Playing With Fuego

by K. G. MacGregor

  Miss Attitude wasn’t glowing with anything but sweat, so much that her tight gray T-shirt was soaked and clinging to her slender back. I got a good look at it when she brought another load out to the curb.

  By this time, I figured she’d learned her lesson—we weren’t a bunch of pushovers—and Bo had left me feeling a tad guilty about how sore she’d be tomorrow. I started thinking if I pitched in to help, we could knock off the rest of the pile in an hour or so and she could finish up the day with something simple like pushing a broom through the house.

  I was about to tell her that when Roberto Rodriguez pulled up in his building materials delivery truck and started chattering away with her in Spanish. “Abadabababa something-about-a-baño abadabababa.” Granted, I have a lot of trouble understanding Roberto’s English but it pisses me off when these guys don’t even try to talk to me at all.

  “He wants to know how many bathrooms the house has,” Maribel said, her deep, sexy voice quite businesslike.

  “Uno,” I answered pointedly, which was a huge mistake because he followed that up with about two hundred more words in Spanish, making me look utterly stupid because I had to look to Maribel to translate.

  “He has two matching medicine cabinets but one of them is broken. He’ll donate them if you’ll write him a receipt for both.”

  One was all we needed anyway so that worked for me. “Tell him fine. I’ll go get the receipt pad.”

  She was gone by the time I got back. Roberto jabbered a few more unintelligible words as I handed over the receipt, and then he drove off, leaving me to wrestle with getting the fifty-pound crate inside by myself. If I hadn’t been such a jerk earlier, I could have just asked Maribel to lend me a hand. But I’d taken a lot of pleasure in making her day miserable and slapping on a sweet face now wouldn’t change that.

  I didn’t even get the chance. The next time the wheelbarrow rolled around front, it was Bo who was pushing it.

  “Need a hand with that, Daphne?”

  “What happened to Miss Attitude?”

  “Mari? Her hand was bleeding so I bandaged it for her and told her I’d finish up. She’s out back holding a ladder for somebody.”

  Mari? How sweet. Not Mary, but Mah-ri. So sah-ri, Mah-ri.Bet it rolled right off her lips when she batted her eyes at Bo and got him falling all over himself to fix her little boo-boo. Where did these people get off feeling so special?

  I let Bo carry in the crate by himself and took a moment to get a grip on why I was so annoyed, since I’d been planning to go help her finish up anyway. The fact he’d done it first meant he looked like a knight in shining armor and I looked like a total asshole.

  Make that a total Jenko.

  My gloves, though folded neatly beside what was left of the stack, were shredded from the day’s work, and predictably stained with blood around one of the places that had worn through. In just the twenty minutes it took Bo and me to finish, I felt the start of a blister on my thumb in the same place. No wonder Maribel’s—Mari’s—hand was bleeding. I never meant for that to happen.

  In fact, I never meant to make her whole day wretched either, at least not after I got over my initial hissy fit. Now that she was working with the others on the painting, she was all smiles and laughing about how she couldn’t sing a note. She liked everyone here but me.

  When Bo called for the afternoon break I caught up with her as she walked back over to her car. “Hey, uh…Maribel?”

  “What now?” When she spun around, it was like she was shooting daggers from her eyes. Sure, I needed to fix the part of her Attitude that was my fault, but I wasn’t going to kiss her butt to do it.

  Nothing against her butt…no, I didn’t need to go there.

  “I, uh…I was looking at my notes and realized you didn’t come to our orientation meeting last week. We usually require that for everybody, even the community service people.”

  “Yeah, I know. The clerk told me when I signed up but I’d already missed it. I figured I’d come to the next one.”

  “You didn’t really miss a whole lot. It’s just a basic rundown of safety rules, and I go over all of them again first thing every morning…which is kind of what you skipped by getting here late.”

  “It won’t happen again,” she said curtly and started to walk away.

  “Wait, I wasn’t trying to bust your chops. I was just going to say that I waive the orientation sometimes when it’s obvious people know what they’re doing. We give a couple of hours’ credit for coming, and I can go ahead and put you down for it. That gives you eight hours so you can call it a day if you want.”

  “Seriously?” She gave me a sidelong look that I assumed was distrust. Better than contempt.

  “Yeah, just try not to do anything careless next time you come.” Like tearing the skin off your hands because you’re too stubborn to let somebody know your gloves had worn out. “That would make me look bad.”

  “So I can go?” This time I got a smile, just big enough to show off an adorable dimple on her left cheek.

  “Beat it. I’ll see you next week.” I was trying to sound friendly for a change but it came off more like a mom giving in to her kids. Not exactly the image I wanted to convey, especially since my thoughts of her were anything but childlike as I watched her backside twist away in those skinny jeans.

  Chapter Two

  At least Emily got one thing right. Our south-facing balcony in Edgewater has one of the best views in Miami, especially on mornings like this one. From my lounge chair, I can see the cruise port, the Biscayne Bay and the high-rises of downtown and Brickell. Another skyscraping condo building is planned for the vacant lot beside us and it will cut off part of my view, but the real estate bust guarantees it won’t go up anytime soon.

  Also guaranteed is the fact I’m stuck here. Emily and I bought this prime corner unit on the fifteenth floor—two bedroom suites and a wraparound balcony—while the market was on its way up. Nearly half of the building’s investors have defaulted since then, and our property values have tanked by forty percent.

  Until a couple of years ago, Emily and I had both been on the hook for the loan. Then I did something incredibly stupid. She had stopped sending her half of the monthly payment, so I got her to sign a quit claim deed, turning over sole ownership to me. Sure, she forfeited her half of our sixty-thousand-dollar down payment, but she’s now free and clear of the debt. I, on the other hand, owe a hundred thousand more than this place is worth.

  Why do I have to ruin every single day by thinking about Emily Jenko first thing in the morning? I should be soaking in the sunrise from our balcony—my balcony. It was glorious, one of the few things about Miami I find worthy of its being called the Magic City.

  Although I find the Miami Herald pretty magical too. I’d never been much of a newspaper reader, but some of the things that happen in this town are so outrageous, it’s like reading The Onion. Half the time you can’t tell what’s real and what’s parody.

  Somebody wants to know why the same company gets all the vending machine contracts at the airport. I can answer that without reading another word—because their families were all friends back in Cuba. Or Puerto Rico. Or Colombia.

  I peeked.

  Surprise, surprise. They weren’t friends after all. The Cuban contractor is the uncle of the county’s procurement officer. Silly me not to think of nepotism.

  You don’t stand a chance in this town if you’re not connected. I learned that the hard way when I made the final cut for assistant director of human resources at one of the cruise lines and lost out to a twenty-two-year-old Venezuelan guy fresh out of a college I’d never even heard of with a degree in international studies. International studies!

  If I’d taken the job at the hotel chain in Boston, I’d be an assistant vice president by now. But no, I’d followed Emily, the love of my life, who picked a law firm in Miami because she was drawn to the glamour and sunshine. Then she realized the plum assignments at her firm went to the bilingu
al associates, no matter how many nights she burned the midnight oil at her desk.

  At least that’s where she’d told me she was. Turned out she and one of the other attorneys had found true love in the legal stacks and they left the firm together to hang out their own shingle in Sarasota. Emily was so very sorry, you know. She never meant for it to happen. Like I give a big fat Jenko.

  The sliding glass door on the next unit banged open and I braced for the tirade that was sure to follow. It didn’t take a psychic to know that when the door slid with such ferocity, Edith and Mordecai Osterhoff would soon be screaming at one another.

  My neighbors were in their late seventies, a fiery combination of Long Island WASP and resettled German Jew. Edith is just about the staunchest liberal I’ve ever met, and Mordy isn’t far behind…except when it comes to the Cubans. The retired head of a service workers union, he feels the same way I do about Miami being a banana republic. But where he’s my simpatico, Edith is my conscience and his too.

  “Because they don’t give two shits about the workers,” he growled at Edith. “They got their own union and it’s called the Cuban Mafia.”

  Clearly, he’d read the same story I had.

  “They aren’t anything like the Mafia and you know it,” Edith yelled back. She never backed down, and even seemed to enjoy these battles. “They came to America just like the Jews and worked hard to give their children a better life.”

  “The Jews didn’t come over here and expect Americans to learn Hebrew. We melted into the pot with everybody else. They act like we’re the ones who should accommodate them.”

  “Pipe down, old man. Daphne’s going to think you’re a bigot.”

  Even though we couldn’t see each other through the wall that divided our balconies, they knew I sat out here every morning. Sometimes I thought they brought their bickering outside just to see whose side I’d take.

  “I think I’m with Mordy on this one, Edith. Fifty years is a long time not to assimilate.” Then out of nowhere, I got a mental image of Maribel León with her sweaty T-shirt and bandaged hand. “But I agree with you too. Our Cuban volunteers at the foundation work as hard as anybody.”

  Taking both sides wasn’t acceptable to either of them and they began shouting over each other as though the loudest would win. When their respective diatribes wound down, I heard Mordy draw a deep conciliatory breath.

  “Come over tonight, Daphne. Edith’s making matzo ball soup.”

  “Since when?” she snapped.

  “Be nice for a change. Daphne likes matzo ball soup.”

  “Fine, but you’ll have to go to the store for parsley and eggs.”

  “Fifty-one years we’ve been married and you never noticed I go to the store every day.”

  “You only go to watch the women who stop in on their way home from the gym. All that spandex will make you blind.”

  No matter how much they fought, I knew they loved each other more than life itself. I’d seen it firsthand the night Mordy had collapsed during dinner at Roasters and Toasters on Miami Beach. Edith was practically in tears as we waited for the doctor at Mount Sinai to tell us it was only the flu. Then she began berating him for probably giving it to her when he took a bite of her corned beef sandwich. Three days later it turned out she was right.

  For all my grumbling about the diversity in Miami, my life was richer for knowing Edith and Mordy. Now if only I could learn to appreciate the rest of the hodgepodge.

  “I’ll pick up a bottle of Manischewitz,” I called. There was fine wine and there was the syrupy sweet concoction we always drink with dinner because it’s kosher. “I have to go to work. You two try to behave yourselves.”

  On my way down the elevator opened on the fourteenth floor for Ronaldo García, the fortyish Brazilian man who lived directly below me. Even my lesbian eyes found him handsome. His crisp white shirts lit up his olive skin, piercing brown eyes and wavy dark hair slick with gel, and while I don’t know Armani from Brooks Brothers, I’d bet my paycheck his suits were expensive, since they draped flawlessly from his slender body.

  “Bom dia,” he said, momentarily blinding me with his dazzling white teeth.

  “Good morning.” I stepped toward the back and tried not to inhale his cologne because it made me want to sneeze. Other than that, he was possibly perfect.

  As handsome as Ronaldo was, I’d rather have run into his wife Tandra, who made me drool like a lecherous Neanderthal. She looked like a Maxim model with her long thin neck, four-inch stiletto heels and spandex dresses that barely covered her curvaceous backside. I even found her baby bump sexy as hell.

  Maribel León would be smoking hot in spandex. She probably had a boyfriend as handsome as Ronaldo. Not a husband though. She struck me as too independent for that. Even in a Latin culture, I was willing to bet women like Mari called the shots.

  Ever the gentleman, Ronaldo held the elevator door to allow me to exit first. I wish I could be friendlier but I’d never heard him speak a word of English and the few times I’d tried to interact, I’d gotten only a polite smile that suggested he didn’t have a clue what I was saying. It was awkward.

  At least Mari was bilingual. Even though she spoke with a slight accent—as most Cubans did—I had a feeling she was born right here in the good old US of A. Many of the Cubans of her generation had older family members who didn’t speak English at all. The kids had grown up naturally bilingual because they spoke English in school and Spanish at home, and that’s why they all had accents.

  Wonder what Mari would think of my ten-year-old, formerly black Mustang, which I’d named Sally. Next to her Porsche, mine was a piece of Jenko. Pretty sporty when it was new, but the combination of salt on the snowy roads of New Hampshire and now the salt air in Miami had taken its toll on the paint job, leaving it a drab gray. I was stuck with it too.

  “Fixated, Daphne?” Yes, I talk to myself all the time. When you live alone, you have to check every now and then to see if your voice works.

  I’d been thinking about Mari way too much over the last few days. No matter how much I justified to myself coming down hard on her, I really didn’t enjoy behaving like a jerk. Besides, I’m a well-educated human resources professional who knows you don’t get your best work out of people by treating them like Jenko.

  I pulled out of the garage, girding myself for my least favorite part of Miami, the commute to our office park out past the airport. At the very first stoplight, the driver behind me laid on his horn the split second the light turned green but I held my ground and counted. I know better than to assume the right of way, since cross traffic always continues like a conga line, with each car practically welded to the bumper of the car in front. Mordy calls it the Three Second Rule, meaning you have to wait that long before entering an intersection or risk getting broadsided.

  A few blocks later I joined the quagmire inching west on the Dolphin Expressway. I can easily admit Boston traffic is worse, but no one comes close to Miami drivers on the Rude-O-Meter. I have a rule of my own, the Never Take Your Hands Off the Wheel Rule, which helps me fight the urge to flip off all the drivers who rush to the front of the Exit Only lane, only to cut back into traffic. Nine times out of ten they’re talking on their cell phones because they’re far too important to occupy themselves with such tedium as safe driving.

  Forty-five minutes each way, thanks to the half million construction barrels that forced us down to only two lanes around Douglas Avenue and again at Bird Road. It’s a wonder I don’t drink all the time.

  The first person to greet me was my boss, the foundation’s executive director, Gisela Ruiz. “Happy Hump Day,” she said, smiling smugly. Like most Colombians, she spoke English with a distinctive lilt.

  I like Gisela, except when she rubs it in that Hump Day for me is Thursday, since I work Saturdays at the construction site. “At least I never have to face a Monday morning on the Dolphin.”

  As the public face of the foundation, she always dressed conservatively i
n a business suit and high-collared blouse, and wore her dark hair in a tight bun with large hoop earrings.

  “You must be going out today,” she said, eyeing my dress slacks and silk blazer. Most days, I wear casual chinos, saving my better clothes for when I have to meet with the public.

  “I’m doing an orientation over a brown-bag lunch at Total Bank. They’ve got a dozen or so volunteers signed up for Saturday.”

  We were the only ones in the office at nine a.m. because—and this drives me absolutely berserk—everyone else was late. Everyone. Hispanic Time, they call it. They’d work through lunch and stay late to get their hours in, but forget calling a meeting in the morning because you never know when people are going to get there. Gisela lets it slide, writing it off to culture. Just another sign I’m not cut out to live in Miami.

  My office was little more than a cubbyhole but at least it had a door and I didn’t have to share it. It’s not that I don’t like the people I work with. I do, but some days their chatter seems endless, and of course it’s all in Spanish. I can pick up a word here and there, enough to know I don’t want to hear about what happened on such and such novella or that Macy’s is having a sale on slingback zapatos. I spend a lot of time on the phone procuring both volunteers and donations of building materials, so I can get away with keeping my door closed without people thinking I’m antisocial.

  My first task was to print out directions to Total Bank. When I saw the Brickell address, it too made me think of Mari, and her fancy condo building on Brickell Bay Drive. And that made me think of something I’d been meaning to ask Gisela, so I stuck my head in her office.

  “Got a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  It was then I noticed the nameplate on her desk, Gisela Ruiz-Martino, and it occurred to me for the first time that I’d been calling Mari by the wrong name. The Spanish custom is to take both parents’ surnames, the father’s first and then the mother’s, but to use only the first surname unless in a legal document…like court papers. That meant she was Mari Tirado, not Mari León.