Chapter 12 Dante
I wake at five-thirty, no alarm, no transition. Asleep and then not. My body’s done this since I was twenty-two and decided the day starts when I say it starts, and I say it starts at five-thirty. Every single day.
The apartment is silent. The screen door’s still open, warm air pushing through against the AC that fought it all night. Through my open bedroom door, I can see down the hall to the second bedroom.
I don’t check on him. I know what I’d find. A man on the floor between boxes of yard signs, wrapped in my blanket, pillow under his head. Same as the last time. Same as the time before.
The cafetera is on the counter where I keep it.
The one personal thing in this apartment that means anything.
A Bialetti my abuela put in my hand before I left for college, because she couldn’t stand the thought of her grandson drinking American drip coffee.
Cuban coffee isn’t a preference, and my tía Rosa would disown me if she saw the drip machine I keep for guests who don’t know better.
I fill the bottom with water, pack the basket with Bustelo, ground fine and tamped firm, and set it on the burner. The flame catches. I stand there barefoot in shorts, watching the pot, listening for the first hiss of steam through the coffee.
Within two minutes the apartment smells like Cuban espresso. It fills the kitchen and the hall and probably the second bedroom where a man is asleep on my floor for the third time in days.
I pour two cups. Small and dark, strong enough to restart a dead engine.
I drink mine at the counter and the coffee is right, bitter and dense, exactly what my mother’s kitchen smells like at six in the morning in Coral Gables.
I can picture them in my mind, my father reading the paper and my abuela already on the phone with someone in Hialeah, arguing about something that happened in 1987.
I have a home there.
The Panhandle isn’t home. It’s the second place. The Roadhouse, Benji and Mickey, Tex and Sheila and Stormy. I chose them, they chose me, and the choosing is different from having family but not less.
By six I’m feeling uneasy. I want him up and out.
He doesn’t need to be at the house until ten, by his own word, but I don’t run my morning on his clock. I’ve got a closing to prep and a day of my own to get to. I gave him most of my night, he doesn’t get the day too.
I refill his cup because the first pour went cold. Then I go to the second bedroom and stand in the doorway. He’s what I imagined. On the floor, blanket to his chin, pillow under his head.
“Get up. Time to go.”
His eyes open. “What time is it?” His voice is loaded with gravel and tequila.
“Six. Move it.” No coddling from me today.
He gets up slow and stiff. The floor doesn’t forgive a body that spent last night sitting in a holding cell. He goes to the bathroom, the faucet runs, and I go back to the kitchen.
I set his espresso at the edge of the counter where the hall meets the kitchen, where he’ll see it coming out.
He comes out. He sees it. He looks at the cup, then at me, and his face gives me nothing.
“Here, it’s coffee,” I say. “You look like you need it.”
He looks at the cup like it might be a trick. “You fixing me now?”
“I’m getting you upright. Drink it or leave it.”
He shakes his head. “We need to go. I want to stop at the liquor store.”
“At six in the morning?”
“It opens at seven.”
“No. We’re not stopping at the liquor store, Levi. Never again.”
“You made a deal, Dante.”
“You broke it when you called me from a jail cell at two this morning. No liquor store. Don’t bring it up again.”
“Needing a ride the one night I couldn’t drive isn’t breaking the deal. It’s the deal working.”
“The deal’s suspended. Right alongside your judgment.”
He lets it go. He’s too hungover to fight and we both know it.
I drink the coffee I poured for him and take my keys off the counter. “Let’s go.”
On the drive neither of us says another word.
Our rides are becoming the most stressful moments of my life.
He’s got his head back against the seat and his eyes shut, riding the hangover out.
I drive over the speed limit because I want him out of my car before he pukes in it.
When we arrive, he gets out without a word, punches the code, goes inside.
I sit in the driveway fuming for about thirty seconds, then I hear it.
Doors being flung open. The terrace sliding glass door banging the frame.
The front door hitting the wall. He’s throwing open every door in the house, one by one, fast, the sound carrying out through the open entry. Now he’s upstairs doing the same thing.
I get out of the car. By the time I’m through the front door he’s done.
Every door in the house stands open, terrace, front, interior.
Gulf air is already pouring through the living room and the AC is grinding against eighty-five degrees of wet summer heat.
He’s at the refrigerator with the door open.
He pulls out the paper bag with Tex’s ribs. He opens the carton, takes a rib, bites into it cold. His eyes close for a second when he bites in.
“These ribs are really good,” he says, mouth full. Then, like it’s nothing, “I was there last night.”
My head whips toward him. “Where?”
“Tex’s place. Big Tex’s.” He tips the bag toward me. “Where these ribs came from. You left them here, right?”
“How did you get there?”
“Took a bus.”
“This house is not on a bus route. There are no buses here.”
“There was last night,” he says. “A party bus for a party of one. Me.”
“A party bus. Fifteen miles, to a bar you’d never heard of.”
“Heard of it last night. Bag said Big Tex’s.” He works meat off the bone. “Figured ribs like that were worth the drive.”
“What did you do, Levi? Did you get arrested at Tex’s?”
“Nope.” He pulls meat off the bone. “Cop picked me up walking in the road after midnight.”
“What happened to the bus?”
He swallows, doesn’t look at me, then shrugs. “Guess I wasn’t worth coming back for.” He says it matter-of-fact, then he reaches for another rib.
And that’s what does it.
I finally lose my shit with him.
I’m across the kitchen in two seconds flat and my hands are at his collar. His back hits the refrigerator hard enough to rattle the frame. The rib’s on the floor. My face is six inches from his and I press my body up against him.
“Stay the fuck away from there!”
Full volume. It tears out of me, and it doesn’t stop, because English runs out before the anger does and the rest comes in Spanish.
?Tú estás loco? Te montas en un autobús con un desconocido, te emborrachas, caminas solo por la carretera a las dos de la ma?ana, y yo ni sé quién carajo eres. ?Y te apareces donde mi gente? ?En su bar? ?Por qué no me hablas? ?Quién eres tú? ?Me estás volviendo loco!
He doesn’t fight me. He doesn’t flinch, either, and that’s worse. He locks up under my hand, palms open at his sides, and lets me hold him against the refrigerator while I come apart in a language he can’t understand.
The stillness is what stops me. A man who comes up swinging I’d know what to do with. This I don’t.
A few more Spanish curse words rip out of me before I drop my hands, and let go of his collar. I step back, then another step, until the island is between us and my hands aren’t on him anymore. My pulse is going like I sprinted here, my chest heaving. I drag my fingers through my hair and breathe.
My fingers are still feeling the heat of his neck against them. I had him pinned with my body and deep down there was a piece of me that didn’t want to stop — and that, more than the yelling, is why I put the island between us.
I notice the staging lemons are getting moldy. I grab the silver bowl and dump them in the trash to give my hands a job that isn’t him.
“You stay away from Tex’s place,” I tell him again. “You don’t go back there. Ever.”
He gives me a curious look. Then he reaches into the carton and goes back to eating.
Rib by rib, meat off the bone, sauce on his fingers, not looking at me.
He knows I’m standing here daring him to a fight and he won’t give me one.
He finishes, sets the empty carton on the counter and wipes his hands on his jeans.
“Tex makes really good ribs,” he says. “I like it there. It’s a nice place. Good people.”
There’s sauce on his chin. Dark circles under his eyes and stubble thicker than yesterday. I had him against a refrigerator two minutes ago, now he’s standing in my listing eating cold ribs and telling me he likes Tex’s bar.
I grab my keys and walk out without another word.
If I don’t leave now, I might kill him.
The coast is empty this early. 30A belongs to the delivery trucks and the sprinklers. I drive it with no place to be, past a house in Seaside I closed in the spring and a teardown in Grayton someone overpaid for, because driving is the only thing my hands will do calmly right now.
My hands can still feel him. I flex them on the wheel and it doesn’t help.
The words I yelled at him are still in my mouth. I said them in Spanish and I knew why even as they came. Not because the anger grabbed the nearest language. Because some things are only safe to say to a man who can’t understand them.
Are you crazy? You got on a bus with a stranger and drank yourself stupid and walked a highway alone at two in the morning, and I don’t even know who the hell you are. And you went to my people. To their bar. Why won’t you talk to me? Who are you? You’re driving me crazy.
What I didn’t say, in English or Spanish, is the part that put my hand on his collar.
When he told me the bus didn’t come back because he wasn’t worth coming back for and then reached for another rib like it was nothing.
My anger wasn’t about the listing, the thousands in damage or the showing on Saturday.
It was the floor going out from under all of it.