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After surrendering my large suitcase, Adam’s boxes and our carry-ons to the cruise ship’s luggage delivery service, Adam searched for a Trip on his phone. The humidity slammed into us the moment we stepped outside of the air-conditioned airport. I fanned myself uselessly. I’d experienced my share of sticky weather living in Durham, North Carolina, but it wasn’t something a person could get used to.
“Have you been to Miami before?” Adam asked as we climbed into the rideshare to make the twenty-minute journey to Little Havana.
“No. I’ve only ever been to Orlando. “Have you?”
“I come to Coral Gables every year for a conference on emerging diseases.” Adam looked down at his smartwatch for a moment. “ETA from my sister. They have already left Fort Lauderdale and should be at the restaurant in thirty minutes.”
Fort Lauderdale was almost an hour north of Miami. “They didn’t want to fly direct?”
Adam met my eyes, an unexpectedly wistful smile on his face. “Seventy years ago, my grandparents drove to Miami from Fort Lee in Virginia on their honeymoon trip, and they stopped in Fort Lauderdale for a night. Grandma wanted to recreate a little bit of their journey.”
The story was even sweeter than Adam’s expression. “I guess your grandpa has already passed on?” He’d never mentioned one, but if his grandma was eager to recreate their honeymoon, I doubted they’d been separated by divorce.
“Yeah, he was killed in Vietnam after they’d only been married ten years.” Adam got another buzz on his watch and looked down.
“That’s so sad. She never remarried?”
He swiped a message on his watch screen. “Nope. She raised her only child—my dad—as a single mom.”
My brows rose a little at that. Knowing his mom was also coming on the trip, I’d assumed it was Adam’s maternal grandmother we were cruising with. “Is your dad... still alive?”
Adam snorted. “Oh, he’s alive. Just hasn’t left Peru in fifteen years.”
I did a few mental calculations. “For your graduation?”
“To accept an anthropology award.” Adam’s curt tone made it clear he didn’t want to discuss the subject further, so I didn’t ask anything else. But I was dying to understand how his mom would end up on a cruise with her ex-husband’s mother, especially when her first marriage had ended badly.
The Trip driver dropped us off on Calle Ocho, right in front of the New Havana Cuban Restaurant. I tried the door, but the sign said it was closed for another thirty minutes. Already I could feel sweat dripping down my back, and there were no trees or awning to provide shade.
Adam took out his phone and presented me with an update. “Sorry, my family stopped to use the bathroom.”
“No problem.” I took a few steps forward, using my hand as a sun shield. “Maybe we can go and stand in the shadow over there?” I pointed toward the space between two buildings.
He looked around as if suddenly aware we were directly in the sun. “Oh yeah, good idea.”
We moved to the alley between the restaurant and a lounge that hadn’t opened yet. Over the next half hour, Adam occupied himself by taking his phone out repeatedly to assess how far away the rest of his family was, keeping me apprised with terse announcements. After their bathroom detour, his grandma wished to stop at the same giant orange statue she remembered from her honeymoon. Then Frank, Beverly’s boyfriend, wanted some Cuban cigars. At least by that time we knew they were in Little Havana, thirty minutes after we’d agreed to meet.
The humidity was intense, and the sun kept encroaching on our hideaway in the alley. “New Havana should be open now. Maybe we could get a table?” I suggested, fanning myself with my hands. All of Ellie’s hard work on my makeup earlier that morning was melting right off my face.
“Yeah, let’s try.” Before we could enter the restaurant, Adam got a call, but he waved me to continue inside without him.
I opened the restaurant door and basked in the sweet air conditioning for a moment before stepping in further. Despite the unlocked door, no one was behind the hostess stand. “Hello?” I called.
A man in his fifties walked out from a back office and launched into Spanish.
“Sorry,” I apologized. “No habla español.” At least not enough to understand what he’d just said.
He switched to barely accented English. “Can I help you, ma’am?”
I waved a hand back toward the door. “We have a party of six.”
“For tonight?”
“For lunch?” The strangeness of the interaction muddled my thoughts. It was normal to walk into a restaurant during business hours and ask for a table, right?
He scrutinized me for a moment. “Oh, okay, no problem. Tourists, right?”
I nodded, wondering if it was my lack of Spanish or apparently odd request to eat lunch that had clued him in.
