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“This goes on forever,” Abyssian said, gesturing to the quantity we still had left. “How many do you make?”
“There’s not a way to make a small amount,” I answered. That wasn’t entirely true. You could make a casserole out of it, but that was not something I wanted to explain. I’d told Ben that once and he begged me for months to keep making them. It was still a pain in the ass. “So, when you want to feed about ten people?—”
“You make about five thousand,” Clara said through a snort. I laughed too because that’s always what it felt like.
“What?” the guys all said in unison, eyes wide as they looked up from the assembly line.
“Not literally.” As my cousin folded them and handed them to me, I put them in a giant pot to steam. “It just ... that’s how it goes. One, it’s a lot of work to make them, so when you do, you make it count. Two, we’re Hispanic. We don’t cook for a small crowd.”
“You should get her to cook barbacoa in a pit in the ground,” Clara said, handing me more tamales. “My absolute favorite. It’s to die for.”
“I am pretty damn good at that.” I wasn’t humble about my cooking. In our family, love and food went hand in hand, and I poured my heart into it.
“If that’s important to you, I’ll get whatever you need. We can do it together,” Caius said, and I gave him a half smile. He was genuinely trying, and I gave him credit for that.
After they were done, I put a pile on the first platter and set them on the table with bowls of salsa I’d asked Nog to bring us. He’d basically become my carrier pigeon, crossing back and forth through the portal frequently.
The guys looked at them with a healthy dose of skepticism, but have you ever smelled tamales? They speak for themselves. When I turned to grab napkins, my cousin shouted.
“Wait!”
Abyssian wasted no time and had bitten into a tamal. His mumbled yelp was partially from consuming steaming hot food, and partially from not knowing he needed to take the corn husk off first. He’d already ground his teeth in, desperately trying to tear it.
“You don’t eat the leaf, dumbass.” Pol laughed, showing him how to unwrap it.
“How’d you know how to do that?” Abyssian asked, pulling husk fibers from his mouth and gagging.
“That’s what she said to do,” he answered, putting the discards on an empty plate.
“No I didn’t,” I said, tilting my head to the side, platter still in hand. Only a little while before, he had done so well at making them, plus just knowing how to do that without instruction made me pause.
Pol held the tamal in his hand, eyes unblinking as he stared at me for a moment. Two.
“Hmm. That’s weird. I could have sworn you did. Maybe it’s just intuition.” Breaking eye contact with me, he looked away before he took a bite and moaned. Pointing at it, he added, “Holy shit, this isreallygood. Caius, you should eat one.”
I kept watching him, trying to figure out why that interaction made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t place it. Once Caius started eating, and Abyssian took a bite of it correctly, their reactions shook me out of my thoughts. Moans of satisfaction filled the room as the plate of empty corn husks grew in size.
“My tastebuds want me to eat more, but my stomach says stop,” Caius said, leaning back in his chair and blowing out a breath.
Clara polished off her eleventh without blinking, and Pol stared. She looked up at him. “What? I have a high metabolism.”
I snorted. “Whatever. If you had to pick a sin, it’d be gluttony.”
“Damn straight.” She smiled at me, lips sealed, her cheek bulging with a mouthful of food. “Now get the game. And the moonshine!”
Shaking my head, I placed small mason jars of moonshine on the table, handing them out individually, then grabbed the game I had Nog bring me. Lotería. Mexican bingo. The narrow yellow box was old and torn, taped together ten times over. A thin rubber band wrapped around it, holding the top on, but just barely. It was my mom and dad’s, and he’d given it to me. It was the one we always used on game night. I would pay to spell that box back together if it ever truly fell apart.
Clara clapped her hands and rubbed them together as she opened the box. Taking out the tablas, she picked one and passed them around. “Choose one. That’s your bingo card.”
“What’s a bingo? How do you know which one to pick?” Pol asked, tilting his head as he looked at it. “I can’t read it.”
“You just pick one with pictures you like,” I said, taking a handful of dried pinto beans and putting a pile next to everyone. Explaining the concept of bingo, and that we used the beans for markers, I chose my table and sat down. “Don’t worry. Just match the picture. You’ll learn the words.”
Tamales. Game night. Quality time in the kitchen. For the first time since I’d arrived, Tartarus didn’t feel foreign to me.
Clara called out the cards. El Mundo. La Chalupa. El Alacran. El Nopal. La Calavera. Beans started to fill the tablas, and we were getting so close.
“La Luna.”
