Second Hand: A Tucker Springs Novel 2

wish through junior high and high school had been to become an orphan.
    Everything with his family was a battle. Family gatherings were not quiet idylls on the back patio sipping beer while the kids ran in circles after a couple of dogs. In fact, usually the Rozals looked like the highlight reel from a documentary film about troubled families right before the film crew gave in and called the cops. Someone shouted while someone else cried quietly in the corner, and the doors always slammed. The kids usually did a kind of warm-up to the adults’ drama, fighting over who had brought what toy and how long they’d played with it and whether or not it had been broken before they had it. The adults argued over who had done what family chore or drunk the last beer. Even if El managed to stay out of the opening act, he’d be dragged into it eventually as someone’s unwilling ally, at which point he’d have to say he did or didn’t agree, immediately putting himself on a side. He couldn’t even walk out, because Uncle Mariano would follow and read him the riot act for disrespecting family. El’s defense for dealing with his relatives had been to be so “busy” with work he couldn’t come.
    When Abuela called and told El she needed help moving some things from the attic, however, El didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t say no to his grandmother, and she knew it. After closing the shop early and bracing himself for a long, grueling afternoon, El coached himself for the reality that he’d likely leave the house frustrated and angry. He warned himself not to engage, to let everything roll off his back, and under no circumstances to get embroiled in the drama.
    He rounded the corner of his grandmother’s street, saw the pile of crap teetering near the edge of the front porch, and plugged in so hard and deep it was like he’d never left.
    While he’d known his mom’s hoard would be worse because it always was, and because it had been three months since he’d last been over, the reality of what she’d done to Abuela’s house hit El the same way it always did: as a bitter cocktail of frustration, fear, and loss. The porch swing, where he’d sat joking with the neighbor boy, had snapped and broken beneath the weight of plastic bins, broken yard tools, and God knew what else. Junk. Shit that should have gone out with the trash years ago. Not to his mom, though. Nothing was ever trash to Patricia Rozal.
    She met El at the door, embracing him like the prodigal son, smelling like tortillas and cinnamon. “Emanuel, so good to see you.” She kissed him hard on the cheek and pulled him by the hand deeper into the house. “Mami, Emanuel ya está aquí.”
    The path to the kitchen was as circuitous as ever, taking them around the dining room table—piled two feet high with paper and boxes—around a precariously stacked mess of Rubbermaid bins, and through a tunnel of hanging clothes clogging the doorway. The kitchen itself was mostly okay, because that was Abuela’s domain, but El couldn’t help noticing the piles of mail and the latest shopping on the table.
    He smiled and hugged his grandmother, accepting her kisses as she fussed in Spanish, telling him he was too thin and smelled like smoke.
    Though he could hear the telltale shrieks of Rosa’s eldest drifting in through the window, Rosa wasn’t there, which was a blessing because Lorenzo’s wife Anna was, and as far as El knew, she and Rosa were still fighting. Anna sat at the table with Sary, Miguel’s wife, and Sary’s eldest daughter, Lila, the three of them filling tamales. They’d broken up the tasks, Lila drying the husks, Anna pressing out the masa, and Sary adding the meat and rolling the whole thing up and adding it to the pan of items waiting to be steamed.
    Anna smiled and waved at him, looking weary. “How’s it going, El?”
“Good.” He moved junk from a chair and sat down between her and Lila. “What about you?”
El listened as they took turns talking about work, school, and kids. Lila rolled her eyes a lot and played the part of a disinterested pre-teen, abandoning her assigned task of drying the soaked husks to check her constant stream of text messages. Sary asked about the shop, poking El for funny stories about things people tried to sell, and he told her a couple.
When Patti started to inventory her latest Goodwill purchases, though, El left the table and went to Abuela at the stove.
“Smells good.” He tried to sneak a bite of