With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo

 

Fickle Fatherhood

My father has always loved to read to me. I may question a lot of his actions, but his phone calls from San Juan and his attempts to instill a love of knowledge into me aren’t among them. Even my earliest memories include his voice in my ear reading a passage from whatever book he was currently into. Julio didn’t believe in children’s books. He believed whatever he read, he should read to me. Always nonfiction, and rarely fit for a child, but I loved listening to his voice.

These days, he doesn’t read to me when he comes to visit, and he visits at the same time every year. Julio arrives at the beginning of July, usually with a full agenda. This past summer he rented a chair at the barbershop down the block and cut a couple of heads in the morning, volunteered at the cultural center in the afternoon, and attended summer lectures and readings at whichever one of the universities in the city was having an event.

Every day he invited me to come with him on his afternoon adventures, but I’m not one for lectures and my relationship with my father is complicated. Not to mention my new job didn’t allow me to just drop work whenever he asked.

In the evenings, he was the perfect houseguest.

He helped wash the dishes even though he was always too late to eat dinner with us. He picked up ’Buela’s medicine at the pharmacy or anything we needed from the grocery store. He played with Babygirl and pretended he was going to buzz-cut her hair until she squealed with laughter and batted at his clippers. He was one of the few people who could stop her from crying when she was throwing a tantrum. I had a glimpse into the kind of father he might have been if my mother had lived.

If he had chosen to stay.

But Julio never stays long and he never gives notice. At some point when August starts rearing its head, Julio begins rearing his toward a flight back to Puerto Rico.

At the end of July this year, when ’Buela and I got home from the supermarket, all his stuff was gone from the living room. His suitcase wasn’t in the corner. His blanket was neatly folded over the couch. The case with his barbering tools was nowhere to be seen. Babygirl was at Tyrone’s house that weekend, so not only did he not say goodbye to us, he didn’t even say goodbye to her. And by that point she’d gotten attached to “Pop-Pop,” as she called him.

But poof! Houdini in the flesh. Or rather, in the disappearance. He didn’t leave a note, he didn’t text goodbye. He called a week later like nothing had happened and asked if I could send him Angelica’s Netflix password so he could watch a documentary on the Young Lords.

And maybe because I struggle to learn certain lessons, this one has taken me years and years to learn: You can’t make too much space for a father like mine in your life. Because he’ll elbow his way in and stretch the corners wide, and when he leaves all you have is the oversized empty—the gap in your heart where a parent should be.