Page 149 of Down Bad

“I’ll get you a coffee.”

I barely start to stand when he says, “How’s Wyatt?”

Just the name buckles my knees. Glues me back to the seat.

Cripples me.

“Doesn’t matter,” I mumble, barely audible.

“Didn’t ask if it matters. Asked how he is.”

I fold my arms on the table and stare down at the wet ring my cup of bad orange juice left.

Tío sighs. “You know Lottie still hears everything, right?”

I look up. “Huh?”

“Well, she knows something’s been going on between you and Wyatt. You guys were the talk of the town these past few days.” At my blank face, he gently scoops eggs onto his fork, runs it through syrup, then adds, “The ladies still keep Lottie in the group chat.”

He says “group chat” like it’s the name of some dark magic.

Maybe it is, where Spruce is concerned.

“Then why ask me if you and Tía already know everything?”

“Maybe I wanna hear it from the source. Never really trusted grapevines, not even when we lived in Spruce.”

He already talks about the town like it’s a memory from many years ago.

I wonder if that’s how I’ll be in a month from now. Or a week.

Tomorrow.

Thinking of Wyatt in the distance, disappearing behind me as I keep going, shrinking until he’s nothing more than a speck in my rearview mirror.

I feel sick suddenly. “I hurt him.”

“How?”

“By standing up for him.”

He’s still trying to cut off a bite from the second pancake with a little plastic knife and fork. He’s failing. “That doesn’t sound like hurting him yet.”

“This guy was treating him like shit. A big client of his. Former client now … maybe ‘cause of me.” I scratch a spot on the table. “I don’t know what the fuck else I was supposed to do.”

He gives up cutting the pancake and just picks it right up off the plate to take a bite. “Did you ask Wyatt?”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

That makes him laugh. “Like father like son. I say this with all the love in my heart, Diego, but the older you get, the more and more I see my brother in you.” He lowers the pancake, looking at me across the table. “He would always try to solve everyone else’s problems. It drove everybody fucking crazy.”

This is where I start to feel the floor vanish beneath my feet.

Tío Marcos went and opened up his secret weapon on me.

My dad.

“Protective to a fault. Fixing shit no one asked him to fix. Did you know even your mother came up to me once at a party—mind you, she’d had a few, had a nice buzz going—and she asked if it’s normal for men to get offended when someone won’t let them fix their kitchen sink? No idea what that was about, but I understood it immediately. No context needed. My damned brother …”