EIGHT TACOS
LENNOX
I want to talk about the three words.
My dad used to.
That’s it. That’s all I got. Three words, and then the vault slammed and I got a lecture about shell-to-filling ratios delivered at a volume normally reserved for evacuation orders.
And I know — I know — the correct move was the one I made: don’t chase it, hand her a taco, look elsewhere.
You don’t knock on a vault. You wait until somebody wants to show you what’s inside.
But I’ve been thinking about those three words for six days, and I’ve arrived at a conclusion, and the conclusion is this: that woman has one good day a week, it’s load-bearing, and somebody built it a long time ago and isn’t here anymore.
So. New operation.
Objective: give her a good day that isn’t Tuesday. No stakes. No sacred ground. No questions. Just proof of concept that the week has more than one safe house in it.
Was this a date? Absolutely not. I want to be extremely clear, for the tribunal: at no point did I plan a date. I planned a joint tactical exercise with seven contingencies and a snack budget, which is different, legally.
Planning notes, recovered from my phone, submitted as evidence:
VENUE: The arcade on Fifth, because it shares a wall with a roller rink, because if the arcade runs dry I need a fallback that keeps momentum, because — and this is important — you cannot give that woman a lull.
A lull is where she remembers she’s at war with you.
Keep the ball moving and she forgets to retreat.
FRAMING: Cannot be an invitation. An invitation can be declined, and worse, an invitation is sincere, and sincerity makes her hiss. It has to be a challenge. She has never once declined a challenge. I watched her accept a challenge from a vending machine.
STAKES: Tacos. Obviously. Denominate everything in tacos and she’ll follow you into the sea.
RISK: That I have a nice time and my face does something undignified. Mitigation: none found. Proceeding anyway.
There was one more piece of prep, and I’m not proud of it.
I went to Kurt.
Look — the man had stonewalled me at the freezer.
“That’s between me and Dolly.” Between. Him and Dolly.
I’d spent an entire evening staring at my ceiling running that sentence through every possible parser and they all returned the same result: HISTORY DETECTED, DETAILS UNKNOWN.
And you’d think that would make him the last person I’d go to for help, and you’d be right, and I went anyway, because he’s also the only person on the planet with six years of field data.
I found him on his break, in the back, drinking something gray-purple with VOID (KURT’S) written on the cup, which raised several questions I filed for later.
“Hypothetically,” I said, “if a person wanted to know what Dolly likes. Besides tacos.”
Kurt didn’t look up. “There is nothing besides tacos.”
“There’s something besides tacos.”
“Mm.” He took a long, deliberate sip, the smoothie equivalent of a lawyer shuffling papers. And then, just as I’d written the whole trip off, he said — flat, quiet, to the middle distance:
“She likes winning. Lose badly. Make her work for it first, or she’ll know.”
I stared at him. That wasn’t nothing. That was real. That was field-grade, six-years-in-the-trenches, know-her-better-than-anyone intel, handed over in a monotone like a weather report.
“…Why are you helping me?”
“I’m not.” He crushed the empty cup and dropped it in the trash without looking, a perfect shot, the most athletic thing I have ever seen him do. “Break’s over.”
And he walked back out front, leaving me standing there holding a piece of her that he’d just given away for free, and feeling — for reasons I couldn’t name yet — like I should have said thank you for more than the tip.
File that. File all of it. Later.
Tuesday, close of shift. She was in her booth doing her end-of-night ritual — tray stacked, napkin folded, one last survey of the kingdom — and I clocked out, came around the counter, and dropped into the seat across from her like it was nothing, because everything depended on it being nothing.
I put two arcade tokens on the table.
She looked at the tokens. Then at me. Her eyes went narrow, which is her version of leaning in.
“What is this.”
“Found ’em in my jacket. From the place on Fifth.” I shrugged with a looseness I had rehearsed. “I have two tokens and a grudge. You coming or not?”
“A grudge.”
“You said, and I quote, that you could beat me ‘at anything, anywhere, in any arena, terrestrial or otherwise.’”
“That DOES sound like me.”
“Thursday. Skee-ball. Loser owes the winner ten tacos.” I paused, and deployed the payload with the flattest face I own: “Unless you’re scared.”
Silence. Her whole body went still, the stillness of a nature documentary right before the good part. Somewhere in her head, I could hear the war council convening. It’s the enemy. But it’s a challenge. But it’s the ENEMY. But — ten tacos.
“This is not,” she said finally, pointing at me, then the tokens, then me again, “a friendly outing. This is a SANCTIONED MILITARY ENGAGEMENT. There will be no fun had.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I’m bringing a FLAG to plant.”
“I’d expect nothing less.”
“And when I win, you’ll deliver my tacos in FULL REGALIA—” she stopped. “What’s your regalia?”
“The hat.”
“IN THE HAT. Weeping, ideally.”
“I’ll see what I can produce.”
She stuck out her hand. I shook it. Her grip is genuinely alarming — somewhere in that tiny frame is the forearm of a stonemason — and she pumped my arm once, hard, like closing a deal on livestock, and swept out of the restaurant announcing to no one, “THURSDAY, TATTY. WEAR SOMETHING YOU CAN LOSE IN.”
The door swung shut.
I sat there in the empty restaurant, in the booth, on her side of the table now somehow, looking at my own hand.
Here is my professional assessment of the operation, for the record:
Objective achieved. Engagement secured. Deniability intact — hers and mine, and I’d stopped being able to tell whose I was protecting somewhere around the handshake. Total cost: two tokens and whatever that was in my chest, which I am not itemizing.
From behind the counter, Kurt watched me sit alone in a booth grinning at my own hand like a man recently struck by lightning and enjoying it.
He shook his head slowly. He didn’t say anything.
He didn’t have to. The smoothie said it all.
Thursday. Skee-ball. Ten tacos on the line, plus several other things not listed on the invoice.
Lose badly, he’d said. Make her work for it first.
Kurt, buddy. I’ve been losing badly since the menu board salute.
She just hasn’t noticed what I’m losing.