Bandit Read Online Free Page B

was hot and we had to go. Dad seemed tired, suspicious of it all, not especially interested in learning too much from the guide or in looking too hard at the ruins. I was happy, though, and he was pleased with that. He seemed to want to let me have my happiness without necessarily sharing in it or talking about it. Perhaps it’s easy to dismiss children’s happinesses because they seem so uninformed.
    On the way back, our tour van had to stop for gas. Children my age but much skinnier came to the windows with their hands out, pleading and keeping steady eye contact. Some tourists in the van gave them coins. The kids whoreceived coins immediately pocketed them and outstretched their hands again, empty. I looked at my dad. He laughed dismissively. “They’re just bums. They can work like the rest of us.”
    And then, back to the days like before, which now seemed even longer. I grew tired of the pretty beach. The tourists were loud, desperate in their drinking and blaring radios. I sat alone in the hotel room for a few days as the vacation shrunk to the end. The room was yellow and clean and there was a small TV I would flip through endlessly. I had done a poor job of having fun. My sister would have known, implicitly, what to do. She was
made
of beaches and loud radios and virgin strawberry daiquiris and laughing at Dad’s jokes and hamming it up for his camera. I imagined her there in the room with me: her correct joy and acceptance of this neon fun. She would not have let me lie there in my bathing suit and watch TV in Cancun. She would have pulled me out of the hotel’s corridors where I wandered aimlessly, cold hallways tiled brown, the smell of chlorine from the pool trapped forever both night and day. Without her I walked from the room through the hotel and back to the room again with the twenty-dollar bill he had given me for food, not sure what to do with it.

10
    H ow is it that I am my father’s daughter? Something feels fraudulent about our blood bond. Before my sister and I were born there was an irrevocable fraudulence Dad carried out against my mom, and I can’t help but assign significance to this.
    Dad steered Mom through the broad doors of the restaurant at the Hazel Park racetrack for their first date. The old host lit up, welcomed him by name, and seated them by the wide windows. The waiters knew him too, and he tipped outrageously. Mom wore a baggy white hippie smock embroidered with lines of tiny red flowers (a dress, she said, like “a loose interpretation of a baseball”) and her wild, black curly hair down in a loose cloud. Dad wore a gold-button sports jacket, creased slacks, and hard-shined shoes, slick hair, a near Robert De Niro. They’d met while working in a tool-and-die shop inRomeo, Michigan, in 1977. Mom had been placed there by a temp agency and had been working there only a few weeks.
    After only a couple months of dating Dad took Mom on an elaborate vacation to South America to see Machu Picchu. He’d first suggested Mexico, but Mom said she didn’t like Mexico. It made her nervous.
    The trip was impulsive and strange, something my mom would have loved. And he seemed so rich. He’d told her, I imagine in his shy way, without eye contact, that if he ever were to marry someone, it would be her. Mom felt adored, scooped up in his big gestures, bound by the certainty of them. I have seen some of the photographs from this trip. They both look excited, free, and wild, in jeans and thin T-shirts, laughing, almost childish against the ancient monuments and green vistas. He directed this trip out of sheer confidence, ever calm, bullying through the language barrier, tossing my mom indulgences along the way, like the king of the parade.
    “I didn’t know,” Mom tells me at the end of this story, “that he cashed in a life insurance policy to take me on this trip. He was dead broke. By the end of it he’d run out of money and we roamed Lima aimlessly, subsisting on street vendors’