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day at Burbank?”
    I’d been in the middle of placing the last plate on the table when Javi asked his question. I froze. I didn’t know how to respond. Rance and Javi were friends. If I told the truth, what would that do to our new friendship? It wasn’t like I could expect Javi to choose me over Rance. We’d just met, and Lord only knew how long he and Rance had been best buds. I decided being vague was my best bet. “It was interesting.”
    He snorted. “Yeah, right. There’s not much interesting about BHS.”
    “Don’t talk badly about your school,” Mrs. Castillo said. She shook her wooden spoon at Javi to make her point. “It’s been good to you. You might even get a baseball scholarship to college because of it.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” he said as he rolled his eyes. This subject was obviously a bone of contention between them. “There’s more to life than baseball.”
    “Like what?” someone suddenly asked.
    I turned to see a man, who looked like an older version of Javi, standing at the entrance to the kitchen. Besides being slightly taller and thicker around the middle, Javi’s dad also had skin about two shades darker and a full moustache across his top lip. He wore a button-down short-sleeved shirt and brown pants. Unlike most of the people he spotted in the neighborhood wearing dirty work overalls, Mr. Castillo apparently worked in an office somewhere and not in a garage or doing shift work.
    Javi rose from the table and greeted his father with a hug. Mrs. Castillo then followed suit.
    “And who’s this?” he asked as he walked over to shake my hand.
    “I’m Tru,” I answered as I took his hand in mine. His grip was strong and confident while mine was loose and tentative.
    “True?” he asked. “Like true or false?”
    “Dad!” Javi complained.
    Mr. Castillo glanced at his son as if he had no idea why he was being fussed at. “What?” he asked. “I just asked a question.”
    “Tru is short for Truman, sir,” I answered, trying to save Mr. Castillo from his son’s teasing.
    “Ah, like President Harry S. Truman,” he said.
    I nodded. “Except Truman’s my first name.”
    Mr. Castillo nodded. “You bolios sure pick weird first names,” he said with a playful wink.
    “ Dad !” Javi clearly didn’t appreciate his father’s teasing or addressing me as a white boy. Like Mr. Castillo was the first who’d ever called me that. In the barrio, I heard it on a daily basis.
    “It’s okay, Javi,” I conceded. “My name’s pretty weird. And I am a bolio.”
    “See,” Mr. Castillo said as he gestured at me. “Some boys know how to take jokes.”
    “And how to help set the table,” Mrs. Castillo added.
    “Really?” Mr. Castillo glanced at his wife. When she nodded, he turned back to me and smiled. Javi only groaned. He must have sensed what was coming next. “Perhaps we need to swap sons,” he said as he messed up his son’s hair. “The only thing this one concerns himself with is baseball and his hair.”
    “Dad, stop!” Javi squirmed underneath his father’s playful gesture. “You know I hate it when my hair’s messed up!”
    “I know,” Mr. Castillo grinned at me. “That’s why I do it.”
    I sat there transfixed as Javi and his dad playfully tussled with each other in a perfectly choreographed dance. The ease with which they interacted revealed this was how they truly acted, and they weren’t putting on a show. No wonder I’d been overcome by a general sense of welcome upon entering this house.
    True love lived here.
    It wasn’t like my mother didn’t love me. Or that she didn’t do her best to make a nice life for me. She was just so busy working, trying to make up for the hell we’d gone through since Bart Cox entered and exited our life that we passed like proverbial ships in the night.
    Seeing Javi and his family made me miss the family I’d once had even more.
    “Okay, enough playing in my kitchen,” Mrs. Castillo said as she swatted her husband on