We were deep in rural Mexico, well on our way to Honduras, when a man with a machine gun waved us down. My mom snapped at my stepdad to pull over. “Ron, stop, it’s another passport check.”  She glanced back at us kids and the tension rose. We had been through at least a half a dozen of these, but each time we sat up a little straighter. My mom warned us that if we did something wrong, we might end up in a Mexican prison. For what, who knew, but we took her at her word and kept our mouths shut. I was thirteen when my mom announced we were moving to Honduras. No one had asked my opinion, but this was nothing new. My mom and stepdad Ron had demolished two families to be together, their illicit affair crushing everyone around them for the sake of their love. The idea of Honduras came as unexpectedly as their marriage. They suddenly wanted to buy a piece of property on the Caribbean coastline and start a scuba community. It was 1993, and how they dreamt up Honduras without Google is a mystery to me. I imagine my mom standing in front of a spinning globe, letting her finger come to rest randomly. “Ah yes, Honduras. Of course.” The reality was that neither she nor Ron had any experience with Honduras or diving for that matter. No one spoke Spanish, and they wanted to drive three kids four thousand miles in a van. 

Now we were in Mexico with a man carrying a machine gun, smiling under his thin mustache as he gestured towards our van. He waved my mom off when she handed him our passports. Then something registered, and my mom began nodding rapidly. “Kids, scoot over.” The door slid open and the man squished in next to me, his gun pressing against my shoulder. Our Spanish-English dictionary sat in my mom’s lap as she diligently tried to make sense of what this stranger needed. He was in the van, but why? Flip, flip, flip through the dictionary as she tried to make sense of what he was saying. “Well, either he was transporting bandidos to jail,” she said, “or he is a bandido who just escaped from jail.” Our eyes widened. She stared at us for a beat, and then started laughing, at first a small giggle which turned into a full body heave of laughter. Her face turned bright red, and tears streamed from her eyes. A small chuckle erupted from Ron, and within seconds all of us were laughing, gasping for breath. It might have been the sense danger or the absurdity of the whole trip that set us off, but for just a moment in this shared laughter, we felt like a family. Our armed friend began speaking again, motioning for us to pull over. He hopped out with a wave and began walking down the dusty road, his machine gun slung over his shoulder.