My father stood up. For a second I thought he was going to stop me. Then he picked the chair up off the floor and set it back on its legs and pushed it in under the table, gently, so it wouldn't fall again.
"Take your phone," he said. "Answer if I call. That's all. Answer if I call."
I put the passport in my back pocket. I don't know why. I think I didn't want either of them to have it. I went out the front door so I wouldn't have to walk past the orange pack, and I got my bike out from under the porch, and I rode.
Danbury is a city that likes to call itself a town. It has a hundred thousand people in it, and a mall, and a hospital where I was not born, and a downtown on Main Street that used to make hats for the whole country and now makes mostly empanadas and phone repairs and Brazilian bakeries with pão de queijo in the window. It sits at the bottom of a lot of hills, and if you ride a bike in Danbury you learn to hate all of them personally. I rode down Deer Hill Avenue without braking, which my father would have killed me for, and through the light at Main Street when it was already yellow, and I didn't think about where I was going until I was standing up on my pedals on the long climb into Tarrywile Park with my lungs on fire and my thighs shaking.
I had been going to Tarrywile since I was nine. It was where my mother had taken me with the library-sale field guide, on her Sundays off, because it was free and because it had two ponds and an old orchard and a mansion on the hill that nobody we knew had ever been inside. We would walk the loop around Parks Pond while she pointed with her chin, the way people from the mountains point, at things in the cattails. Garza. Martín pescador. Who is that? Who's talking? She knew all of them. I always thought it was strange that she knew so many birds when she never went anywhere. When I asked her once, she said she had liked them as a girl. That was all. She liked them as a girl.
Now I sat on the bench at the end of the pond, the one with the little brass plaque for a man named R. Quennell who loved this place, and I took the passport out of my back pocket and opened it on my knee, and I did the thing I had wanted to do since the kitchen, which was read every word in it.
There weren't many. It was a very boring document. That was almost the worst part. My entire life had been turned upside down by something with the emotional range of a library card. Name. Surname. Nationality: ECUATORIANA. Sex: F. Height, not filled in, because I had been