Fireside Susan Wiggs (best free ebook reader for android .txt) 📖

He sounded so phony, saying the same thing every time—I’m fine, don’t worry about me, we’re getting you help. The lawyers are really good. AJ worked hard to sound confident. Bo had not had to warn him that it did no good to complain.

Although he knew it was no use, he dialed their home phone number. He just wanted to hear her voice, even though he knew how much it would hurt. “It’s Yolanda. Leave me a message, and I’ll call you back.” It wasn’t the words, but the sound of her voice, followed by the open invitation signaled by the beep. “Mom,” he said, “Mami, where are you? I’m really scared and I want to be with you again.” He knew she wasn’t home to hear the message, but he added, “I love you, Mom. Te quiero. Okay, bye.”

Every time he turned off the phone, he would study the only photo he had of her, the shot taken at last year’s Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. It was just by luck that he had the picture in a pocket of his backpack. Otherwise, he’d have nothing at all.

After studying the photo, he would close his eyes and conjure memories of her, trying to bring her closer to him. Her smell and the way her hand felt, brushing the hair off his forehead. The sound of her voice when she sang along with the radio. The frown of worry that creased her brow when she didn’t think he was watching, and the way she twisted the phone cord around her finger and talked in a low voice so he couldn’t hear. He remembered the good times, too. Like in the summer, when it was so hot you almost couldn’t see straight, she’d take him to a secret place for swimming—a big holding tank called a rice well, fed by cool, clear water pumped from the ground.

“This place is special to me, niño,” she’d once told him.

“Why?”

A faraway look had softened her eyes. “It reminds me of a special time in my life.”

“What special time?” he persisted, but instead of answering, she’d laughed and ducked him under water. Afterward, they’d stop at the Sonic for soft ice cream cones, and AJ would find himself wishing his mother had more time off work.

Each Fourth of July, she used to take him to the bayou spillway west of town, and they would sit at the top of a steep bank, watching the fireworks, soaring in patriotic colors. He could still picture the glow on her face and the way her eyes sparkled as she lifted them to the sky and watched in wonder. “Do you see, hijo? Flowers blooming in the sky. Anything is possible. When I was your age, my parents used to take me to a place by the Rio Grande, to see the flowers.”

“Tell me about when you were little.”

Her face had grown sad, her eyes soft with a faraway gaze. “We lived in Laredo, down in the valley, and there was music every night, and wonderful food…My papa was hardworking and stern, but he loved me, and my mother was a wonderful cook. It was not such a big problem to cross the border in those days, and sometimes we visited my mother’s family in Nuevo Laredo, on the other side of the river. The Mexican side.”

According to his birth certificate, he’d been born in Laredo, though AJ barely remembered his abuelos. He hadn’t seen them since before he started kindergarten. He remembered his mother’s sadness when she told him his abuelito had died, and his grandmother was moving back to the valley, to live in Mexico. By then, his mom had married Bruno and they moved to Houston for work.

When AJ would ask if they could go visit his grandmother, the sadness returned to his mother’s eyes. “It’s not safe,” she said, and now he understood what “not safe” really meant. It wasn’t safe to be Latino, and poor. Sometimes you had to show proof of who you were, and he was fast finding out how hard that could be for people like his mother.

People seized in the raid were told they could agree to immediate voluntary deportation, or choose a hearing. Mrs. Bellamy-Shepherd, the blond lawyer, had explained that a hearing was when you went to a federal judge and explained why you should have the right to stay in the country instead of being forced to leave.

The bad news about that was, waiting for a hearing could take a long time because of something called a backlog. Even though the lawyers had filed emergency papers, the delay might last for weeks or months. Plus—and AJ had figured this out by looking at the Internet on Bo’s MacBook—the detention center was pretty much a jail.

A jail. He couldn’t picture his mom in jail. He could picture her listening to him read a poem aloud. He could picture her sitting in her bathrobe on a Sunday morning, sipping coffee from a mug and listening to the radio. He could picture her waiting in the school hallway for a parent-teacher conference. She always wore her nicest blouse, the sleeves pressed with a crisp crease, her hair pulled back in a clip, her mouth shiny with lipstick. He could picture his mom coming home late from the plant, so exhausted she had to fight to find a smile for him. And he could picture her brushing the hair from his forehead and saying, “You need a haircut, mi hijo, so I can see those beautiful long eyelashes.”

He could picture his mom a hundred ways. But he couldn’t picture her in jail.

Even worse, Mrs. Bellamy-Shepherd had explained that challenging detention was risky because they would almost certainly accuse his mom of doing something illegal.

“She hasn’t done anything illegal,” he said.

“I believe you’re right,” she said. “But something might come up—a parking violation or an expired tag, littering or filling out a form wrong. There are cases on the books of people