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T-shirts and eye makeup and clunky silver jewelry. But the makeup was all gone now, and she wore a plain light-green blouse with long sleeves. “How’s Father Fillipo?” I asked her.
    “I don’t go to San Lazaro,” she said, shaking her head. “A different church.”
    I took a forkful of pork. “Which one?”
    “One near my school. How’s your new apartment?”
    Okay, Beatriz didn’t want to talk about her church. That was fine with me; I wasn’t that big on organized religion. “Pretty cool. We have a great view of Biscayne Bay, and at night with all the lights on in downtown Miami, it’s like a picture postcard.”
    “Just be careful,” my father said. “You know what kind of men live over there on South Beach. Maricóns.”
    My father suspected that half the politicians in Tallahassee and Washington DC were secret homosexuals, as were the corporate presidents and CEOs who weren’t Jewish. Some of them, of course, were both.
    After we finished dinner, the front door popped open and a horde of cousins spilled in. My father had sponsored his younger brother to come to the US as soon as he was financially able to, and Tío Teodoro had promptly married and begun reproducing. He had six kids, all of them a year apart, and our house became a zoo whenever they showed up.
    He and my father went out back to smoke cigars—Tío had a contact who got him the real Cuban ones, and Abuelo would have had heart failure to discover we were supporting the Castro regime in any way. Tía Luisa, my mother, and Abuela clustered in the living room to gossip, and Abuelo nodded off in his chair.
    The kids, all of them named for saints, rampaged around from room to room like a herd of wild dogs. Beatriz disappeared to her room, and Del and Hernan scooped up Fabiola and made their excuses. I was stuck, though.
    I went into the kitchen and started cleaning up. There was something very satisfying about working my way through the dirty dishes, glasses, and cutlery, stacking it all neatly in the dishwasher. “Why are you doing that?” my father demanded when he and Tío Teo walked in from the backyard. “That’s woman’s work.”
    “You see any women around?” I asked. “You don’t want to live in a pigsty, do you?”
    My father, the big exaggerator, proclaimed our house a pigsty when anything was out of place—if I left a jacket on the sofa, or Del left her makeup out, or Beatriz wasn’t quick enough to carry her dirty dishes to the kitchen sink.
    “You may be grown up, but you’re still my son, and I can still put you over my lap and spank you!” My father raised his hand as if to smack me, but used it instead to pull me close and kiss the top of my head. “ Mi pequeño niño ,” he said into my hair. “Now he’s a big working man.”
    “Where are you working?” Tío Teo asked.
    “Loredo Construction. We’re building a warehouse complex out west of the airport.”
    “Loredo? Walter Loredo?”
    “You know him?” I asked.
    He shook his head. “Not personally. But my boss, he and Loredo are pals. They go way back, to the Jesuit school.”
    I knew Walter had graduated from a Jesuit high school in Miami, one that had originally been founded in Havana and had relocated to the US after Castro took over. Many of Miami’s most prominent Cuban Americans had gone to the same school.
    “That’s where he gets his money,” Tío Teo said. He rubbed his fingers together. “All those boys, they stick together and they take care of each other.”
    He leaned against the counter beside my father. Papi was five years older than Tío, but they looked enough alike to almost be twins. Bullheaded, ox-bodied, square jawed, handsome in their way. “How is working for him?” Tío Teo asked.
    I turned from the sink and said, “Really cool. I’m learning so much every day. My boss is amazing. He always makes sure I understand what’s going on. He knows so much; it’s incredible.”
    “Sounds like you are in love with him.”