Mason turns off the main road and the streetlights disappear. The headlights cut a path through trees that crowd the road on both sides, and for a second, it's just the engine and the radio and the smell of pine.
"So what did you do for late-night food before?" Arthur asks.
"Crackers over the sink, mostly."
A beat of silence from the backseat.
"That's the saddest sentence I've ever heard," Arthur replies.
"Grant really never took you to Carlo's?" Knox asks.
"Grant cooked," I say. "We didn't really do late-night dinners. He was more of a meal-prep-Sunday, early-to-bed situation."
Mason makes a sound in his throat.
"Thinking back on it, we're very different people," I add quietly.
Nobody seems to know what to do with that. The silence stretches just long enough for Johnny Cash to finish a verse, and then Arthur reaches forward and turns the volume up a notch.
Carlo's appears around a bend in the road like a little glowing outpost at the edge of the world. It's a white food truck with a hand-painted mural of the Mexican flag wrapping around the side, strung with warm Edison bulbs. There's a chalkboard menupropped against the tire, a window where a man in a backwards cap is working a flat-top grill, and a longer line of people than I would've expected for a Thursday at eleven. A few picnic tables sit in the gravel clearing beside it, half-occupied, lit by the truck's glow.
"Carlo's been here about eight years," Arthur says as Mason parks. "Carlos moved up from Guadalajara with a family recipe for birria and a dream. Started with just the truck. Everything's fresh, most of it sourced local."
We join the line. The air smells like charred meat, grilled onions and churros. My stomach makes a sound I hope nobody heard but, given Mason's sideways glance, at least one person did.
"Okay," I say, squinting at the chalkboard menu. "What do I get?"
"Get the tacos," Arthur replies. "We'll grab more stuff to share."
When we reach the window, Carlos, stocky, grinning, backwards cap slightly askew, spots Knox first and says something rapid in Spanish. Knox replies in kind, which I was not expecting, and Carlos breaks into a laugh, slapping the counter. Arthur leans in to add a quick comment of his own. Carlos murmurs a response, and whatever Arthur just told him earns me a look of profound, sudden sympathy.
"What did you tell him?" I ask.
"I told him," Arthur says smoothly, "that you've lived here for seventeen months and never tried his food."
"And what did he say?" I ask, narrowing my eyes at him.
Arthur's grin turns wicked. "He said he's praying for you."
Knox gives Carlos our order. Three orders of carne asada tacos, a birria quesadilla, two elotes, churros, and one horchata each. We step aside and the food comes fast. Within minutes we're standing around one of the picnic tables, each holdingpaper trays and foil-wrapped bundles that radiate heat through the napkins. The carne asada tacos are perfect: tender, bright with lime and cilantro.
"Okay," I say, mouth half full. "I'm sold."
"Told ya," Arthur and Mason say, more or less in unison, neither of them looking up from their food.
Then Mason, without a word, angles his birria quesadilla toward me. The cheese is doing a slow, golden stretch from the foil, the slow-braised beef glistening underneath.
I tear off a piece and close my eyes.
"Oh no," Arthur says. "We've lost her."
"That's—" I press a hand to my sternum. "That'sobscene."
"She gets it," Knox says quietly, almost to himself.
"Seriously," I say, opening my eyes. "I can't believe you've all known about this place and just—let me exist without it."
"In our defense," Knox says, tearing a churro in half, "before tonight, we didn't know you'd never been here."
