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to go to my locker first,” I finally managed. “You guys go on.”
    I don’t know what’s worse: when you act stupid, or the moment after, when you’re stupidly kicking yourself for acting stupid.
    My stage fright with Pablo might have lasted forever. But like Mom says about small towns: everything does come around again.
    One night, Dad came home with the news that he had hired a carpenter to help him with his extra jobs. “This guy can do anything with wood, I mean
anything
.” He didn’t speak much English, but that was no barrier for Dad. I suppose because of me, my parents kept up their Peace Corps Spanish over the years. Ever since I was a little kid, Señora Robles, whose husband taught Spanish at the nearby university, would come over for family lessons. We’d watch videos, play games, listen to tapes. Afterward, we’d all sit down to a meal where we spoke Spanish and ate tacos, enchiladas, stuff like that.
    “And you’d never guess who this guy is.” Dad had turned to me. Small town that we live in, I should have guessed. “Señor Bolívar, your classmate Pablo’s father.”
    I nodded, like yeah yeah, I knew that.
    “Poor family has been through hell.” Dad went on to tell how Señor Bolívar’s brother, a journalist, had been murdered. His oldest son had been taken away by the secret police. “They still don’t know where he is. The middle son has had to go into hiding. Both sons are with this new party that’s trying to get rid of that jerk we once put in control.”
We
was the United States of America. We had helped some general to take over or start a civil war or something. I never can keep all the countries in the world connected with their stories. But I knew there were a lot of dictators in many Latin American countries that had been supported by our government. “Bolívar managed to get out with his wife and Pablo, don’t ask me how.”
    I felt even worse about rejecting Pablo now that I knew what he and his family had been going through. Mom, meanwhile, was shaking her head. She sometimes talked about how hopeful she had been about the future of her host country. That’s why she had gone there in the first place—to help spread the tools of freedom. The dictatorship was supposed to be temporary. But even while Mom and Dad were there, the roundups had started.
    “Bolívar says they’ve tried to get news of their sons. They’re worried sick,” Dad continued. “They don’t know where to turn.”
    That’s all you have to say to Mom, Caretaker of the World, because the next words out of her mouth were “Let’s have them over.”
    My heart did two things at the same time—it kind of soared up with relief that the stalemate with Pablo would finally end,
and
it plunged down with fear that I’d have to face him. I felt like I was having an emotional heart attack. Meanwhile, my hands began to itch.
    Mom noticed me scratching them. She looked suddenly unsure. “Would that be all right with you, Mil?”
    Ever since the Happy incident, Mom had been hovering all over me. I knew she was just concerned, but it made me feel like she was babysitting my feelings.
    “Sure.” I shrugged. A Spanish meal might actually be fun. Last summer, the Robleses had moved back to Mexico. I was surprised how much I missed our get-togethers.
    Kate, meanwhile, was jumping all over Mom’s idea.
“¡Por
favor, invítalos!”
she said, showing off. She had already taken Advanced Spanish last fall and was now doing a private tutorial with Mrs. Gillespie. “I want to keep up with
mi español
.”
    Her
Spanish! Mostly, I was glad that Kate and I shared another language and country. But sometimes I felt proprietary about the one thing I had that was my very own. Kate had only been born there by accident. I
was
an accident.
    “So’s it okay if I invite the Bolívars for dinner Saturday?” Mom asked the table, but she was looking at me.
    “Sí,” Kate and I said together. We glanced at each other and