Bronwyn reaches across me and punches Roman in the arm. “Nice going, dickhead.”
“Sorry,” he says, handing me another beer without looking at me. “I forgot.”
I take the beer and I know why Roman doesn’t want to look at me. I’m grateful for that because I know if he does tilt his head up, I’ll see the pity stare. The same expression that drove my sister away. It’s the way people look at you when they know you’re damaged, but don’t know how to react to knowing a thing like that.
Dominic walks over to the guitar that one of the twins has sitting on a guitar stand. He picks it up and plucks at a few of the strings.
Bronwyn laughs when she sees what Dominic is doing with the guitar. “Dude.” She shakes her head. “You can’t play that thing.”
Bronwyn, her real name is Theresa, but she’s been making everybody call her Bronwyn for a couple years, now. “Theresa sounds like a fat chick,” she told me when she first came up with the idea to be a Bronwyn. “A Theresa is unremarkable. Mundane. Adequate. Invisible. Bronwyn is a strong woman. A warrior goddess. A myth.”
Bronwyn is too much woman to be invisible by any name. She looks like a Theresa, but she reads a lot of books and just got braces to make her teeth look less Theresa-like.
So, I sit next to Bronwyn — new and improved Theresa — and wait for Dominic to wow us with his musical skills. He takes a deep breath, and then attacks the guitar with an epileptic fury. The erupting cacophony has nothing to do with music, it’s only squeals and screeches of pain from the helpless instrument being tortured.
The chaotic sounds pull both twins up and out of their seats. One of them — it doesn’t matter which one — grabs the neck of the guitar and rescues it from any further abuse.
Bronwyn’s arms wrap around her body, which quakes and jiggles as she laughs so hard that her face turns bright red. “Man, I tried to tell you that you couldn’t play that thing, you idiot.”
Dom shrugs and takes a pack of smokes out of his pocket. “I was just curious to see if it would work.”
“If what would work?” I say.
“My hidden talent.” He packs the box of cigarettes a few times against the palm of his hand. “I don’t know what it is yet. I thought that might be it.”
“Better keep looking,” says one of the twins.
“I think your hidden talent might be comedy.” Bronwyn wipes the tears from under her eyes.
Dominic ignores their comments. “Too bad that wasn’t it,” he says. “That would have been so fucking punk rock.”
This sends Bronwyn into another fit. Roman shakes his head and rolls his eyes. Luke takes a hit off the joint.
I feel a little sad for Dominic. Life might be easier if a person accepts that they can’t do anything exceptional or interesting. Maybe a person like that would be exceptional, probably more exceptional and interesting than anyone I’d met so far. I begin to wonder if I should start picking up random instruments to see if I can play them, too. It doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Then the door flies open and the screaming begins.
2. BONES OF BIRDS
THE TWINS’ MOTHER looks as though she might open her mouth and speak with the tiny chirping voice of a cute woodland creature from one of those animated Disney movies. A pair of oversized glasses distort her face, enlarging her eyes and shrinking her nose. Her diminutive frame makes it easy to imagine she holds herself up with small, hollow bones like a little bird.
The thing about this tiny bird lady, though — she is batshit insane.
When she opens her mouth, terrible, shrill sounds come out. She shrieks frustrated Spanglish fragments as she looks up at her identical teenage boys.
“You little! What! Fucking shit! In my… NO! With the putas! What! Not in my! Taking my cigarettes!” She turns and points a finger in Dominic’s scabbed face. “Pendejo!”
Thinking this means it’s time to move the party elsewhere, I stand up.
Big mistake. My sudden movement has drawn her attention to me. She looks up at me, walking toward me, bird finger pointing up at me in accusation.
“You dirty putas!” The twins take advantage of the diversion, stashing the weed while she’s preoccupied with wanting to kill us. “I’ll kill you, puta! I’ll call the police! What!”
She is the frailest person in the room, with the weakest language skills, but she’s got all of us confused and petrified.
Dominic jumps up from the couch. “Time to bail, guys.”
Bronwyn flies out the door right behind him.
The furious little woman standing in front of me spins around. “Pendejo!” She runs after him, banging her shin on the table. A beer bottle that had been sitting on it topples over. She snatches it up and hurls it at the two escapees.
She throws much harder than I’d expected someone so delicate to throw anything, but she misses and the bottle smashes against the wall about two feet from the door.
The twins move to restrain their mother. Without thinking, I run for the door, following Dominic and Bronwyn outside to freedom.
I find them laughing in the alley behind the house.
Dom hugs himself with one arm as he wipes tears from his face with his other hand. “Oh, man. That is the funniest thing I have ever seen. What! What! Puta! Police! Pendejo!”
Bronwyn laughs so hard she starts coughing.
“Fuck you, guys,” I say. “You sacrificed me to the screechy old bird woman.”
“Hey,” Dominic holds up a hand. “It’s every man for himself in these situations. Survival of the fittest.”
“I hate you.”
“I know.”
Bronwyn begins to catch her breath. She
