Page 148 of Spiced!

He simply lifted his coffee half an inch, the smallest possible salute, and I felt it land in the same place all his quiet things landed, which was somewhere beyond language, somewhere that required no translation.

Mofongo, who had come with Brendan, conducted a rapid assessment of the bakery, determined that it contained both people he loved and the reliable possibility of pan dulce, and installed himself under Rafael’s chair.

Doña Carmen looked at him.

“That dog gets a piece of pan dulce every Tuesday,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“He thinks he’s subtle.”

“He’s the least subtle creature I’ve ever met.”

“He gets it from you,” she said, picking up her purse. It was time, and she was not a woman who lingered past the time.

She said goodbye to the kitchen before she said goodbye to me. She didn’t announce that she was doing it. She simply walked the length of it once, slowly, her hand trailing along the edge of the marble, past the ovens, past the proofing drawers, past the flour bins with no labels. She looked at each thing the way you looked at something you were seeing for the last time—not the last time ever, because she would be back, she would be in and out, she would appear on Tuesdays and offer opinions and feed my dog pastries she thought I didn’t see, but the last time as the person it belonged to.

She stopped at the cracked tile from 1994.

“Rafael broke that,” she said. “Dropped a mixer. He still says it was the mixer’s fault.”

“It was a poorly balanced mixer,” Rafael said, from the corner, again without looking up.

“Forty-six years and he can’t admit he dropped a mixer.”

“I maintain my innocence to the end,” Rafael said serenely.

Doña Carmen returned to me. She reached up and put her hand on the side of my face the way she had done when I was nineteen and had burned an entire tray of quesitos. I had thought the world was ending.

“I gave you the key,” she said. “The words are hers to give.” She looked toward the corner where Abuela had been sitting very still, letting Doña Carmen have her morning.

“I do.”

Abuela crossed the kitchen and took Doña Carmen’s place in front of me, and my old friend stepped back to let her, because some things pass between family and some things pass between the women who stayed, and everyone in that kitchen knew which was which. “Your mother would be proud of you, wherever she is,” Abuela said, and she was the one person alive who could say it without it landing wrong, because she was the one who had watched the plane take off and had stayed on the ground with me and never once, in twenty years, let me believe the staying was a burden. She held my eyes, in the way of a woman who knew the full shape of that particular ache from the inside and had never tried to fix it, only to outlast it with me. “A boy who builds something like this from four in the morning and never once complains, that’s not nothing, Adrian. That comes from somewhere, from women who worked hard and loved hard and gave you what they had.” She patted my cheek once, firmly, which from Abuela was an embrace and a warning against crying on her good dress, both at once. “Now it comes from you. You give it to the next one when it’s time. That’s how it works. That’s how it has always worked.”

I couldn’t speak.

“Bueno,” Abuela said, and let go. It was Doña Carmen who turned to Rafael. “Vámonos, viejo. Let the man run his bakery.”

Rafael stood, folded his newspaper, and collected his thermos. He shook my hand, and then thought better of it and hugged me, briefly and hard, and said quietly near my ear, “She cried in the car on the way here. Don’t tell her I told you.”

“I heard that,” Doña Carmen said, from the door.

“You did not,” Rafael said. “The door was closed.”

“I always hear you,” she said. “After forty-six years, I hear everything.”

They went out into the West Tampa morning, which had gone from dark to gray to the first gold of actual daylight, while I wasn’t watching. The door closed behind them, and the bell rang its small merry ring, and then it was quiet.

Chapter 42

Brendan

The zoo opened at ten o’clock, but we came through the staff entrance at nine-fifteen, because Dr. Reyes had cleared us in early to see a recovered patient before the crowds arrived.

Adrian found nothing unusual about this. He knew that Brendan-the-veterinarian had veterinary-adjacent access to places, and a private early visit tracked completely with who I was and how I operated.

“She’s really okay?” he asked as we walked the empty path toward the tapir enclosure, the zoo quiet and green and gold around us in the early light.