1. The girl with scratched pink ballet flats sat carefully counting her change. Piled on her lap: nickel, quarter, penny, dollar at a time, disappeared into the pocket of a black jacket. Leather, maybe. Her […]

At 3:20 a.m., I was dressed and standing in front of the mirror in my bedroom.  My bedroom was not large, about fifteen feet by ten, with a window facing west, and several posters on the wall.  There was one of Don Mattingly, the Yankees’ first baseman, his glove on the ground waiting to stop any baseball from getting by.  Another was of Debbie Gibson, in concert, as well as a poster of a topless Samantha Fox.  I stared back at the mirror and smiled.  Today was supposed to be the beginning of something special; today was the beginning of my mother and I reconnecting.

My mother and I used to be really close.  We could talk about anything.  We would stay up late watching television and drink hot chocolate with marshmallows.  This changed, however, when I was fourteen years old and she decided to come out of the closet by having her lover tell me that she was gay.

My mother walked into my room and seemed to be in a good mood.  “I didn’t think you would be awake,” she said, fixing my collar.

“What? Shit, mom, I’m not gonna miss this trip for nothin’,”  I said.

“Good, I’m gonna have a cup of coffee, want some?”

I nodded and she left the room.

We had grown apart.  Arguments and disrespect dominated the airways of our tiny home.  After my mother came out, Isabel, her lover, moved in with her “entourage” of four kids cramming eight people into our two-bedroom apartment.

We exited the building and were greeted by the cold winter morning air.  The wind was blowing fiercely, and I loved it.  The streets were filled with mountains of dirty snow, and the pavement had that white coating left behind by the snowplows.  My mother had borrowed her best friend’s car: a blue 1983 Chevy Nova.  It was three years old with light-blue cloth seats and the Puerto Rican flag hanging from the rear view mirror.  It was very clean, smelled like cinnamon, and it had a cassette player.

We were on our way to Buffalo to visit a lady, a lady my mother was playing dirty with behind Isabel’s back.  The lady was named Jennifer, and my mother had met her in a gay club called Aries, in the Bronx.  Jennifer, a court stenographer, had been in New York City visiting her friends for the weekend.  They hit it off, and the affair soon followed.  My mother’s philandering never surprised me.  It would not have been the first time she strayed.  My mother was also having an affair with a lady that lived on the fourth floor of our building.  All this despite being in an “exclusive” relationship with Isabel.  My mother sat in the driver’s seat, placed the key in the ignition and turned it on.  The inside was freezing, and she quickly turned on the heater.