—30— Diego
Diego
I sit in the lobby staring off at the window, morning sunlight burning through like the world’s on fire.
Cup of cheap free orange juice from a machine.
A rubber pancake and a mound of fake eggs.
Free breakfast in a hotel out in the middle of nowhere really teaches you fast beggars can’t be choosers.
The desk clerk said when I arrived last night that I looked sort of rough.
Then he giddily decided to cheer me up by informing me that “the Chase Holt” stayed at this very hotel just a month or so ago and autographed a package of Oreos that the clerk to this day still hadn’t eaten.
“Chase who?” I grunted back, then snatched my keycard off the counter and headed for the elevators.
I wasn’t in the best mood.
Still didn’t give me the right to bite his head off.
And why’d I act like an asshole pretending I didn’t know who Chase Holt is? Wyatt’s always playing him on the radio in his car.
Maybe I just didn’t want to think of Wyatt.
It’s too soon. I’ve already made my peace.
I’m not good for him.
And while I know his whole hang-up was with people making decisions for him, I think this is one I can make that’s definitely in his favor: me leaving. His life was fine without me in it in the first place. All I did was make everything more complicated.
Even if I think Bellamy fucking off was a goddamned favor.
Not that I meant for the asshole to drop Wyatt just like that.
But if Wyatt was gonna cling on to him forever, too afraid to find out whether he can stand up on his own without that bastard, wasn’t it better I helped take away his crutch to prove to him he’s capable of standing on his own?
I’ve felt dead inside since leaving that Tumbleweeds bar.
I thought last night would never end.
It took everything in me to walk home, make that phone call, get a driver, and put my ass and the backpack I’d just stuffed into that vehicle.
It was a man with salt and pepper at his temples who glanced at me over his shoulder and asked, “Rough night?” I kept my eyes on the seat in front of me and said, “Just drive, please.”
Drive, he did. Making small talk, he didn’t.
And I was fucking grateful for that.
Also, I may or may not have had a potted orchid in my lap.
Like hell I was gonna entrust it to whoever the fuck was about to move in.
I settled on some dusty hotel just out of town. Paid the driver. Then sat on the curb outside, orchid next to me, staring at a car rental place and a diner across the street, both closed at this hour, while some light overhead buzzed and blinked.
And if packing a bag and calling a driver wasn’t hard enough, I gathered what little strength I had to take out my phone and give my tía a call, too, the only person on the planet I felt like I could talk to.
Strangely, I didn’t even plan to ask for help.
Didn’t want to burden anyone else. Just needed to hear a familiar voice and sort a few things out.
Then I realized my phone was dead.
Someone at the desk inside let me use the landline. Luckily, I knew my tía’s number by heart.
Hearing her voice was the instant medicine I needed.
The undeserved sweetness and sugar that just a simple, “Hey, sweetheart, how are you?” fed my soul, turning me into a stupid little happy kid again with no worries in the world.
“Are you on your way back to your own place now? At this hour? You could’ve left in the morning or even the next day, y’know. ”
I don’t know why, but I decided to tell her a little more.
More than I was planning to.
“Well, if I’d known your landlord was an evil gremlin and you didn’t have a place to go back to …” She sighed in the sweet, sad way she always does. “You should’ve said something.”
“I’ll be fine,” I assured her. “I just need help getting my dad’s car towed. And maybe the number to that contact you, uh … said you had in …” My head was so fuzzy. Could barely think. “… had in Houston. Can see if something pans out with them, or maybe—”
“Which hotel are you at again?”
“I said I’m fine, Tía. Really. I just …” I shut my eyes.
I guess she wasn’t buying it.
And maybe I was asking for help. Maybe I needed it. I wasn’t myself. I had no strength left. I was a walking shell.
“Stay put ‘til morning,” she told me before hanging up.
Couldn’t sleep five damned minutes last night. I even brought my dad’s book, tried to read that first chapter again, set it aside on the table next to the yellowed hotel bible when I gave up, and laid my body down sideways on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
I wasn’t fighting back tears.
But I was on the verge.
I wouldn’t dare let them come. If they came, they’d never end, and I’d be heading right back to Spruce ready to screw up Wyatt’s beautiful life even worse.
Wasn’t my heart in the right place? I kept asking myself that, wondering if I really was in the wrong, or if it really was just me not learning any lessons from anything again, my same routine of bulldozing my way into people’s lives, just as stubborn as my dad was on his worst days.
Now it’s morning.
I’m not any better than I was last night.
And I can’t take another bite of rubber pancakes or these fake powdered eggs.
When the shadow falls over my face and takes the seat right across from me at this tiny lobby table, I look up from my plate.
And my stomach drops.
Tío Marcos.
Mustache. Unsmiling face. Tilted head.
Just like he used to look when I was a kid about to get another talking to. Another scolding.
“Where’s Tía?” I ask instead of greeting him.
He works his mouth, peering down at my plate. “Not planning to eat your continental breakfast?”
I stare at him. “Tastes like paper.”
He pulls the plate to himself, takes my fork, and digs in.
I cross my arms and lean back. “She waiting in the car?”
“Nope,” he says between bites. “All you got’s me. Which is a shame, considering Lottie loves these stale hotel pancakes.” He grimaces as he chokes down the first bite, then looks at me. “But the drive was long. And all I’m running on is coffee.”
“Why’re you here?” I ask, getting to the point.
“Why are you?” he asks right back, chewing.
I’m still trying to figure out why Tío Marcos came and not my tía. “Nothing holding me to Spruce anymore,” I answer. “House is sold. Did my part looking after it. Time to move on.”
“To what?”
“What’s with the interrogation?” He continues eating calmly, not giving my question any attention. I sigh. “I don’t know. That’s for me to figure out.”
One pancake already finished, he starts on the next one, then continues talking without even looking at me. “Funny, how sure you sound saying nothing’s holding you to Spruce anymore. Yet your face is telling a whole other story.”
I ignore him. “Want my juice?” I nudge the cup to his side of the table. “Didn’t drink any of it.”
“Wouldn’t care if you did.” He gives it a look, then shakes his head. “I’ll pass. Not good for my reflux.”
“I’ll get you a coffee.”
I barely start to stand when he says, “How’s Wyatt?”
Just the name buckles my knees. Glues me back to the seat.
Cripples me.
“Doesn’t matter,” I mumble, barely audible.
“Didn’t ask if it matters. Asked how he is.”
I fold my arms on the table and stare down at the wet ring my cup of bad orange juice left.
Tío sighs. “You know Lottie still hears everything, right?”
I look up. “Huh?”
“Well, she knows something’s been going on between you and Wyatt. You guys were the talk of the town these past few days.” At my blank face, he gently scoops eggs onto his fork, runs it through syrup, then adds, “The ladies still keep Lottie in the group chat.”
He says “group chat” like it’s the name of some dark magic.
Maybe it is, where Spruce is concerned.
“Then why ask me if you and Tía already know everything?”
“Maybe I wanna hear it from the source. Never really trusted grapevines, not even when we lived in Spruce.”
He already talks about the town like it’s a memory from many years ago.
I wonder if that’s how I’ll be in a month from now. Or a week.
Tomorrow.
Thinking of Wyatt in the distance, disappearing behind me as I keep going, shrinking until he’s nothing more than a speck in my rearview mirror.
I feel sick suddenly. “I hurt him.”
“How?”
“By standing up for him.”
He’s still trying to cut off a bite from the second pancake with a little plastic knife and fork. He’s failing. “That doesn’t sound like hurting him yet.”
“This guy was treating him like shit. A big client of his. Former client now … maybe ‘cause of me.” I scratch a spot on the table. “I don’t know what the fuck else I was supposed to do.”
He gives up cutting the pancake and just picks it right up off the plate to take a bite. “Did you ask Wyatt?”
I frown. “What do you mean?”
That makes him laugh. “Like father like son. I say this with all the love in my heart, Diego, but the older you get, the more and more I see my brother in you.” He lowers the pancake, looking at me across the table.
“He would always try to solve everyone else’s problems. It drove everybody fucking crazy. ”
This is where I start to feel the floor vanish beneath my feet.
Tío Marcos went and opened up his secret weapon on me.
My dad.
“Protective to a fault. Fixing shit no one asked him to fix. Did you know even your mother came up to me once at a party—mind you, she’d had a few, had a nice buzz going—and she asked if it’s normal for men to get offended when someone won’t let them fix their kitchen sink?
No idea what that was about, but I understood it immediately. No context needed. My damned brother …”
He chuckles again at that.
I’m hearing more laughter from this man during this chat in a hotel lobby than I’ve heard from him my whole life.
He sighs. “Think he confused being needed with being loved.” He shakes his head.
“Your dad loved harder than anybody I knew. Didn’t always love smart, though.
” That makes him chuckle again. “Once, I got into some financial trouble. Right around the time you were born, actually. And you’d have thought your dad was ready to sell his own house to bail me out.
He might as well have. Took out his nest egg for me.
Didn’t ask him to. Didn’t want him to.” He pokes at the eggs with his fork and sighs again.
“I was so mad at him for doing that, we didn’t speak for two damned months. ”
“Family helps family. He was just doing what was right.”
“But I didn’t ask him to.” He shrugs. “Didn’t mean he was a … a bad person. It just … made him my brother, I guess.”
I think about my dad’s car suddenly.
How I failed to get it working.
Failed to bring it back to life.
Fucking failed the way he failed.
“What’s going through your head right now?” asks my tío.
I’m staring down at the table again. “Sometimes, I feel like …” I shake my head, deciding not to say it. Then suddenly I do. “Think he’d look at me now and … wonder what the fuck happened.”
“No.”
I look up at him, my jaw tightening, lip quivering.
“Not a chance,” he says. “If you only knew the things your dad said about you back when you were in school. He’d brag all about you.
All the time. Jesus Christ, constantly. Drove me nuts.
Like, I get it already, Diego’s a star, Diego just did his first oil change, Diego’s first pick on the team, Diego’s—Don’t get me wrong, you being my only niece or nephew, I loved knowing you were a stand-out kid—but didn’t that man live for anything else?
” He chuckles at himself and shakes his head.
“No, of course he didn’t, and that’s how my …
how my brother was. Loved you every day like he somehow knew he only had a few years left. ”
I look away, fighting something on my face.
“I know you don’t wanna hear this last part, and I’m not much a fan of her either for leaving how she did, but your mama loved you, too. Both of them. Whatever else went wrong between your parents, mistakes they made, flaws they had, don’t ever convince yourself you weren’t loved.”
“Just stop.”
He doesn’t. “You want to convince the world you’re such a hard-ass, Diego, but I can see right through that. I think that shell you grew around your heart is just hiding how squishy and full of love you really are inside.”
“Nothing squishy about me,” I spit back. “And don’t compare me to Mom. I’m nothing like her.”
He shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe not. But what I’m seeing right now is someone who’s running away when his heart got broken. That sure sounds like one of them.” He tilts his head. “She loved you. And she still did a terrible thing to you. Both can be true.”
I throw my eyes down again, picking at the table. “What’s the point, Tío? That I’m too helpful like Dad? Running away like Mom? What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”
“You tell me.” He sets down his fork. Finally. “Your dad never figured out he could let a loved one fuck up now n’ then. Thought loving someone meant always catching them before they fell.” He eyes me. “You gotta let people you love fall on their ass.”
“So you’re saying I should’ve just let Wyatt get screwed?”
“I think you should have let Wyatt decide for himself, then be there for him afterwards. In the way your mother wasn’t for you.”
I wipe away something under my eyes.
Then look away.
Then wipe something else.
Tío Marcos slides a napkin across the table to me. “Premium-quality tissue right here,” he says.
I guess that’s a joke.
The napkins here are sandpaper.
I snatch it and use it anyway, wiping off my eyes.
He sits back with a sigh, crosses his arms, and tilts his head as he keeps looking at me, studying me. “Come live with us.”
I look up like I didn’t hear him, squinting. “What?”
“Not forever. Just until you get your—”
“I don’t need your charity.”
“Well, that’s great to hear ‘cause I wasn’t offering any. I’ve got shit you can help with around our new place. My back isn’t as spry as it used to be. Knees sound like celery. Just stay with us until …” He shrugs. “Until you figure out what’s next. Door’s open, Diego.”
Don’t know if it’s the way he says my name.
His voice going softer in a way I haven’t heard in years.
Like saying my name still carries a piece of my dad with it.
He tells me the door’s open.
Starting to wonder if I’ve been relying too much on opened doors lately.
Isn’t it about time I open my own?
“Sit tight,” I tell him, getting up. “I’ll get you another plate.”
“Discreetly,” he mutters back, glancing toward the front desk. “Think that guy’s been eyeing me, knowing I’m not really a guest here, and I’m enjoying sharing this bad breakfast with my nephew more than anyone’s got a right to.”
I eye him. “Seriously don’t think they give a shit, Tío.”
He looks at me.
I look at him.
He cracks a smile.
I try not to.
Then I’m off back to the buffet to fill another plate I won’t eat.