Page 37 of Down Bad

“Let that one be,” I tell him.

He nods and moves on.

I stand there a second longer than I need to, staring at it.

Totally not thinking of someone else.

It’s hours later that I’m home outside my car, and all I can do is stand here staring at the house next door with a mouthful of unasked questions. What’s he doing? How’s he feeling?

No response. Closed garage. Closed blinds.

Not a sign of life whatsoever.

Even the hood of that clunker in his driveway is shut.

For a man who spent his first few weeks here making himself impossible to ignore, Diego Valdez’s absence is amazingly loud.

I notice something else:

No tools out.

Did he actually put that toolbox I gave him to use? Is this his way of communicating to me that he’s okay?

No. I won’t read into it. All I’ve done today is read imaginary writing on every wall I walk past. This is just how he says he needs space: by removing nearly all evidence that he exists.

I can accept that.

Maybe he’s moved all his car work to the middle of the night, not wanting a chance of running into me too soon.

I’ll have to accept that, too.

But even a quarter past midnight when I wake up with a start, sweaty from head to toe, and drag myself into the kitchen for a glass of water, I don’t see him in the driveway. Hood still closed. Garage, too. It’s like he’s gone.

Except he isn’t. He’s still very, very much here in my head.

I stand here in the dark and all I can do is think of Diego’s lips as I lift the glass to my own, sipping slowly, distractedly.

How much I could see him holding back in his tortured eyes.

Then giving in.

I’m standing here reinterpreting every single interaction we have had since the moment he first arrived to town. His coldness. How he reacted to mowing over the flowerbed. When he showed up to my shop to buy flowers and walked away with an orchid. I’m trying to piece together the story he wasn’t telling me all this time.

A story I’m certain even Lottie and Marcos don’t know.

A story that, for one incredible instance, became ours.

A story he let me in on.

Just a flash of the first page.

Before the book slammed shut.

But I’m not satisfied with that. I refuse for that to be it. I want to read so much more.

—8—

Diego