I could not be happier. I can’t stop smiling, and I can’t stop looking at my hand and thinking about our future together.

It’s only been a few days, but already all sorts of funny things are coming out, things I never knew about the first couple of days of being engaged. It’s a new and amazing experience. So here it is – my list of things no one tells you to expect when you first get engaged.

1. It’ll take your finger a while to get used to wearing such a huge rock. Just kidding, maybe I’m bragging. But seriously now, it will feel really weird to be wearing something on that forbidden finger, the one finger of all your fingers that you’ve never been allowed to wear a ring on before. Enjoy it, and get used to it. And for the love of god don’t stare at your hand too much while driving. (No? Just me?)

2. People will expect you to have a date, location, dress, and color scheme picked out when you announce your engagement. So be ready for that, and be ready to tell them you haven’t started planning yet. Unless you have, in which case screw you. Slash will you plan my wedding?

3. Wedding magazines are expensive. I mean seriously Real Simple, fourteen bucks? That’s a freaking book. But I don’t want to buy a book, because then what happens once the wedding’s over? It will sit on my shelf unused and unloved and slowly become irrelevant.

4. Weddings are expensive. So put off looking into costs if you can. Enjoy the flush and joy and happiness of first being engaged for as long as possible. It may be tempting, but trust me. Enjoy it before you have to get real and think about all of the dirty logistics. Really makes me want to elope (just kidding!).

5. No matter how chill your mom is, she *will* start planning your wedding the minute you get engaged. I’m serious. I never would have guessed that my mom would be sending me possible locations just three days after I got engaged, but there you go. Oh, and did I mention she knows we want to wait for at least a year? Yep.

6. The F word. At first, you will feel to shy to use it. You may even miss your first chance because you’re caught off guard or maybe you’re just awkward. But then: out of nowhere: you will be dying to use it. You will be dying to call him your fiancé.

7. Even if everyone knows you’re getting engaged because you’ve been talking about it for months, they’ll still be ecstatic for you. Happiness is contagious, I guess :)

I’m at my parents’ house. Not the house I grew up in but the one they moved to after my sister and I left and they got back to living their own lives. I remember this, but not why I’m here, and that’s enough for now.

When I sit up the pain comes like a headrush and I want to throw up. I bite down hard on my lower lip for the distraction. And the tiny reminder that I’m still here.

Navigating the stairs with my left eye swollen shut is no easier today – my depth perception is all off, and the staircase in this house curves to the left so I have to tilt my head at an awkward angle just to see the stairs. Mom is in the kitchen washing a pile of dishes, though I remember helping her do this last night after dinner.

“How does it look?” I ask her. “Better?”

She turns her head but keeps her body facing the sink and looks me over quickly. She nods. “A little,” but I’m not five anymore, I know when she’s lying. She turns back to the sink.

“Morning, buddy,” Dad says. He comes from the right side and stops to grasp my shoulder. He turns me toward him; I lower my head. “Look like you’re doing better today. How’re you feeling?”

“Well, my head is killing me,” I say, and as soon as I do I realize just how much I hurt. With every beat of my heart my left eye throbs.

“Yep, that’ll happen.” He nods and smiles. I close my eyes and lean my head to the left, because it seems to hurt less this way. Dad squeezes my shoulder twice as if to wake me up.

“Can I give him some ibuprofen?” he asks, looking to Mom, who just shrugs.

“Maybe just some water? And a piece of bread,” I say.

The glasses are over the sink, right where Mom is, but she doesn’t make a move to hand me one. Dad takes a step and she says quickly, “He knows where they are, he can get it for himself.”

Dad touches her on the shoulder. The same small gesture he used on me, but this time it’s tentative, tender. “Honey,” he says. “Don’t. He’s here now. Right?” He raises an eyebrow at me.

“Yes,” I say.

“But how do we know it will stick this time?” she says, her voice sinking with sadness.

Before I can say anything, Dad says “We don’t. But we all want it to.”

Mom leans her head onto his hand and nods. A minute later I wonder if I should go back upstairs or wait here until she’s ready. Then she reaches up towards the cupboard and when she turns around she’s holding a white mug with a design on it and her eyes are red. I squint at the mug until I recognize it: the red and blue smiley faces, the baseball bat with my name in squiggly unsure letters, Mom’s cursive script dating the mug I decorated on my fifth birthday.

I smile; Dad smiles; Mom looks away. I want to tell her I’m sorry. I want to say, I only have one good eye; how am I supposed to see what the future holds? I want to say I will try. Then she looks at me and holds the mug out towards me and I take it.

I’m behind Mom, balancing the cake in its white cardboard box on the palm of my left hand and gripping the neck of the champagne bottle with my right hand. It’s the same kind of champagne we drank on New Year’s Eve when I was a sophomore in college – wrapped in pink plastic, with little flowers on the label. Aunt Mary gives my shoulders a squeeze; she looks tired.

I walk into the wood-paneled living room with the familiar family photographs hung on the walls. My favorites are the four oval-shaped framed photos of my mom when she was about six, with a turned-out bob and the exact same huge smile she still has, arranged in a diamond above the low L-shaped sofa. Grandma is perching on the arm of the sofa next to small end table.

“Jan!” she says, happy to see her youngest child. Then she sees me. “Oh, and Mackenzie too. What a nice surprise.”

Mom’s smile freezes a little and her eyebrows twitch down. It wasn’t meant to be a surprise. She told Grandma I was coming; I’ve been planning to come for a few weeks now. Partly because they are getting older and I want to spend time with them while I can, and partly because I’m out of work and done applying to grad school and bored. I decide not to correct her. Behind me Aunt Mary giggles a little.

My grandpa doesn’t get up from his easy chair in the far corner of the room. He doesn’t even smile; he just nods at us then looks back down at his hands in his lap. Mom leans down and kisses the leathery skin on his cheek. He reaches up to squeeze her hand but misses, his hand grasping empty air. He is ninety now. Above his chair is a photo of the whole family from my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, a little more than ten years ago. That same day my grandpa was showing off by doing pushups with the grandkids on his back. He started with the youngest and worked all the way up to a couple of pushups with my oldest cousin Vince sitting on his back. Now just a few minutes of conversation tires him, and it seems like he’s always sitting at the edge of the room halfway asleep. I force my smile even wider and hold out the champagne and cake to my grandma.

“Oh, what is this for?” she asks.

“For you, grandma. Happy birthday,” I say.

“Oh, it’s my birthday,” she says. I nod, unsure if I should be amused or unsettled at this. She is still smiling, her bright lips stretched against her pale white skin. I can’t remember a time when her eyebrows weren’t completely drawn on.

My mom takes the cake and champagne from me. “I’m going to put these in your fridge for later, okay Mom? Something for you two to celebrate with tonight.” In the doorway at the other end of the room, between the living room and the hallway into the bright yellow kitchen, Mom turns around and raises her eyebrows at me and presses her lips together. She glances past me at her sister, who laughs again. She rolls her eyes then disappears into the kitchen.

“So Mom, where do you want to go to lunch?” my aunt says.

“Oh, you know,” Grandma says. She holds up her right hand and turns it in little circles like she’s trying to remember something. Around and around and around in the air, the right words always just out of reach.

At the train station, she puts the suitcase on the ground on its side and holds her knees close on either side of it, but it juts out into the walkway and one of the other people there almost trips on it and a large woman in a pantsuit glares at her, so she pulls the suitcase in so the back is against bench she’s sitting on and with her calves she holds it up that way. This reminds her of Frida, how she used to love to touch and be touched, and if she thought you weren’t paying enough attention to her she’d weasel her way in between the backs of your legs and the couch, and she’d just stand there like that with your legs pressing her against the couch, wagging her tail which was sticking out from behind one side of your lap and looking up at you with smiling puppy eyes from the other side. She was a good dog, had always been the most loving creature in Darcy’s life, and now she was just another on a long list of things and people who were No Longer Here.

The train comes, finally, and she stands up and picks up her suitcase and walks towards it slowly. The conducter sees her and sticks his head out of the window and says, hurry up girly, and she wants to cry again but she just walks the last couple of feet, gets up on the first step and looks back at the station, and then the she turns around and the door closes and that’s it. She’s gone.

I swing my legs back and forth as we’re talking, like I’m sitting on a swingset and trying to get higher and faster. Emilio says my father is nothing like Batman, because his skin is too dark and he’s too short. And he doesn’t wear suits.

I wish Papi would hurry up. He is late, again, to take me to soccer practice. He hates it when I call it soccer. He wants me to call it futbol, like they call it back home. But this is home, and I don’t understand what’s the difference.

Papi finally pulls up before Emilio’s older sister, which is good because I hate to be the very last one at school. I climb into the front seat and toss my bag at my feet. Dad grunts hello without taking his eyes off the road, then after a minute tells me to stop kicking the dashboard.

“Aron,” he says, “I’m moving away.”

I can’t move for a second as I try to figure out if this is a joke. But I know my father is not the joking kind. “Papi?”

“It’s not about you, Aron. I need to do this. I need to move home, to Mexico.”

I hold my breath when he says Mexico. Mami would never move back there, and I will never go without her. If he asks me to come with him, I will say no.

But he doesn’t. He just keeps driving.

Then he tells me, “Aron, I will miss you very much, and I will write and call you whenever I can. Ok?”

I nod, but I don’t understand. He wants to go, and he wants to leave us here. We pull up to the soccer fields. I don’t want to get out of the car. I want to stay with Papi and convince him to stay, or go to Mami and ask her why.

Papi turns the car off and sighs like he is annoyed with me, and I know he is really leaving. I hate him. I open the door and jump out of the car before he can say anything else.

It’s still light out after soccer practice, so me and the other boys who live in my building walk home together. Our parents let us do this because we can cut through the park and take the back streets, instead of walking down the expressway.

On the way home, soccer in our heads, we talk about the game we’re playing on Saturday against the Crushers. Raul says our team is better and we’ll beat them, and I agree. I say, I will stop every goal they try to make, and I show them some of my best moves right there on the sidewalk. Then I see the front of our building, and I remember what I have been trying not to, and I am quiet again.

Mami is sitting at the kitchen table with a roll of toilet paper in her hand. At first she doesn’t look up, and when I hello her eyes turn to me but they don’t see me. “Mami,” I say.

“Aron….” she says. There’s something wrong with the way she says my name, how her voice goes up at the end and is high and shaky. Her makeup is smudged around the eyes and I can tell she’s been crying. Papi is gone for good already.

I want to ask her if it’s true, that he’s gone. I want to ask her why Papi is leaving us, if there is anything we can do to make him stay. What if I clean my books up before he even asks? What if I always say futbol instead of soccer? What if I show him my good grades from school? I’ll do my homework on time, and I’ll even wash the dishes every day, not just twice a week. Will he stay?

I want to ask her all of these things, but I can’t. Because she’s crying again, and if I ask her she will only cry more. I need to be strong for Mami. So I walk over to the table and I put my arm around her and I kiss her on the cheek, and she smiles even though she is still crying. “Aron, I love you. You are a perfect son. You will never leave me.”

I touch my forehead to hers and I smile.