Chapter 28 Dante
The call comes while I’ve got the Birmingham couple standing in a four-bedroom in Rosemary Beach, telling me the bunk room’s too small.
It’s my Miami office. The Brickell penthouse with the wraparound, listed since spring.
The buyer who kept circling is done circling.
He wants to write it up, in person, this week.
Eight figures of done circling. I tell the Birmingham couple the bunk room sleeps six with the right beds.
I promise them three more listings tonight and walk them to their car.
I’ve booked the last flight out of Panama City Beach before I reach my SUV.
Twelve hours ago I stood over Levi asleep on a deck chair and asked him to get together this week. Now the week has other plans for me, and they’re in Miami.
That’s how it goes. Miami is where the money moves fast, and the moving is mine. At the gate I text Levi on the burner phone for the first time.
Dante: Flying to Miami tonight. A penthouse deal closing. Back Wednesday.
Three dots, then:
Levi: Good luck! You’re killing it this week. Don’t worry about the house.
Dante: You’ll have the place to yourself.
Levi: I’ll try not to flood anything
Dante: Try harder.
Levi: No promises. Go make your money, Reyes.
Exclamation points. Punctuation he’d never risk on the other phone. I pocket the phone and board.
Miami takes me back all at once, with both hands. The heat’s different the second the doors open at the airport. Wetter, older. The Caribbean behind it instead of the Gulf’s flat shimmer.
I’m in the penthouse by ten Monday morning, running numbers I could run asleep. The buyer respects exactly one thing. A broker who doesn’t perform. By Tuesday afternoon we have a signed offer, a closing date, and a number that’ll lead the office board for the quarter.
I keep turning my phone face-up. The screen almost never changes.
Monday night it changes once.
Levi: gulf’s doing the sunset thing.
Dante: Send it.
A photo comes through. Bad framing, his thumb in the corner, the sky over the water gone orange and violet behind the rail. He’s never sent me a picture before. I stare at it longer than a sky is worth, then set the phone face-down so I’ll stop.
Tuesday night I end up where I always end up in this city, which is my mother’s table in Coral Gables. There’s no version of me home for two days that doesn’t end there. She heard I’d landed before my own office did.
The house is loud before I’m through the door. My father is in his chair with the paper, folded to the back page, glasses down his nose. My abuela’s on the phone in the kitchen.
The smell hits me in the hall and takes me back to my childhood in one breath. Garlic, cumin, sour orange. Black beans going low and slow. Plátanos hitting hot oil somewhere. A pernil that’s been in since morning.
My sister Mirta’s got two kids underfoot and a third on her hip. My sister Clara’s at the counter, stealing pork off the cutting board and getting her hand slapped for it by tía Rosa, who came the second she heard. Rosa does not miss a meal where there’s a nephew to inspect.
“He remembers us.” My mother takes my face in both hands, turns it left and right like she’s checking a melon, decides I’ll do, and puts me to work. “The picadillo. You. Your abuela’s hands are no good today and Clara can’t be trusted near a stove.”
“I can be trusted near a stove,” Clara says.
“You set fire to the arroz at Nochebuena.”
“I was nine.”
“And we remember,” says tía Rosa, and the kitchen laughs. I take the wooden spoon, because this is the one room in the world where I do what I’m told.
I stand at my mother’s stove with my sleeves shoved up, browning the meat, arguing with my abuela in two languages about how much cumin. Mirta’s kids climb me like furniture. Clara narrates everyone’s failings from the counter. My father drifts in to taste things and drifts out.
The cafetera goes on and off and on again, because in this house coffee is not an event, it’s a standing order.
No one here has ever wanted a single thing off me but for me to eat more, call more, and bring someone home already.
I get fed and teased and corrected and loved by my people.
I don’t have to do one thing to earn it.
I’m good for most of the meal. Then my phone lights up by my plate and I turn it over to look. Nothing. I turn it back, and Clara’s watching me.
“That’s the fourth time,” she says.
“The fourth time what?”
“You keep flipping that phone over.” She points a fork at me. “Who’re you waiting on?”
“Work.”
Clara looks at me. Only a younger sister has that look. Hers has been stripping away my excuses since we were kids. “Sure,” she says, and pretends to let it go.
My mother sets down the platter and says it lighter than Clara, which is how I know it’s worse. “You’re somewhere else, mijo.”
“I’m right here. I cooked the picadillo.”
“You cooked it good. And you’re somewhere else.
” She sits, unfolds her napkin, doesn’t look at me while she says it.
“I haven’t seen this on you. Not for a business deal.
A deal you bring home and put on the table for your father to be proud of.
This,” she tips her chin at whatever she sees on my face, “this you’re carrying off somewhere alone. Who is it?”
“It’s the house in the Panhandle,” I say. “I’ve got a difficult listing.”
“The house,” my abuela repeats, in the tone she keeps for a story she isn’t buying. She says something to tía Rosa in Spanish, too fast for the kids, and the two of them laugh. I let them, because the alternative is answering, and I don’t have an answer that fits in this kitchen.
I keep seeing Levi sleeping outside on a deck chair so I could have the warm throw.
Boots kicked off, one forearm over his face against the morning, too long for the chair.
The shirt ridden up over his stomach, the long stretch of his legs crossed at the ankle.
I know that picture in more detail than a man who only glanced has any right to.
None of that goes on my mother’s table next to the pernil. I take more rice I don’t want and turn it onto Mirta’s kids, and the meal rolls on over and around me. I let it carry me. It has my whole life.
But my mother’s got her eyes on me now, on and off, the rest of the night. She raised three of us. She knows the difference between tired from work and a head that’s been left in another room.
Late, the kids go down and the rum comes out, and the grown people settle into the part of the night where the stories get older. I step out onto the back porch, into the wet Miami dark, and call the phone I gave him.
He picks up on the second ring, like he was sitting with it in his hand.
“How did it go?” he asks.
“The deal closed,” I tell him.
“Course it did.” I can hear the waves behind him, the city behind me. “Did you get the price you wanted?”
“Full ask.”
“Knew it.” I can hear the grin in it. He’s genuinely happy for me and it warms me from the inside. “You’re having a hell of a week.”
“Yes, guess I am.” Inside, through the glass, my father says something and the room laughs at once.
“I’m out at my parents’ house with my sisters and their kids.
My mother made me cook. I’m standing outside because it’s too loud inside with them.
You should hear it in there. My abuela spent an hour on the phone trying to win an argument with an old classmate. ”
“Did she win?”
“She never loses. The other person dies first and she counts it as a win.”
He laughs. It carries down the line, and I stand there to keep it going. “What’d you make?” he says. “You said you’re cooking.”
“Picadillo. My mother won’t let anybody else near the meat.”
“Picadillo.” He repeats the word. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Ground beef, olives, raisins, the works. I’ll make it for you.” The silence on the line after it runs a little long.
“I’d like that. I’ll eat anything you want to cook. You’re a man of many talents.”
We talk for a while. Easier than we ever get in a room. A phone in the dark lets us say things we’d never say across a table. Then somewhere in the back half of it, he starts to say something.
“Dante,” he says. “Listen, I—” And stops.
I wait.
“There’s a—” He stops again. I can hear him breathing. He takes the run at it and pulls up short. Twice. Whatever it is, it’s big enough to have him by the throat.
I don’t push. I decided a while ago I wasn’t going to pry with him. You don’t pry a shut door. You wait by it or you leave it.
“Forget it,” he says finally, light, sliding off it. “It’s not important.”
“They’re still at it in there,” I say, watching through the glass. “They’ll sit at that table till two in the morning. Nobody wants to be the one who says good night first.”
“Sounds like the best problem a man could have.”
“It’s a loud one.” But I hear what’s underneath it. “You didn’t have that growing up? A loud table?”
The pause runs long enough that I think I’ve overstepped.
“No,” he says. “Never did. Where I came up, silence was the best outcome you could pray for. Loud meant somebody was about to get something they hadn’t asked for.
But I like hearing yours. Crack the door a second.
Let me listen to them. Even if I don’t understand what they’re saying. ”
I reach over and open the door slightly. I let the noisy conversation inside pour down the line to someone who’s never once had it.
“Thanks,” he says, when I bring it back to my ear.
“For what?”
“For letting me hear it.”
We talk easy about nothing for another few minutes, and that’s where I leave it.
“Get some sleep,” I tell him.
“Yeah, I will. Glad your deal closed.”
“Thanks.” I look at the glass, the warm room behind it. “Talk Wednesday.”
I hang up and stand on my mother’s porch a while, the family loud at my back. I add whatever Levi didn’t say to the list of things he won’t tell me. The list is getting long.
Later, my mother walks me to the door with a foil-wrapped plate of pernil I didn’t ask for and won’t refuse. She holds my face again and says, “Bring him to the table sometime. Whoever’s got your head.”
“It’s the house, Mami.”
“Sure.” She pats my cheek, twice, the way you pat someone you’ve given up correcting and decided to love anyway. “The house.”
I book the first flight out the next morning. The beach house needs me. Jonathan, the packet, the second look, the number I’m walking toward. A clean, full set of reasons, every one of them real.
I’m at the gate an hour early anyway, watching the board.