I smiled. “How old are they here?”
“Emilio is ten and Danny is twelve.” She shook her head. “They were always wild, those boys. Emilio was the worst—that kid hated being told what to do. He was packing his own lunch and walking to school by himself in the first grade, and he dragged Danny around everywhere he went, pobrecito. Always getting him into trouble.” She set the frame back on Emilio’s desk, adjusting it until it was exactly where it belonged. “Don’t tell him this, but I used to follow them in the car to make sure they got there safe.”
“Sounds like Emilio,” I said. “He’s so stubborn. Oh—he’s really good with the bikes, though. I just mean that he’s . . . you know. Independent.”
“Sí. Can’t tie that one down for more than five minutes, that’s for sure. Always had one foot out the door, just like his Papi. Ah, but we love them anyway. It would be easier if we didn’t, but what can you do?”
All Emilio had ever said about his father was that he lived in Puerto Rico, that it was kind of a weird situation. I’d never heard anything about Danny, either, and I wondered if they were still close, or if Danny had moved away like Emilio’s father and brothers. I wanted to ask Susana, but she seemed lost in her own memories. I held my tongue. No family was immune to heartbreak, and it wasn’t my business to go mucking around in someone else’s.
Susana tugged playfully on my ponytail. “Okay, cariño. Let’s go check on them before they eat all our hard work.”
“Sure you don’t need a ride home on the bike?” Emilio asked. We were outside again, and he was totally smiling at me, like, all dimples all the time.
I thumbed toward the blue pickup in the driveway, not that he could miss it. “I’ll follow you up there.”
“I could bring you back later to get the truck.” He dangled the bike keys in front of me, and my mind flashed back to the map in his room, the parade of thumbtacks marching to the sea. “You might actually like it.”
“I seriously doubt—”
“Jude, wait!” Susana burst through the front door with a Tupperware container full of cookies. “These are for you. Take them home for your family, okay? Especially your mom. You tell her I’m always thinking of her.”
I took the container and she kissed me, her hand smoothing my hair, fingers slipping under my chin.
“Come back and see me again, okay? You’re welcome anytime, cariño. With or without this brute.” She leaned over and ruffled Emilio’s hair.
“Te quiero,” he told her, and her whole face lit up, and seeing them together, joking around and just being . . . well, a mom and her kid . . . I don’t know. It was hard to reconcile what my sisters had said about this family. How could someone so dark-hearted love his mother so much? How could they have pictures of cousins and maps and flowers and candles? How could they be so sweet to me?
After Susana went back inside, Emilio squeezed my hand, then let it go. “Thanks for your help. Ma’s practically glowing. She really likes you.”
“Yeah?” I looked away to hide my inevitable blush. “Guess you’re not the only one who’s a charmer with the parents.”
Emilio laughed. “You know, princesa, I think this boyfriend/girlfriend thing might actually work.”
“Not if Rosette has anything to say about it, chillo.” I hopped into the truck. “You know that’s a fish, right, chillo?”
Emilio shrugged and started up his bike. “Nah.” He revved the engine, shouted over the rumble. “We say chillo for lover.”
Chapter 14
“Of course your mother fell in love with me. Look at me!” Papi pointed to an old group shot of Las Arañas Blancas. He was the front-runner of the gang, a motley collection of black-haired and ripped-jeaned bad boys on even badder bikes. Valentina shone like a jewel among the others, and I tried to imagine being a young girl in Argentina, coming upon this wild bunch, all chrome and leather and heat.
Every last one of those boys should’ve come with a warning sign.
Danger: Serious heartbreak ahead!
“It wasn’t hard to meet girls.” Papi’s eyes glinted. “But your mother . . . tough, that one. Every time we’d ride up to the diner where she worked, I’d order the same thing: chicken milanese with a side of ensalada rusa and a Coke. She’d bring the food, set the bill on the table before I took one bite. She never said hello, nothing! The guys used to call her coco, like a coconut. They bet money I wouldn’t get her to crack and talk to me.”
“What happened?” I’d never heard the story. Across the kitchen by the coffeepot, Mari shrugged like she hadn’t either.
“It took me all summer, but I made a bunch of pesos.” Papi flipped to the next picture, a shot of him and one of the other guys kneeling in front of a black motorcycle. It reminded me of Emilio and his friends at Duchess.
“I went back on the road again, took another long trip. But your mother couldn’t resist my charms forever,” Papi said. “Two years later we got married. All these guys did. Most stopped riding too.” Papi went quiet as he thumbed through the rest of his album. I wondered if he regretted it, if he thought he’d missed out on a more exciting life, and a tingly mix of sadness and guilt crept down my spine. Sadness that he’d left his old crew and stopped riding Valentina. Guilt that it was our fault. That maybe if he’d never stopped riding, if he’d never taken the path from the open road back to here, to Blackfeather, to the wife and the house and four daughters, things would’ve turned out okay for him. If he’d stayed there, he’d probably still be riding now, and he’d keep on living the life he was supposed to live, no wrong turns, no dead ends. No idle time or empty space for El Demonio to sneak in and set the whole thing ablaze.
“Don’t look so serious, queridita. It’s only a picture.” Papi patted my hand across the table, bringing me back to the moment. His other hand rested on a photo of a bike partly wrapped around a tree. One of the guys stood next to it, totally bamboozled.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Benny was our daredevil. Lucky dumb bastard,” Papi said. “That’s what we called him. He jumped off before the crash here. Not a scratch on him. But he lost the bike, went back to riding a Honda after this.”
“You guys were all crazy,” Mari said.
“Crazy times, yes. Great times.” Papi shook his head, the ghost of a smile on his lips. For a second I thought he might tear up, but when he looked at me, his eyes were full of life. “Wouldn’t trade my girls for anything, though.”
He leaned in and kissed my forehead, and when he disappeared upstairs to put the album away, Mari poured two fresh cups of my Dark Moon blend and joined me at the table.
“He remembers everything about his biker days, huh?” she said, reaching for a cookie from the stash I brought home the other day.
“It’s completely . . . unfair.” I took a chug of coffee to keep the emotion in check, but it was pointless. “He’ll probably always remember that story about Mom. But one day he won’t remember that the Mom who lives here now is the same woman. He’ll think she’s someone else. Like the one he loves is still some nineteen-year-old waitress in Argentina.”
“I know it’s unfair, Juju,” she said. “All of it. Unfair he’s sick. Unfair there’s no cure. Unfair you’re giving up your last summer as a kid. You’re missing out on everything, and Mom is working crazy hours, and it’s just . . . it sucks.”
I tugged at a loose thread on one of Mom’s woven place mats. Yeah, maybe I’d given up part of my summer, but it was already the Fourth of July, and what had I really missed? Ogling stupid boys at Witch’s Brew, golden summer boys none of us ever had the nerve to talk to? Trying to force some last great summer just because we were heading to college in the fall, and this was the end, our last chance to be kids? What did that mean, anyway? Like if Papi wasn’t sick, I’d be outside in my Mr. Turtle pool, catching fireflies in a mason jar and chasing down the ice cream truck with a dollar in my hand?
“I didn’t give up the whole summer,” I said. “I’m still going
to the Dunes next month. I’m just . . . I’m trying, okay?”
Mari shoved in another cookie, gulped it down with a swig of coffee. “I’ve been kind of a hard-ass since I got here, huh?”
“We’re all worried about him. I get it.”
Mari shook her head. “I was pissed at you. You knew I was coming, and you never even mentioned Emilio. Maybe you don’t remember what that family put us through, but I do. I was totally blindsided. Not to mention hurt.”
Okay. Maybe I should’ve told her. Warned her, prepared her, something. I’d kept my mouth shut, lied to my favorite sister. But we both knew where the honest road would’ve led; the bike project would’ve been canceled the moment she arrived. She probably would’ve gotten my other sisters involved, gotten everyone to remind me what a bad guy Emilio Vargas was.
The thing is, she would’ve been wrong. They all would’ve been wrong. They were wrong.
“Emilio’s different,” I said. “It’s not like that with him.”
Mari traced the rim of her coffee mug. “When I saw you guys, the way he looks at you . . . it was like going back in time with Celi and Johnny. I saw the same thing happening to you, and I freaked.”
I nabbed a cookie and thought of Susana, her bright smile, the way she laughed at Emilio’s jokes and scolded him for trying to lick the beaters before we were done. Maybe Johnny and Miguel had hurt my sisters, maybe they deserved to be on our blacklist for all eternity. But Mari didn’t know Emilio or his mother or anyone else in that family. How could she punish Emilio for his brothers’ past?
“I met Emilio’s mother yesterday,” I said. “I guess she and Mom were friends before?”
Mari nodded as if she were remembering, maybe imagining how things could’ve been if Johnny hadn’t staked Celi through the heart. But then she downed the last of her coffee and rose from the table, swept her cookie crumbs into the empty mug. “How much have you told Emilio about Papi’s condition?”
“We don’t talk about it. But he’s seen Papi’s mood swings.” I didn’t tell her that Emilio was the one who’d talked Papi down during the Great Tampon Incident, or that he was pretty much the only person outside the family who hadn’t gotten totally scared off. “I’m sure he can put it together.”
“He doesn’t need all the details, okay? That’s family stuff. Our family stuff.” Her eyes glazed with emotion, but she blinked it away. “Lourdes and Celi still aren’t sold on this bike idea.”
“You told them?” My stomach twisted just imagining Celi’s reaction. Last year when I visited her in New York, she’d left her Facebook open, and she was totally creeping on Johnny. And she still had the ring, tucked away in a velvet box in her top dresser drawer. “It was five years ago, Mari. You guys made me cut my hands and sign that stupid paper, and it had nothing to do with Emilio. I just wanted to be, like, included for once. I was twelve!”
“I told them about the bike, not Emilio. We’re Skyping tonight. I told them to dial in before the fireworks.”
I jammed in another cookie.
“Papi and I are having lunch in town,” she said, “but I need you to pick him up at two so I can do a phone meeting. I’m setting up at Witch’s Brew.”
“You have a meeting on the Fourth of July?”
“New York doesn’t sleep.” Mari slung her computer bag over her shoulder and bent down to nuzzle Pancake. She didn’t offer additional insights, big sister advice about how she was going to fix everything.
She’d stopped telling me not to worry after the first day, and in her short time here, she’d already aged another year.
So had I.
Chapter 15
Mari had been right about a lot of things in our seventeen-years-and-counting relationship: which books would hit the bestseller lists. The culinary masterpiece that is french fries dipped in dulce de leche. The swoonworthiness of Dillon Panthers fullback number thirty-three, Tim Riggins.
But she was wrong about the Vargas family. Wrong about Emilio. She’d mistrusted him before he’d ever set foot on our property, pegged him as a heartbreaker the moment we cut our hands and spoke the words five years ago.
I’d misjudged him too. Maybe he’d never know it. Maybe he’d never care. Maybe he’d ride on out of here at the end of summer with his final check and a bag full of clothes and bandannas, hit the road, and never look back, just like he’d been saying all along.
In a whole string of maybes, there was one thing I knew with absolute certainty. Emilio Vargas didn’t deserve a page in the Book of Broken Hearts. We’d put him there anyway. I had to make things right.
“Gimme ten minutes,” Emilio said when I found him at Duchess. “Hang out awhile?”
I staked out a bench along the back wall. Emilio was shirtless again, so watching him work wasn’t exactly punishment. I’d just settled in for the show when the rest of the boys kicked off their predictable red-hot hazing.
“Hey, Jude . . .” One of them—Marcus, I think his name was—started singing the old Beatles song and laughed like it was the most original idea in the world, like I hadn’t been hearing it my entire life. His voice wasn’t bad, but he screwed up most of the words, and by the time he got to the second verse, Paul McCartney was probably ready to get on a plane, fly on over here, and smack him.
“You should stop,” I said. “You’ve got a good thing going with the bikes. Maybe stick to that.”
“No, here comes the good part.” He cleared his throat and started again, one hand over his heart. The whole thing was kind of endearing, if you liked that sort of thing, which I didn’t. Not coming from him, anyway. “Hey, Jude, don’t be a fool. Don’t go out with . . . that bum E-mee-lee-o. The minute . . . you let him into your—”
“Better be the end of your song, bro.” Emilio clapped him on the shoulder, and Marcus winked at me and turned his attention back to the Harley he’d been working on. A knucklehead, I remembered from Emilio’s lesson.
“He’s a dumb ass,” Emilio said to me. “I’m almost finished.”
The second he was out of earshot, Marcus sauntered back up to the bench with stiff, rehearsed swag. Definitely a mirror practicer, that one.
“Why you messin’ with Emilio? What’s up with you and me?” He wiped his hand on his black tank top and held it out, presumably for me to take, at which point we’d presumably climb aboard his moped and ride off into the sunset. Before I could shatter his dreams, Samuel smacked his hand away.
“Keep it movin’,” Samuel said. He nudged him back toward the bikes, but the guy was unfazed.
“She likes me.”
“She thinks you stupid,” Samuel said. “And she right.”
Marcus cocked an eyebrow and licked his lips, more dazzling mirror work, and leaned in for another proposition. “When you’re ready to graduate from a boy to a man, you call me.”
“How about I call when you’re ready to graduate from a boy to a man?”
The other guys howled, and just when I decided this game might be kind of fun, Emilio was at the bench, tugging a shirt over his head. “Vamos, princesa.”
He led me out a small door in the back, one I’d seen him use before. I’d always assumed it led to a break room or smoking area, but it opened onto a sidewalk with a crooked, sun-splashed path that forked into the woods behind Fifth Street, and I followed him, eyes on the white bandanna dangling from his back pocket. I wondered what happened to the blue one. Not that I was launching a police investigation of his backside or anything. I mean, that bandanna was like a beacon. Look! Look! Look!
“No bodyguard today?” he asked as we hit the path. He turned and waited for me to catch up, obscuring the view of his butt. Bandanna. Whatever.
“She’s at lunch with my father, so you’re okay for now.”
His dimples vanished. “What’s up with her? I get that she’s worried about your pops, but damn.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I’d been tiptoeing around it since we met, but there’s no way he didn’t know, and I was sick
of pretending otherwise. “Araceli . . . Johnny totally dicked her over!”
His face changed, forehead crinkling beneath that mop of hair. It clearly wasn’t new information for him, but it was like he’d never considered it, never imagined it would affect the present day.
“Shit’s got nothing to do with me,” he said, continuing up the path. “And it was a million years ago. That’s seriously why she hates me?”
“She doesn’t hate you. She just . . . extremely dislikes you. Distrusts you. No, dislikes. Maybe both.”
“Because of my douche of an older brother?”
“Technically, there were two douches.”
“A douchette?”
I laughed, but only for a second. “Miguel dumped our sister Lourdes at their prom a few years before that. There’s a picture of them in your house.”
“Hold up.” Emilio stopped in his tracks and grabbed my arm. “How many sisters do you have, and please tell me the story ends there.”
“That’s it. Three, plus me. And two of them got their hearts broken by your family. Obviously Johnny was the big one.” I thought again of the wedding, the lilac dresses. I’d already had one fitting, and it was my favorite dress ever. I felt like a princess in it. A real one. I probably would’ve had to dance with Emilio during the bridal party song since we were closest in age. “Think about it. They were supposed to get married. Imagine?”
“Yeah, I know.” Emilio kicked a bleach-blond tumbleweed that had lodged itself on the path. “My mother was so pissed at him when she found out.”
“After that . . . Okay, this might sound crazy—”
“You? Sound crazy? No way. Better call the news copter.” Emilio grinned. “Okay, hit me with the crazy.”
I took a deep breath, let it out slow. “That night, after Celi and Johnny broke up, I made a promise that I’d never get involved . . . like, I wouldn’t hang around a guy in your family. Ever.”