Along These Highways

Remember, Before You Go

15 Remember, Before You Go Joey was disappointed that J.R.’s mother was not home when he walked across the street from his house to meet up with J.R. before going out that night. He had planned on getting all of his goodbyes for the Recio family out of the way before he went out and got too drunk to say anything and sound sincere. Mr. Recio was there and, though he had never been as close to Joey as his wife had, he had a handshake and a hug to give to Joey before he left. “Be safe over there.” His words were short, but the look of respect he gave told Joey all he needed to know. Joey was no longer just the kid from across the street who was always interloping on breakfasts, dinners, and family TV hours, and to Mauricio Recio Sr. he was more than J.R.’s best friend. He was a man now, a Marine. Standing taller and straighter than he ever had, with a muscular frame and the same crew cut that had marked men as warriors when Mr. Recio was a child and his cousins and neighbors served their country against the North Vietnamese, Joey was a different person than the scared, slightly scrawny boy who had left for basic training what seemed mere days ago. Joey excused himself from the awkward scene in the living room, where Mr. Recio had made a big deal of getting up from his La-Z-Boy to shake Joey’s hand and give him a hug closer than the ones he seldom gave his own son. He went into the bathroom in the hall and let the water faucet run to drown out the silence of the bathroom and the cacophony in his head. When a couple of minutes had passed and the sink was full of water, Joey shut off the faucet and cupped some water in his hands before it all went down the drain. He rubbed the cool water on his face and behind his neck. After toweling off his face, neck, and hands, Joey thought, looking in the mirror, that he didn’t look like the man Mr. Recio was looking at in the living room. When he stepped out of the bathroom, he saw that the door to Cristela’s room across the hall was slightly open. He stepped across the hall Rene S. Perez II 16 quietly, so Cristela wouldn’t hear him trying to look in. In all of his years of friendship with J.R., Joey had never been into Cristela’s room, nor had he ever been curious as to what was in there. Walking out of the bathroom and out of Greenton, as he would be the next morning, Joey was compelled to the open door he had never been behind. He could see the foot of her bed and, on the wall, the left edge of a poster he couldn’t fully see through the opening in her doorway. Making anything out in the room was made more difficult by the fact that it was lit only by a desk lamp. Joey wanted to see more. He felt his hand rise up to the door, intending , on its own, to push it open a bit more. Before his hand touched the door, Joey heard someone walking toward the hallway from the living room. He managed to break his concentration on the room and look over to see Cristela walk into the hallway. His hand was still inches from the door when Joey spoke to her surprised smile. “Hi, Chela. I thought you were in there. I was going to say goodbye.” Cristela was sixteen and a half years old. She had never been more than J.R.’s little sister to Joey. She had always existed peripherally in the Recio home, just as Mauricio Sr. had. But with the reality of the goodbyes he was saying opening his eyes to what he had never noticed, everything looked different to Joey. Greenton looked like a home, to be missed rather than loathed, Mauricio Sr. looked like something more than the bump on the couch he’d always been, and Cristela looked more like a woman shedding off the last few remnants of girlhood, bearing no resemblance to J.R.’s little sister. “Thanks, Joey,” Cristela said, getting closer to him and putting her arms around him. “I went to the living room...