We rushed in and found him choking on rancid foam bubbling out of his mouth. My grandmother called an ambulance. “I’ll have to go to the hospital,” she said. “You’re old enough to stay here on your own.” My mother was out with a man I’d never meet, like every man she saw right after Frank. The paramedics came and maneuvered Emilio’s gurney down our uneven flight of stairs. Neighbors fluttered to their front porches like moths. “Mind your own goddamn business!” my grandmother shouted as she followed him down the hill. Months before he was due his pension, Emilio had been fired from his line cook job because of chronic incontinence and forgetfulness. Before he was let go, he’d been robbed on the city bus twice, once by a cross-dressing prostitute who jabbed him with a sharpened wire coat hanger that gouged a cut deep into his suit jacket and ended up sticking out the back like a broken wind-up key.
