Summers in Chicago are scorching hot. The thick humidity wraps around you like an inescapable fleece blanket and the sun's heat makes everything an untouchable hot, making any air-conditioned place the only place to be. My mom would patiently wait for the precise moment when the last rays of the cruel sun would dip behind the highest point of the horizon to corral us into our maroon Astro van. This van was an upgrade from our previous car, a red Chevy that sucked all the free time from my dad for its endless repairs, spills, and breaks. Once the Chevy had not one ounce left to give, and no repair could resurrect this rusted hump of metal, my parents went in search of a worthy replacement at used car lots all over the city. We found our van in a lot only two bus rides away, it had endless rows of “almost new” cars and an equal amount of those tiny little flags strung from pole to pole, waving slowly in the thick hot wind. My dad inspected every part under the van's hood and every part inside it's cabin. The boys jumped in the back, elated over two rows of seats instead of one. I, for one, was most excited about the idea of not being squished in the middle ever again. No more monkey in the middle with my shoe, no more elbows to the ribs, no more refereeing pointless arguments and dodging wild punches aimed at the kid next to me. I didn't have to scream for shot gun anymore while tearing at my brother’s clothes to sit in the front seat when it was free. I had the entire middle row to myself.
We drove off the lot in our new maroon Astro van feeling like a million bucks with the windows down and the music playing loudly. It had passed my dad's thorough and relentless inspection! It was the one! The van didn't have many upgrades. My dad said that all those upgrades drained the life of a car battery and would make the van run slower. So almost all of the extra functions that can be added on to a car at purchase were missing. The manual windows needed to be rolled up by hand, the doors had to be opened one by one with a key, and if there was air conditioning I wouldn't know because we never used it. The seat fabric trapped body heat in it, leaving my skin moist and itchy whenever it came into contact with the maroon fabric. And the back didn't have windows that opened by rolling them down, you had to pop up two latches at the bottom and prop open the window for a crack to let air in. But for us those features didn't matter because the car did have one extra feature. The radio worked in our car and it had the option to play CD's. This was what my dad showed off to his brothers when they visited from their suburban homes, and to the neighbors when they came over to the van propped open with music calling out for everyone to come see Roberto's new ride. My dad only had one CD so he rarely used that function, but my mom would buy me Backstreet Boys CD's for my birthday and we'd listen to them when it was just me and her.
My favorite thing about summer were our night drives. It didn't matter how many hours I sat motionless on my front porch, lethargic from the heat of the day, I was always excited for our family drives. We'd pile up in the van, Robert and Cesar in the back row, me in the middle, Mom in the front and Dad driving. Sometimes Mom would drive but usually when we went through areas that had interesting street curves and hills. We would blast the radio and sing as loud as we wanted to music from Mom and Dad's time: Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Otis Redding and The Supreme's, and then they'd let our stations play, B96 and WGCI. On rare occasions we'd listen to the jazz station. We never fought over the radio, each song that came on had it's own chance in our van to be itself, our preference was just to have music playing. My brothers would make up games in the back seat of the van, infinite competitions against each other’s wit, strength and ultimate superiority. Sometimes I'd participate just to prove that girl's rule and boy's drool, and on occasion I would win. My mom and dad let us have it out most of the time. They wanted us to be capable of standing up for ourselves if ever the need came, so they'd only interject when savage fists were flying.
One night after my mom piled us all in, we set out to explore another unknown suburb or neighborhood and grab a bite to eat. My brothers were playing a game of “Guess what I'm thinking” which is supposed to prove who is the smartest somehow. I usually won at this game because I quickly picked up on the fact that they almost always thought of something related with the last answer and they always tried to make it funny. “Barf” would spark “barf face” which would spark “butt face” and so on. We were all born right after each other so my mom would call us her step kids. I guess she thought it was funny, but people rarely got the joke. My brothers were often mistaken for twins because of age but also because they were completely inseparable. Whenever Cesar got in trouble, so did Robert, and whatever mischief Robert was doing, Cesar wasn't far behind. They were like those terrible Tibble twins from “Arthur”. And I was like whoever the nerd loner character is from that show. I usually had my face stuck in a book or sat around writing in my diary or listening to music. I day-dreamed most of the summer days away and still played with my barbies until the age of 12, when boys became something other than gross jerk faces.
Cesar was thinking of a word for us to guess after I had guessed Robert's thought “butt lick”, when my mom cleared her throat and my dad turned down the radio. Whatever hit was playing on the radio faded to a low hum as my mom faced us with an odd look on her face. We all sat forward and looked at her quietly. I don't know what it was about this look, but we all knew inside that something bad had happened or was coming our way. Her eyes looked sad, and her mouth had a small frown pulling at the edges of it. “Hey guys, we need to talk to you about something.”
I was a nervous kid around strangers, I liked to be with my family because they were safe, and I was happy. But my mom's sentence made me feel strange and insecure. Mom turned to look away from us as she started to unravel a tale involving my dad getting in trouble at work a year ago that has now led to us losing our house and was now ending in a possible divorce. Just like that. She told the story and all of its facts while she looked straight ahead out the window in front of her that my dad also stared out of. Dad sat in the driver's seat, continuing to drive down a quiet street in the dark, I could only catch his face in the rear-view mirror as we approached a lamp post and his eyes looked weary and troubled. We didn't say anything after she finished and the only word that rang in my ear was “divorce”. I didn't care about the house; the grass never grew in the front and everything was falling apart anyways. But my family was everything. We couldn't split up. I loved our family drives in the summer, they are what I looked forward to every single day. I would have to go with my mom of course cause I'm a girl and she's a girl, but where would my brothers go? Cesar would go with Dad for sure, but Robert would probably stay with Mom because she spoils him. I sat there trying to understand the logistics of how this could possibly work when my dad stopped the car in the parking lot of a pizza place and a convenient store. Mom wiped her tears and asked if any of us wanted to go in with her to get food and my brothers jumped out the car. I sat paralyzed in the middle row after she shut the door.
After a while I laid my heavy head on the fabric seat bench, my cheeks red from rubbing against the itchy wet fabric from where the tears flowed out, changing the lightness of the maroon fabric and leaving a dark stain. I looked into the rear-view mirror and caught my dad's eyes looking back at me. A neon red light from the store front lit my dad's face and accentuated the lifetime worth of rough lines and wrinkles around his eyes. He was handsome and stoic as ever but a small sigh revealed his pent up sorrow. He stared at me, small and crying, and I know he could see my understanding of life shatter. His eyes welled up and began to overflow like mine and we both sat in the dark maroon van lit by the dim neon red sign and sobbed.
After this night, things changed. The van rides stopped, summers grew hotter than ever, and longer than ever. I filled my spare time with boys and figuring out the fix for my broken heart. When we finally moved out of our childhood home, another victim in the affair, we had no place to go. So we did what any poor lower class family would do. We moved into a hotel. A $99 a night hotel room. And we lived there for a month. $3,000 of borrowed, shame filled, argument producing money to stay in a place that made my parents feel as if they weren't poor and weren't screwed up. Me and my brothers swam in the pool every day, the school year ended the week we moved in, and my hair turned a light sickly green that month from the chlorine. Us kids were in paradise, and the hotel management knew us and kept an eye out for the three wandering poor kids. Eventually we knew every corner and hiding place in the facility and we spent our long summer day hiding from the sun, basking in the air conditioned coolness, behind walls and corners, waiting as long as it took for the person who was IT to find us. Time stopped. And me and my brothers vacationed as my parents lived through hell.
When we left the hotel after a month, we had a storage space and a van. This was the first time I moved in with my boyfriend who happened to live next door to my house. Well, ex-house now. The rest of the summer I lived in his room, waiting for him to come back from hanging out with his friends on the corners of his old neighborhood. I read a lot of books and looked at my old house out the window. It was abandoned, becoming the bank’s property after we foreclosed. The yellow bricks looked dry and dusty, worn from years of being unkept. The front dirt patch which had been the spring project every year, as it refused to sprout anything but weeds, quickly was overcome by enthusiastic weeds, excited to not be tended to, no longer forced to comply with its previous owners wishes. Maybe the dirt just wasn't cut out for grass. It thrived healthily in front of a decaying abandoned home, and every day I watched the weeds sprout and grow taller, healthier and prouder, reaching towards the sun.