Page 81 of Serving Bunt

Her beady eyes bored into me. Uh-oh. I knew that look all too well. It was the same one she’d given me back in sixth grade when I’d made the mistake of lying about who’d (allegedly) broken our neighbor’s window. In another life, she could’ve made one hell of an interrogator.

“You are pining, mijo.”

I nearly spit out my sip of beer.

“Excuse me?”

“Pining. Like one of those sad women in my telenovelas who stare out the windows while the dramatic music plays.”

Damn. She was too observant for her own good.

“I’m not pining,” I argued through gritted teeth, even though I knew it was a lost cause. Abuelita had never met an argument she couldn’t win.

She pointed toward my lap. “You’ve spent the past ten minutes staring at the same piece of popcorn.”

I looked down and sure enough, I was holding a single piece between my fingers like it contained the secrets of the universe.

Traitorous popcorn.

“I’ve just got a lot on my mind,” I admitted.

Abuelita set her bowl down on the table between us and reached for the remote control, pressing pause. “Does that include a certain young man with freckles?”

I rubbed the back of my neck and nodded. “Matty.”

“I could tell when I visited the show set,” she said. “He is the teammate you have feelings for, yes? The one you told me about before?”

I let out a soft laugh. “That obvious, huh?”

“To me? Yes.” She reached over and patted my knee. “But nobody else knows you like I do.”

I took a minute to decide how much I was ready to share with her, landing on a PG-version of the truth. “A lot changed between us over the past week. Before we left the inn, we agreed to take a few days apart and think things through before we go back to work.”

“And now you’re regretting it?”

“Big time.” I rested my head back against the chair. “I keep thinking about him, wondering what he’s doing. But mostly, I worry that any minute now, he’ll realize it was a mistake and not want . . .”

For the sake of my own personal well-being, I didn’t finish that sentence. Abuelita was quiet for a moment, then let out a wistful sigh.

“You know, there was a point when I was younger, much younger than you, when I was seeing a few boys.”

A slow grin crept across my face. “A few, Bueli?”

“Three,” she said, a mischievous sparkle in her eye. “Don’t look at me like that, mijo. It was the sixties.” She waved her hand. “Anyway, your guelo, may he rest in peace, was one of them. By far the quietest of the three, a delivery driver who spent his free time helping out in his family’s shoe store. For a while there, I thought, maybe, he wasn’t even interested. He never pushed me to spend more time with him, just accepted whatever I was willing to give him. One evening, he found me outside his house, crying. I had just had my heart broken by one of the other boys.”

I clenched my fists. I had the sudden urge to track down an eighty-something-year-old dude and give him a . . . stern talking to.

Nobody disrespected Abuelita.

“I hadn’t realized that I had run to his house, and your guelo didn’t say a word about it. He just let me in, made me some tea, and held me while I cried.”

A soft smile spread across her face.

“At the time, I thought I was in love with the other boy. The exciting one. The handsome one. The one who always knew exactly what to say.” She laughed quietly. “Your guelo barely spoke two sentences all night.”

“That’s hard to imagine.”

As far as I knew, my guelo had never met a stranger in his life. The man could strike up a conversation with anyone, anywhere. Cashiers, mechanics, the guy stocking avocados at the supermarket, it didn’t matter. A five-minute errand inevitably turned into a forty-five-minute social event. One that usually ended with swapping recipes or making plans to go fishing.