TWENTY-ONE TACOS
(an epilogue)
DOLLY
Halloween came to the kingdom, and the kingdom threw a party.
Gus closed early and opened the whole restaurant to the resistance — one year to the DAY since nothing in particular; we invented the anniversary, all the best ones are invented — and I spent the afternoon at Walmart with my cousin Cameron, loading a cart with decorations while he questioned the operation.
“It’s a taco place,” Cameron said. “Why does a taco place need a fog machine?”
“AMBIANCE, Cameron.”
“And the skeleton?”
“He’s the DOORMAN.”
“And the—”
“Tacos make everything better, Cameron,” I said, with the patience of a queen educating the provinces, “and everything makes tacos better. It’s a closed loop. It’s beautiful. Push the cart.”
By eight, the kingdom was transformed: fog rolling under the booths, the skeleton saluting at the door (I’d fixed his arm; the General deserves a garrison), papel picado tangled with paper bats, and everyone in costume.
Mrs. Alvarez came as a churro and won a prize we invented on the spot.
The fangirl table came as the three ghosts of the betting pool: Past, Present, and Payout.
Gus came as himself but crying, which he insisted was a costume (“I’m a fountain”).
Kurt arrived at 8:15, and his costume required an explanation nobody got.
He was wearing his normal clothes, plus a sash. The sash said: SENTENCE FRAGMENT.
“I don’t get it,” said everyone.
“You wouldn’t,” said Kurt, content, and took up his station at the punch.
At 8:30, Penny walked in — closed the smoothie shop early, BE BACK WHENEVER — wearing her normal clothes plus one enormous black dot pinned at her collar.
A period.
She crossed the room, took up the spot next to Kurt at the punch bowl, and stood there. Sentence fragment. Period. Complete.
Nobody else got it all night. They didn’t explain it once.
I watched Kurt not-explain it four separate times, each refusal more content than the last, and when the fangirl table finally begged, Penny looked at them, shrugged one shoulder — multitudes; excerpts unavailable; sealed testimony — and Kurt said, “It’s grammar,” and that was the happiest I have ever seen that man in six years.
Almost.
Because at nine o’clock, the doors opened, and my knight made his entrance, and I need you to picture it, because I will be picturing it for the rest of my life:
Lennox. Six-foot-everything, tattoos out, cardboard construction from shoulder to shin, hand-painted, structurally ambitious beyond his skill ceiling (I’ve taught him nothing about craft safety and everything about craft COURAGE) —
— dressed as a giant letter T.
A capital T. With tiny tacos embroidered — EMbrOIDERED, hand-stitched, I checked, there were BLOOD BLISTERS — around the border like a coat of arms, and a small crown glue-gunned on the crossbar, and he ducked through my doorway sideways because the T was too wide for the frame, and he straightened up in the fog-machine fog like the most ridiculous monument ever raised, and he looked directly at me across my whole shrieking kingdom and said:
“Told you I’d be your Tuesday, Dollface.”
Kurt spit out his punch. FULLY. A spray. The sentence fragment lost all punctuation. Penny handed him a napkin without looking, like she’d had it ready for an hour.
And I — the Taco Queen, sovereign of the wooden sea, defender of the twenty-five cents, keeper of the one thing the week can’t have — did the only thing there was to do.
I marched across my kingdom, took that beautiful cardboard idiot by the crossbar, and kissed him in front of the entire resistance while the fog machine gave it everything and the fangirl table’s Ghost of Payout collected on one final bracket.
Then I pinned it on him. I’d made it that afternoon, glue gun, gold paint, blood blister of my own, fair’s fair: a medal. A little golden taco on a ribbon.
“Highest honor of the realm,” I said. “For conspicuous Tuesdayness.”
He looked down at it like I’d knighted him with Excalibur. “What’s it called?”
“The Order of the General.”
His eyes did something. He knew exactly who that was. He saluted — crisp, two seconds, correct, he’d been PRACTICING — and the whole kingdom, on instinct, on love, on twenty-five cents a week forever, saluted back.
VIVA LA TACO REVOLUTION.
(But that, my friends, is a story for — no. You know what? It’s THIS story. It was always this story. THE END.)