I hadn’t been back to El Paso since I was seventeen. That town was dust and ghosts and the kind of heat that seeps into your bones and makes you feel like even your memories are sweating. But when my cousin Val called last week, her voice barely a whisper over the line, I knew I had to go.
“He’s slipping, Mateo,” she said. “Abuelo forgets things. Faces. Names. He called me Rosa yesterday. Rosa’s been dead since ’97.”
I pressed the phone tighter to my ear, like that would change what I’d heard.
“He asked for you.”
That didn’t make sense. I hadn’t spoken to him in nine years. Not since that night. The night I screamed that I wasn’t going to be the man he wanted, that I didn’t owe him my life just because my father never came back from Afghanistan. I packed a duffel bag, the one with the broken zipper and the beer stain from Ricky’s party, slammed the screen door behind me, and walked out into the desert night without looking back.
He didn’t come after me.
So I didn’t go back.
But now here I was, standing on the cracked porch of the same stucco house that used to smell like fried eggs, cigars, and whatever soap Abuelo bought from the flea market. I half-expected the screen door to still have that hole in the bottom where the dog used to nose through, but it had been patched. Sloppily. Probably by Val’s husband, Arturo.
I stepped inside and the air hit me like a slap: stale, hot, and thick with silence. No radio. No whistling. No swearing at the TV in Spanglish.
Just the creak of his chair.
He sat in the same place he always did—next to the window, facing the old Magnavox, suspenders cutting into his shoulders, one sock sliding halfway off his foot. His hair was whiter, thinner. Skin like old paper, spotted and delicate.
I waited, standing just inside the doorway, like a kid again, not sure if I was going to get a hug or a lecture.
Nothing.
I cleared my throat. “Abuelo.”
No response.
I took a step closer. “It’s me. Mateo.”
Still nothing.
That used to drive me crazy as a kid—the way he could just ignore you until he felt like responding. I once stood next to him for thirty full minutes after breaking a lamp, waiting for him to speak. He just kept flipping through the newspaper.
But this was different. This wasn’t control. This was emptiness.
I knelt down next to him, close enough to smell the Vicks and menthol rub on his chest, and whispered the one word I knew would get through.
“Baseball.”
His eyes flicked.
I reached into my backpack and pulled out the glove. His glove. Cracked leather, stitched at the thumb with dental floss because he said it held better than thread. It looked like it had survived a war—and maybe it had.
His blink was slow, deliberate.
Then he looked at me.
Really looked.
And said, “You always threw it crooked.”
I laughed—one of those laughs that comes out too fast, like a reflex, like you’re trying to keep yourself from crying.
He didn’t laugh.
But he reached out, fingers trembling, and grabbed my face like he was trying to mold it into the boy I used to be. The boy who believed that Saturday games and corner store sodas were enough to make a family whole.
I kissed his forehead.
He whispered, “Don’t be mad at old men who forget how to say sorry.”
That should’ve been the end of it. A tender moment, a loop closed. But nothing in my family is ever that neat.
I stayed in El Paso longer than I planned. Val said it was because I needed to “reacquaint myself with my roots,” but I think she just wanted someone else to take night shifts when Abuelo woke up asking for people who were long dead.
One afternoon, I was rummaging through the garage for an old extension cord when I found a shoebox tucked behind the water heater. Curiosity got the better of me. Inside were letters. Dozens of them. Some yellowed and brittle, others still creased from being opened too many times.
All addressed to my dad.
Not from Abuelo.
From my dad.
He hadn’t disappeared. He hadn’t just left.
He’d written. For years.
And Abuelo had kept every single one.
My heart started pounding like a drum. I sat on the concrete floor and read through them, hand shaking, lips moving without sound. There were pictures—photos of me tucked into envelopes, drawings I didn’t remember making, even a crayon-smudged Father’s Day card.
“Mateo’s doing well,” one letter said. “He’s playing ball now. Says he wants to be a pitcher.”
Another: “I know I wasn’t there for your mother’s funeral, Dad. I’m sorry. I got stuck on base, and the Red Cross didn’t pass the message fast enough. I would’ve come if I could.”
Another: “Is he mad at me? He never writes back.”
By the time I reached the last one, dated just four months before Dad’s unit was ambushed in Ramadi, my throat was raw.
“Tell him I love him. Even if he doesn’t want to hear it.”
I stormed back inside, letters in hand. Abuelo was asleep, head tilted back, mouth slightly open. I wanted to shake him awake. Scream. Cry. But all I could do was sit next to him and wait.
When he woke, he blinked at me.
I held out the top letter.
“You told me he left. That he didn’t care. That he never called.”
He stared at the envelope. Didn’t take it.
“You lied to me.”
He closed his eyes. “I didn’t want you waiting for someone who wasn’t coming back.”
“He was coming back. He was trying.”
“He was trying, Mateo. That’s the point. Trying’s not the same as being here.”
I stood up. “You took that choice away from me.”
He looked up at me, eyes wet. “And I’d do it again.”
That should’ve been the end of it. The real ending. But again—nothing in our family is simple.
Three weeks later, Abuelo passed in his sleep. Val found him with a photo in his hand. One of me, at nine years old, wearing his glove and grinning like I’d just hit the winning home run. He must’ve dug it out of the box when no one was looking.
The funeral was small. Quiet. Just family and a few neighbors. Afterward, Val and I sorted through the house. She let me keep the glove. I didn’t ask for much else.
But I took the letters.
And I wrote one of my own. Not to my father, not to my grandfather.
To me.
I wrote it in the voice of someone who forgives. Who understands that sometimes people make the wrong choices for what they believe are the right reasons.
I read it whenever I feel the weight of old silence pressing down.
And sometimes, when I visit the cemetery, I bring a ball.
Set it down by the headstone.
Say the word.
“Baseball.”
It still makes me smile.
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