26. Brendan
Brendan
Adrian briefed me in the car like a man walking a rookie cop into a hostage negotiation.
“Okay. Let’s go over the rules. First, don’t compliment the plastic on the couch.
It’s not tacky; it’s preservation. She will explain the difference for forty minutes.
Second, don’t offer to help in the kitchen.
She’ll say, ‘Yes,’ then judge you. Third, and this is the most important rule, eat everything.
I can’t stress this enough. Everything, Brendan. ”
“I eat things,” I said. “I’m an accomplished eater of things.”
“You eat like a man filling out a form.” He shifted in his seat to look at me with urgency.
“She reads people by how they eat. It’s a whole system.
Fast means you were raised hungry and she’ll feel sorry for you.
Too slow means you think you’re better than the food, which is worse.
You want . . .” He searched for it. “Grateful. You want to eat gratefully.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Nobody does. You just have to do it.” He got out of the car. “Also, she already knows everything about you, so don’t bother being strategic.”
“How does she know everything about me?”
“I have no idea,” he said with the weary certainty of a man who had lived his whole life inside this particular riddle. “She just does. It’s the family superpower. Clearly, it skipped me, but it landed on her and, apparently, my dog.”
Abuela was approximately five feet of gray hair in an apron. She opened the door before we knocked, which Adrian later swore she couldn’t have heard, and which I did not, after that afternoon, entirely believe. She looked at me the way I look at an X-ray.
“So,” she said. “You are the veterinarian.”
“Brendan,” I said, and put out my hand. “It’s a real pleasure, Mrs.—”
She did not take my hand. Instead, she took the box of pastelillos I was holding, the one Adrian had made me bring.
She weighed the box in her palm like she was pricing gold, then handed it to Adrian without comment.
When she stepped aside to let us in, I understood, dimly, the gesture to be a passing grade on some test I hadn’t been told I was taking.
“He’s tall,” she told Adrian, in front of me, as though I were a horse. “Tall ones eat and eat and never get fat and then they die at fifty of the heart. My cousin Tito, he was tall and dead at fifty-one.”
“Abuela.”
“I’m only saying he should get his heart checked. It’s love to say it.” She looked at me. “Get your heart checked.”
“I will,” I said, and meant it, because it seemed unsafe not to.
Abuela’s food was extraordinary, which was a good thing, because there was an amount of it that suggested she had been cooking for a family of twelve and would be insulted if we didn’t eat like one.
She watched me eat the way a professional athlete watched game tape.
Somewhere around the second helping of arroz con gandules—which I had not requested and which had simply appeared, because declining was not among the available options—she said to Adrian, not to me, “He eats nice. Slow, but not proud-slow. Careful-slow.” She paused in a way I felt in my spine. “Like he’s afraid to want it too fast.”
I stopped, a forkful of pigeon peas halfway to a fate it would never meet, because that was—uncomfortably—the most accurate thing anyone had said about me in years, delivered by a woman who had known me for thirty-five minutes over rice.
“She does that,” Adrian said quietly, watching my face. “You get used to it. Actually, you don’t, but you stop flinching so much.”
After the plates were cleared—by me, over her objection, which was itself a test, and which I passed by simply not stopping—she sat me down at the table with a coffee I had not asked for and did not need at that hour.
I would be awake until 2 a.m. regretting that coffee, and she didn’t seem to care. She folded her hands and got to it.
“What do you want with my Adrian?” she said.
Not “What are your intentions?”
Nothing so soft.
“What do you want?”
Present tense. Itemized.
“I—” I looked at Adrian, who had suddenly become extremely interested in a spot on the tablecloth and was providing no cover whatsoever. “I want to keep seeing him. I like who I am when I’m—”
“No poetry,” Abuela said. “Poetry is what men say before they leave. My daughter got poetry.”
She let that land, and I didn’t yet know the full weight of it, only that a weight had entered the room.
“I want to know the boring thing, the Tuesday thing. When he is not dancing, when he is not pretty, when he is tired and forty and the bakery had a bad week and he is not fun—are you the kind of man that stays for that, or the kind that only came for the show?”
It was, I would understand much later, the entire book of Adrian in one question, asked by the one person who had stayed through every chapter of it. At the time, I only knew it was the realest thing anyone had ever demanded of me across a plate of guava pastries.
“I’m the kind that stays,” I said. “I’m not fun either. Ask anyone. I reorganize cabinets for recreation.”
Something happened at the corner of her mouth.
It wasn’t a smile.
It was the distant rumor of one.
“Your ferret man,” she said to Adrian. “He reorganizes cabinets.”
“I told you about the ferret,” Adrian said.
“I like the ferret better than I like him,” Abuela said. “But it’s early.” She stood, which meant the audience was concluding. “Take pastelillos home. Not those ones.” She waved dismissively at the box I’d brought. “Mine. Yours are from a store. I can taste the sadness.”
At the door, she took my face in both hands, which I did not see coming and nearly undid me, and she looked up at me for a long moment with Adrian’s exact eyes, decades further down the road.
“He acts like nothing can hurt him,” she said, very quietly, so Adrian, gathering his dog in the other room, could not hear.
“It’s a good act. He learned it young, and he learned it because he had to.
I will not tell you why because that is his to tell, but you are a man who fixes things, yes?
” Her thumbs pressed once against my jaw.
“Do not fix him. He is not broken. He only thinks the room will change its mind about him. Your job is to not change your mind. That is all. That is the whole job.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, around something in my throat.
“Good.” She released me. “Also, get your heart checked. Remember Tito. Fifty-one.”
In the car, Adrian was quiet for a block.
“She took your face,” he finally said. “She doesn’t do that. She didn’t even do that to—” He stopped. “That’s big, Brendan. That’s the Vatican of Abuela things.”
“What did it mean?”
He looked out the window. I watched him decide how much to say and land, as he often did, somewhere honest and sideways. “It means she’s going to be very annoyed with both of us if you turn out to be poetry.”
“I’m not poetry,” I said. “I’m a Tuesday.”
He reached over and took my hand across the console, and didn’t say anything. Behind us, Mofongo sighed the sigh of a dog who had been fed four separate times by a woman who would deny all of it. We drove home through West Tampa in the golden end of the afternoon.