by Lisa Samson
“But you’d better hurry. Manny—”
She hung up, surprised at herself. She didn’t think Pieter was the perfect guy, but she thought maybe he’d say something like, “Gee, Nina. I’m sorry. This must be so hard for you. I helped get you into this mess. I’ll help you whatever way you think you need to go here.” Nope. Nothing like that.
And I’m having his child. Oh man.
She felt like the idiot of the century.
How come this never happened to the Sex in the City girls? They did a lot more than she ever did.
Manny entered the kitchen, walking right up to José’s station where he stood chopping peppers. José knew that look on his brother’s face. So the day’s troubles were already beginning.
“José, what’s up with Nina? She was late yesterday, and today she is forty-five minutes late. That’s two days in a row, plus calling in sick last week at the last minute makes three, and you know what happens at three.”
Everybody knew what happened at three. José swore Manny would fire himself if he was late three times. “She’ll be here.”
Manny looked around the busy kitchen and said softly, “I can’t run my business like this. I just can’t.”
Carlos, a Cuban with eyebrows like caterpillars and an open gaze, held out a saucepan toward José. “Try this, José.”
José dipped the tip of his knife into the sauce. Not bad. Better than the cook’s last try. “A little more epazote.”
Manny snapped his fingers, and the cook turned the pan toward him. He dipped in a finger and brought it to his mouth. José studied his face. He wanted to disagree, José could tell, but he shook his head and grinned.
“Just a little bit,” Manny said with a laugh.
Yes, there was the brother who had first played soccer with him. José shook his head. Manny.
“What’s for family dinner?” Manny glanced at his watch. “It’s almost ready, yes?”
“Yeah. Chiles rellenos and roasted quail in mole rojo.”
“What?” Manny leaned down to examine the pan of quail through the shelves of José’s workstation. “That’s a pretty fancy family dinner.”
“The chiles are going bad, man.”
Manny tapped his fingers on the stainless-steel surface of the workstation window. “I’m talking about the quail, José. It could have been a special.” He stood up straight. “Oh, I see how it works. You just make the fancy staff orders and I pay for them, right?” He leaned forward. “Wrong. We cook for the customers, not for the staff. Next time you feed them tacos and rice. Period! ”
José nodded like he’d hop to and obey those orders in the future. But he wouldn’t. He made the quail on purpose. If Manny wasn’t going to pay some of these people in the kitchen, illegals mostly, a fair hourly wage, he’d pay in food. It was only right.
Nina thought about calling her mother. No. Not now. She wished she could call her father. He’d have been there for her. She smiled when she imagined the conversation they’d have had. She always pictured him sitting on the beach.
“Dad, I’m pregnant.”
“Oh, so the virgin birth is happening again, is it?”
She’d smile, just a little sideways grin. “It’s Pieter’s.”
“Never did like the guy.”
Or he wouldn’t have, had he met him. To her father, all people were fashioned of cellophane.
“Come back home. Your room’s the same. I’ll take care of you.”
And then the truth of it would have hit him.
“Doggonnit, Nina! I raised you better than this!” And he would have remembered the fact that he was going to have to face his family, and they’d be judgmental because Gregory was the one who never quite lived up to his potential, and wasn’t this proof ? Didn’t it just figure? Well, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, they’d say, because her father’s family wasn’t exactly original in the speech department.
She’d make excuses to her dad, right there on the cell phone, about how she needed to get to work, how she was almost there, which she was, how she was sorry. But she lived in a big city, millions of lonely people, and besides, she was twenty-five, Dad, and how many twenty-five-year-old females were still celibate?
She’d work her shift and he’d leave five voice mails, the first one a little clipped, the final one saying how sorry he was for getting so upset and call him back. Please.
That’s how it would have shaken down if he’d lived into the age of cell phones. But he hadn’t.
He would have told her what she could say to soften Manny’s heart when she walked in late, but what on earth could she possibly say to “three strikes you’re out” Manny that would convince him to let her keep her job?
Not one person Manny ever fired had come up with the lucky phrase. And today, well, she wasn’t one of the luckiest people in the world to begin with.
Seven
Okay, Loochi. Ready to play again?”
“Yes!”
Celia hated hide-and-seek, and it figured it was Loochi’s favorite game. Her sister warned her about that sort of thing too. “Okay, I’m going to count . . .”
She hid her eyes. “Ten . . .”
Something inside of her always stuttered when Lucinda ran from her view. Don’t go! she always thought, for sometimes two people are all each other has, and this was very much the case with Celia and her daughter.
“Nine . . .”
Her husband was killed overseas even before the baby was born, and Celia had almost lost Lucinda at birth.
“Eight . . .”
But Celia kept her alive by sheer force of will, demanding the doctors, the nurses, God, even that still little baby, blue, not breathing, to live. Live!
“Seven . . .”
And so Lucinda did live, sucking in a breath, finally, at the raging shout of her mother who, by all that was right, wouldn’t let this child go without a fight. “Breathe!” she had screamed, the word ending in a pitch that caused one of the nurses to hold her hands against her ears.
“Six, five, four, three, two . . . one! Ready or not, here I come!”
Celia opened her eyes.
“Cheese!” Lucinda, still right in front of Celia, held out the butterfly.
“Sweetie, this is the part where you’re supposed to hide.”
“I see you!”
Celia laughed. “I see you too. We’re going to play this game a lot when we go to Grandma’s. She has horses and pigs and cows.”
“Moo!” Lucinda scrunched up her smooth brow.
“Moo! That’s right!”
Celia just couldn’t bring herself to leave the apartment she and Scott moved into five years before.
“Play again!”
Lucinda scrambled off and Celia covered her eyes, counting backward from ten. Again.
“Ready or not, here I come!” She opened her eyes and saw no trace of Lucinda. Maybe the three-year-old was finally getting the hang of the game.
“Loochi?” She peered beneath the back porch and all around the small garden behind their first-floor apartment, where they’d planted bulbs the previous autumn. Now irises bloomed and the daylilies were broadcasting a sunny tint against the greenery. The crocuses were long gone, most of them ending up pinned in Lucinda’s hair, and when Lucinda made enough of a fuss about it, in Celia’s as well. One morning they walked to the store with at least ten blossoms each in their hair. Lucinda told her they looked like flower queens.
“Loochi, where are you?”
No. Not behind the snowball bushes either.
“I’m coming!” she yelled.
Not in the yard at all, as a matter-of-fact.
Fear trilled down the back of Celia’s neck to the base of her spine. “Loochi?!”
Eight
José wished Pepito would turn off that radio, but instead the cook turned up the volume of the sports show. “The Mexican National soccer team will face the United States in New Jersey in the Gold Cup elimination game.”
So. The Mexican National team would be in the area soon. José hoped his old manager, Francisco, would not be traveling with them. Francisco managed several players now and was doing quite well for himself. This came as no surprise to José.
He poured chopped green tomatillos in the blender and set it to whirring, his former hopes of coming face-to-face with that very team welling in his chest cavity. Knowing Manny, he’d somehow get them in the restaurant because it was “good for business.”
José threw some wilted greens in the sink, then flipped on the garbage disposal. The water swirled in the suction, a whirlpool of greenery, leaves, and stems that joined together. He stood, mesmerized, immune to the game on the radio and the squeal of the blender, sweat pricking his brow. What looked like a butterfly, green and papery, swirled down the drain.
That day. That day. His hand smarted from the earlier burn, but instead of bandaging it like he usually did, covering up the blistered, angry flesh, he gripped the edge of the sink, becoming not so much oblivious to the pain as wrapped up inside the exquisiteness of the sensation. You are still alive, it told him.
Manny stepped into the kitchen and saw his brother over the sink. Two years had passed since José had been released from prison. In that time he’d come further than Manny would have thought possible. For six months José had stayed in an apartment their parents set up for him, reading books, eating the simplest of foods. Few of his old friends from his soccer days remained, and the ones who showed up usually stood at the apartment door, knocking and knocking and knocking.
They’d give up after several minutes, and after a while they gave up completely, telling Manny they tried.
Manny and his parents talked about it, their words flying back and forth across the kitchen table on a Sunday morning in January. “He can’t live like this anymore, Mama,” Manny said. “You have to do something.”
His mother nodded, her black hair, parted in the middle and gathered in a bun, picking up the overhead light. Blue lights streamed along the strands. “I grieve for him. He is gone.”
He cannot forgive himself,” his father said, his brown “eyes turned down at the corners, his mustache doing the same.
So much sadness.
Mama grabbed Manny’s forearm that morning. “Hire him at El Callejon.”
“What? No, Mama. I’m still trying to get this restaur—”
Please, Manny. You’ve been in business for six years. Manny. “Please.”
Manny turned to his father, who shrugged. No help there.
You know he can cook!” she said. “He’s even better than “you were.”
“Now, now—”
She took his hand, kissed it. “Please, my son. Just for a little while and then, if it doesn’t work out, we can find something else. He can come back here and stay with us until he heals.”
He may never heal,” Papa said. “
No! Do not say that.” Mama’s eyes fl ashed like drops of “oil on a rainy street. “He will.”
And now, in the kitchen, Manny leaned toward his brother. José still zoned out much too often. And the burns. His family hadn’t figured out what José was doing to himself. But Manny knew. He kept it to himself, however. It obviously met a need his brother had or he wouldn’t show up occasionally with his hand bandaged. It didn’t seem to affect his work, and he kept quiet about it.
“You ready, right?” he asked José.
José nodded and looked back down in the sink. He was holding back tears. Manny could read his brother’s face like he read his wristwatch, which told him it was almost time to unlock the front doors.
José came to life. “Let’s go! Marco! Andale, andale, jefe!”
He’d give Mama and Papa a call later, warn them José might be slipping back. But right then he had a restaurant to run, and he was going to make sure it ran like Secretariat at the Preakness. First, family dinner. He liked to think of his staff as family. But he wondered what role he played. Grouchy uncle?
Several minutes later, the staff gathered alongside the long table spread like a runner down the center of the restaurant. They began passing bowls of beans and rice and the chiles rellenos.
Manny stood at the head of the table, a list of specials in his hands. “Shrimp and crab legs over Mexican sweet black rice. Squash with a papaya lemon oil.” Cutlery began to clink against the white bone china. “There are three boxes of shrimp in the walk-in, people, so push it, push it, push it!” He snapped his fingers. “By the end of the day, this item should be eighty-sixed in my kitchen. The last special is scallops. I think you’ve all served this before, so I’m not gonna say anything else about it.”
José entered the room, holding the quail, hand bandaged now. Good. Surely the Health Department wouldn’t appreciate it if they came in and saw his chef with a hand like that. That is, of course, if they could get past the beard.
Time to share the good news.
“I’ve got a special treat, Pepito. This coming Friday the Mexican National Soccer Team, along with the coach, will be here for the Gold Cup. They play the United States out in Jersey next week. I’m putting them in Kevin’s section.”
Manny looked at each person as they ate his expensive quail. He sighed. Well, there was nothing to be done.
“Also, there will be no autographs. If you want one, you can ask me, and I will ask them personally.”
And where was Nina, eh?
He leaned down. “Get a sub for Nina, and, Pieter, gather up her things from her locker.”
Pieter hesitated. “Do you think—”
“Don’t question me. Just do it.”
Pepito reached for the rice. “I’m starving.”
Amelia smiled. “You’re always starving.”
“I’m starving when El Callao cooks. You got that right.”
Henry, the new bartender, reached for the water pitcher. “El Callao? Why do you guys call him that?”
“Means ‘quiet one’ in Spanish. It’s easier to pull a tooth than to pull a word out of him,” Carlos said.
Amelia patted José’s hand. Manny noted the tenderness in her eyes. She’d never looked at him that way. “He speaks to me all the time.”
Nina approached the door of Manny’s midtown restaurant. An hour late, she thought up all sorts of excuses. Water main break that flooded her apartment. A shooting on the way to her subway station. Emergency phone call from home.
Oh, that’s right. Her mother wouldn’t call her if her life depended on it. Nina thought of the last conversation they’d had five years before. Mother talked about the latest season of her favorite sitcom and wouldn’t it be nice if everybody had good friends like that silly group, how she needed a new roof but just couldn’t bring herself to get quotes, even about the stray cat, the sweetest little gray fur ball imaginable, coming around. After she’d asked Nina how she was doing, she’d interrupted her answer. “Oh, and did you see that new cop show on that cable channel?”
Nina had hung up the phone and realized that during the eighteen months since she’d left for the city to dance professionally, her mother hadn’t called her once. So Nina made herself a cup of tea and asked herself if she should torture herself any longer by trying to maintain a relationship, putting in 100 percent when she shouldn’t be carrying the primary burden in the first place.
So Nina experimented. She waited for a month. No call from Mother. Then Nina called. The conversation could have been the same with the replacement of different shows and an update on the cat and the leaking roof.
Next time she waited two months.
Then four, then a year. And now she had to admit even a TV-watching, roof-procrastinating mother would be better than nobody. Maybe the news that Nina was pregnant would bring her out of TV land.
Surely Mother would say something about a grandchild.
Nina pulled on the door handle. Her arm jerked. Locked. Okay, other door. The restaurant wasn’t officially open yet. She walked a few steps, pulled on that door. Locked as well.
She rushed toward him as he unlocked the door, then blew out onto the sidewalk.
“Manny, I’m sorry.”
He silenced her with an upheld hand. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“Look, I had things—”
“Things?” Nostrils flaring, he pointed inside at the staff gathered for dinner. “You see Amelia? Three kids, Nina. She comes down here from the Bronx every day. Want to know how many days she’s been late in the last eight years?” He joined thumb and forefinger together to form an O. “Zero, Nina. Zero.”
“I know. I know how hard that must be.”
“You know? You know? You know?”
He looked like he was ready to bite her. This was even worse than she’d imagined. Four years she’d worked for him, and she didn’t like him any more than she did the first week when he railed her out for not filling up people’s water glasses quickly enough. And you’d think she hadn’t learned anything in all that time, the way he hovered over her, nitpicking, always finding fault.
“Manny, I didn’t mean—”
“Okay, so then you know how easy it would be for you to find another job.”
He straightened up, looked around him, and turned away, heading back toward the door. Pieter stood in the doorway. He whispered something to him.
José stepped outside.
Panic whittled at Nina’s pride. Not today! She needed that money. “Manny, please! Give me another chance! I promise I’ll make everything good.” It was Friday, and tonight there’d be big tips, maybe enough for Wednesday’s appointment. “How could you be so . . .”
No. Let it go, Nina. You’re sounding like a grade-schooler.
Manny stopped, turned, and walked toward her, each step punctuating his diatribe. “So . . . so what? Unfair? It would be unfair, in fact, if I didn’t fire you. It would be unfair to your coworkers for me to let them continue doing your job.” He stopped, finger in her face. “This is the second day in a row, Nina. Not counting the times people looked the other way or—or covered for you.”