Bowerbirds

by Ada Maria Soto

  “That’s why he’s selling.”

  “And that is why he’s selling. He wants to make as much as possible and dump it into an account for his illegitimate daughter and grandchildren. He also wants to make sure his employees are taken care of. I can respect that.”

  James cast his gaze up for a moment, obviously thinking. “I’ll guess that Solar Flare’s patents have something to do with all these elements.”

  “Ah, yes, that, that is the big thick layer of icing on my cake.” He snuggled in closer to James, relaxing against his body. “Do you know what the big problem with solar cells are?”

  “They need the sun.”

  “Pretty much. And when do people use the most electricity?”

  “At night.”

  “And when you go to charge standard batteries with standard cells, a lot of power is lost, even more so when you’re talking low voltage power, which is what most solar cells produce. So having a few around LA is fine, but it’s hardly worth the investment once you get to Seattle.”

  James grinned. “Let me guess, Solar Flare has patents for efficient solar cells.”

  “And more importantly a gizmo that charges batteries with minimal power loss. Now let me send you to business school, please?”

  James made a face like he had a bad taste in his mouth. “Thank you, no. But they have solar cells?”

  “Revolutionary ones.”

  “And they need these rare earth elements.”

  “Oh yes. They’ve got a prototype for a set of panels and batteries that would allow the average homeowner to go completely off mains for a minimum eight months out of the year anywhere south of Toronto and north of Invercargill. They would cost about as much as a dishwasher to buy and install, and the panels are half the size of current ones on the market. Full return on investment in two years or less. With a couple extra panels, you could charge up an electric car for the day.” Gabe couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. “But they need stacks of indium, and the best batteries for them need plenty of vanadium.”

  “Which you are about to get cheap, or cheaper, assuming the Russia deal goes through, allowing you to make solar panels at a price attractive to middle America.”

  Gabe rolled onto his back and spread his arms wide toward the heavens. “Bingo. I mean, it won’t get us off foreign oil or solve the energy crisis—”

  “But it’ll normalize it. Take it out of the purview of hippies. People already have TechPrim computers, phones, entertainment systems, their cars decked out in TechPrim stuff. Why not TechPrim solar panels?”

  “And even if I can’t manage to sell it here, Germany is 30 percent solar already. They’ll snap it all up.”

  James rolled over to look Gabe in the eyes. “And no one knows about this?”

  “About the Solar Flare bit, it’s just you, me, and Tamyra. Am I crazy for trying this?”

  James didn’t answer right away. Instead he flung his leg over Gabe’s body, straddling his hips. “No. It makes sense.”

  “Oh thank God.” The relief that flooded him with those few words was staggering in a way Gabe had never imagined. He sat up and pressed his lips to James’, hard, before flopping back down. “When you sit on your own idea long enough, you start wondering if maybe you’re delusional.”

  “It’s going to piss off a lot of people.”

  “I know.” A giggle sounding more than a little manic bubbled its way from Gabe. “It’ll be a toss-up as to who puts out the first hit, China, OPEC, PG&E, or Simon, when he realizes what he’s given up over a game of golf.” He settled his hands on James’ hips, where his skin happened to be particularly smooth.

  “Why did you tell me all that?”

  “Because I really needed to tell someone. Someone I can trust. I’ve been sitting on it for too damn long and have been starting to wonder if I’m crazy.”

  “You have Tamyra or Nate or Frank.”

  “I know, but they’re… they’d want to talk about practicalities, supply chains, business plans. I needed to tell someone who might understand what I’m hoping to do.”

  James leaned over and kissed him softly. “You’re trying to change the world.”

  Gabe brushed their lips together. “Yes,” he replied softly.

  James smiled at him. “I won’t tell anyone. Even Dylan.”

  “He’d probably want in on it. And I know you won’t. It’s one of the many things I really like about you. You’re not working an angle on me or out to stab anyone in the back. Your first thought isn’t ‘How can I use this to my advantage?’.”

  “You seem to know me well.”

  Gabe rolled quickly, toppling James off him and switching their positions. He ran his hands across James’ chest, thumbing his nipples, fluttering his eyes shut. “Oh, there is a lot I still don’t know. I’m sure there are vast depths to you. But I like to think I’ve got a handle on the basics. I like to think I’m right when I came to the conclusion that you are the very rarest of things, and that is a good man.”

  James glanced away. “You keep saying things like that.”

  “Like what? That I think you’re good, rare, special?”

  James shifted slightly away in discomfort. “I’m really not. I’m just one of the masses.”

  “No.” He brushed his fingers across James’ cheek and down to his lips.

  James kissed them. “You’ve been chewing on your fingers again. You should try putting vanilla extract on them. Or chili oil.”

  “See, I’ve been doing that for years, and not a single other boyfriend has ever commented except to tell me it was gross. They never tried to help me stop.” James laced their fingers together. “Maybe you need to sleep next to me every night, holding my hands so I don’t chew on them in my sleep.”

  “I think that may become a difficult commute for one of us.”

  Quit your crappy job! Gabe screamed in his head. Move in with me; go back to college; learn the best place to put dinosaurs! Let me give you what you deserve just for being a decent person!

  Gabe brushed his lips across James’ knuckles. “How about we start with tonight?”

  “I think I can do tonight.”

  Steam rolled from Mrs. Gonzales’s kitchen, making the air thick. James rolled another tamale and added it to a steadily growing stack. Gabe had dropped him off, and by the time he’d gotten to his apartment door, he could smell the boiling chicken and onions filling the hall.

  He changed out of the dark blue silk shirt he’d found for five bucks at Thrift Town before following his nose to Mrs. Gonzales’s door. The ladies had gotten quiet as he’d let himself in and grabbed a plate. That quiet meant he had been the main topic of gossip, for possibly the first time since moving in.

  He rolled a few tamales before sighing. He had been hoping to spend the afternoon discussing some sudden plot shifts in El Lamento del Cuervo, but it looked like his love life was going to be a more interesting topic. “Adelante, preguntan lo que quieran.”

  “How rich is he?” Mrs. Valadez asked before anyone could start with something more tactful.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t asked. It would be rude.”

  “Have you met his family yet?” Mrs. Serrano asked. She had the largest family in the building.

  “No, not yet.” That got some murmurs of disapproval.

  “Are you moving in with him?”

  “I haven’t even met his family yet. I think that is getting ahead of things.”

  “You should meet his family,” Mrs. Gonzales stated firmly.

  “He’s very busy. He’s got a very important job. He has to work a lot.”

  Mrs. Gonzales shook her finger at him. “Those are all excuses. If he has some bad ones in his family, he needs to tell you now and introduce you to the rest.” There were general nods of agreement.

  “I’m sure he will.”

  “Is he good in bed?” Mrs. Silva asked. The other women gave her hard looks. She was the dirty old lady of their little group. It was almost h
er job to ask that.

  James gave a noncommittal shrug and tried to focus on his tamales, even as he heard some naughty giggles.

  His phone started vibrating in his pocket. He wiped his fingers and quickly fished it out.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s me.” Gabe’s voice seemed to echo in from a distance, and James could hear traffic in the background. “I just got a call from my sister, and apparently everyone’s schedule has finally aligned, and the family is all getting together for dinner next Saturday. I was wondering if you’d like to join me?”

  “To meet your family?”

  The women who’d been watching all gave stern nods and hard eyes.

  “Yeah, if you want. I mean, if you’d like to avoid them, I’d totally understand, or if you had other plans—”

  “No, Saturday sounds fine.”

  “Good. I’ll pick you up at seven?”

  “Seven is fine.”

  “Good. I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Okay.”

  “Bye.”

  James hung up the phone. “There, I’m meeting his family. ¿Feliz?”

  6

  James tried to smooth his shirt down. “You look fine,” Gabe told him for about the fiftieth time. He hoped James wouldn’t regret agreeing to meet his family. They could be a handful, but this was the first time his schedule had matched up with all three of his sisters’ in ages.

  He knocked on the front door of a tidy suburban home. He’d gotten it for his parents the year after TechPrim opened their first international office. He could have gotten it earlier and gotten a bigger one, but his father hadn’t believed Gabe could afford it until The Wall Street Journal printed an article about Gabe and TechPrim.

  The door opened, and Gabe was hit with the smell of boiling chicken.

  “Hey, Uncle Gabe.” Alisa, his eldest (and privately his favorite) niece, pulled him into a hug.

  “Hey there, when did you get back to town?”

  “This morning.”

  “James, this is my niece Alisa. She’s been down in Mexico as part of a research project on indigenous language groups. Alisa, this is my boyfriend, James Maron.”

  “Nice to meet you.” James shook her hand and didn’t look too nervous. Alisa opening the door was a stroke of luck. It would give him the chance to ease James into his family before meeting his mother.

  Alisa stepped aside, letting them in. Gabe took another sniff of the air. He identified boiled chicken, boiled pork, onion, and a hint of pepper, cut with a slightly starchy smell. “So, your grandmother’s making tamales.”

  “About a billion of them. Come on. The assembly line is in the dining room.”

  In the dining room, the table was covered with bowls of shredded pork and chicken, masa paste, and damp corn husks, plus trays of assembled tamales. Gabe’s sisters and father were sitting around the table, diligently assembling the little rolls for steaming. Everyone looked up at Gabe and James.

  “Hey, everyone, this is James Maron, my boyfriend. James, this is my father, Emilio Juarez.”

  James immediately shook hands. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  Gabe’s father smiled. “And you.”

  “And these three are my sisters, Alandria, Rosalina, Nina.”

  “Hi.” His sisters wiped masa paste off their fingers to shake his hand.

  “And this.” Gabe waved his arm grandly across the table. “Is the fine art of industrial-scale tamale making that my mother engages in on occasion. And since there is no such thing on earth as a small tamale recipe, this might take a while. I’m sorry, I thought we were just having dinner.”

  “It’s not a problem.” James had a slightly odd smile on his face that Gabe had never seen before. “Can I help out?”

  Alandria, the eldest of the Juarez children, patted a seat beside her. “Of course.” She handed James a plate to work on. “What you do is you take a corn husk, lay it flat. Then you take a bit of the masa.” She dropped a spoonful of the thick paste onto the wet corn husk. “Try to spread it out even. Then some of the filling.” She made a log of shredded chicken down the center. “Now you roll it very carefully, trying to keep everything inside the husk.” That was the step that Gabe had never mastered, carefully rolling up the corn husk so nothing leaked out and it didn’t totally disintegrate when steamed.

  James nodded slowly with a look of concentration on his face. “Like this?” James took a corn husk and dropped it on his plate. Twenty seconds later, a perfectly rolled tamale sat on James’ plate, and his hands were completely clean.

  His sisters all looked at Gabe. Gabe shrugged. He had no idea where James picked up the ability to do that. They looked at James, who had already taken another corn husk. “The women in my building get together every other month and make about five billion tamales, and if I sit quietly, keep out of the kitchen, and help roll, then I get to take some home, which is a good thing because Dylan’s been eating like a horse since he turned twelve.” James completed another tamale, identical to the previous one in size and shape. “I have been doing this regularly for about twelve years now. Mrs. Silva, next door, does hers in banana leaves. Around Christmas she does turkey ones and makes me wrap them up like little presents for her. That gets tricky.” James completed yet another, hardly even looking.

  Alandria looked back up at Gabe. “I like him.” James ducked his head, his cheeks going pink. “But you have to roll too.”

  Gabe shoved up his sleeves, wishing he’d worn something a little less nice. He’d never managed to roll tamales without getting at least one all over himself. He tried to eyeball James’ technique, but his hands were moving too quickly. Gabe could hear clanging coming from the kitchen. His mother had mastered her own steaming technique and usually kicked everyone out of the kitchen to take care of that part herself. Soon she would emerge, however, and the tricky introduction would happen. The rest of the family didn’t care about his sexuality, or if they did, he’d bought their acceptance by sending their kids to private schools and paying for their doctors and lawyers.

  His mother, on the other hand, had learned to be polite, but that was about it. His father playing mediator kept the tenuous peace between the two of them. Even with that, they’d spent the last decade and then some keeping their conversations as neutral as possible.

  Gabe brought his mind back to the present. James had produced a neat little stack while Gabe was still trying to smooth out masa for his first tamale.

  “James,” Alandria started. “Gabe never tells us anything about the people he’s seeing. So you’re going to have to.”

  “I do—” Gabe tried to object, but Alandria just waved a hand in his general direction.

  “Um… I’m a team manager for Technical Services at UCB. I have a son, Dylan, who is almost eighteen and is likely to be the death of me, and despite what Gabe might say, I am possibly one of the most boring people you are ever going to meet.”

  “You roll tamales well,” Alisa pointed out.

  “After the first few thousand, I sort of got the hang of it.” Everyone at the table chuckled. They knew James was not exaggerating. Most of the recipes Gabe had seen for tamales started with “Take two whole chickens and an equal weight of pork.” And those were single-family recipes. Enough to satisfy an entire building would easily take out a small farm’s worth of animals.

  “James, how did you meet our Gabriel?” his father asked.

  “He was a guest lecturer at UCB, and his computer froze up. I unfroze it, and he was good enough to buy me a cup of coffee. Which I have to say is something no other guest lecturer or even professor has ever done. That got my attention.”

  The kitchen door opened, and everyone looked up. Gabe’s mother was in her plain, faded yellow apron. A light sheen of sweat decorated her face from standing over gallons of boiling water. She held a large empty tray. Gabe hadn’t seen her in a while, and there was always a moment of shock, the way she looked so much older than in his memory.
In his mind she still had soft black hair like his, not the dark steel gray it had become.

  “Mom, this is James, my boyfriend,” Gabe said carefully. He had only ever gotten as far as introducing a few of his boyfriends to his mother, whereas his father had met several of them and even gotten along with a couple. “James, this is my mother, Adela Juarez.”

  James stood and held out his hand. “It’s very nice to meet you, ma’am.”

  She gave James’ hand a perfunctory shake, then looked at the tidy stack of tamales in front of James’ plate. “You made those?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  His mother looked at them for a few more seconds before nodding and gathering them up onto the empty tray with the rest for steaming. Once she was back in the kitchen, James sat down, and everyone breathed.

  “Well now, that should be the worst of it,” Gabe said with a sigh. It was far and away the easiest introduction between his mother and a boyfriend. Then again, he’d never brought home a boyfriend who could assemble perfect tamales.

  Gabe looked at the half-finished one sitting on his plate and tried to roll it. James looked over just in time to see the masa start to squeeze through.

  “Hold on.” James stopped his hands. “You overfilled it.” He unrolled it, scraped at it with a spoon, then rerolled it, setting it with the rest.

  “You’re just trying to make me look bad.”

  “Leave him alone, Gabe,” Alandria scolded. “He’s the first one you’ve brought home who knows what the hell a tamale is.”

  “He also watches the novelas.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” James stated in his own defense.

  “Which ones?” Nina asked. She was a connoisseur. Gabe had spent large portions of his teenaged years fighting with her for control of the TV. He usually lost.