come, and today at noon the lady in Boston would call and say I'm sorry, Maya, and you would cry, and we would hold you, and you would hate the post office, and the government, and the stupid lady in Boston. And you would never know. We would just keep going like before. Like nothing."
"That's not fair," my mother said.
"No," my father said. "It's not. It's not fair at all."
I looked at my mother. I wanted her to say it wasn't true. I wanted it so badly that I could feel the shape of the words she would use, the reasonable tone, the hand on the shoulder. She didn't say any of them.
"I wanted you to have it," she said instead. Very quietly. "The three months. You were so happy. You were walking around this house like—like you were already somewhere else. Singing. You don't sing, Maya. You were singing in the shower. I heard you. I would stand outside the bathroom door and listen to you singing and I thought, let her have this. Let her have this one thing for a little longer. Not yet. I'll tell her. Just not yet."
"And then it would be my fault," I said. "Or nobody's. It would be the mail."
"Then it would be nobody's fault," she said. "Yes. That's what I wanted. I wanted it to be nobody's fault. I wanted you to be sad about a passport and not about—" She gestured, a short, helpless motion that took in the kitchen and the leaning garage and the town and the whole country around us. "Not about your whole life. You're seventeen. You have the AP exams. You have college. You have the applications in the fall. You have—what was I supposed to do, put this on you? This? At seventeen? I wanted to give you one more year. One more year of not knowing. And then another one. That's how it happens, mija. You say not yet and then it's ten years."
"Fifteen," I said.
She closed her eyes.
I stood up. The chair with the wobbly leg scraped and tilted and fell over backward onto the linoleum with a crack that made all three of us flinch. I didn't pick it up. I still had the little passport in my hand. I looked down at the baby on the first page with her two gold earrings and her sour face and I thought, I don't know you. I don't know who you are. And she looked back at me, slightly to the left, at somebody waving something just out of frame.
"I'm going out," I said.
"Maya—"
"I'm going out, Papi. I'm not going to the airport. Okay? I'm not going to run away to Ecuador. I just can't be in this kitchen."