38. Adrian
Adrian
The week after the anniversary party was the best week I could remember having, which, for a man who had spent twenty years braced for the other shoe, was its own kind of vertigo.
We texted like teenagers. Brendan sent me a photo of Puck asleep inside a tissue box with only his tail visible, captioned, “He lives here now. I’ve accepted it.
” I sent back the laughing face and a photo of a tray of quesitos.
He sent one back an hour later of an empty spot on his counter where, he claimed, a quesito had briefly existed before “a crime occurred.” I accused Puck.
He said Puck had an alibi. I said Puck always had an alibi; that was what made him dangerous.
None of it was hollow. That was the part I kept turning over in the good way, the way you press your tongue to a tooth that used to hurt and marvel that it doesn’t.
For most of my life, easy had been a thing I manufactured, a performance I ran so that no one would look too closely and decide the real me was more than they’d signed up for.
We weren’t that. We were just easy.
He had seen the whole of me by now—the 4 a.m. version, the flour-in-the-eyebrows version, the version that cried at a cartoon penguin—and he kept showing up anyway, quietly, on purpose, with soda he didn’t drink.
Abuela noticed, because Abuela noticed everything. She still called every morning at seven-fifteen, in the narrow window between her novela and her stories, and on day two, she heard it.
“Qué te pasa,” she said—except this time it wasn’t the worried version. It was the version with a smile hiding in it.
“Nada,” I said. “Good nada. The best nada.”
“Mijo. I raised you. I can hear the man in your voice.” A pause, the sound of her stirring something. “The vet.”
“Brendan.”
“The one who fixed the dog and then fixed the rest of you. Bring him Sunday. I’ll cook. I want to watch how he eats—that tells me everything.”
“You’ve met him, Abuela. Twice.”
“And both times you were hovering like a nervous waiter. Sunday you will sit down and let me actually look at him.” She said something else, half to herself, and I could picture her exactly: at her own kitchen table across town, the good tablecloth already on her mind.
“Tell him there will be pernil. Tell him to come hungry. A man who comes hungry to my table is a man who is not hiding anything.”
“That’s not science, Abuela.”
“It is better than science. Now go. Your dough is waiting, and God does not proof it for you.” She hung up before I could answer, the way she always did, having decided the conversation was over the moment she was done with it.
I stood there with the phone warm against my ear and thought about how much I wanted to bring him to that table, how little the old, bracing Adrian had to say about it anymore.
The panadería changes were moving fast, too.
Dona Carmen had decided, somewhere in the last month, that she was done pretending she wasn’t handing me the place.
The lawyer had the paperwork drawn. The bank had made its bank noises.
She had started saying, “when it’s yours,” instead of, “if,” and had begun the long, ceremonial process of teaching me the things she had never written down—which regulars got the warm greeting, which supplier to never trust on a Friday, the precise emotional life of the sourdough starter.
“You will run it your way,” she told me one morning, elbow-deep in dough, not looking up. “But you will not change the sign. Some names you keep.”
“I wasn’t going to change the sign.”
“I know. That is why I am giving it to you and not to a stranger with opinions about branding.” She spat “branding” like it was a communicable disease.
I told Brendan all of it, in pieces, across the week.
He listened the way he listened to everything, which was completely, asking the next question because he actually wanted the answer.
When I told him the sign was staying Panadería Carmen, he was quiet for a second and then said, “Good. It should. It’s a good name, and it’s hers.
” I had to put the phone down for a moment and look at the ceiling, because he understood without being told the exact thing it had taken me a month to be able to say.
And underneath all of it, all week, was Saturday.
Because Saturday was the Barbacks anniversary—the real one, the public one, the loud one—and I had built something for it.
Not my usual set or the rotation I could do in my sleep, the crowd-pleasers I’d run a hundred times.
I had spent two weeks creating something with a shape to it, a beginning and a middle and an arrival, a story told in contemporary movement instead of the bar’s usual grammar.
It was the closest thing to a real showcase piece I had ever tried to put in front of the Barbacks crowd, and it scared me a little, which was how I knew it mattered.
I hadn’t decided whether to tell Brendan to come watch the whole thing or to let him wander in like any other Saturday.
There was a part of me—the old part, the part with its hand always near a packed bag—that wanted to keep the biggest thing I’d made a little bit hidden, just in case.
I was still arguing with that part of myself on Thursday when Brendan settled it for me, the way he settled most things, without appearing to try.
“Saturday,” he said, over the phone, late, both of us half asleep. “The anniversary. That’s a big one for the bar, right?”
“Big one.”
“Then I want the whole thing front row, start to finish. I’ve watched you dance plenty of times, and I’ve never once watched you like it was the only thing in the room. I’d like to fix that.”
The old part of me went quiet. There was nothing for it to do. He had reached, unprompted, for the exact thing I’d been afraid to offer, and had asked for it like it was obvious, because of course he wanted the biggest thing.
“It’s a new set,” I warned him. “Contemporary. Some of the neighborhood people are going to have no idea what they’re looking at.”
“Then I’ll be the idiot in the front row who also has no idea what he’s looking at,” Brendan said, “except I’ll be having the best time of anyone in the building. I’m good at that now. I’ve been practicing.”
I laughed into the dark of my apartment, Mofongo a warm weight against my shins, and felt the last of the old bracing go loose in my chest.
“One condition,” I said.
“Anything.”
“You watch the whole set, and you don’t once, in the back of your careful head, wish it were a bakery.”
I was joking.
He knew I was joking.
But he answered it like I wasn’t, because he was Brendan.
“Adrian,” he said. “I’m going to watch you dance, and I’m going to know exactly what I’m looking at. That’s the whole point. I’ve got a lot of Saturdays to make up.”