Page 102 of Spiced!

“What do you want with my Adrian?” she said.

Not “What are your intentions?”

Nothing so soft.

“What do you want?”

Present tense. Itemized.

“I—” I looked at Adrian, who had suddenly become extremely interested in a spot on the tablecloth and was providing no cover whatsoever. “I want to keep seeing him. I like who I am when I’m—”

“No poetry,” Abuela said. “Poetry is what men say before they leave. My daughter got poetry.”

She let that land, and I didn’t yet know the full weight of it, only that a weight had entered the room. “I want to know the boring thing, the Tuesday thing. When he is not dancing, when he is not pretty, when he is tired and forty and the bakery had a bad week and he is not fun—are you the kind of man that stays for that, or the kind that only came for the show?”

It was, I would understand much later, the entire book of Adrian in one question, asked by the one person who had stayed through every chapter of it. At the time, I only knew it was the realest thing anyone had ever demanded of me across a plate of guava pastries.

“I’m the kind that stays,” I said. “I’m not fun either. Ask anyone. I reorganize cabinets for recreation.”

Something happened at the corner of her mouth.

It wasn’t a smile.

It was the distant rumor of one.

“Your ferret man,” she said to Adrian. “He reorganizes cabinets.”

“I told you about the ferret,” Adrian said.

“I like the ferret better than I like him,” Abuela said. “But it’s early.” She stood, which meant the audience was concluding. “Take pastelillos home. Not those ones.” She waved dismissively at the box I’d brought. “Mine. Yours are from a store. I can taste the sadness.”

At the door, she took my face in both hands, which I did not see coming and nearly undid me, and she looked up at me for a long moment with Adrian’s exact eyes, decades further down the road.

“He acts like nothing can hurt him,” she said, very quietly, so Adrian, gathering his dog in the other room, could not hear. “It’s a good act. He learned it young, and he learned it because he had to. I will not tell you why because that is his to tell, but you are a man who fixes things, yes?” Her thumbs pressed once against my jaw. “Do not fix him. He is not broken. He only thinks the room will change its mind about him. Your job is to not change your mind. That is all. That is the whole job.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, around something in my throat.

“Good.” She released me. “Also, get your heart checked. Remember Tito. Fifty-one.”

In the car, Adrian was quiet for a block.

“She took your face,” he finally said. “She doesn’t do that. She didn’t even do that to—” He stopped. “That’s big, Brendan. That’s the Vatican of Abuela things.”

“What did it mean?”

He looked out the window. I watched him decide how much to say and land, as he often did, somewhere honest and sideways. “It means she’s going to be very annoyed with both of us if you turn out to be poetry.”

“I’m not poetry,” I said. “I’m a Tuesday.”

He reached over and took my hand across the console, and didn’t say anything. Behind us, Mofongo sighed the sigh of a dog who had been fed four separate times by a woman who would deny all of it. We drove home through West Tampa in the golden end of the afternoon.

Chapter 27

Adrian

My alarm didn’t go off. It didn’t need to. My body had been running on baker’s hours since culinary school and had no interest in adjusting for circumstances, however compelling those circumstances might be—and these circumstances were, objectively, the most compelling they had ever been.

I lay still and had a mental conversation with my body about this. My body was unmoved. By now, my body and I had reached an understanding about Brendan’s apartment. It would let me enjoy exactly one extra minute of the warm, two-person bed before the baker in me threatened open revolt. I was three seconds into that minute when I made the tactical error of opening my eyes.