Amara told them, or Razor did, or the news just travelled fast.
Every person at these tables knows what happened to me in a hole in Arizona.
And not one of them looks at me longer than a second.
They give it back to me. All forty. A big man with a beard at the far table catches my eye, gives me about a quarter of a nod, and goes straight back to his plate.
Finn's at the second table.
He's not hiding. He's sitting in the middle of the room with his back to the door and his elbows on either side of a plate he hasn't touched.
I don't go to him.
I take the seat at the end of the far table with the wall behind it, because it's got the wall behind it.
From there I can see the courtyard door, the kitchen door, and every hand in the room.
I sit down.
The woman across from me is maybe twenty-four with wet hair, a nursing textbook next to her plate, and she's got a spoon halfway up, and she puts it down and shoves the whole basket of tortillas at me like she's been waiting an hour for the chance.
"Nova," she says.
"Mila."
"I know." She's already got the pot. "Ruby madepozole rojo. I want you to understand something about Ruby'spozole. It’s no joke. People come back from Vegas talking about it. Grown men. It's a whole thing."
There's a bowl in front of me.
I don't remember agreeing to a bowl.
"Cabbage, radish, lime, all of it on top." She's pointing at things. "Not some of it. All of it, don't be polite, that's what it's there for. And the oregano's Mexican, not Italian, and if you can taste the difference, we can be friends."
The room's talking again. Somebody's arguing about a compressor.
I put the cabbage on.
"Radish," Nova says.
I put the radish on.
"There it is." She sits back with her arms crossed like she's watching a building go up. "Okay. Eat that."
I eat it.
My stomach doesn't work properly.
It hasn’t worked in nine years, and it didn't work in a Circle K in Elfrida, and it doesn't work now.
Six spoonfuls in, it starts to close, and I stop and put the spoon down.
Nobody says a word about it.
Nova keeps talking. Her clinicals, a professor she hates, a man named Doom who apparently can't be trusted alone with pancake batter.
She doesn't ask me one question.
Not one, for twenty-five straight minutes, and by minute four I've got it—she's trying to distract me.
