“Why not?”
“It’s such a beautiful name,” Alexei said. “It felt…intimate.”
Ben gave him a funny look, a smiling-but-slightly-puzzled look, and Alexei snapped his mouth shut.
Except after a beat, he opened it again.
“She said the kids at school called her that. Is she a teacher?”
Ben shook his head.
“Secretary. Head secretary, actually, at the high school I went to. Or as she not-so-humbly puts it, ‘The only person who actually knows what the hell’s going on at that damn place.’”
Alexei smiled. “I bet that’s true.”
“It is. Everyone knows Miss C.” Ben grinned into the distance with fondness. “She says she’s going to retire after Carolina graduates this year, but we’ll see. The school wouldn’t be the same without her. She obviously deserves to retire, but it makes me a little sad. That all the kids coming through East High next won’t get to know her.”
Alexei wished he knew what she looked like, so he could fill in the details better. But he could picture most of it anyway, a rough sketch of a bustling high school office, Iris’s energy filling the room.
Ben picked at the label on his beer bottle.
“I give her a hard time, but I am glad she taught us Portuguese, even if I only ever get to use it when she wants to yell at us. It was how she and my dad fell in love, or so the story goes.”
Alexei held his breath, rapt. All he knew about his own parents was that they had met at church.
“I know I said I wouldn’t bring up depressing stuff again, but remember I said my grandma had passed from Alzheimer’s? So my dad came into the school office one day, way back when, looking to apply to be a bus driver, around the time my grandma, Iris’s mom, was starting to get pretty bad. She’d lost language. Ma said it happened so fast. That one day she was talking, and the next she simply…wasn’t. My grandma was second-generation Portuguese American, knew the language pretty well from her parents. My mom and her siblings, though, never really learned it. Just bits and pieces here and there.”
Ben took a long swig of Pacifico.
“So when she heard the name Caravalho, when my dad came into the office, she asked him if he spoke Portuguese. And when he said yes, she decided, all of a sudden, that she would truly learn it, so she couldfeel closer to her mom, who was fading by the day. And my mom is…my mom, so of course she convinced my dad to teach her, right there and then, even though they barely knew each other.” Ben shrugged. “The rest, as they say, is history.”
Alexei was pretty sure this was the most romantic story he’d ever heard.
He wanted more. His Malibu Bay Breeze was long gone, and Ben’s second Pacifico was almost demolished, too, but Alexei didn’t want to leave the bar yet. Alexei wanted more stories. More whatever this was.
So after a few minutes, he said, “My parents made Alina and me go to Russian school for a while, when we were kids.”
“Yeah?” Ben turned his head toward him. “And what does Russian school entail?”
“It was connected to my church, so…church stuff, sometimes. Academic stuff sometimes—math tutoring. But mainly language.”
“So you speak Russian?”
“Yeah. Mostly because we spoke it at home, though. Alina and I hated Russian school.” Alexei grinned, remembering. “It was all day, every Saturday, and it was boring as all get-out. It actually wasn’t that hard to convince my mom to let us stop going. My dad didn’t like it, but I think my mom’s always had complicated feelings about Russia. I mean, we all have complicated feelings about Russia, but my dad is first generation. Moved here when he was six. So he’s more…”Alexei waved a hand, as if the gesture could encapsulate his dad. “Anyway, going to Russian school was just what you did. So when Alina and I were whiny about it, my mom chalked it up to our family friends as us being rebellious. But looking back at how adamant she was about things shedidbelieve in, I don’t think there was a lot of love lost there.”
“How very rebellious of you and your sister. Wanting to have Saturdays to yourselves as children.”
“Yeah.” Alexei grinned into his empty glass. He knew Ben was teasing. But ithadfelt pretty rebellious, at the time.
“All right,” Ben said, a smile in his voice. “Say something in Russian.”
Alexei stared at the dark countertop, contemplating.
It wouldn’t sound sexy and romantic like Ben’s Portuguese had.
But after a few moments, he opened his mouth and said, “Mne nravitsya tvoye litso.”
Alexei immediately dropped his head to the counter then and began to laugh, before Ben could ask what it meant, because Alexei felt so ridiculous, downrightsilly, about the fact that he had just saidI like your faceto Ben Caravalho in Russian at a Mexican restaurant in the middle of nowhere, California.
