Page 101 of Spiced!

“And eat something that isn’t eggs. You lie to me about the eggs.”

I laughed, caught once again. “I love you, Mamá.”

“Te amo, mijíto, more than the bread.” It was the highest thing she could say, and she knew it. She said it, and then she was gone, back to her chair and her window and her street, three islands away, on the far side of a door neither of us had walked through.

I sat on my couch for a while after. Then I texted Brendan a photo of Mofongo asleep in a sunbeam, because he was the person I could send the real things to now. It was both a low bar and a high one. He wrote back within a minute. He’s helping, said the caption, though Mofongo was plainly asleep and helping with nothing. I felt the happiness climb back onto my chest, warm and heavy and purring.

The small hand reached, out of habit, for the bag.

But it found me already reaching to text Brendan again.

Chapter 26

Brendan

Adrian briefed me in the car like a man walking a rookie cop into a hostage negotiation.

“Okay. Let’s go over the rules. First, don’t compliment the plastic on the couch. It’s not tacky; it’s preservation. She will explain the difference for forty minutes. Second, don’t offer to help in the kitchen. She’ll say, ‘Yes,’ then judge you. Third, and this is the most important rule, eat everything. I can’t stress this enough. Everything, Brendan.”

“I eat things,” I said. “I’m an accomplished eater of things.”

“You eat like a man filling out a form.” He shifted in his seat to look at me with urgency. “She reads people by how they eat. It’s a whole system. Fast means you were raised hungry and she’ll feel sorry for you. Too slow means you think you’re better than the food, which is worse. You want . . .” He searched for it. “Grateful. You want to eat gratefully.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Nobody does. You just have to do it.” He got out of the car. “Also, she already knows everything about you, so don’t bother being strategic.”

“How does she know everything about me?”

“I have no idea,” he said with the weary certainty of a man who had lived his whole life inside this particular riddle. “She just does. It’s the family superpower. Clearly, it skipped me, but it landed on her and, apparently, my dog.”

Abuela was approximately five feet of gray hair in an apron. She opened the door before we knocked, which Adrian later swore she couldn’t have heard, and which I did not, after that afternoon, entirely believe. She looked at me the way I look at an X-ray.

“So,” she said. “You are the veterinarian.”

“Brendan,” I said, and put out my hand. “It’s a real pleasure, Mrs.—”

She did not take my hand. Instead, she took the box of pastelillos I was holding, the one Adrian had made me bring. She weighed the box in her palm like she was pricing gold, then handed it to Adrian without comment. When she stepped aside to let us in, I understood, dimly, the gesture to be a passing grade on some test I hadn’t been told I was taking.

“He’s tall,” she told Adrian, in front of me, as though I were a horse. “Tall ones eat and eat and never get fat and then they die at fifty of the heart. My cousin Tito, he was tall and dead at fifty-one.”

“Abuela.”

“I’m only saying he should get his heart checked. It’s love to say it.” She looked at me. “Get your heart checked.”

“I will,” I said, and meant it, because it seemed unsafe not to.

Abuela’s food was extraordinary, which was a good thing, because there was an amount of it that suggested she had been cooking for a family of twelve and would be insulted if we didn’t eat like one.

She watched me eat the way a professional athlete watched game tape.

Somewhere around the second helping of arroz con gandules—which I had not requested and which had simply appeared, because declining was not among the available options—she said to Adrian, not to me, “He eats nice. Slow, but not proud-slow. Careful-slow.” She paused in a way I felt in my spine. “Like he’s afraid to want it too fast.”

I stopped, a forkful of pigeon peas halfway to a fate it would never meet, because that was—uncomfortably—the most accurate thing anyone had said about me in years, delivered by a woman who had known me for thirty-five minutes over rice.

“She does that,” Adrian said quietly, watching my face. “You get used to it. Actually, you don’t, but you stop flinching so much.”

After the plates were cleared—by me, over her objection, which was itself a test, and which I passed by simply not stopping—she sat me down at the table with a coffee I had not asked for and did not need at that hour. I would be awake until 2 a.m. regretting that coffee, and she didn’t seem to care. She folded her hands and got to it.