Drown

This story is told in past-tense, and chronicles Yunior’s imaginings of his father’s life. 

Yunior tell us that his father—whom he calls Papi, but whose real name is Ramón de las Casas—left Santo Domingo just before Yunior’s fourth birthday. Ramón had been planning to leave for months, and was hustling and borrowing from friends and anyone else who owed him money. However, the timing of his visa approval was just plain luck. Yunior remarks that this was the last of his luck in the Dominican Republic—as Yunior’s mother had just found out that Ramón was cheating on her with an “overweight puta” he had met while breaking up a fight on her street in Los Millonitos.

Yunior remembers that during the initial fights between his mother and his father, which lasted a week, Yunior’s grandmother, named Virta, would throw the silverware into “ferocious orbits” (163). After a fork cut Ramón in the cheek, he decided to move out and stay with his mistress until things calmed down. Yunior tells us that on his father’s second night away from the house, Ramón “had a dream that the money Mami’s father had promised him was spiraling away in the wind like bright bright birds.