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happened to you, Miguel. I can’t let you go back to that school until I know.’ Something like that. It was the not being allowed to go back, even though I was afraid of getting beaten up again, that made me more ashamed of those boys thinking I was a coward. Empty-headed machismo even then.” He laughed.
    “Did your mother tell the authorities?” she asked.
    “No.” He laughed again. “She told my brothers. She said, ‘If he comes home with one bruise, I will beat you and then your father will beat you.’”
    “Well, that’s pretty horrible,” Brie said.
    “Old World. Tradition.” He grinned. “Don’t worry, Brie. There were a lot more threats than there were beatings. I don’t remember beatings. My father whipped us across the bottom with his belt, but never injured anyone. For my mother, it was the wooden spoon. Not your pansy gringo wooden spoon, but a spoon as long as her arm. Christ, if the belt was unbuckled or the spoon plucked off the shelf, we ran like holy hell. The next generation of Valenzuelas has given up that form of child raising. By the way, it’s not Mexican by genesis—it’s that generation. It was not against the law to beat your child if he misbehaved.”
    She was quiet for a moment. Then she asked, “Did you marry Hispanic women?”
    He looked at her curiously. “I did,” he said. “Both times. Well, mixed Mexican.”
    “You’re drawn to that culture…. Very strongly drawn…”
    “I love the traditions of my family, but I don’t think that had anything to do with the marriages. I dated a lot of women who weren’t Hispanic. My marriages were brief failures of my youth.”
    “What happened?”
    “Well, the first time I was too young, and so was she. I was in the Marines, and she worked for my father. I wrote to her, married her while home on leave, returned after my tour of duty to find she was interested in another young man. I could have been outraged, but the truth is—I wasn’t faithful either. I was married and divorced by the time I was twenty-one. My mother was completely ashamed of me.”
    “And the second wife?”
    “Just a few years later. An employee at LAPD. A dispatcher.” He chuckled. “Time-honored tradition—cops anddispatchers. It lasted six months. My mother has completely lost hope in me.”
    “I guess you didn’t cling to all the traditions….”
    “You know what I miss about my family’s traditions? My mother’s cooking, my father’s skills and ingenuity. My mother and father did most of their cooking for large tribes on the patio—on the grill and in huge pots over slow burners. Mole, the old family recipe, tamales wrapped in banana leaves, enchiladas, carne asada. My mother’s salsa and guacamole would make you pass out, it’s so good. She makes a fish with sliced olives that’s amazing. Her shrimp in tomatoes, avocado and Tapatío is astonishing.”
    “Tapatío?”
    “Hot sauce. Pretty hot hot sauce. And my father could do anything—he built a room on our house, a gazebo in the yard, poured concrete, put a wall around the yard, rewired the house, built a freestanding garage—and I’m sure he did all that without building permits, but I had the sense never to ask. And the landscaping was incredible. That was his business, landscaping. He started out trimming hedges and mowing lawns, but later he started his own little business. It’s now a pretty good sized business with a lot of corporate clients. He has a million relatives and sons—he never runs out of employees. My father was an immigrant, but he didn’t have to naturalize. My mother is a first-generation American, born in Los Angeles—marriage to her validated him. But interestingly, she is the one to uphold the old traditions in our family. He wanted to acclimate himself to the U.S. quickly, so he could get about the business of making that fortune poor, hungry Mexican boys dream about. And he did, though he worked damn hard to do it.” He pulled into the town of