Jennifer
ONE YEAR LATER
The island is beautiful this time of year.
Matteo told me that before we came, and for once he was underselling it.
The water below the hill catches the morning light and scatters it back in shards of silver.
Yellow flowers along the shell path breathe out a warm, honeyed scent.
The herb garden has gone lush and unruly, rosemary spilling over its borders as if rules no longer apply here.
I stand at the kitchen window with a cup of coffee and my daughter, Sofia balanced on my hip.
Sofia inherited my green eyes and dark hair, which in humidity behaves with the same complete disregard for structure as mine.
She also seems to have inherited, from elsewhere, the combined stubbornness of every alpha I have ever loved.
At present this is focused entirely on refusing to release the dish towel she acquired during the three seconds I looked away.
She is wearing the yellow onesie Santos bought in three sizes because he said the color suited her.
He was right. It does.
We named her on the second day, when it became clear she already had opinions and needed something to sign them with.
Sofia, because it works in Italian and Spanish, and because when Santos said it out loud in the medical room she turned her head toward him.
Tomas called it a coincidence, but it suits her.
And it’s a precious name, just like her.
"Sofia," I tell her. "The towel is not a toy."
She looks at me with those eyes and says nothing.
“Why did you take after your dads?”
Santos walks in, and then says, "She got it from you."
He grins at the pan.
At first we agreed to live on this island forever. It was a silly fantasy, and the idea lasted before Sofia was born.
Santos is happiest in the kitchen, flour on his shirt and three pans going at once, but Matteo and Tomas need offices, screens, calls, deadlines, the whole serious-person ecosystem.
I don’t mind. I only care that everyone is happy, apparently it is key to a successful relationship, and so far we’re all doing great.
Every second week or so, Matteo and Tomas fly back for a few days to handle whatever business deal they have under their sleeves. They call constantly, send photos of miserable boardrooms, complain about hotels, and behave as though they have been exiled for decades rather than forty-eight hours.
Then they come home carrying far too many gifts for Sofia.
They spoil her.
To be fair, we all do.
Sofia grabs a fistful of my hair and I make the involuntary sound.
I hear the tender before I see it.
The low steady sound of the supply boat coming into the dock, which shouldn’t be happening today, because they never run on Sundays. I go back to the window with Sofia on my hip and my coffee going cold.
Then I see her on the dock.
Bag over one shoulder, hand shading her eyes against the morning light, looking up at the island with the expression of someone who has been meaning to do this for a long time and has finally stopped letting the restaurant talk her out of it.
Anna.
Behind her, three very large men are helping unload bags from the tender. Beside one of them, holding a stuffed rabbit by one ear and looking at everything with enormous interested eyes, is Lily.
I am down the shell path before I have thought about shoes.
We reach the bottom of the path at the same time as Anna reaches the top of the dock, and then I have my free arm around her and Sofia between us making a sound of profound protest at being squashed.
“Jennifer!”
"You didn't tell me," I say.
"You would have worried about the rooms."
"The rooms are always ready."
"That is exactly why I didn't tell you. You would have found something else to worry about."
She is right. I would have found several things.
She looks at Sofia. Sofia looks back, then grabs a fistful of Anna's hair.
Anna laughs.
"Hello, Sofia," she says softly.
Sofia responds with something that is not a word and is absolutely an opinion.
Then Lily, Anna’s eldest daughter appears at Anna's side, Mr. Flops dangling from one hand, wild curls escaping a braid that has clearly had a long morning. She looks at Sofia with the particular solemnity of a six-year-old encountering something smaller than herself.
"Is that the baby?"
"Her name is Sofia," I tell her.
"She has a lot of hair," she concludes, which from Lily I understand to be a compliment, given her feelings about her own curls.
Sofia reaches toward those curls with one small determined hand.
"She likes you," I say.
Lily looks pleased about this in the careful way of children who are trying not to show how pleased they are.
Behind them, Laurent, Julien, and Bastien have finished with the bags and are standing on the path taking in the island.
Laurent says something in French. Julien responds.
Bastien looks at his phone and then puts it away, which for Bastien I understand represents a significant commitment to being present.
"They'll be fine," Anna says, reading my face. "Laurent already asked about the kitchen."
"Of course he did."
"Julien wants to know if there's a pasta wheel."
"Santos has four."
Anna smiles. "They're going to get along like a kitchen on fire.”
Santos appears at the top of the path at that exact moment. He clocks Laurent, Julien, and Bastien, does the rapid silent assessment one chef performs on other chefs, and then his face opens the way it always does with people he has already decided he likes.
Laurent is doing the exact same thing back.
"You have four pasta wheels," Julien says to Santos, still on this apparently.
"I do," Santos says. "You want to see them?"
"Oui," Julien says, immediately.
Anna and I exchange a glance. Two professional chefs, same kitchen, approximately thirty seconds of acquaintance between them. We both know what happens next.
"Six hours minimum," she says.
"At least," I agree.
Once everyone is settled, Lily down after the long journey, the chefs are still in the kitchen four hours later. Bastien reorganized the spice closet. He denies it, but Anna says he is definitely guilty. Sofia is asleep, Tomas and Matteo are in the study working as usual.
I'm in the living room with Anna, finally getting to talk to her alone. I haven't seen my sister in a long time, and she looks not only healthy but really happy too.
I'm glad.
She reaches into her jacket pocket and takes out a key.
Old, slightly worn, on a plain ring. I know what it opens before she says a word. I know it the way you know things that have been part of you for a long time, the weight and shape of something that cost you everything and then was taken and then was simply gone.
My taco truck.
"I'm not going to cry," I tell Anna.
"You absolutely are."
She tells me what I already suspected: Ricardo has disappeared off the face of the earth. It doesn't matter, because I have everything that really matters to me, including my taco truck, even if it is sitting in Cedar Ridge.
Ricardo is probably part of some pack, just like Chiara is with her pack. They're the type of people that always end up on their feet. They will probably find happiness for a while, hopefully forever, as I have.
Anna says she'll look after it while I decide what to do with it.
I have no idea. I'm not about to sell it. I don't need the money, but I hate the idea of it just sitting there doing nothing. I'll figure it out.
I always do.
Two weeks after Anna leaves, my phone rings.
The number is not saved but the area code is Los Angeles, and there is only one person from Los Angeles who has had this number for years and never used it.
"Dani," I say.
A pause. "How did you know it was me?”
"Because you said if you ever actually called it would be an emergency. Is it an emergency."
Another pause, one with a longer story behind it than she is ready to tell in the first thirty seconds.
"I don't know yet," she says.
Dani Torres was one of my regulars. Not the once-a-month kind or the special occasion kind.
The real kind. She showed up on a Tuesday when it was raining and nobody else was there and ate two fish tacos standing on the sidewalk without complaining about the weather.
Standing order: carne asada, extra pico, the hot sauce I made from scratch that I never wrote down because I knew it in my hands.
She tipped well and asked questions about the truck, and one afternoon while I was closing up she told me she wanted to run away and never come back.
I told her I understood that feeling.
I gave her my number and told her if she ever needed a starting point, to call.
That was four years ago.
"I remembered what you said," she tells me now. "About starting points."
“Good.”
"I need one." A breath. "I don't have much money and I don't know where to go and I—" She stops. Starts again. "You said if I ever needed anything."
I look at the key on the counter.
Sofia is in the garden with Tomas, and I think about Anna giving me the key, and the truck sitting in Cedar Ridge for months while I tried to figure out what it was waiting for.
Now I know.
"Do you know how to drive a food truck," I say.
A very long pause.
"Yes," she says carefully. "Why?”
"Because my taco truck is sitting in Cedar Ridge, Colorado doing absolutely nothing, and taking it off my hands would be doing me a genuine favor. I loved that truck. The idea of it parked and collecting dust when someone needs a starting point is something I can’t sit with."
"Jennifer."
"I mean it. I’ll tell you the address, and tell my sister that you’re coming.”
“Your sister? Anna?” Dani asks.
“The one, and only. A lot has changed.”
I tell her about us being reunited, and that I’m living on an island. She sounds happy for me. I’ll feel the same way about her, when she’s sorted and away from that horrible situation.
"Call me when you get there,” I say.
“I will. Bye,” she says, and hangs up.
I set the phone down.
Matteo looks up from his laptop. He has been listening without appearing to, which is one of his better qualities.
“Your taco truck,” he says.
“Yes,” I confirm. “I’ll call Anna after dinner, and tell her what’s going on.”
He closes the laptop. "I will have the lawyer handle the transfer. Properly, in her name, all of it." He holds my gaze. "Done before she arrives in Cedar Ridge."
Santos appears in the doorway with soil on his forearms and Sofia on his hip, both of them looking extremely pleased with themselves about something that probably happened to the rosemary.
"What did we miss?” he says.
"Nothing. Everything. I'll tell you at dinner."
He crosses the kitchen and presses a kiss to my temple and hands me my daughter, who smells of sunshine and whatever she found in the herb garden that she was not supposed to eat.
I hold her against my chest.
Somewhere between Los Angeles and Cedar Ridge, a woman who has been standing still for long enough is about to start moving.
I hope she is ready.
The truck is….