Page 116 of Spiced!

She picked up her own cup. “You don’t have to answer today.”

“Okay,” was the only word I could make work.

After a moment of her holding one hand while sipping coffee and watching me stare without seeing through watery eyes, I rose and went to the proofing drawer to check the second proof. It was exactly where it needed to be. I took the empanada dough from the marble and began shaping it. My hands knew what to do without my brain contributing a thing, which was good, because I still couldn’t form words, much less coherent thoughts.

I filled two trays, put them in the oven, set the timer, and stood at the counter and waited. Some minutes later, the timer went off. I took the trays out. The bread was perfect.

“Okay,” I said, as much to the bread as to anyone else, though Doña Carmen knew I spoke to her. She waited for me to make eye contact, then nodded once. Then she picked up her coffee, turned away, and stared out the window at West Tampa.

At noon, I sat on the back step with Mofongo on my foot and texted Brendan.

Me: Something happened this morning. Something good, I think.

He called instead of texting, which he did when a thing was real enough to need a voice. How he always knew the difference was a mystery that would never be solved. The man was remarkable that way.

“Tell me.”

I walked him through it all, the coffee, the proofing, Doña Carmen wanting to retire and naming me her heir, if there is such a thing in the bread world. By the time I finished, my allergies were acting up again so badly that I had to step back into the kitchen and grab a tissue, Mofongo dutifully on my heels.

“Makes sense,” was all he said.

Two words, not congratulations or enthusiasm or the elaborate response the moment might have invited. Brendan merely offered the quiet recognition of something that had been true for a while and had now been said out loud.

“Yeah,” I said. “It does.”

Mofongo sneezed on my shoe.

“What does Doña Carmen say about Mofongo being at the panadería?”

“She feeds him when she thinks I’m not looking.”

His snort flowed through the receiver. “Of course she does.”

“He gets a piece of pan dulce every Tuesday. She acts like it doesn’t happen. He acts like it doesn’t happen. I act like it doesn’t happen. It happens every Tuesday, and probably other mornings, though I haven’t caught them on any other day.”

Mofongo looked up at me, pan dulce nowhere in evidence, deeply unconcerned about the future.

Chapter 33

Brendan

There was a Tuesday, a few weeks before the bar’s anniversary, that I keep coming back to. Nothing had happened, but that was the entire point. Adrian closed the panadería at noon and came over. We didn’t go anywhere or celebrate anything or mark any occasion. He just let himself in with the key I’d given him. Neither of us had made a ceremony of the giving. I’d just had one cut and set it on the counter. He’d looked at it for a second longer than a key required, then slid it onto his ring and said nothing, which from Adrian, was the loudest possible thing.

He fell asleep on my couch at two in the afternoon.

Puck assessed the situation from the arm of the couch. He had opinions about Adrian, Puck did. They had negotiated a treaty over the preceding weeks, the terms of which appeared to be that Adrian was permitted to exist and to occasionally provide warmth, in exchange for Puck retaining the right to steal one item of Adrian’s per visit and secrete it into his hammock. So far, the hammock contained a dancing shoe insole, a hair tie, and, inexplicably, a single flour-dusted sock that Adrian had been looking for across two visits.

Puck climbed down, crossed the blanket, and installed himself in the warm valley behind Adrian’s knees with the smug entitlement of a creature claiming disputed territory before the other party could wake to contest it.

I didn’t move for a long time.

Mind you, I am a man who reorganizes when he’s happy the same way he reorganizes when he’s not, because motion is how I metabolize feeling. I have stood at more than one significant moment in my life and thought, with the back of my brain, about whether the supply cabinet was in order. And here I was, pinned under a sleeping dancer and a ferret who had chosen violence in the form of proximity, holding a phone that wasn’t mine, unable to reach the coffee I wanted and unwilling to disturb the arrangement to get it.

Oddly, I felt no urge to reorganize anything at all.

Instead, I felt the slightly terrifying peace of a man who has stopped bracing himself.

Gerald sat on the windowsill in his patch of afternoon. Beside him sat a second succulent, the one Adrian had turned up with the Sunday before and announced that Gerald needed a companion because “a plant that lives alone gets weird.” I had pointed out that I, too, had lived alone for many years and turned out mostly fine. Adrian had looked at me when I said that. He hadn’t argued. He’d just nudged the little pot an inch closer to Gerald and let the silence make his point for him, which was a rhetorical technique his abuela had clearly perfected and passed down like a family knife. The new succulent didn’t have a name yet. He said that part was mine to decide, and I was taking my time, because it felt, obscurely, like it mattered. Now the two of them caught the light on the sill, Gerald and the nameless one.