The Comeback Route

by Jamie Bennett

  Chapter 7

  Let your inner love shine like a beacon for all the world to see; it will it attract others to you just like a bug zapper with mosquitos!

  Yours in histamine reactions, Mysti

  “Not again. Please, Tatum, can you give it a big rest?”

  I looked up at Lucy in surprise. “What? Was I still singing?”

  She straightened up from looking in the display case. “All damn day with the eighties music! You’re driving us crazy. How do you even know that stuff?”

  “I think my mom used to sing these songs, or play them for me. They start going through my mind when I’m in a really good mood.” I twirled around with the broom across the shop floor, still singing but a lot more quietly. “It’s like I have the music in me, and I can’t keep from letting it out.”

  “Try,” Lucy advised. “Before one of your coworkers tries to stuff a loaf of bread down your throat, try.”

  I made the motion of zipping my lips and tossing away the key, but then I unzipped to say, “I’m just happy. Sorry.”

  “You know, I’ve never seen you exactly down.” Lucy studied me. “Even when I fired you, you took it like a champ. But all week you’ve been relentlessly…peppy.” She winced as I hit a high note. Seriously, I couldn’t keep the good vibes in. “Stop! What’s going on?”

  I held up my hand. “You know how I almost sliced through a tendon? Well, it’s wonderful.”

  She nodded. “Things are still so good with the boyfriend, then?”

  “They’re amazing!” I confirmed, beaming. Things had been great since I had stabbed myself with the chisel at the beach as I tried to open the coconut. Nico had been attentive and sweet and present, like not going out to party or club or anything for the past two days. He had been asleep on the mat on the sand when it had happened, and I’d had to wake him up by poking him with my toe while holding my hand well away so that it didn’t drip blood down onto him. He had been pretty upset to see me gushing away like a platelet geyser, and ever since then he had been nothing short of perfect, hanging out and talking, and helping me with things that it took two hands to do, like cutting up the food we had delivered or tying the laces of the ugly yet comfortable shoes he’d bought for me.

  “Here,” Nico had said when the package arrived. He ripped open the box and held one up. “So small, it looks almost like something you’d hang from your rearview mirror, doesn’t it?”

  “What is that?” I had asked, horrified at the sight of it.

  “That, Tatum, is what you’re going to wear so your back doesn’t hurt anymore. This on one foot and the mate on your other,” he explained. “You can’t get away with putting on just one.”

  The shoes were hideously unattractive but the thought behind them made my heart fill my chest. It made me wish I had accidentally chiseled my palm long before now, because it had brought us so much closer. I was wearing those revolting shoes right at the moment, and despite their appearance, I smiled at my feet when I looked down at them. He had also been right, because my back had felt a lot better since I’d worn them to work the day before. I twirled again and sang.

  Lucy took the broom from me. “Have you ever used one of these? All you’re doing is making a cloud of dust. Watch.” I did, and I stopped swirling the dirt around in eddies when she passed it back to me. “By the way, I didn’t mean to say that things are good with your ‘boyfriend.’” She held up her fingers and made quotation marks. “I meant to say, things are good with the ‘man who you want to be your boyfriend but is still just a person you’re mooching off of while you try to manage his life.’”

  I also made quotation marks. “Potato, potato,” I said.

  “What do potatoes have to do with anything?”

  “You know, I say potato, you say potato. Maybe he’s not my boyfriend yet, but the key word is yet. He’s starting to see the error of his ways.”

  “The error of his Tatum-less ways?” She laughed.

  “Exactly!” I carefully maneuvered the pile of crap from the floor into the dustbin. It was harder than it sounded without the full use of my left hand. “He’s starting to see that without me, his life has been a meaningless expanse of whoring around. Monogamy, with me, is the only way to go for Nico, and he’ll come to terms with it soon. He’ll embrace it!” I said with gusto.

  “I have to try my best not to laugh right in your face when you talk like that,” Lucy told me. “It’s not easy, though.” She picked up a platter off the top of the display case closest to the door. It was empty now of the cards that had piled on it earlier, one per purchase of a half-dozen or more cookies. “This promotion went really well. I had no idea so many of our customers would be interested in coupons for manicures and the nail place just called me to say they’re booked out for the next three days. It worked great for both of us.”

  “Haven’t you been looking at everyone’s hands?” I waved my fingers at her, but my own manicure sucked. “A lot of people who come in here have great nails. I thought the nail place might like us pointing business in their direction and they loved the plate of marañuelas I brought over.”

  “I saved one coupon for Chara,” Lucy said. I nodded. I had kept one back for me and Nico to use, too—I was still trying to make him embrace his feminine side.

  “She gets out early from school on Wednesdays and she’s supposed to be working here right now,” she continued. Lucy looked at her watch, then shook her head and sighed in the same way that she always did when she discussed her daughter. The same sigh I had heard from teachers, au pairs, principals, zookeepers, and other authority figures about my own behavior.

  “What’s she doing that’s so bad?” I asked curiously. “Besides being late to work today. Which, you know, isn’t the most terrible thing in the world.”

  “Tatum, I’m still docking you that fifteen minutes for this morning. It’s a lesson, not a punishment, ok? And don’t make that face where I can see it.”

  I turned so she couldn’t see it.

  “Chara is a good girl,” Lucy said. “Mostly. This year she turned seventeen and got herself a boyfriend and things started to change. She quit soccer, which she’s loved since she was little. Look.” She pulled out her ancient phone and showed me pictures of her daughter at various ages in various uniforms.

  “She’s beautiful. She looks so strong and confident.”

  “She is. Or, she was.” Lucy sighed again. “Her grades have dropped, from As and Bs to Cs and even a D last semester. How is she going to go to college with grades like that?”

  “What do you think of her boyfriend?”

  Thunder loomed on Lucy’s face. “That guy is no good. He wants all of her time, all of her love.”

  I nodded, considering. “Is she on the Pill? Or getting a shot, some kind of birth control?”

  “Yes. That was the first thing we did when I heard about her and Pirro.” Third sigh, but then she lit up and said, “Mija.”

  The girl from the soccer pictures slouched into the bakery, but she didn’t look the same at all. Now, instead wearing of a big smile, her face was covered in a lot of black eyeliner and way too much foundation for 17-year-old skin. “Hi,” she told her mother, and looked around, wrinkling her nose. It was like the unhappiness rolled off her in waves.

  “Chara, this is my new employee, Tatum. Remember I told you about the woman I fired and rehired on the same day because of what she did for our sales?”

  “Did you?” Chara walked behind the counter and removed a bollo preñao. Half of it went into her mouth in one bite.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, and then remembered. “Mucho gusto.”

  “I speak English,” she told me.

  “Me too!” I smiled at her. “My friend Daisy would go nuts about your hair. She’s always trying to braid mine but it kind of has a mind of its own. Yours is so thick and glossy!” I shook my head. “You know, you shouldn’t braid it. You should always wear it down so everyone can see it.”

  Chara’s fi
ngers moved to her head. “Oh. Thanks.”

  María José, one of the bakers, came out of the back and said something in Spanish to Lucy that was way more complicated than mucho gusto. “Oh, ok. Sí, vamos,” Lucy answered her. “I have to go to the bank. María José’s paycheck isn’t depositing and she can’t get them to help her. You girls all right here alone?” She seemed very anxious.

  “Lucy, of course, we’re ok. How long have I been working here by now? This is like second nature to me!” I assured her.

  “You’ve been here less than a week. Chara, you’re all right for sure?”

  Chara gave a slight nod, which was the best that her mom was going to get out of her. When Lucy and María José left, she started on a napolitana. “What are you doing here?” she asked me through a mouthful of chocolate. She took the stool behind the counter and slouched against the wall.

  “I work here,” I explained. “That means I have to come every day, even if I really don’t feel like it and would rather go back to the beach with my boyfriend.”

  “I mean, you don’t seem the type…never mind. I don’t care.” She finished chewing. “I have a boyfriend, too.”

  “I know,” I nodded. “Your mom told me.” I started to think a little about paint colors for the bakery’s interior. The current off-white looked a little dingy and this place was really so vibrant. I tilted my head, imagining.

  “She hates my boyfriend, Pirro,” Chara informed me. She said it with a little relish. “She thinks he’s a terrible influence.”

  “Is he?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t care. I love him.”

  “Hm.” I went back to thinking about paint for a moment. Pink? Very light, and not bubblegum? “All my former boyfriends’ parents thought I was a bad influence on them. It’s funny to see the other side.”

  “Why were you a bad influence?”

  “Well, I guess because I never did homework, or studied, or played sports, or had a job. I smoked and vaped and drank, did drugs, skipped school. Then there was the whole bank robbery…I can kind of see where they were coming from.”

  Chara’s eyes were huge. “Seriously? You did all those things?”

  “I didn’t actually rob the bank,” I assured her. “It was more of a misunderstanding. But boy, those ink packs they put in the money bags are terrible to wash off!”

  Chara was still staring at me, but now she seemed impressed. Maybe I had said too much.

  “Pirro isn’t actually that bad,” she said. “Like, he does some of the stuff you just talked about, but he never actually got convicted.”

  “Oh, me, neither,” I assured her. “My record is totally clean. Almost. Why do you like Pirro? What’s so good about him?”

  “What’s so good about your boyfriend?” she challenged me.

  I thought for a second before I answered. “I’ll explain it like this. Before I really knew him, I thought he was so devastatingly handsome that I wanted to puke. Like literal nausea. But then, when I was investigating him—”

  “Investigating him?” she interrupted me.

  “You know, I found out about his credit history, his family tree, his vaccinations. Don’t you do that about potential boyfriends?” I asked, surprised. “Anyway, I read all this stuff about him, how close he was with his family, and how much he helped them, and it was so heartwarming. Although he isn’t really, not anymore…” I thought about Nico’s mom calling his cell phone the day before, and how he had put it to voicemail. “I kept noticing him doing nice things. At a party, I watched him help an older lady up some stairs where there was ice.”

  Chara looked unimpressed.

  “Also, I saw him after a game when the fans were waiting for autographs—”

  “What do you mean about fans? He’s an athlete or something?” she interrupted.

  I nodded. “Professional football. He used to play for the Woodsmen, and after their games, a bunch of people would wait outside of the stadium to talk to the guys as they came out. There was this little boy wearing Nico’s jersey and crying because he got scared, and Nico spent like half an hour talking only to him. Calming him down and getting along with his parents, too. I found out that later, he helped the parents out. They had another kid who used a wheelchair and he bought them a special van to make it easier to take her places. I just thought, he’s a really good person. Despite all the women and all the parties and everything else, inside, he’s a good guy.” I displayed my hand. “I sliced it open on a coconut.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “Last night Nico cut bistec encebollado into bites so I could eat it. He did a sweet plantain, too, without me even asking him. He took the knife and went to town. And he ordered flan for himself even though he doesn’t like it so that I could have half, and then I could have his half, too.”

  “I love bistec encebollado and flan,” Chara said wistfully. “That was really nice of him.”

  I smiled confidently. “He’s working out more, getting that back on track. He’s making connections with his new teammates. I’m going to look around for some charitable stuff for him to do here in Miami, because he really enjoys that, and it will give him ties here. I think things are going to be great for him.”

  “You’re lucky things are working out with you two.” She took another napolitana and offered me half.

  “I’m not supposed to eat more than one thing a day from the case,” I said, reluctantly shaking my head. The chocolate was calling to me.

  “It’s my mom’s bakery and I already touched it. We can’t put it back.”

  Soon my mouth was also full of the pastry. “You don’t think things are working out with you and Pirro?” I asked as I licked my fingers.

  “We’re great,” she bristled, but then almost immediately, she launched into a list of things that sucked. He ignored her in front of his friends and would only talk to her if they were alone. It always seemed like he was flirting with other girls, but that couldn’t be true, right? She looked at me pleadingly, and I shrugged. She showed me a screenshot of what he had commented on another girl’s post, a lewd remark about how her breasts looked in the picture. “He deleted it and said it was a joke.” She looked at me anxiously. “Do you think he was joking?”

  I looked at the screen. “No. That doesn’t sound funny at all.”

  Chara snatched the phone back from my hand. “Well, it was!” she bit out. “He’s just a friendly guy and he gets along with a lot of people! Just because he’s nice, it doesn’t mean that he’s coming on to them. Ok?”

  “You don’t have to convince me! I don’t care what Pirro does. If he writes that he wants to suck on some other woman’s—”

  “I know what he wrote!” She sighed. “He wouldn’t tell me where he was going after school today. I think he’s going to meet up with Tiara. They were talking when I got there this morning, all up on each other.” She looked so unhappy.

  “If he’s with other women, do you really want him?” I frowned after I said it. Nico…

  “I don’t know that he’s with her, not like that!” Chara quickly defended her boyfriend. “He said he was taking to her about English class. I wish I could go find him right now instead of being stuck here!”

  A customer came in and Chara helped her very sullenly. The woman quickly left.

  “You should smile and say thank you. We’re known as the friendly bakery,” I advised.

  “Since when?” Chara snarled.

  “Since I came up with a marketing plan.” I pulled my notebook out of my pocket. “I think I should type it up before I show it to your mom. We’re going large on social media.”

  “Seriously? My mom doesn’t do any of that, not even the old people stuff. Her phone is from, like, before I was born.”

  “Don’t judge,” I said, and held up the flip phone from my purse behind the counter. “I myself need to upgrade. If you don’t have anything else going on, maybe you’d want to take on the social media stuff for El Asturiano.”

  “M
aybe.” She sounded bored. “What do you want to do?”

  I showed her the ideas in my notebook, and after a while, she started to chime in with ideas of her own which I quickly wrote down also. “That would all be awesome! You’re good at this,” I told her admiringly.

  “You think so? It’s just messing around.” But she looked pleased.

  “My boyfriend needs help, too. He’s been doing all his social media by himself and it’s bad. Look up Nico Williams.”

  She did and gaped at her phone. “Fuck! This guy is your boyfriend? Is this real or did he use some model as his profile picture?”

  “He’s real,” I smiled. “See? Didn’t I tell you that he’s so cute you’d want to puke?”

  “I kind of do.” She scrolled. “He actually posted all this? My God. He’s saying shit about his coach? My coaches wouldn’t have liked that and they weren’t famous or anything, like Coach Cattaneo.” She scrolled with her finger and her eyebrows rose. “Was this one taken before you guys were together?”

  I glanced at the picture of Nico grinning, with a woman on his lap. “Yeah, before we were together.”

  “You said he was nice, and he’s hot and all, but is he really stupid?” she asked skeptically.

  “Right? That’s what I keep telling him! Only a stupid person would put up pictures like that and say the crap he wrote! And he’s not. He’s very angry, and he’s lashing out. He’s taking his trade to the Cottonmouths way too personally and he’s pissed off at Coach Cattaneo for some of the things that he said to the press.”

  “He’s acting like a big baby,” Chara noted. Coming from the mouth of a 17-year-old, yes, he was. She scrolled more and raised her eyebrows higher. “Oh, wow. Who is that pata sucia he’s with?” She shook her head. “He needs an image makeover.”

  “Right?” I repeated.

  “You would really hire me to do his social media?”

  “I would. But I have to run it by Nico first,” I amended. “Mostly because he would have the money to pay you. I hardly have any at all.”