I was seven years old when a flood washed away life, as I knew it. At first, the flood was mysterious and full of adventure. My mom dressed me up in my fishing waders on the third day of the torrential downpour and we waded out into the street with water up to my knees. I brought my fishing pole with me, thinking maybe fish from the nearby river escaped, and were swimming along my street. Then I wanted to get my Spiderman raft out of the garage and float by the houses of my friends, but my mom wouldn’t let me.

Our house stood on a high road. When we walked down a small hill to a lower road, the water rose to my waist and a current started pushing at my legs. My mom let out a scream, grabbed hold of my hand and quickly pulled me back up into the house. I sat inside for three more days and nights and stared out the window to the black sky above, and the violent rains falling onto the earth. Sometimes God threw it down in buckets, sometimes He sprayed it down with His giant hose. I asked my mom if this flood, like Noah’s, was being used by God to wash away all the evil people in the world. “No, God will not punish man with another flood,” she said. But on TV, I saw that the flood was swallowing up people alive.

When the waters finally receded, I learned that they washed away my parents’ import business and all the stuff in it. My dad cried with his arms folded on the kitchen table. I wasn’t supposed to go into the kitchen and see him like that, I scolded myself back in my room. My mom took my child savings account – the one that I deposited change into every week -and emptied it, along with my porcelain piggy bank, all the drawers in the house, all the pockets in the closet and the lucky two-dollar bill our neighbor gave my parents when they started up their business. At school, I asked my teacher where ‘bankrupt’ was located, because that’s where my parents said they were going. The next few weeks, strangers would ring our doorbell and leave food on the porch. Every time my mom took the food into the house, and prepared a meal with it, my dad grew more silent. He didn’t like it, I could tell. It was an invasion into our lives, this food delivered to us by strange hands. And yet, we had to swallow it after my mom said grace at the table.

I remember next that my dad parked a hotdog truck in our driveway. It was a project that he quickly took up so we didn’t have to lose our house, I overheard while hiding at the top of the stairs. It was summer, and being on a hotdog truck was actually a fun place to be as a kid. I worked on the truck fixing hot dogs and making milk shakes. I kept increasing the price of a chilidog on the blackboard by five cents, justifying to my dad that the fluffy buns we used were worth it. On the truck I could eat all the ice cream and hotdogs I wanted, and in the neighborhood I was known as the Puerto Rican boy who gave away free milkshakes. I am not Puerto Rican, but I mistakenly thought I was because when my mom was pregnant she and my dad traveled to Puerto Rico and I concluded that, since I was being formed in Puerto Rico in her stomach, I must be part Puerto Rican. Doing the calculations on my fingers in front of the other kids in the neighborhood, I declared myself to be three quarters Italian, and a quarter Puerto Rican. The other kids were all full-blooded Italian (although born in America), so they called me the Puerto Rican boy with the free milkshakes. I was allowed to give away two free milkshakes an evening, and it was my choice whom to award the lucky two.

Normally, we parked the hotdog truck at the beach and prayed for good weather to deliver a lunch crowd fat enough to pay the bills. But special events, like the church carnival and the Fourth of July fireworks were when we could really make a killing. My dad called the church rector. My mom was an active member of the church. She didn’t just put a one-dollar bill in the basket every week, but a five-dollar bill, even when we had to eat that food left on our porch. So my dad called the rector and asked if we could have a space at the church carnival that year. The answer he received was no. ‘But my wife gives money every week to the church.’ ‘I’m sorry, but we have no more space.’ ‘But we’re in financial hardship right now and we really’ ‘I’m sorry, but there is no more space, and I’m not the one who deals with the permits anyway. Try contacting Vinney Scarbetti. He’s in charge of the permits this year.’ So my dad hung up the phone with the conviction that the Catholic Church was corrupt and he would never set foot in it again. Everyone knew that Vinney Scarbetti was the leader of the local Italian mafia ring. And my dad, staying clear of Vinney Scarbetti when he moved to this town, now didn’t have a chance of getting a permit from him.

My mom kept giving money to the church anyway, telling my dad that you couldn’t spite God because of your misfortunes. She believed the church must have had good reason for turning us away. Maybe the families owning the other hot dog trucks were even more needy then we were. And besides, we weren’t starving. No, she wasn’t going to turn away from her faith because of this. It was her faith that kept her sane, hopeful, and positive through the hard times. ‘You,’ she told my dad, ‘are going to turn into a hardened rock, hating the world and blaming everyone else for your problems.’ ‘Okay, okay, enough with the nagging,’ he’d yell back. ‘Keep giving to the church. But when you need them, they act if as they don’t even know you.’ And so it just changed, that on Sundays my dad no longer came to church with us.

The second event at which we could score a killing with the hot dog truck was the Fourth of July fireworks down at the shore. My dad managed to get us a space with the event director, despite the fierce competition. So we prepared for the score, buying four hundred hot dog buns, thirty buckets of ice cream, five hundred cans of soda. However, when we arrived and parked our truck, we realized the event director sold permits to at least twenty hot dog trucks. My dad panicked. I could see it in his face. Thinking of how to get us out of this bind, I strapped a potato chip rack on my body and went out in the beach blanket crowd screaming, ‘Potato chips, potato chips, get your potato chips, thirty five cents a bag.’ A man stood up and, making a fine joke out of me, invited his friends to pluck bags of chips off of my body. He turned to his friends laughing, ‘Hey, aren’t there rules against child labor in this country?’ Then I heard a woman say, “Leave the little boy alone. His family is probably poor.” And just as that woman said that, I saw Jake from my second grade class sitting on a nearby blanket, staring at me with his mom and dad.

I raced back to the hotdog truck with the potato chip rack bobbing and scraping into my back, jumped inside the truck, and hid myself from the world.

They made fun of Jesus too, I tried to remember from my children’s book of Bible stories. But remembering those stories weren’t helping, because a new, dark feeling was tearing apart the protective wall of safety inside of me. I was feeling shame. Shame for what I was doing, for what my parents were doing, for what we were forced to do to keep from losing our house. And being poor meant something was not right about us, something was missing, inadequate and embarrassing. I didn’t want to see anyone, because everyone looked at me, at my family, as poor. I stopped making milkshakes for kids in the neighborhood. I stopped eating the food left on our doorstep. I also stopped going to church with my mom.

The last one, not going to church, lit my mom up. She screamed at my dad, saying he was destroying all the teaching she had given me, the endless hours that she read the Bible stories to me. And I liked them! I really liked the stories of Abraham, of Jesus, of David. My mom firmly believed that without faith, and the right kind of faith, you were doomed. My dad screamed back that he believed in God, just not the Catholic Church. But there was no separation for my mom. And if you stopped believing, the blessing of God would fall from your head and you would be cast into a pit of eternal darkness and misery.

My mom dried my tears one evening when we were alone in my room, and told me to remember the mysterious story of Job. God tests us sometimes, to see how strong our faith is. And if we keep believing, she held onto my hand, He will always reward us with peace and love. But I refused to reread the story of Job. ‘The flood that destroyed your business,’ I screamed at her, ‘was just like Noah’s flood. It killed many people who were not evil, I saw it on TV, and it’s making us suffer too.’ And it made me feel that awful feeling of shame that, no matter how tightly I wrapped my arms around my waist, I couldn’t squeeze away. But I didn’t tell her that. Instead I cried out, ‘I don’t believe God should make us suffer. If He really loved us, He wouldn’t.’ And to spite Him, I went to sleep without saying my prayers.

My dad sold the hot dog truck after that one summer and got a job with my uncle’s trucking company. I don’t exactly remember what followed, but they never spoke anymore about going bankrupt. The food at the door stopped invading our table, and my mom started giving me change to deposit into a new savings account. The shame of being poor that year turned into my secret scar that less and less people could see, but I knew would always be there.

My dad never stepped foot in the church again, because he was full-blooded Italian, and once you betray an Italian, it’s almost impossible to regain his trust. As for me, I was still a quarter Puerto Rican, and afraid of falling into the pit of eternal darkness and misery.