For Sale
Ortiz
It’s a week before the bruises on her arms go yellow, and by then she’s back to stealing my pepperoni.
She’s still upstairs. Nobody asked her to stay. Nobody had to. She came down the morning after with Sharknado under her arm and the road mark still on him, and poured her own coffee. That was the whole conversation about whether she was leaving.
The first night back, she asked me one question. “Did Santo call you? When they brought me there?”
“No.”
“Not even once?”
“Nobody called me. If he’d said your name, I would’ve known. And I would’ve found you.”
She looked at me for a long time. “I knew he was lying.”
“You still had to ask.”
“Yes.”
“Then ask again if you need to. The answer won’t change.”
Steel finds her at the bar a few days in. I’m on the stool next to her and I don’t get up. He stands there with his hands in his pockets, which I’ve never seen him do, and looks at the taps.
“I said you were the problem Santo could use,” he says. “I was arguing we stop waiting and go through him before he got to you again. I said it like you were the danger instead of the one in danger.”
She looks at him a long time.
“That’s the worst sentence I’ve ever heard a man say,” she tells him. “If she wasn’t here. You couldn’t have started with the part where nobody was putting me out?”
“I’m not good at the front of things.”
“No.” She picks up her coffee. “You’re not. Mat Room. Tomorrow. You still owe me the choke.”
Something in his face lets go. “Same time.”
“I’m not pinky promising you again.”
“Thank Christ. And Ortiz’s dick?”
She smiles wide. The one that usually only I get, and in that moment, her whole relationship with Steel makes complete sense.
“Off limits,” she says.
Rook is harder, because Rook won’t come near her. She goes and gets him. She finds him on the lot pretending to check a tire that doesn’t need checking, and I watch from the door while she stands over him with her arms crossed.
“You didn’t lose me,” she says. “I learned you. I waited for the back wall. You did your job and I used it.”
“I should’ve—“
“You should’ve what. Been on both sides of the building?” She puts her hand on top of his head, once, the way you’d do to a kid brother. “Drive like that for me again and we’re square.”
He looks up at her. He’s twenty-seven and he looks about twelve. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Don’t say okay like that. We’re friends, Rook. Forever.”
Upstairs she shuts the door and sits on the bed with the bag in her lap. Not the red shirt bag. The other one. The one she walked out with and carried into Santo’s house and, Steel told me, went back across that room for, with a man screaming behind her, before she’d let herself run.
When I asked her why, she said, “I’ll show you.”
She runs her fingers along the lining until she finds a place where the stitching’s different. She works something out through the gap. A tin. An old one, the kind that had mints in it once, rusted at the corners.
She opens it and turns it so I can see.
Feathers.
They’re brown and brittle and some of them are broken in the middle. There’s one on top that’s smaller than the rest, a gray one. I know that one. I gave her that one on the step the night before my father took me across the water. I told her it was a good one. I told her I wouldn’t forget her.
I told her we’d find each other again, even if it was in another life.
I can’t say anything. I sit down on the bed next to her because my legs decide it.
Nineteen years. Through her grandmother dying and whatever came after.
Through a truck and a house with a mattress on the floor.
Through her finding me, and this house, and getting her laugh back, this tin was in the lining of that bag.
She went back into that room for it with Santo on the floor.
“You kept them.”
“All of them.” Her voice is steady. “I was seven, Mateo. It was the only thing anybody ever gave me that wasn’t food.”
I close the tin carefully and put it back in her hands.
Nineteen years. She kept these through Cuba and Miami and that fucking house twice. She went back for them with bullets coming through the walls.
“You went back for this.”
“I wasn’t leaving them.”
I look at her for a second. There’s something I want to tell her, but not here. Not yet.
I stand. “Get your shoes on.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m taking you somewhere.”
She narrows her eyes. “Is this another arcade?”
“Bring Sharknado. This concerns him too.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Shoes, Pluma.”
She rides behind me with Sharknado zipped into the front of her jacket and his head sticking out under her chin, and I don’t say a word about it. We go over the causeway and down the coast road until the strip malls quit and it’s just houses with the ocean showing between them.
I turn in at a little yellow one with a porch, a tin roof, and a mango tree in the yard. There’s a sign on the grass that says FOR SALE.
I shut the bike off. She doesn’t get down.
“Whose is this?”
“Nobody’s. That’s the point.” I get off and stand in the yard. “This one’s got a porch and a tub and a room that could be anything you want. You can hear the water from the bed. I’m not buying it. I’m asking.”
She gets off the bike slow, standing in the grass with the shark’s head under her chin and looking at the house.
“Asking what.”
“If you want to live in it. With me.” I’ve had the words for a week and they still come out rough.
“You want your own place, I’ll help you find it.
You want to work, go to school, take a year, take five, I’m there.
But you’ve spent this whole time telling me what you want, and I’ve never once told you what I want.
This is it. I want to wake up in this house with you in it.
I want to know what you want next month and next year, and I want to be there when you decide. ”
“We’re not married,” she says.
“I know.”
“I’m Catholic, Mateo.”
“I know.” I’ve got my hand in my pocket.
I’ve had my hand in this pocket all week.
I take it out. “I loved Pluma before I knew what the word was for. I’m not asking Pluma.
I’m asking you. The one who orders coffee the bossy way and cheats at air hockey and went back into that room for feathers I gave her. I’m asking Maribel.”
The ring’s plain. Gold, small, because she’s small. I picked it out alone in a shop where the man asked me if I wanted something bigger and I said no.
She looks at it. She looks at the house. She unzips her jacket, takes the shark out, and holds him up so his crooked face is looking at me.
“What do you think,” she asks him.
“He gets a vote. Not the whole decision.”
“He’s been through a lot.”
“Pluma.”
She’s laughing. She’s crying too, finally. She tucks the shark under her arm and holds out her left hand. It’s shaking. Mine is too.
“You cannot buy a house and a ring in the same week,” she says.
“I didn’t buy the house.”
“That’s not the important part.” She waits while I put it on her. It fits. Of course it fits. She looks at it on her hand in the sun with the ocean going behind the house, and then she looks at me. “Yes. To all of it. The house, you, the tub. Yes.”
I pick her up. She yells at me about it and I don’t put her down. Sharknado gets crushed between us and doesn’t complain. Behind us the sign in the grass says FOR SALE.
Tomorrow I’m going to call the real estate agent, because she said so.
Tomorrow, it will say SOLD.