Random Family

Coco seizes upon every available opportunity to improve her life, “but sustaining the improvements [proves] impossible against the backslide of poverty” (336). Mercedes incurs unending disciplinary troubles at schools, and Coco must quit her job at Price Chopper due to its erratic hours: the household cannot sustain the absence of Coco, who is its “spirit and anchor” (336). Also, Frankie, who is back to making a living on the streets, is a poor parental substitute for Coco. 

Initially, Coco lands a job serving food in the nursing home at which Hector works as a security guard. While others complain about the ornery residents, Coco quickly learns each person’s name, and sees their pickiness as endearing quirks. The situation works beautifully for a time, as the job’s regular hours (6AM-3PM) allow Coco to manage her household successfully: she industriously wakes and sends the children off to school, and is also back in time for their arrival home. However, under the onus of Pearl’s medical appointments, which are far away due to the lack of local doctors who will take Medicare in order to treat Pearl’s conditions, Coco must soon quit.

Mercedes babysits whenever Frankie steps out to tend to his drug business. However, without Coco to consistently supervise, Frankie often lets customers into the house. Coco, perennially unable to turn her back on needy friends, takes in some old characters from the Bronx: Bambi, Coco’s cousin has just moved in next door with Weebo, Coco’s old neighbor. They are often at Coco’s house. Munchie, another boy from Foxy’s building, is also now Coco’s neighbor, and in and out of Coco’s house—in addition to Platinum and her son, who sleep on Coco’s floor. The house quickly descends back into chaos.

Frankie and his friends often park themselves in the living room to watch TV, and Frankie still feuds with Mercedes, refusing to share his food and to allow the girls to watch their desired programming, such as their idol Mariah Carey’s televised performance.

Coco becomes pregnant again, and wars with herself and the moral code against “murdering an unborn child” (341). Her daughters kindly assure her that they will help out with the new baby, while telling her that abortion is wrong. They assure Coco that they love her.

Coco grows extremely fatigued and begins to vomit blood. Mercedes’s disciplinary summons from school pile up. The school demands that Coco bring Mercedes to counseling. Coco is wary of the effect of psychiatric drugs: she has seen Foxy add prescription drugs to her cocaine habit, Iris become grievously ill when a dose of her anti-depressants is missed, and Hector remain volatile despite a prescription for Dilantin. However, she eventually brings Mercedes in for counseling. However, the prospect of open frankness with the counselor on the part of Mercedes proves itself threatening to the stability of the household and the girls’ sisters: Welfare cannot know about Frankie, because Coco could become disqualified for her housing subsidy and cash benefits, and the authorities equally cannot find out about Frankie’s illegal dealings. 

Cesar, now housed in a prison closer to New York City, begins to disabuse himself of his initial illusions surrounding his future after prison. Initially, Cesar looked forward to coming back to his community and resuming his womanizing, tough guy ways. However, with time and the enforced distance from his family, he begins to re-examine his priorities and desires. He acknowledges his terror of being alone, and his previous reliance upon the company of women to comfort himself. He begins to wonder whether his family’s previous reliance upon him to resolve their issues with violence truly qualified as love. He begins to deeply desire to protect his children by setting a better example for them. He enjoys increased visits from Giselle, with whom he has reconciled. And, due to his newfound proximity, their visits become less contentious. He wonders why such a stable, self-sufficient woman is standing by him. He also decides to quit all drugs cold-turkey.

Lourdes also suffers the first of two heart attacks, which stokes Cesar’s fear that his mother will die as a woman who is disappointed in him.

Rocco, for his part, blames himself for the state of his FMP brothers: Mighty is dead, Tito has descended into paranoid delusions at Sing Sing, and Cesar is serving a protracted sentence. Rocco vows to help Cesar reform, upon Cesar’s release.

Jessica slowly establishes herself on the outside. She shows her new boyfriend George pictures of herself during the days of Boy George, and the new George cannot reconcile the old, flamboyant Jessica with her current, more staid identity. She rents a new studio apartment, located in “the basement of a privately owned home on a pretty block in Pelham Parkway in a middle-class neighborhood” (345). Boy George tries, in vain, to reach Jessica, through both Lourdes and his own mother. Jessica, uninterested in her former lifestyle, nonetheless misses the “anchor that Boy George provided” (346).

Jessica invites her daughters to spend a summer month with her, when the warehouse where she works suspends operations. Brittany and Stephanie come, but quickly grow homesick and return to Troy. Serena, however, stays. Jessica takes her daughter on double-dates with George and Frederico, George’s younger friend. George chafes at the way that Jessica talks to Serena like Serena is an adult.

Rocco is involved in a motorcycle accident, which leaves him paralyzed. His wife quickly makes arrangements for his care, and then abandons him. Rocco struggles with his new, severely-limited life.

Giselle takes Mercedes and Nautica, along with her son, Gabriel, to visit Cesar. Mercedes is distressed when she hears Gabriel call Cesar “Daddy.” Although Cesar questions the timing, he and Giselle are trying for another child. Cesar feels flummoxed by the prospect of explaining his additional children to Mercedes.

Coco receives the news that her baby is a boy. However, Frankie ruins the baby shower by getting arrested and being unable to attend.

Coco encourages Mercedes to return to Ramapo Camp, and Mercedes does. However, any strides that the troubled girl made at camp are quickly usurped by the return to her normal life.

Frankie proves himself an inadequate aid to Coco, struggling with picking up the slack and anticipating her needs.

Mercedes attempts to escape the chaos of her home by spending time with her aunt Iris. However, Iris’s home does not prove to be the haven the girl craves. In August, after the police perform a brutal and traumatic drug raid on Iris’s home due to faulty intelligence, Iris quits college and retreats into depression, and her husband Armando becomes seriously rattled. Even after they move to a different apartment, Iris cannot shake the feeling that drugs will manage to wreck her life, no matter where she goes. 

Serena has returned to Troy in time to start high school. She begins calling Jessica’s boyfriend “Daddy George.” This concerns Milagros, who warns Serena that Jessica will have many boyfriends before she actually settles down.

Serena also begins her first romantic relationship, with a boy named Cristobal, who “[sports] a profile from a Roman coin” (351). He isnineteen, while Serena is fourteen. Serena grows to love him. He often whisks her to McDonald’s and treats her to her favorite Value Meal. Coco believes the boy to be too ugly for Serena, while Jessica—perennially valuing love above all else—approves of the union. Milagros, determined to guard Serena’s chastity, threatens Cristobal with calling the police, as Serena is a minor.

Milagros grounds Serena for failing all of her classes, and Serena wiles her time away by writing sweet, insightful paragraphs about Coco, whom she treasures as a kind and reliable confidante, and Milagros, whose strength and fortitude she admires. Despite these charitable thoughts, Serena still sasses Milagros in person, while she trusts Coco as the mother-figure she can run to with her secrets and troubles. Coco begins to regret undermining Milagros’s strictness, as she begins to appreciate Milagros’s logic: Coco sees her own nine-year-old talking about boyfriends, and the prospect scares and disturbs her.

One day before Coco’s due date, Jessica surprises Coco with a visit. Coco commiserates with Jessica about Cesar, who, in his latest letter, has promised to rescue Mercedes from the chaos, and castigated Coco for having another child. Jessica counsels Coco to ignore him.

Coco has more solidly rejected the city as her homeand settled into life as “a country girl” (353). However, she ironically goes into labor while moored at Foxy’s. She had been in the city trying to hunt down Frankie and ensure that he would be there for their son’s birth. Coco gives birth to her son, La-Monté Carmine Antonio John.

Pearl has the most trouble with the new baby’s arrival, as she is no longer the baby of the house. Nautica is mostly disinterested with her new brother, while Nikki flourishes in the mother’s helper role that Mercedes no longer wishes to fill.

The principal with whom Mercedes has constant conflict is replaced by an offbeat, affable, and genuinely caring woman named Miss Scutari. Also, Mercedes loves her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Cormier. Mrs. Cormier empathizes with Mercedes after meeting Coco. The teacher allows Mercedes’s minor infractions to slide, and completely ignores Mercedes’s outbursts: she recognizes them as bids for negative attention. Mercedes begins to thrive under her new teacher’s tutelage.

Coco begins a new job at Garden Way, a factory that produces garden tools and lawn mowers. Her start date conflicts with her standing appointment for a tubal ligation, so she forgoes the medical procedure. She uses her first paycheck to splurge for Christmas.

Mercedes assumes the morning duties of caring for her siblings and sending them to school: Coco goes to work early, and Frankie sleeps late. Frankie stays home with his new son because he does not trust strangers with the baby. However, Coco pops in on her lunch break because she does not entirely trust Frankie to peel himself away from the television enough to play with the baby. Also, Frankie sometimes leaves Mercedes alone with La-Monté in the evenings, although he and Coco have agreed that he is supposed to wait for Coco to come home.

Coco occasionally brings Serena to Secrets, a teen nightclub, in order to ease the burden the family places on the girl, as long as she can afford the $10 cover charge. However, she soon gets laid off.

Serena spends Christmas with Jessica, who has arranged a rendezvous between Serena and Cristobal in the Bronx. However, Milagros catches wind of the arrangement, and makes good on her threat to call the police.

One Friday in February, Jessica departs for Troy, with Elaine’s two sons and Robert and Shirley’s daughter (the fourteen-year-old Tabitha) in tow. Her visit is to be her first overnight on her own with her children in the fourteen months since her release. Milagros makes arrangements to have a child-free weekend in the Bronx, and departs. When Jessica arrives, four hours late, Milagros’s home is overrun by teenagers and children. LeBlanc documents the almost surreal scene as Jessica wends her way through the commotion and mayhem.

Unbeknownst to Milagros, Jessica has also made plans to go out dancing with Coco. Full of admiration for her legendary aunt, Mercedes watches Jessica get dressed, and questions her about her tattoos dedicated to George.

Jessica and Coco have a fun night on the town, and Jessica indulges the flirtations of the club’s doorman. On the ride back to Milagros’s, however, she says, “I miss my kids” (360). 

Jessica, still craving to be a mother, files for full custody of Serena. Milagros, tired of feuding with both Serena and Jessica, and growing weary of raising children, does not contest the action.

Jessica begins a new romantic relationship with a man named Máximo, who is a weight-lifter with an outrageously-sculpted body. Jessica hopes that he is “the one.” He works as a recreation specialist at a state park, and also sometimes as a male stripper. Eventually, however, he hopes to become a police officer.

In March of 2000, Jessica quits her job, citing her boss’s disrespect as the cause. After they are evicted, Lourdes and Emilio move in with Jessica. Máximo joins them soon after. Lourdes feels wounded by the way that Jessica openly expresses resentment against her for her presence, while comparatively fawning over Máximo. Jessica pours all of herself into cultivating her romantic relationship.

Serena fantasizes about Cesar being her ceremonial father at her upcoming Quinceañera, but he will not be out of prison in time for it.

At Serena’s custody hearing, it is determined that Serena will finish out the school year and summer at Troy, before moving to Jessica’s. Serena is also supposed to finish her summer internship at The Ark, a nonprofit art, technology, and job preparation center. One of her projects involves her making her own website, on which she posts her autobiography. In her autobiography, she reveals that she would like to teach kindergarten in the future, get married, have a daughter and a son, and then travel the world after her children are grown. Milagros forces her to quit the internship due to her awful grades. As soon as the school year finishes, Serena moves to the Bronx. 

Frankie’s days as a doting father have waned. This leaves Mercedes in charge while Coco is at her new job at Ames. Often, Mercedes loses her patience and hits her siblings—hard.

Meanwhile, Cesar’s days are characterized by a new peace. He is receiving many visitors. Elaine frequently takes her sons, Justine, Giselle, Gabriel, and Jessica’s girls to visit him. After Jessica receives clearance and a proper ID, Elaine arranges a family reunion. It is the first time that Lourdes and her four children have been together in almost ten years.

Giselle is pregnant, and therefore drawing closer to Cesar’s sisters, especially Jessica. Coco feels jealous.

Foxy is living with Hernan, the Vietnam vet, whom Coco has long despised. Foxy has been approved for SSI because of her psychiatric condition. Mercedes stays with Foxy, although she finds the pace of the older folks dull. Cocochecks in via phone with her daughter frequently. Ordinarily, Hector would keep an eye on the girl, but he is currently locked up on drug charges.

Cesar seizes on the opportunity to prove his commitment to Giselle by going through with having the baby with her. Giselle, in turn, believes that the pregnancy reinforces Cesar’s commitment to a positive future for himself. Cesar is doing so well that the authorities reduce his security from maximum to medium. He thus enjoys the privilege of festivals, which are like high school field days for prisoners, and to which they can invite guests.

Mercedes comes back to Troyand promptly resumes fighting with Frankie. When she returns to school, her new fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Hutchins, does not have the same magic touch as Mrs. Cormier. Mercedes bounces between the nurse and counselor’s offices when she becomes too much for Mrs. Hutchins to handle.

Serena moves in with Jessica in the fall of 2000, and she starts ninth grade over. She and Jessica immediately start feuding.

Milagros works full-time and studies nursing four nights a week.

Mercedes has grown more interested in her looks, and Coco rises early every morning to help her daughter with her hair.

Mercedes abruptly reveals that Hernan did “something nasty to her” during her summer stay with Foxy. According to Mercedes, after she had showered one day, Hernan suggested the girl “remove her towel, and that, in turn, he would expose himself to her” (370).

When Coco breaks the news to Foxy, both women cry hysterically, and each profess that they were both sexually abused when they were young: specifically, Coco was molested by a cousin when she was nine. Foxy feels shocked that Coco never told her.

Coco brings Mercedes to a doctor, who cannot detect anything wrong with Mercedes. An investigator comes and interviews Mercedes and her sisters, as well as Hernan, but the investigator ultimately opts out of pursuing the matter.

When Foxy decides to stay with Hernan, Coco’s feelings toward her mother change. She sees her mother as, ultimately, too weak to do what is right for herself and her family.

The following spring, Mercedes finally undergoes a tubal ligation.

Coco’s grandmother dies, and Frankie surprises Coco with $200. Coco, with a measure of guilt, decides to opt out of traveling to the funeral, and spends the money instead on bringing her family and two girls from her building to a buffet. LeBlanc paints an intimate portrait of an almost magically-peaceful family dinner. La-Monté charms an elderly lady seated behind the family by offering her food, but fails to charm the couple that replaces the elderly lady when she leaves. Coco basks in the glow of her good-natured and generous son; “Some people were nice and others simply weren’t”, LeBlanc writes (371). “There was no shame in that” (371). 

By April, the soothing effects of Mercedes’s December trailer visit with Cesar and Giselle have worn off. She resumes having trouble in school. In a bid for attention, she tells a parent liaison that she’d had sex with a boy. When word makes its way to the principal, no action is ultimately taken, and Coco is not even notified. Once Coco finds out, (through Iris, who works as a school aid), she becomes infuriated with the school administration.

When Mercedes then decides to simply leave campus in her second bid for attention, Coco receives a certified letter stating that her attendance is required at a superintendent’s hearing. Thirty pages of disciplinary records are enclosed. Coco fears that her daughter will be taken from her. She reflects on the numerous stories from her community about children being taken from their parents following disciplinary troubles at school. Foxy predicts that Mercedes will run away: Foxy herself was only thirteenwhen she ran away with Manny, Coco’s father. LeBlanc intimates that Mercedes has already endured her share of grief and terror, from watching her mother struggle with poverty, to enduring the absence of her imprisoned father, to witnessing Pearl’s terrifying seizures, to watching the ravage of drugs on the adults around her.

Coco and Mercedes attend the mandated meeting, which turns out to be far less severe than Mercedes anticipated. Mercedes is suspended indefinitely and the principal is ordered to file for a PINS petition on behalf of the school. Before Mercedes can be considered for reentry, she must attend at least two sessions of counseling. In the meantime, a tutor would visit her at her home, and she would report to a probation officer. Following the meeting, Mercedes retreats to her room morosely. Coco states that she knows exactly what is wrong with Mercedes: “The answer is […] Cesar […] Everything is just missing him” (376).

Cesar, overwhelmed by the responsibilities of his new prison life, had forgotten Mercedes’s most recent birthday. At the time, he was having trouble adjusting to the relative freedom of medium-security, and was busy with the substantial workload that the five college courses he had enrolled in generated. He greatly enjoys school, however, and immerses himself in the work. While his relationship with Giselle remains strong, he hungers for more news and visits from Mercedes. He pores over his daughter’s thirty-page disciplinary report, seeing himself reflected in it. He ruminates on the fact that authority figures only ever punished him, without alternatively showing him how to do better, or the root causes of the problem. He also intuits that the culture of poverty and scarcity is designed to make children fail, and sees economic oppression as the root of both his own problems, and those that Mercedes experiences. However, he ultimately blames himself and his absence for Mercedes’s difficulties. In a letter, he openly admits his mistake of missing her birthday to her—without any qualifiers.

Mercedes and Coco attend the mandated meeting with Mercedes’s probation officer. The officer is cold, disinterested, and unhelpful, and she offers empty platitudes in lieu of substantial help.

Rocco, toiling under both his physical condition and its accompanying depression, falls in love with Maya, “a short religious missionary from the Philippines” (380). Maya initially rebuffs him, but experiences what she interprets as prophetic dreams, which point her in Rocco’s direction. Rocco eventually proposes to Maya, despite his friends’ warnings that she may be pursuing a sham green card marriage, and Maya accepts.

Mercedes returns to school on time to graduate with her fifth-grade class. Despite Mercedes’s best efforts to make her graduation day special, Mercedes merely goes through the motions of the day, while remaining detached and combative.

Frankie, lamenting his meager earnings in the drug trade, his limited prospects for above-board employment, and the dissolution of his dream to play professional baseball, sinks into despair.

LeBlanc depicts Coco tenderly nuzzling La-Monté, treasuring him as her son and unabashedly declaring him a “mama’s boy.” Coco also complains that tending to Mercedes is like a full-time job. 

It is summer 2001. Jessica is working at an international bank’s security desk, and earning higher wages: $16 an hour. She moves to a bigger apartment in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, where she splits the $750 rent with Máximo and her older brother Robert, who has recently divorced. Serena misses the manner in which the family’s previous, smaller studio apartment created intimacy, and she often flees to her friend Priscilla’s apartment, which bustles with people and activity. Together, she and Priscilla enact the youth culture codes of the day, which typify people based on their taste in music (Hip-Hop and Rap vs. Pop), and issue codes about what is considered “ghetto” behavior. Serena nurses a crush on Priscilla’s landlord’s son, who is twenty-three; however, she will only let him kiss her cheek. She is also regularly kissing a fifteen-year-old boy named Derek, who has a pregnant girlfriend. Jessica does not approve of Derek, warning Serena that he is only interested in sex. Lourdes counsels Jessica to become self-sufficient before investing in any boy.

Serena’s social life leaves little room for Jessica. And Elaine, who has broken up with her previous boyfriend, is busy with a new life with her new beau. Jessica has not yet met any of Máximo’s children, and also finds out that he is involved with two other girls. To Jessica’s humiliation, he has told those girls that he lives with his aunt.

Boy George finally reaches Jessica by letter. He counsels her to make the best out of her life and her freedom. He isn’t able to sustain regular contact with Luciano, his firstborn, and has disowned his other son due to the fact that the boy has not heeded George’s example, and is “into some heavy hoodlum shit” (389). Remarkably, George’s legend and brand still carries street credibility and appeal.

Jessica reads George’s letters aloud to Serena, and Serena blames George for the anguish she and her siblings have been through. Serena writes to him, telling him how much she hated her mother’s incarceration. Jessica forwards her daughter’s letter, wrapped into her own, to George. In response, George acknowledges that he abused Jessica, and also states that “God could not have saved her” if he had known about her affairs, which he eventually learned of through the wiretap audio tapes (390). He encourages Jessica to “hold her head up and move on” (390). In a separate letter to Serena, he asks the girl to rid herself of her preconceptions about him, and to understand that both he and Jessica were living a “fast life,” and were therefore mutually unable to commit to each other (390). He apologizes for the pain he has caused the girl and expresses hope that he can someday be of service to her, upon his release.

Jessica, having gained an additional thirty pounds, on top of the twenty she gained in prison, no longer attracts attention when she walks down the street. Serena and her friends, however, do.

By the time Serena’s sixteenth birthday comes around, she has spent two solid weeks at Priscilla’s. Jessica wants her home for her birthday. When Jessica disapproves of Serena’s purchases for a birthday outfit, Serena retorts that her “father,” Jessica’s ex-boyfriend George, will buy her new clothes. George has stayed in contact with Serena, whom he calls his daughter, while treating Jessica coldly. The chapter ends with an image of Serena yelling at Jessica to vacuum her room. 

It is Serena’s birthday. Jessica comes to collect Serena at Priscilla’s house, and somewhat anticlimactically presents her present for Serena: a new cell phone. The two share a tender moment. Then, Jessica notices the remnants of a hickey on the girl’s neck, and the mother and daughter fight about it. Jessica considers canceling Serena’s surprise party, although it is hardly a punishment to take away something that Serena doesn’t know about. After Jessica leaves, Derek tries to console Serena by telling her that it was indeed a sign of disrespect for him to leave a hickey on Serena’s neck for Jessica to see.

Serena’s birthday party proceeds, although the surprise is ruined by Kevin, who calls Serena asking for directions to Lourdes’s. Serena struggles with whether to invite Derek to the party, given the day’s earlier conflict with Jessica, and Milagros’s vow to take the boy aside for a conversation. She ends up locked in a room, in tears, lamenting the hypocrisy of the guardian women around her: railing that many of them have multiple children, and “everyone has sex” (387). LeBlanc intimates that the girl will be pregnant within six months.

Derek eventually shows up at the same time as the surprise limo that Jessica has ordered for Serena and her sisters and friends. The children have until midnight with the limo. Serena tells him that he is too late, and that he should go home. Furious, he leaves. The group of children throw out whimsical destinations for the driver to take them, including Times Square and various bridges, but they ultimately settle on Tremont as their destination. The block has changed in ways only perceptible to those in the know, from edgy to bleak. LeBlanc attributes this change to the new policies of New York City’s “prosecutorial mayor,” which have aggressively rounded up and scattered the neighborhood’s drug dealers. Jessica visits her old building, which has transformed into a lonely, single-occupancy residence. The children have no time to go anywhere else. Upon learning of their meager trek to Tremont, Jessica becomes furious. 

Coco’s family was not at Serena’s birthday party. They did hear about it, and Coco felt bad that she had not been able to hire a limousine for Mercedes’s fifth-grade graduation. Her family, however, was drowning in their own crisis. Following Mercedes’s disciplinary troubles and mandates, the roof had caved in—literally. The disaster led to a monsoon of roaches, which overtook the apartment when the landlord refused to answer Coco’s calls.

A bright spot, however, is Cesar. On the family’s most recent visit to him, they find him calmed, and only wanting to say “yes” to his girls’ every request. Unlike his former self, he allows his daughters to tie his hair, which has grown into an afro, into irregular ponytails. He joyfully roughhouses and enjoys his favorite snacks with them. He even lightly teases Coco, instead of berating her.

The book ends with Cesar lifting Mercedes high into the air. When she protests, saying that she is too heavy, and that she will fall, he replies: “Relax, I ain’t going to drop you, don’t worry…Listen, you light as a feather to me” (404).