How we got home before Eli I’ll never know. Probably on account of Mrs. Glass driving way too fast with her head turned backward for half the drive, and Eli also probably stopped to run errands. He always wanted to run errands after church and my mom would never let him. The after church crowd made too much work for the poor shops on the day of rest, she always said.
We microwaved some leftovers, and my mom said it would probably be better if we went and ate in our rooms. Santos was going to go to his room, but if I had to help him walk there was no way I could help him off that camping mat when he wanted to get up. So we ate on my bed and he practiced English. He was actually getting pretty good.
I asked where he learned some English. “In the… em… escuela?”
I thumbed through the dictionary. “School?”
“Yeah, eschool.” I thought it was funny he would add the “eh” sound before a bunch of words. I wondered if they taught them to do that in school.
“Where did you grow up?” I asked one of the questions he was trying to learn out of the back of the dictionary.
“In Onduras.”
I’d never heard of Onduras so I looked through the old encyclopedia set my grandma gave me when she died. I would have looked online instead but I didn’t really know how and we could only get the internet in the library, which was closed on Sundays. Eli said the internet was just liberal propaganda and he didn’t want it in his house. I think he just didn’t want to pay for it though since I guess it was pretty expensive.
I couldn’t find an “Onduras” on the map of Mexico in the old encyclopedia. I asked him to write it, and that’s when I realized he wasn’t even from Mexico.
“You’re not Mexican?”
He laughed. “I detest Mexico.” I thought detest was a funny word to use.
“Wait, are you… illegal?”
“No, gringos detest Honduras.” Turns out he’d figured out the word “illegal” pretty quickly since Eli seemed to think it was his name.
I looked up the word detest to see if I could figure out why he was using it so much and realized detesto is the word for “hate”. Man I hated not knowing any Spanish. I wondered if he thought I was one of the gringos that detest Honduras. I hoped gringos just meant people like Eli, not me and my mom.
Normally I just left plates in my room for a while, but he started trying to clean them up after we ate. I told him to stay and gave the plates to my mom. When I walked down the hall Eli was already in his stained brown chair watching the news and getting angry at the TV. I swear that man should have blown a blood vessel from how angry he always was. Would’ve done us all a lot of good.
I quick ran outside to do my farm chores for the day. I got it done pretty fast since Santos showed me how to dump the food all at once without hurting my back. When I went back to my room, he was asleep on the bed. That was good, cause I really hoped he’d be in better shape to help me with the farm work the next day. I sat on the floor to read and ended up falling asleep until my mom knocked on the door and said it was time for dinner.
She had me wake up Santos and bring him a plate of food before she dished up mine and Eli’s plates.
“How’d the illegal like your new liberal church?” Eli was actually in a decent mood. You could tell cause he asked my mom a question instead of right off the bat telling her she did something wrong.
“It was alright. I might go back.” My mom would never tell him what she really thought. I learned a long time ago this meant she loved it.
“Long as you keep him away from my church. Someone already told me we shouldn’t even be letting him in our house. Can’t say I disagree. We should’ve kept the quarters separate.”
“Yeah, we’re lucky it seems like Ben doesn’t mind.” I don’t know how my mom was so good at disagreeing with Eli without him noticing.
“I don’t like him staying so close to Ben either. News today said we’ve gotta be worried about illegals being gang members and rapists and murderers. Imagine that, in my own damn house. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“I can take care of myself, remember you taught me all those self defense skills?” Eli put me in a self defense class when I was ten cause he thought I’d get kidnapped or something. He got it in his head that he was the one who taught the classes and it’s just easier to let him keep thinking that.
“I thought you were worried about them taking your job?” My mom was poking the bear with a stick. I loved it.
“That’s the thing. There’s so many of them they’ll come right up and take our jobs and use up our welfare money and…”
My mom interrupted Eli, which was a really bad idea unless he was in a good mood like he was that Sunday. “What do you do for work that rapists and murderers and gang members are gonna take your job?”
I loved this. He sat speechless for a second while I bit my lip so hard I couldn’t laugh.
“I will not be disrespected at my own damn table. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.” My mom and I had an inside joke that we’d only call Eli sir when we won an argument against him. I dunno why, but teasing him like that sort of made him seem more human. Especially if he was in a decent mood.
I guess we hurt his feelings, cause we ate the rest of the meal in silence.