by Harper Lin
“…I’ve been thinking I need a new phone. I dropped mine the other day, and that crack in the screen got worse. I know I could just get the screen replaced, but I feel like I’d rather just get a new phone.”
I stared at him for a second then exhaled in relief. He laughed at me.
“You’re too easy to mess with, Franny.”
“You’re my boyfriend! You’re supposed to be nice to me.”
“I am nice to you. I’m so nice to you I even let you have the last chip.” He pushed the basket over to me.
I took the last chip and dunked it in the queso. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said just as Pablo walked by our table. Matt picked up the empty chip basket. “Hey, Pablo, could we get some more chips?”
I rolled my eyes. So much for him being so nice to me.
Pablo took the basket from him and brought back a new one overflowing with chips just as the screens on all the TVs around the room changed to show the lottery drawing. For a second, the hubbub in the room increased, then it got quiet. I looked around and realized that everyone was focused on the drawing, even the wait staff. Several people clutched lottery tickets in their hands. Across from me, Matt got his wallet out and slipped out his ticket. Pablo, standing at the bar, held his own ticket. He kept looking from the TV to his ticket and back again, even though they hadn’t started the drawing—they were just in the long tension-building part where they did a couple of smaller drawings and talked up the size of the prize.
From the feeling in the room, I began to think that I was in the minority of people who didn’t play, and I wondered if maybe I was the crazy one. After all, tickets were just a dollar or so, and though the chances were slim, the reward was astronomical. I briefly entertained the thought of running out of the restaurant and going to the nearest gas station to buy what would obviously be the sole winning ticket, but I knew it was ridiculous. The closest gas station was at least a mile away, and I wasn’t a fast runner anyway. Besides, the drawing was already starting.
Chapter Three
The pretty blond girl on the TV was wearing a short, tight red dress with lipstick to match. I never really understood why lottery girls had to look like pinups. Was the allure of winning hundreds of millions of dollars not enough to get people to watch? There had to be a pretty girl thrown in too?
She smiled, and I wondered how she managed to keep that bright-red lipstick off her impossibly white teeth. She pushed the little button, and the first ball popped up. As she reached to turn it, I noticed her nails were the same shade of red as her dress and her lips. I wondered if she color coordinated every night. That would work for pink, but if she ever wore a black dress, it might come across a little too goth for the lottery crowd. Maybe she just stuck to red all the time.
The first number finally came into view. Half the restaurant groaned and dropped their tickets. As each number was read off, more people put down their tickets, and the volume in the restaurant gradually began to come back up.
Matt held on to his ticket until they read the fourth number, then he tossed it on the table.
“Not a winner?” I asked.
“Just something like ten bucks.”
I picked up the ticket and slid it into my purse. Hey, ten bucks was ten bucks.
As far as I could tell, when the blonde in the red dress pushed the button for the fifth ball, Pablo was the only person in the restaurant still holding his ticket. He was no longer looking between the TV and his ticket—he just stared at the television. He must have had the numbers memorized by then.
She called the last number. I watched him, hoping to see his face break into a wide smile. But it didn’t. His expression remained steady until he slowly lowered his hand and put his ticket back into his wallet. Then he walked back into the kitchen.
A moment later, he reemerged holding our plates. He brought them over to our table and set them down. “Fajitas de pollo para la señorita. Y un gran burrito para el señor. Can I get you anything else? Another margarita? Una cerveza?”
“I’ll take another beer,” Matt said.
Pablo turned to me.
“I’m good, thank you.”
Pablo raised an eyebrow.
“No, gracias,” I corrected myself.
He nodded.
“I guess you didn’t win either?” I asked before he walked away.
He shook his head with a slight smile on his face. “No. But it’s okay. It would have been nice, but—” He shrugged. “But it’s okay.”
I nodded then watched as he walked away. “Does he seem sad to you?” I asked Matt when Pablo was out of earshot.
Matt looked in his direction then shrugged. “Not really. Maybe a little bummed about not winning, but aren’t we all? That was a lot of money.” He cut off a chunk of his truly massive burrito and shoved it in his mouth.
I watched Pablo until he disappeared from my sight. Maybe disappointment about the lottery was all it was. Maybe I was just reading into things. Whatever it was, I doubted it was anything I could change. Not unless a free cup of coffee would fix it. Cups of coffee and some tasty baked goods were my go-to fix-it for everything. It’s always been that way, especially now that I took over as the owner of Antonia’s Italian Café, the coffee shop and café my grandparents had opened when they first came to Cape Bay from Italy seventyish years ago. They could go a long way toward soothing a broken heart or perking up a bad mood on a rainy day, but even I didn’t think they could go quite so far as to make up for missing out on a billion-dollar lottery jackpot.
I assembled my first fajita, starting with some of the crisp lettuce on the bottom, then the savory chicken, then some cheese, and topping it all with the cool sour cream and guacamole. I bit into it. It was delicious, as everything from Fiesta Mexicana usually was.
“How’s your food?” I asked Matt after I swallowed down the last bite of the fajita. He mumbled something I assumed was complimentary around the massive mouthful of burrito he was currently chewing. Then he mumbled something else, this time looking at me with his eyebrows raised. “Mine’s good too,” I said. I guessed that was the right answer to his question. It must have been because he nodded before shoving another bit of burrito in his mouth.
After a few minutes, Pablo walked back by our table. He paused and looked at us as if he was trying to remember something. He rubbed his hand across his furrowed brow. “How is everything, my friends?” he asked after a moment.
“Really good,” I said. Matt nodded and grunted.
Pablo nodded, still looking confused, then began to walk away.
“Could I have another margarita?” I asked, stopping him. In the few minutes since he’d asked, I’d drained mine. I wished I’d thought far enough ahead to ask for another one when Matt had asked for his beer. Which I just now realized Pablo hadn’t brought by yet. That was unlike him. He was usually quite prompt. “And Matt hasn’t gotten his beer yet.”
Pablo looked at me, then at my empty margarita glass, then back at me, then repeated the action with Matt and his beer glass. Then he nodded. “Sí, señorita. Sí.” He stood there for a few more seconds before walking toward the kitchen.
“Does he seem okay to you?” I asked Matt again, hoping he’d actually swallow and respond to me with words.
At first he just shrugged, his mouth still full. Then he swallowed. “He seems like he might have something on his mind.”
I nodded thoughtfully then, before Matt could take another mouthful, asked quickly, “But what? He was in such a good mood earlier.”
Matt shrugged. “I don’t know. Things happen. Maybe the lottery got him down. Maybe his leg’s bothering him. Who knows? It could be anything.” And he immediately shoved another forkful of burrito in his mouth.
I, on the other hand, just poked at my fajitas. “It just seems strange.”
Matt put his fork down and stretched his hand across the table. I slipped mine into his. “Franny. You know that one of the things I love most
about you is how much you care about other people. More than yourself sometimes. But you can’t let somebody else’s mood swing ruin your night. We’ve hardly seen each other this week. Let’s just focus on each other and not worry about anything else. Pablo’s a big boy. I’m sure he will be just fine.”
I looked into those warm brown eyes of his and finally nodded. He squeezed my hand then released it so he could pick his fork back up and get back to his burrito.
“I thought we were focusing on each other,” I teased.
“We are. But this burrito is really good. I can focus on it and you at the same time.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, still teasing.
“Pretty sure,” he replied and tapped my foot under the table with his.
I shook my head and focused on assembling another fajita. It probably was in my best interest to let him focus on his food. The sooner he finished eating, the sooner he’d actually have his mouth free to carry on a conversation.
Pablo came up to our table—empty-handed—and muttered something in Spanish I didn’t understand. He looked at us like he was waiting for us to answer.
“No comprendo?” I managed to say.
He looked at us like he was confused. Then, finally, in barely comprehensible English, he asked, “How is everything, my friends?”
Matt and I exchanged a glance. “Are you okay?” I asked Pablo.
“Sí, sí, gracias, mis amigos.” He smiled, nodded, and started to walk away.
I looked at Matt again. He shrugged.
“Pablo?” I asked.
He turned back to us and leaned his hand on Matt’s chair like it was the only thing holding him up.
“I ordered another margarita. And Matt wanted another beer.”
He looked at my empty glass like he wasn’t sure what it was or what he was supposed to do about it. Then he grasped Matt’s chair so hard his knuckles went white. His free hand flew to his head and clutched it.
I jumped up from my chair. “Pablo, are you okay?”
Pablo didn’t respond, but his face contorted with pain as he grabbed at his head with both hands.
Several of the customers around us turned to look. Bill poked his head around the corner, and one of the waitresses started walking toward us.
“Pablo!”
“Sí, sí,” Pablo muttered. “Sí, señorita. Sí… margarita… sí… sí… Alberto… Adriana…”
And he collapsed.
Chapter Four
A person collapsing in real life isn’t like it is in the movies. In real life, they don’t sort of gracefully fall first to their knees and then roll to the side so that the person doing the collapsing doesn’t get hurt. In real life, someone collapsing is sudden and kind of horrifying. One second, Pablo was standing next to Matt, the next, he was in an awkward lump on the floor. There was nothing graceful about it.
Matt hit the floor an instant later, but thankfully, it was just because he was trying to check on Pablo. He crouched over him and, with Bill’s help—thank goodness he’d run over as soon as Pablo fell—gently rolled him onto his back. Because when someone collapses in real life, they can’t protect their face.
“Pablo! Pablo!” Matt screamed. He slapped him a couple of times on the face. I cringed at how hard he hit him. But there was no reaction. “Pablo!” Matt yelled once more. The desperation in his voice was palpable.
He put his head to Pablo’s chest, listening for a heartbeat. Then he checked for a pulse in Pablo’s neck. Then his chest again. “I’m starting CPR! Somebody call 911!”
For a second no one moved. Then, realizing that no one else was doing it, I grabbed my phone. “I got it!” I yelled. “I’m calling!” Yelling was probably unnecessary since it was quiet enough to hear a pin drop in the restaurant. Even the kids were silent.
My hands shook as I dialed, and I wished for an old-fashioned push-button phone where it wasn’t so easy to accidentally hit the wrong thing. After what seemed like too many tries, I finally got all three numbers entered in and hit the call button. The phone rang.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“I’m at Fiesta Mexicana, and Pablo just collapsed!”
There was a pause. Then: “Oh my God! I’ll send someone right over!” It was Margaret, one of the handful of Cape Bay police officers who took turns both manning the front desk of the police department and answering the few calls that came in to 911. One of the advantages of Cape Bay’s tiny size was that I didn’t have to give her the address of Fiesta Mexicana or tell her who Pablo was. She already knew. I heard her talking in the background before she came back on the line. “Okay, I have police, fire, and EMS on the way. Is he breathing?”
“Is he breathing?” I repeated out loud to anyone who might know. Not that I knew who I expected to answer. I was the closest person other than Matt and Bill, but I wasn’t thinking about that. “Can you breathe when your heart stops?”
“…twenty-nine, thirty!” Matt paused his chest compressions while Bill bent to breathe for Pablo.
I took that to mean Pablo wasn’t breathing. “No, he’s not breathing,” I said to Margaret.
“Bill, count!” Matt yelled. Bill began counting as Matt locked his arms over Pablo’s chest and resumed pumping Pablo’s blood for him.
Margaret said something in the background. Then, to me: “Is his heart beating?”
“No!” Even in my flustered state of mind, I was glad I had my wits about me enough not to ask that out loud.
“Is anyone performing CPR?”
“Yes, Matt and Bill.”
“Is that you, Fran?” Margaret asked. We’d known each other growing up in Cape Bay and, of course, had seen each other around a good bit since I’d been back in town. She was a cop after all, and I did own a coffee shop. Even though we didn’t have donuts on the menu, we still had steady business from the police department, at least partly because of our longstanding “Police and Fire eat and drink for free” policy.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Hey, Fran.”
“Hey, Margaret.” It was the awkward ritual of a small town. You could talk to someone for twenty minutes, but as soon as you realized their father’s cousin was your next door neighbor’s babysitter, you had to drop everything and greet them all over again. It didn’t make sense, but it was what we did.
“Okay, I have the fire department five minutes out. They’re trained first responders, so they’ll be able to take over until the ambulance gets there. Ryan’s on his way too.” Ryan was the newest member of Cape Bay’s police department, having just arrived in town the summer earlier. He also happened to be the boyfriend of Sammy, my right-hand woman at the café, so I knew him well.
“Okay, good,” I said.
“You want me to stay on the phone?” Margaret asked.
“No, no, I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“All right, well, call back if anything changes. You know the number.” I thought I heard a little bit of a chuckle in her voice as she said that line, but it seemed inappropriate to joke at a time like this. Of course, this was probably a much more routine situation for her than it was for me.
I disconnected the call just as Matt finished another thirty count. “You take over,” he gasped to Bill, sitting back on his heels. “I need to catch my breath.”
Bill immediately leaned in and started pumping Pablo’s chest. Matt wheezed the count until I stepped in and took over for him. He glanced at me with gratitude in his eyes as he kept panting. Bill, I could tell, was already wearying on just his first set of compressions. It was obviously hard work.
I stared at Pablo as I counted, looking for some sign of life, some sign that he would recover—a flicker of his eyes, a wiggle of his fingers, something, anything to tell me everything would okay. I grabbed Pablo’s hand and squeezed it as I counted, hoping for a squeeze back, but there was nothing. I stared at his lifeless face and willed it to move just the tiniest b
it. As Bill paused his compressions for Matt to breathe into Pablo’s mouth, I noticed that Pablo’s shiny-black rosary had slipped out of his shirt pocket. I wanted to tuck it back in for him but didn’t want it to get broken or to bruise Pablo’s chest during the compressions. Instead, I just whispered a prayer for Pablo to be okay.
Somewhere in the restaurant, a baby started crying. The mother shushed the baby and immediately ran out of the restaurant with the little bundle in her arms, but it was too late. It was like the dam had been broken. All the children who had been so silent, as if they knew something serious was going on, finally started making noise. I could hear some of them asking their parents what was happening. Others just resumed whatever they’d been talking about before all the commotion started.
Most of the parents tried to hush their children, and some hustled them outside, but I could tell the time when I could speak and actually be heard was almost up. “Does anyone else know CPR?” I called. I looked around and made eye contact with as many people as I could, knowing that personal appeals carried more weight than a general question. “They need help!” I said, growing desperate at the lack of response. Matt was still breathing heavily, and I knew Bill couldn’t hold out much longer.
“I know CPR!” someone said from the back.
“I can help!” someone else said.
Several people started to get up and made their way over to us.
“Thank you,” I breathed, not speaking to anyone in particular.
A woman came up beside Matt. “I’m next,” she said and knelt down. Someone else got beside Bill, ready to take his place.
For what seemed like an eternity, our small group worked to save Pablo. I counted and checked his pulse, one of the waiters handled the mouth-to-mouth breathing, and another couple of people joined in with Matt and the other two cycling in and out on chest compressions.
I wondered where the fire department was. Or the ambulance. Or the police. Or a random medical professional who might wander in off the street in search of a meal, realize there was a medical emergency, and swoop in to save the day.