At-Risk by Amina Gautier Page A

most likely that he never knew about me. My mother left her family’s country home for America when she was two months pregnant with me. I never understood why she left him, but I guessed it was because he had the power to make her change her mind.
    Still, she must have suspected that something like me could come about. Used to being protected and cosseted her whole life, she must have thought herself immune and panicked upon realizing that her body was just as human as every other woman’s. I used to fantasize that my father had been one of the servants in my grandparents’house. I imagined feverish and clandestine meetings between my mother and him in closets and bathrooms. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized it would have been impossible for her to love him had she met him in her home. For the most part, my mother was a proper girl. Raised in a house with servants her whole life, she would have no more noticed one than she would the wallpaper, let alone run off with one or let one drive her out of her country. Unlike here in the States, where we were all lumped together regardless of status, there class made a world of difference. Kinsmen or not, in those days, he would have been beneath her.
    My mother didn’t say anything else about the tea. Whenever I asked her if she’d found someone, she told me not to worry.
    The night before the tea, she came home from work excited. “I finally found a father for you!” she said.
    â€œWho?” I asked between mouthfuls. I had microwaved the previous night’s escovitch fish and started eating dinner without her.
    â€œLeon!”
    I almost choked. There was my mother, standing before me, telling me that she’d gotten the laundry man to pretend to be my father, looking at me like I should be happy. She said he would meet me there. I could see it now. The other girls would laugh me right out of our rented hall.
    â€œLeon?” I asked. I had been secretly hoping that she wouldn’t find anyone and I wouldn’t have to go. I hated taking pictures and being looked at. “What happened to all of our family?”
    Everyone was busy that day, she said, or else too young or too old to pass for my father.
    â€œHe’s not even related to us,” I said. “We don’t even look alike.”
    â€œYou don’t resemble your father anyway, except for the height. You look most like me.”
    I wondered if Leon had a real suit, or if he would just throw ablazer over his outdated jeans. Years ago, it had been the style to have artwork spray-painted and graffitied on the front and back pants legs of jeans. The fad had come and gone but Leon still wore his. Every other day, he wore a pair of stone-washed blue jeans with Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck spray-painted onto the legs. He would embarrass me with his tight jeans and his gold teeth. “But people will see. Everybody will see us!”
    â€œAnd so?” my mother said. “Leon’s a hard-working man and he’s always been good to us.” Her focus on class had gradually eroded but I wasn’t as accepting as my mother. Leon was nice enough, but I didn’t want anyone to believe he was my father. Not Leon with his outdated jeans and his camel suede shoes and his loud patchwork shirts in multicolors. He was everything I was trying not to be.
    â€œBut Mommy, he’s so—”
    She made a sucking sound with her teeth to silence me. “Hush. What’s done is done. I already invited him and he said yes. I can’t take it back now. Besides, it’s only for the one day, Dorothy.”
    My mother waited silently for me to nod or do anything to show that I agreed, but I remained still. We had never had an argument before. I had never talked back, disobeyed, or sassed her before. Neither of us knew what to do now.
    By an unspoken agreement, we didn’t yell. Instead, we retreated into separate corners of the kitchen, fighting with