch it. He clenched his jaw, his arms crossed on top of his belly. I pointed to the cash register and flashed him a smile, repeating that Papa Francisco had kept it under the money tray. I gave him two thumbs up and another please, and he begrudgingly opened the register to check for it.

He found the ledger. He scanned it and shut it closed, exhaling in frustration. “I don’t understand this.”

“Let me see,” I said, climbing onto the counter and taking the ledger. I opened it to the most recent page. I found many different names in there, some owing a little and some owing a lot, but there I was under “Muchacho.” I explained to Francisco that these lines were the purchases and the crossed-out ones had been repaid. A running total wasn’t recorded anywhere, but I told him I was keeping track and we owed for nearly two months because last month was a tough one for Papa, but Papa would have the money next week.

"Two months?" he asked.

"Almost two months," I confirmed, raising two fingers.

He scrunched his face and then rotated the ledger so he could read it. He grumbled at all the debts, about how he could use the money for this and that. He didn’t look away from the ledger when he told me I needed to pay the debt. He scrolled through the pages when he told me I needed to pay the two months.

I asked if I could just pay next week and add this order of beef shank to the debt, but he brushed me away, telling me to get off the counter. He leaned on his elbow, holding his hand to his forehead as if blocking out the sun, and demanded, staring down at the ledger, “You need to pay the two months.”

But the next week Papa didn’t have the money and I couldn’t pay off the debt, so when Francisco clutched the four-pound order of beef shank on the counter and raised his voice and asked if I had listened to him when he said I couldn’t have it unless I paid the debt, I looked down at the rack of chips in front of the counter and squeaked, “Please,” because he scared me.

He had to have felt bad because I heard him sigh. “Next week,” he said, his voice sounding weak. “Next week if you pay me, muchacho.”

I didn’t go to Francisco’s Carniceria the following week because Papa didn’t have the money again and I didn’t want to tell Francisco that I didn’t have it. The week after that I gathered a small payment from the bottles I recycled and the change I found around the living room. When the door sensor announced my presence, I got a little nervous when Francisco asked from behind the counter, “Muchacho, you got the money?”

“Some.”

“Mmm,” he said. I emptied my pockets, dropping the money on the counter. He sifted through the crumbled dollars and the coins. “This covers one week, maybe. Not two months.”

I apologized, telling him that was all Papa could afford right now.

Francisco muttered something under his breath. I couldn’t hear it all, but I did recognize the word “borracho.” He said it with so much anger and disgust, as if Papa was one of the borrachos sleeping next to their shopping carts on the sidewalk, and not the nice ones, but the ones who’d grab your ankle and demand change. Papa wasn’t like that. He got sick sometimes, but he wasn’t a borracho. I left the money on the counter, heading for the door.

Francisco called me back, though. He called me back and sighed. “Muchacho,” he said, looking down at the counter, avoiding eye contact. “I’m tired.” He sighed again, rubbing his forehead with his two-fingered hand. “I’ve been tired,” he repeated.

It sounded like an apology. I appreciated that. And I also understood how it felt to be tired. “Sometimes that happens to me,” I said, leaning onto the counter. “Sometimes, when the sun is out and there’s no reason to be tired, I get tired. And that’s okay, I tell myself. Sometimes, we need to be tired because fighting it only makes it worse.”

He sat on the rolling chair. It squeaked under his weight. He rolled back, bumped into the wall behind him, and just sat like a tired loaf of bread.

I grabbed a bag of chicharrones. I picked up one of the crumpled dollars from the debt money and waved it for him to see, pointing at the chicharrones, and placed it to the side, away from the rest of the debt money. And then I tossed him the bag and told him to take it easy for a little. I didn’t tell him this, but I knew that when you’re tired for no reason, sometimes all you needed to do was be comfortably tired until it passed.

I went off to find the broom and swept the floor in front of the counter so he could relax without worries. That also gave me something to do, since I didn’t want to be home without the meat. When I was in one of the aisles, I finally heard the loud crunch when he took his first bite of a chicharron. That made me smile, so I whistled and danced a little as I continued sweeping the floor.

I helped Francisco the rest of the afternoon. I mopped, opened the doors so good air could come in, I wiped away weeks of dust, tidied up the items on the shelves, and anything else I could do to make the store look a little less out of place while he moved between the front and the back of the store to help the customers. After the night fell, when it was time to close up, he pointed to the meat area and told me to turn off the lights back there while he finished closing up at the front. The switches, he said, were on the wall in the work area behind the meat fridges.

“Aye, aye,” I said, saluting him.

He began counting down after I turned the lights off. “We’re closing, muchacho. You’ll be locked in here forever,” he joked with a tone in his voice that sounded heartier than before. That got me racing. Eight, seven, six, he said as I ran down the aisle. Five, four, he said when I burst out of the aisle, drifting on the floor. But he didn’t continue the count as I ran past the counter straight for the exit. He stood right where the door sensor would have been going off if it was still on. He stood in front of the doorway, his hand on the light switch. And then he chuckled when he switched them off without ever reaching zero.

Seeing his frame outlined by darkness, with the murky yellow light from the streetlamp coming into the store and wrapping around his body, it really made him seem huge. It wasn’t a scary huge because although he did sometimes scare me with his recent anger, I knew he didn’t have it in him to hurt someone. He was like Papa Francisco and Papa Francisco wouldn’t even swat a fly. No, it was a huge that made him seem tough, like a boulder or a big bull. The kind of huge you’d think—yeah, that guy couldn’t be broken. Some nights I would wonder in bed if getting hurt goes away when you’re older, when you’re bigger, and if that was something I could look forward to as I grew, but then I realized that wasn’t true. You could be as huge as Francisco and still be hurting, too.

From the darkness, which wasn’t complete darkness but more like a fog that blanketed everything in the store, he said “Ay, muchacho.” That tired, angry voice had returned. “You forgot the lights on the fridges.”

I followed his sulking body through the foggy darkness to the end of an aisle where he stopped, blocking me. I tried to peek around him to see what he was doing or what was in the way, but I couldn’t without squeezing between him and the shelf, so I went back down the aisle and up the neighboring one.

The display fridges, filled with meat, hummed under warm orange light. It gave off just enough light that my reflection was caught on the display glass as I came out of the aisle. I was still in my school uniform of blue slacks and a white polo. I knew my shirt was pretty dirty because I hadn’t washed it in a few days and I had been cleaning the store all day, but it looked pristine in the reflection, as white as powdered laundry soap. I waved to myself and covered my mouth when I started to giggle. That’s when I looked over at Francisco, who was just staring at the display glass.

I almost shouted when I saw it, the image of Papa Francisco in his reflection. I looked up to Francisco, who was stuck in something, who was trying to figure something out. It looked like he was trying to identify who that person was in his reflection. I could have easily said, that was you, Francisco, but he wouldn’t have heard me. And that was something he needed to figure out himself. Still, I wondered who he saw. Maybe he saw Papa Francisco. Maybe he saw a stranger. Or maybe he did see himself. But whoever he saw in his reflection, he didn’t recognize him. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have slowly moved his two-fingered hand up to hold his heart. Otherwise, he would have continued to the light switches without even a moment of hesitation.

Outside, Francisco dawdled as he fastened the chain to lock the doors. He told me to go ahead, that I didn’t have to wait for him. But I said I didn’t mind waiting so we could walk together to the apartments. “Fine,” he said. I knew he didn’t want to walk with me. But it was still kind of dark out there under the light-polluted sky. I didn’t want to go alone, and I thought he shouldn’t go alone, either.

Neither of us really spoke during the walk. When I asked him a question to get a conversation going, he’d give me a one- or two-word answer, and when I hummed a song, he didn’t join in, so eventually it was just the sound of our footsteps on the sidewalk and the occasional cars that drove by.

There was a laundromat still open on a corner where two wide streets intersected. It was an intersection that saw a lot of traffic in the day, but as we waited for the crosswalk light, it was deserted. It would have felt like we were alone out there if the smell of smog and hamburgers wasn’t hanging in the air like a peeping presence. The laundromat, with its tall and wide glass windows, was bright, and Francisco was watching the only two people inside: a young pregnant woman who was watching a dryer and the toddler sitting on her shoulders. She was eating from a bag of chips and drinking a can of soda. When the toddler reached down and grabbed at her chest, she handed him a chip, and he rested his head back down on hers and nibbled on it.

When the light signaled for us to walk, he didn’t move and I didn’t budge, either.

“That junk is not good for her,” he said. “Not for him, not for the baby.”

I told him it was just a snack. I patted my stomach and said, “Babies like chips, too.”

“It’s unhealthy,” he snarled. “She doesn’t care about the boy. She doesn’t care about the baby.”

I disagreed. She did care. I told him they were warm inside—and that’s what mattered most: that they were together. “Plus,” I said, “it’s just a little late-night snack. What could it hurt?”

“I told him,” he said.

I looked at Francisco. His fingers were coiled into a two-fingered fist, tight, tense, shaking as if about to strike.

“I told him,” he said through clenched teeth.

I stepped back because something inside him went off.

“I told him,” he shouted. “I told him, I told him, I told him!” Francisco fumed, pounding on the crosswalk button with the heel of his palms because we had missed the light. He would have torn down the streetlight if he hadn’t started panting, his breath wheezing in and out. His breathlessness seemed to anger him further, so he took a deep, deep breath in, a breath so deep he inhaled the air from the entire world. And then he let it all out and gave it back to us so we, too, could experience, just for a split second, how it felt to be suffocated by grief.

“I told him,” he said, his voice deflating and his body drooping. “I told him to watch his health, watch what he ate. Every day I told him. Every day I took his chicharrones. Every day he ate them behind my back. Every day he made the frijoles in manteca and ate his pound of chorizo. Your corazón,” Francisco said, patting his heart, “will give out like Madre’s. Just like Madre’s, I’d say. But he’d shoo that away, saying it was just un poco—just a little. And then he’d beat his chest and say, ‘It won’t kill me, mijo.’ He said, ‘It won’t kill me, mijo’ every day until it finally did.”

There was a lot I wanted to say. Like, it wasn’t his fault that Papa Francisco made those decisions. But something was telling me that wasn’t what Francisco wanted to hear. Something was telling me he didn’t want to hear anything at all. So, I listened instead, because I knew he just wanted to be heard.

“But every night we ate the carne. Every night I was too tired to make something healthy for dinner. Every night we sat in our chonies, watching the tele, eating the plates of carne. Every night I fed him the carne.” Francisco took a seat on the curb. “Every night,” he said. “Every night.”

I sat next to him, brought my legs up, and hugged them.

We sat in silence through cycles of the crosswalk light, watching the young mama inside the laundromat who was still eating the chips and the boy who was eventually moved to a stroller where he curled to sleep. At one point, halfway through a bite, she tossed the bag of chips onto the folding counter, licked her fingers, and opened the dryer. She scavenged inside and blanketed the sleeping boy with an oversized sweater. Now and then, as she folded her laundry, she stopped, held her belly, and rubbed it. She pursed her lips, and I could almost hear her soothing the baby. And then I imagined she continued humming to her baby, humming as she continued folding, humming as she made it through the night for her baby and her boy.

Francisco said, “Lo siento,” but I didn’t respond. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. He turned and said to me, “I’m sorry, muchacho.” I tilted my head, unsure of what he was apologizing to me for. Then he told me he shouldn’t have given me a hard time the past weeks, that he should have been nicer, that he shouldn’t have been a jerk, that he should have been more like his padre. “Lo siento, muchacho. I wasn’t myself.”

I gave him two thumbs up, flashed him a smile, and said, “No worries, muchacho.”

He seemed relieved and told me he’d clear the debt. “That was in my padre’s book,” he said. “Let’s just start brand new, muchacho.”

That night, as I walked into the apartment, Papa was snoring on the living room carpet, and I was greeted by stomach pangs because I hadn’t had dinner. But even though I was hungry, I didn’t want to eat. I wanted to wait and save my hunger for tomorrow when I’d come home and surprise Papa with some meat. I’d come home and ask Papa if he could teach me how to cook cocido, and we’d spend time together chopping up vegetables, talking, laughing. While the soup cooked, I’d open all the windows in the apartment and tell Papa he had to help me clean every room so we could bring in good air: the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, our bedroom. And then we’d feast on our cocido, with lemon, lots of lemon, and I’d make sure Papa had water or horchata instead of beer. We’d both sit back in our chairs, stuffed, but I’d tell Papa he’d have to take me to the park afterward so we could get a little exercise in and he could sweat out the sickness. At first, he would say it was too late and he’d just have a beer and crash, but I’d tell him that both of us had to be healthier, more active, because I didn’t want his heart to slowly give up like Papa Francisco’s, and he’d tell me, “You’re right, mijo. Thanks, mijo.” I thought about that in bed. I thought about that throughout the sleepless night, and even as I whispered “Good morning” to Papa sleeping on the floor on my way to school.

When I stepped into Francisco’s Carniceria later that day, I shouted, “Francisco, what’s the special today?”

Francisco said from behind the counter, “What’s happening, muchacho? I got it for you.” He hurried to the back and returned with my usual order: four pounds of beef shank. He dropped it on the counter and said, “Don’t worry about this one.”

As I left Francisco’s Carniceria with the meat, something sparked in me the second I heard the door sensor ring. I jumped back in, and when Francisco looked to see who triggered the sensor, I kneeled, raised my hand to the ceiling, and let out the loudest, most heartbreaking grito and sang, “Canta y no llores.” I started again, hoping Francisco would join me, but he didn’t. Instead, I saw the echo of a smile tug on his paunchy cheeks. I let out one last grito and that time Francisco placed his two-fingered hand on his heart and reached to the heavens. He didn’t sing though. He needed more time before he could join me in the grito and sing again. But I sang. I sang from the depths of my aching heart, “Canta y ya no llores.”