Merci Suárez Changes Gears

When Merci arrives at home, there is a police cruiser parked in front of Abuela’s home. Merci wonders if her twin cousins, Axel and Tomás, whom Abuelo normally picks up from school, have instead been escorted home by the police. She expects mayhem whenever her younger cousins are involved, but she also knows that something serious is occurring, and watches nervously as her mother, who has told her to remain in the car, begins to speak with the officers.

Merci can see Abuela speaking to officers. She writes, “Abuela’s face is twisted in worry, although that’s not unusual on its own. She’s the manager of the Catastrophic Concerns Department in our family, after all, so it’s pretty much her resting face. If you want to know all the ways you can be tragically hurt in everyday life, just talk to Abuela. She keeps a long list—and she doesn’t mind sharing details” (15). She adds a long laundry list of the tales of doom that Abuela spins regarding everyday hazards—and sympathizes with Lolo for the way that she pesters him especially.

As Merci jockeys for a better vantage point and asks Roli questions, Roli simply hushes her, as he is trying to eavesdrop. Merci notices that Lolo is in the cruiser’s backseat. She watches as the officer asks her mother where the twins live. Her mother, flustered, explains the family living arrangement, which is often confusing to other people: “Our three flat-top houses are exact pink triplets, and they sit side by side here on Sixth Street. The one on the left, with the Sol Painting van parked out front, is ours. The one in the middle, with the flower beds, is where Abuela and Lolo live. The one on the right, with the explosion of toys in the dirt, belongs to Tía Inés and the twins,” explains Merci (18).

Merci feels unsettled and nervous as she eyes the officer’s billy club and gun. As the officer takes Merci’s mother out of earshot, Merci goes to the open-doored cruiser to talk to Lolo. When she asks Lolo to tell her what the twins did, he insists that they are innocent. He also claims that his glasses are faulty. The twins come barreling out of their home’s back door, and Merci makes them tell her what has happened. They tell her that Lolo insisted on trying to bring home the wrong set of twins—the Vietnamese twins in a different class. Merci turns to Lolo, whose cheeks are flushed and who will not meet her eye. He grouses about the way that parents yelled at him and treated him like a criminal, insisting that more respect should have been shown to him as an elder. The twins report that the police were called and a school mother recorded the incident with her phone.

Merci, beginning to sweat in the summer heat again, invites Lolo over for a snack so they can both decompress. She wants to tell him about picture day, and intimates that she prefers to bring her troubles to him rather than to her mother, whose constant optimism often makes her feel that it’s her own fault when things go wrong for her. They have a tradition of sharing a snack after her schooling and talking about each of their days. However, Lolo is preoccupied and tells Merci to go in without him. A storm gathers and begins, but Lolo will not be roused from the police cruiser by neither his wife nor his daughter.