Page 22 of Spiced!

His whole back half wagged—not just his tail, his entire back half, like the happiness couldn’t fit in his tail alone and needed more real estate. I crouched down, and he launched himself at my face. I caught him and laughed in the dark because what else was I going to do?

My alarm went off at three-thirty.

I did the math.

The math was bad.

Mofongo was still asleep, snoring with the righteousness of a dog who had peed outside correctly and been told he was perfect. He didn’t need math or an alarm or complications.

“Easy for you,” I told him.

He snored with feeling.

I showered, made coffee, and stood at the counter looking at him through the crate door longer than my schedule allowed, then drove to the panadería through empty orange-lit streets. This was Tampa before it decided what it was. I always loved this hour.

Doña Carmen was already there. She was always there. I had long since stopped trying to understand how.

She looked up when I came through the door. “You look terrible.”

“I got a puppy.”

She put down her spatula.

“His name is Mofongo.”

She stared at me for three full seconds, then started laughing. I tied my apron and ignored her, because 4 a.m. and Doña Carmen laughing was a better morning than most things I could name.

The first dough had overproofed. I worked it back carefully, patient and quiet.

“Demasiado tiempo,” I told it. Too much time. “We’ve had this conversation.”

“You’re talking to the bread again,” Doña Carmen said through a smirk.

“The bread listens.”

“The bread is bread.”

“Six years of deep relations with dough say otherwise,” I said.

She made the sound she made when I was right but wasn’t going to say so.

I worked through the first hour in a rhythm that had organized my mornings for six years—dough and heat and the particular satisfaction of making the same things well, over and over, until the repetition became its own kind of clarity.

Mofongo drifted through my mind’s eye.

Then I thought about seeing my abuela on Saturday.

Then Benji’s inevitable interrogation.

Finally, without conscious thought, I remembered Brendan’s hand on my arm.

I slid the pan sobao into the oven and wiped my brow with a towel.

“What are you smiling at?” Doña Carmen asked.

“Nothing.”

“You’re smiling at the oven, Adrian.”