Chapter Two
Alonzo
I came up the back steps of El Colibrí a little after seven with a coffee I'd already half wasted on the gravel and the particular good ache of a man who'd slept like the dead and earned it.
The kitchen was mine at that hour. Before Diego, before the line cooks, before the day put its hands on anything—just me and the walk-in's hum and the smell that's been the smell of my whole life: garlic gone soft in oil, the sour-sweet of masa, yesterday's coffee, bleach over the top of all of it.
My great-grandfather stood in a version of this kitchen.
My father stands in it now, most days, until his knees tell him to sit down and boss people from a chair.
I tied on an apron and pulled the sancocho base off the cold shelf to get it going low and slow, and I thought, the way I thought most mornings, that I was about the luckiest son of a bitch in this town.
I had a reason for every part of it.
I had the restaurant, which is to say I had a family that had built something with its hands and trusted me to carry it.
I had Beth. I'd asked her to marry me back in December, down by the river on the coldest night of the year, my hands shaking so badly I nearly lost the ring in the snow—and I'd wanted to marry her that same week, honestly, before she came to her senses.
Then her father's heart gave out in January.
She spent the whole gray spring two hours away in a cardiac unit, sleeping upright in a vinyl chair, holding Hank's hand through the scary parts, and you do not plan a wedding from a hospital hallway.
So we'd settled on March—this coming one, the first warm month—and I was teaching myself, slowly, to be a patient man.
I'd left her that morning warm and tangled in our sheets, hair flung across the pillow, the ring I'd lost three months of sleep choosing still on her finger, and I'd stood in the doorway like an idiot just to look at her, because some mornings the size of it caught me in the throat.
The best thing that ever happened to me, and somehow I'd gotten to keep it.
And I had Lola back.
That one I felt like a small private miracle, and I'm not going to pretend I didn't. Lola Marchetti and I went back further than anybody alive.
We'd been six years old together, scabbed knees and bikes with no brakes; we'd been seventeen and stupid down at the river; we'd been—a lot of things, over the years, the summers before she left, back when neither of us knew what we wanted or had the sense to want it carefully.
Ancient history. Another life. We'd come out the far side of all of it as something cleaner: friends, real ones, the kind who can pick up a sentence the other one dropped a decade ago and finish it the right way.
She'd landed back in Hartsong that same winter, a few weeks after I put the ring on Beth's finger—drove into town with a car full of garbage bags and a smile she kept bolted on so nobody could see underneath it.
The city had chewed her up and spit her out, and she didn't tell me the half of it, but I knew Lola, and I knew the shape of a person pretending to be fine.
So I'd done what you do for your oldest friend in the world.
I gave her a job. It was the same gray stretch Beth was two hours away at the hospital, so it was me and Mari and my parents who folded her back in—who had her over, who set a place for her at Sunday dinner—and by the time Beth came home with the spring, Lola was just there.
Part of the furniture. The catering side had been quietly bleeding for years—invoices in shoeboxes, my dad's notes on the backs of receipts—and Lola took the books and turned it around in a single season.
Now Dad walks the floor like he invented her.
Mira esto, he'll say, tapping the laptop, mira, mira—like the spreadsheet is a grandchild.
Bookings up. Margins up. My abuela sends her home with flan on Sundays.
She was family now, more or less, and that had felt like one of the things I'd gotten right.
Beth would come around on her, eventually. I was sure of it. The two of them were so alike, really—strong, stubborn, prickly until they decided to trust you. They'd be thick as thieves by the wedding. She just needed to let her guard down a little.
I was sure of a lot of things, that morning.
? ? ?
Lola came in around ten, while I was up to my elbows in yuca, and I heard her before I saw her—the bell over the front, and then her voice carrying back through the empty dining room.
"Tell me you saved me a pandebono. Tell me, or I walk."
"There's two in the warmer with your name on them. Literally. Diego wrote your name on the bag so the cooks would stop eating them."
"That man loves me." She came through the swinging door in leggings and one of those enormous coffee-shop sweaters, hair up, no makeup, and she boosted herself onto the prep stool across from me like she'd been doing it her whole life—which, more or less, she had.
"Okay. Last night. Your grandmother. Eighty.
And she danced. Did you see her dancing with Rafa's brother? "
"I'm trying to forget it."
"It was the best night I've had since I got back, I swear to God." She picked a strip of yuca off my board and ate it raw, which is disgusting, which she knows. "Hey. Can I ask you something, and you have to promise not to do the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have a whole library of faces." She set down the next piece of yuca and wrapped both hands around her coffee, and something in her went a little smaller, a little younger.
"My car's doing the thing again. The grinding, when I brake—it's worse, it's like metal now, and the light came on this morning on the way over, and I just—" She blew out a breath.
"I don't trust anybody to even look at it.
You know how they are at the shop with a woman.
They see me coming and the number triples.
Will you just—look? Or take it to your guy? I'll pay, obviously, I just—"
"Leave it with me."
"Lonz."
"Lola. Leave it. I'll take it to Tuck after close. He owes me, he'll do it right, and he won't rob you." I wiped my hands. "When'd it start sounding like metal?"
"I don't know. A week?"
"You've been driving on metal for a week?"
"Don't do the face."
I was doing the face.
She laughed and reached across the board and squeezed my forearm the way she does, quick, grateful. "You're a good one. I owe you about a hundred of these after last night, I know. I'll bring you and Beth dinner. I'll make the bandeja. I'll—"
That's when Diego came out of the walk-in with a case of limes on his shoulder, and he clocked the two of us, Lola's hand on my arm, and his face didn't do anything at all, which is its own kind of something with Diego.
Lola slid off the stool. "I'm going, I'm going. I've got the Hendersons' tasting at noon." She grabbed her bag and pointed at me. "After close. Don't you dare let me drive it."
"I won't."
"Bye, Diego. The pandebono thing—I know it was you. I'm telling Mom you're my favorite."
"Mm," Diego said, and set down the limes.
And then she was gone, the bell going again at the front, and the kitchen was quiet, and Diego started juicing limes with more force than limes require.
"You know what'd fix that," he said, after a minute.
"Fix what?"
"Lola." He didn't look up. "A boyfriend. Get that woman a man of her own and she'd stop renting you out by the hour."
I laughed. "She's picky."
"So's everybody, till the right one shows up." He reached for another lime. "What about Wade Hollis?"
"Wade Hollis."
"The new vet—bought out the Carraway practice. Good guy, single, owns his place, doesn't drink like a fish, goes to church enough to keep the Pinch sisters off him." Diego shrugged. "I'd set them up myself. They'd make good-looking kids and own a lot of dogs."
"No." It was out of me before he'd even finished. "Not Wade."
I don't know how to explain what happened, except that the picture showed up behind my eyes uninvited—Lola across a candlelit table from Wade Hollis, Lola laughing up at somebody who wasn't—and something in me just shut the door on it, hard, before I'd decided to do anything at all. My face did something. I felt it do it.
Diego finally looked up. "...No? He's a catch. You'd kill for that résumé."
"He's not good enough for her."
It came out flat and certain, the way you'd say the sky is up there, and I heard it land in the quiet kitchen, and I didn't think a single thing of it.
Diego looked at me a beat longer than he needed to.
He had that look on his face I'd come to remember later, when everything was on fire—the careful, measuring one, the one our mother gets right before she says a true thing you don't want to hear.
He didn't say it, whatever it was. He went back to the limes.
"Anyway," I said, easy, reaching for my phone. "I don't mind running her car over. That's what friends are for, right?"
Diego didn't answer that one either.
I texted Beth standing right there at the counter.
Hey babe—gonna be stuck late tonight, don't hold dinner on me.
Eat without me, I'll grab something. Love you.
I didn't put why. It didn't cross my mind to put why—Beth wasn't the kind to interrogate a man over a late night, and besides, the reason was just the car, just Tuck's, just two friends and a brake job. What was there to explain.
I was already thinking about the metal sound she'd described, turning it over, not liking it.
Pads gone, probably into the rotors. Maybe a caliper.
You drive on that long enough and one day you go to stop and you just—don't.
I didn't love the thought of her out on the county road in a car that might not stop.
It's a quiet town, sure. Nothing bad ever happens here. But a brake's a brake.
My phone buzzed. Beth. A thumbs-up. ok love you too.
I pocketed it and went to find Tuck's number, and I didn't think about Beth again for the rest of the afternoon.
I want to be honest about that part, because it's the part I can't stand now.
I wasn't lying to her. I wasn't lying to myself.
I stood in my family's kitchen with my grandmother's flan in the warmer and a wedding three seasons out, and I felt useful, and steady, and good—the kind of man who shows up for the people he loves. I'd have sworn it on my abuela's life.
I had no idea what it was costing her. And I wouldn't, for a long, stupid time.