The motel hall is smoky. There’s music. Accordions. Guitars. A man sings in Spanish, about a country, a mistress. The end of the hall is quieter, but the noise behind the doors keeps me guessing: tangled bodies on a bed, a TV screen filled with gun fire, explosions, gavels, guilty verdicts. And there’s a woman screaming into a phone, demanding that so-and-so sticks with the plan, doesn’t blow it all to hell. Her tone reminds me of Ma’s. I move past her room and arrive at my father’s. I can guess what’s behind this one: TV on mute, my father on the bed, boots off, shirt unbuttoned. He’s fighting drowsiness, but his body’s losing, and because he’s driven all afternoon from up north, his eyelids must rest. For a moment, I hear him saying, Just for a moment, and the moment, as always, leads to me snacking on chips and candy and watching cable all evening.

The door’s unlocked. I enter. Two empty beds. I inhale the old scent of liquor, sweat, and cigarettes. The wood panel walls are burdened with paintings of flowers, vases. River green and vomit red, they give the room a certain life the lamp between the beds, the diarrhea-toned carpet, and the low ceiling refuse to offer. I think my father’s had this one before. He likes consistency. He likes to know that when he returns to purgatory, this motel, if anything, has stayed the same.

I take no more than a few steps when my father walks out of the bathroom, so confident in his birthday suit. Toothbrush in his mouth, he utters something, a curse maybe, but he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t attempt to cover up. I can’t help but look down. It feels natural to. And there it is, there he is, embodied in that dark flare of pubic hair, shriveled testicles, and semi-hard penis that seems darker than the rest of his body.

He takes the toothbrush out. Toothpaste spilling from his lips, he says, “You don’t knock?” but it sounds as though he’s apologizing, as if he knew, long before the divorce, that I was bound to one day see him like this.

“Sorry,” I say, turning away. He walks into the bathroom, returns with a towel around his waist.

“You’re early. Elena said she’d drop you off at six. What time is it?”

“Five, I think. She told me you said five.”

“She’s lying,” he says, lifting his Wranglers from the couch. He slips them under his towel. Commando. Ma mentioned he liked going commando. “Where’s she going anyways that’s so important?” A party I want to confess, she’s going to a party to curse her ex-husband, to praise the accomplishments of her son, to celebrate all the comedy and tragedy of her life with laughter, wine coolers, and tequila.

“A date,” I say.

“Bullshit.” My father buckles his belt, puts on a shirt.

I shrug, toss my backpack on the desk. I turn on the lamp, slump on the chair.

“Is it that Karl guy still?” My father’s the jealous type. Ma’s got stories. The incident with the waiter, the incident with my 5^th grade teacher. And there was that time when the convenience store cashier—a young man built like a former high school football player—asked to see Ma’s ID. Ma doesn’t look young, never has. Photographs of her in her 20’s show a woman who seems to have escaped a long, messy war with her youth. The cashier asked to see her ID and she chuckled, tossed her head to the side, smiled. The cashier, uncomfortable, chuckled back, and that’s when my father stepped behind Ma, grabbed the belt loop of her jeans and took the ID from her hand and thrust it at the cashier’s face. Details are hazy. I don’t remember what my father was wearing, why he and Ma were together so soon after another separation. No, I’m not sure what exactly was happening, but I recall the cashier saying that it was his job to ID everybody. His arms were like tank treads. He stared coldly into my father’s eyes, ready for anything.

“Yeah. I haven’t met him though.”

My father shakes his head. “Karl. What a joke. You can turn on the TV if you want.” He grabs a beer from the mini-fridge, plops on the bed.

This is going to be our Saturday night. He will down the six-pack, ask questions about Ma, pretend he doesn’t care. I will respond the way an estranged son is supposed to respond, and if I’m lucky, he’ll fall asleep before midnight, and I’ll be alone, the TV all mine.

“Why did you come down?” I ask. He licks his lips, places the can on his stomach. Ma said I had to stop being so direct, that it wouldn’t help me get a girlfriend.

“I have some business tomorrow,” he bullshits.

“Work on a Sunday?”

He takes another sip. “Sometimes you gotta work on weekends.”

I grab the motel pamphlet, scan the numbers to the restaurants. I look up, call his bluff. “What kind of business do you do on Sunday?”

“Just business,” he says. My father’s lies are sometimes reassuring, so I don’t push it.

“Can I order pizza?” I ask.

His phone, on the nightstand, buzzes. His body tenses. He stands, flustered and giddy.

“Sure, whatever you want,” he says. He answers the call and heads to the hall. I hear him laughing. I imagine him scratching his crotch.

I take off my shoes, plop myself on the bed with my backpack. The remote’s sticky, and the channel buttons don’t budge so easily. Basketball game. News anchors. A lady selling knives and household appliances. I take out my notebook and pens, work on the eyes of a snake whose head, despite the angle, looks like it’s been crushed.

The door flings open. “Put on your shoes,” my father demands. He buttons his shirt, combs his hair back with his fingers.

“Where we going?”

“You like carnivals and circuses, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“You like them, right? We used to go to the Stock Show, and you were all about the ponies and cattle and stuff.” My father puts on his boots, then douses his shirt in cologne.

“I guess. I don’t really remember.” But I do. I remember scenes of a pony, of my father watching me from the railing, saying something in Spanish, his language of choice when he’s excited. The scent of shit is strong, and if I stare at the rides too long, lights whirling round and round, I start to feel dizzy. But the crowd is happy, and my father is too when I get off the pony and return to him, explaining how well I rode.

My father snaps his fingers in front of my face. “Hey, let’s go. We’re going to the carnival.”

“But the Stock Show already happened.”

“I said a carnival, not the Stock Show.” My father tucks in his shirt. I put on my shoes, and out we go, back through the hall with its noises and mysteries and the haze that follows us into my father’s truck.

My father lowers the windows, lights a cigarette.

“Is your business at the carnival?”

“You could say that. Well, I mean, don’t repeat that when you…” My father hangs a left and we drive west on Old 83. “You know I still love your mother. I’ll always love her.” Like his lies, my father’s confessions are comforting.

“I know,” I say.

“But people move on. They have to. They can’t just live alone all their lives.”

I nod, aware of what he means. “What’s her name?” Again, I’m too direct, but my father likes beating around the bush, and I’m hungry and impatient and don’t know why we just can’t stay at the motel and order pizza.

My father looks at me, then at the side view mirror. He switches lanes and says, “I just want you to know that I did come to see you.” He honks twice at the car next to us, restrains himself from cursing. “Her name’s Juicy.”

“That’s not a name.”

My father laughs. “You’re right, it’s not. But that’s what her friends call her. And she’s just a friend, okay? Not business.” I nod, look out the window. The sky is bruised, and the sun, a half orb on the horizon, feels too cliché to offer any sense of purpose, meaning.

I’ve seen this carnival before. It comes every few months. There are no fast rides or banners or lights to draw people in. But the entry fee is cheap, and there are plenty of families and couples to make someone feel as though they’re a part of something bigger than themselves. It takes a while to find parking, the lot arranged with no cones or markers. I follow my father past the gates. The carnies call to us, their hoarse shouts promising rewards. My father hands me a twenty.

“Meet back around here in about an hour?”

“What are you gonna do?”

He smiled. “Business,” he says, then walks into the crowd.

I wander the grounds, feeling too old for this, and yet I wish my father had spared another twenty. I got five, maybe six games tops. I can sneak in a ride or two, but on an empty stomach, it won’t end well.

The funnel cake is sweet, its mountaintop of sugar powdering my shirt. I play three games, and chose them wisely: Rifle range, ring toss, the one with the buckets that deflects the softballs I attempt three times to toss into.

Somehow an hour passes, and when I return my father’s in between two girls, both whose outfits fail to make them younger than what they want to be. He whispers into one’s ear, and I think that’s Business. But when he leans to the other side and puts his arm around the other, I become confused.

“There he is!” my father yells. I walk up to them.

“So this is your boy?” the girl to his right asks.

“Stephen,” I say, waving at her.

“Esteban,” my father corrects. “That’s the name I gave you.” My father chuckles awkwardly and slaps me on my shoulder.

“Yes. Esteban,” I say, and I’m glad I don’t have to repeat my last name, that I won’t have to roll that R my tongue stumbles on, butchers into a parody.

“I’m Katia. But people call me Juicy.”

“And I’m Sandra,” says the first girl, the one I thought was Business.

There’s a long silence between us all. Kids shout from the mini-roller coaster. A mother, behind us, explains to her son that they have tickets for only one more ride.

Juicy leans into my father.

“You wanna get on a few rides?” my father asks.

“Claro,” says Juicy.

“Sure,” I say, and together all four of us amble the grounds. Sandra walks beside me. I could consider this my first double-date.

Juicy grabs my father’s arm. “Your dad says you’re an artist. You like drawing portraits and stuff.”

“Ganó un premio.” The Spanish throws me off. My father’s excited, eager to show off his only son. “At the Stock Show. Like two years ago.”

Juicy smiles, touches my father’s chest. “Your dad said it was chicken. You drew a chicken, right?”

“I drew a rooster.”

“A cock,” my father laughs. “No, but tell them how you did it, like what you drew it with.”

“I drew it with pens.”

“But what kind of pens? Explain.” My father laughs. “All of a sudden you’re shy? Sandra won’t bite.” Juicy chuckles. Sandra smiles, shows, regretfully, a chipped front tooth.

“I drew it with these colored pens.”

“And they were like glittery. But not like gay glittery. They weren’t pink and all that.”

“The eyes were kind of pink.”

“But not like pink, pink,” my father says, leaning over to me and letting his wrist go limp in my face. I smell the liquor on his breath. My father can never resist. “And he spent hours and hours on it.” He waves his hand in circles in the air, as though the car washing motion somehow indicates time and effort. “And he wouldn’t show it to no one, like we were going to curse it or something. And he won. Out of like three hundred drawings and paintings, Esteban’s drawing won.”

“That’s amazing, mijo,” says Juicy.

“Pretty talented,” says Sandra, veering closer to me.

“He wants to go to art school, but I tell him, there’s no money in that,” says my father. He pulls a flask from his back pocket, takes a swig. Juicy snatches it from his mouth, takes a longer swig. “Big waste of time.” My father pulls down the flask still anchored to Juicy’s lips and whispers something into her mouth. They both laugh.

 “My cousin’s a tattoo artist,” says Sandra. “Owns his own shop and all that. Maybe you could do the same.”

“Maybe,” I say.

Sandra puts her hair behind her ear, smiles and points up. “Juicy, what about this one?”

The Ferris wheel spins. Slow, methodically. There are scabs of paint and rust peeling from the beams. The metal creaks like a broken bed. The pods sway unpredictably, even though there isn’t any wind. From our angle, there doesn’t appear to be anyone on the ride, but when it stops and the pod doors open—the riders stepping out like aliens from a spaceship—we have no choice but to get on.

My father pulls a roll of tickets from his pocket, hands us each a few. We stroll up. No line.

I step into the pod. Sandra follows.

“Hold up, ma’am,” says the carny, putting his hands up. “Only two per car.”

Juicy turns to my father. My father shrugs his shoulders and watches the carny close my pod.

“See you when it’s over,” he yells to me, thumbs up, as if I had just accomplished something.

“Don’t barf, Sandy!” yells Juicy, giggling.

We moved forward. Other riders get on.

“Hands inside at all times,” yells the carny. “And don’t be throwing anything either. Everything becomes a projectile at that height.”

“I’m sorta scared of heights.” Sandra puts that rebellious strand of hair back behind her ear.

“It’s a slow ride,” I manage to say, unsure if I should stare at her. She’s not as old as Ma, but there are bags beneath her eyes, a few static-streaks of hair blooming from her scalp. She looks uncomfortable with her legs crossed, and the blue jean skirt seems to have left a rash on her thighs.

The Ferris wheel moves. We reach skyscraper heights, and lights from the neighborhoods sprawled like lost constellations flicker in the humid darkness. It almost looks pretty out there.

“Damn,” she Sandra. She looks at the lights then looks at the floor. She holds onto the pole between us, her rings scraping the metal.

“Can you hold my hands?” she asks.

“What?”

“My hands, can you hold them?”

“We just have a few more spins,” I say, pointing at the shifting world.

Sandra closes her eyes. She taps her heels on the grimy floor.

Ma would get like this when she was nervous, when the mail arrived, when the cable went out, when she didn’t have a cigarette.

I reach out and touch Sandra’s hand. She keeps her eyes closed and squeezes my fingers. The carny shouts something to a passing pod. The crowd’s laughter ebbs like a siren. Sandra squeezes tighter. Either fireworks or gunshots ring in the distance. If Ma saw me now, she’d scoff. If my father saw me, he’d say he raised me right.