Mildred’s Parents Accepted Her Marriage but my parents stress in secret. At the table in his single room apartment, dad serves us burritos hosed with ketchup, a mock on the salsa he can’t afford but won’t admit. Instead bites down his meal, swears he always made burritos this way and my sister and I, cloudless against the gray of financial crisis, roll our eyes and laugh, having seen our father’s memory make holes to fill with fiction: the gifts he was sure he bought us, the beaches he knew we visited, the tattered years of his marriage to my mother drilled and whittled to a lost home, a Ford Taurus with the transmission blown. Again, my sister and I suspected we were losing more than a recollection of road trips: mom sleeping in the passenger seat, dad steering with his knee, glancing to the backseat where we bob and sing Little Red Corvette. The absence my father must have felt when we returned to our mother and his apartment filled again with the echo of forgotten work, kitchen still acrid with ketchup. Home again, I leaned on the old Ford, read romance novels, knew nothing of the hurt that centered around me like an inadvertent sun. I didn’t know my parents divorced until it happened. Even now, when my parents tell me they’re okay with me dating a white man I look more like them than I mean to: smile a delicate line of tolerance, having been taught drama in movie clichés, low angle shots that never happen between us. We eat our fears like bruised tomatoes, tongues searching for good.
