The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel by Patry Francis

against him. He said I was a mama’s boy, a spoiled little Provincetown cabrao . He wasn’t sure if I was even his son. And when I said I hoped I wasn’t, he threw me against the wall so hard I couldn’t breathe.
    “The next thing I knew I was on the floor, and both my parents were crying. At that point, my father was himself again, the guy who taught me how to dig for clams and read a navigational map, the dad I was so proud to walk through town with. Almost as if the shock of seeing me hurt had sobered him up on the spot.
    “He was like a kid that way, you know? He thought he could throw the biggest tantrum he wanted, that he could hit my mother—once he even pushed her down the basement stairs—and no one would really get hurt. He was always shocked when he saw the marks on her—as if someone else had done it.
    “I didn’t know I’d been knocked out until we were in the car heading for Hyannis, and I didn’t care either. All that mattered was that the fighting had stopped. Even when I found out I had a concussion and had to spend the night in the hospital, I felt like I’d won.”
    “But if you were at the hospital, why didn’t they treat your mother’s shoulder? Why did she wait till the next day and go to Nick?”
    “The people in the emergency room were already suspicious—even though my parents stuck to the story that I’d fallen off my bike earlier in the day. If the doctors had seen my mother’s arm, that would have blown the whole thing. It was the kind of hot spring day we never get on the Cape and she’d just gotten the beating of her life, but she was wearing long sleeves, and holding my father’s hand like they were the happiest couple this side of the bridge.”
    “And you didn’t say anything?”
    “Gallagher might be a great actor, but he couldn’t touch me that night. I said I’d been speeding on my bike when I hit a patch of sand, and I didn’t tell my mother I’d been knocked out because I had a farm league game that day. By the time we left, the doctor was clapping my father on the back, and telling him he had three sons of his own. Boys will be boys, right? And Codfish was flashing that smile of his. ‘One’s enough for me. This kid’s already taken ten years off my life.’ He sounded like he believed it himself.
    “The next day my mother was late bringing me home from the hospital. She’d already seen Nick, but she hid her sling in the car until after we left. ‘Your father wanted to come, but he’s out on the boat. Won’t be back for three days,’ she said, talking to me in code in front of the nurses. But when we looked at each other, this calm I can’t explain passed through us. You’d have to live like we did to understand. For a few days, things would be normal. I didn’t realize how much pain she was in until we got into the car. I had a black eye and this huge egg on my forehead, but we were so happy we sang all the way home.
    “We didn’t talk about anything till after dinner when she pulled me into the living room and cried. Cried and called me her little hero. Then she took me by the chin and looked at me more seriously than she ever had before. ‘I need you to take a vow, Gustavo. Do you know what that is?’ I didn’t answer. ‘It’s a promise you can never break, no matter what,’ she said. ‘Because if you do, you will grow up to be a man without honor.’ It sounded like something a Jedi knight would do. I stood up straighter and said I was ready. I wouldn’t break my vow no matter what.”
    At that point in his story, Hallie noticed the sheen in Gus’s eyes. “She asked you to promise that you would never get in the middle of a fight again.”
    “I vowed that when my parents argued, I would never come out of my room again. I would cover my eyes and block my ears, count from one hundred backwards, and sing the song she taught me.
     
    Atirei o pau au gato tu, tu
    Mas o gato tu, tu
    Nao morreu, reu, reu
    Dona Chica, ca, ca