Junot Díaz

I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life. He was in the States, working and the only way I knew him was through the photographs my moms kept in a plastic sandwich bag under her bed.Since our zinc roof leaked, almost everything we owned
was water-stained: our clothes, Mami’s Bible, her makeup, whatever food we had, Abuelo’s tools, our cheap wooden furniture. It was only because of that plastic bag that any pictures of my father survived.When I thought of Papi I thought of one shot specifically. Taken days before the U.S. invasion: 1965. I wasn’t even alive then; Mami had been pregnant with my first never-born brother and Abuelo could still see well enough to hold a job. You know the sort of photograph I’m talking about. Scalloped edges, mostly brown in color. On the back my mom’s cramped handwriting — the date, his name, even the street, one over from our house. He was dressed in his Guardia uniform, his tan cap at an angle on his shaved head, an unlit Constitución squeezed between his lips. His dark unsmiling eyes were my own.I did not think of him often. He had left for Nueva York when I was four but since I couldn’t remember a single moment with him I excused him from all nine years of my life. On the days I had to imagine him – not often, since Mami didn’t much speak of him any more – he was the soldier in the photo. He was a cloud of cigar smoke, the traces of which could still be found on the uniforms he’d left behind. He was pieces of my friend’s fathers, of the domino players on the corner, pieces of Mami and Abuelo. I didn’t know him at all. I didn’t know that he’d abandoned us. That this waiting for him was all a sham.

- from Drown, by Junot Díaz pages 69 and 70.