I raised an eyebrow. We’d been born in East County and had spent most of our childhoods here near downtown. I wasn’t sure what geographic proximity really had to do with Amy’s successful date with Trent, but accepted that she was happy and let her continue.
“We walked along the boardwalk on Mission Beach for hours. He knew some people who were playing volleyball down at the end, so we stopped for a while and played.”
I almost spit out the tea I was drinking. “You played volleyball?”
She glared at me. “I can do sporty things.”
“Can and do are two separate things.” Amy had never been interested in anything that involved getting sweaty or dirty as far as I could remember.
“It was fun,” she said, sounding defensive.
“I’m glad you had a good time. You’ll see him again, then?” I asked, trying to sound excited for her.
She nodded, her eyes gleaming.
“Did you kiss him?”
Her face fell. “No. There was this awkward moment at the end, where I was getting back in my car and he leaned down like he was going to kiss me. So I stood back up, and kind of crashed into his face. For a second I thought I broke his nose with my head, and then he was rubbing his face, and so I just apologized and got back in the car. But he said he’d call me, and when I was driving home he texted me to ask if I wanted to go out again.”
“That’s good,” I said. “So he probably recovered. Hey, can you ask if he’d be willing to come pick up the tools Rob was using? He has a truck, right?”
Amy nodded, her expression changing from glee to something wary and serious. “Why?”
I didn’t really want to rehash everything that had happened since the last time Amy and I had talked. It had been just yesterday morning but felt like years ago now. So much had happened—finding that picture, losing Rob for good… My grandmother was like a stranger in my mind now—keeping some kind of secret about who she’d really been, who my grandfather had been. Not that I’d ever had much of a sense of who he was. But the stranger I saw in my head, the typical absent man who’d filled some intimate space in Nan’s life for some unknowable period when she’d been young, had taken on more shape, a more solid form. And that form wore a uniform.
And I worried about telling Amy about Rob’s departure. She’d probably be no more surprised than I was. After all, that was my track record with men, right? But I didn’t want to hear her jump to my defense. It sounded silly, but I worried she’d villainize him and make it all sound like some grand scheme he’d had from the start.
“Well, Rob is finished working at the shop, that’s all. And he had to go kind of suddenly to see his family. So I promised I’d make sure the tools got returned.”
Her lips pressed into a thin line and she sat up straight, putting her tea on the tabletop with a thunk. “First, where’d you get these cookies?” She raised a chocolate chip cookie to her eyes and squinted at it.
“Those are the ones I told you about. I found a box of them in the back after Rob left. He must have brought them in this morning.”
Amy’s face cleared and she smiled at me. “He’s good at gifts,” she said in a reverent voice.
“I guess so.” The box had been waiting for me, sitting on the counter in the back of the shop. In all the excitement, I hadn’t even noticed it. And Rob had somehow put it there right under my nose.
“So what happened?”
I felt myself deflating, as if I’d been a false version of myself, an inflated Dani-doll set to stand in for the real Dani, who was busily falling apart somewhere else. I sipped at my tea and shook my head, not sure where to begin. “It just…his father is sick. And I told you how Mateo came up and offered him part ownership in the winery. If his father changed his will, and he’s really dying, like Mateo said, then he’ll go back home, take on the business, and that will be it.”
“That will be what?”
“He’s gone, Amy.” My voice slipped a little, became thinner on the last word.
“I looked up the Guadalupe Valley. It’s not far from Ensenada. It’s only like an hour from the border.”
“It’s a different country. Might as well be a different world.” I knew it was dramatic. I couldn’t help it. I was practical and upbeat with everyone else. This was my big sister. I was allowed to say how I really felt. “If it wasn’t this, he would have found another reason to go.”
“Hello, self-fulfilling prophecy.” Amy’s mouth was a hard line and her eyes narrowed.
“You can say that, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going in with low expectations.”
“You won’t ‘go in’ at all. From the moment you met this guy, you predicted your own demise. How can you be such an optimist about everything else in life, and such a complete pessimist when it comes to love?”
This was not the reaction I had expected from my sister. And it wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“Can we talk about something else?” I asked.
“I guess,” she let out an exasperated breath. “But one day you’re going to have to actually let yourself care about someone again, you know.”
I nodded, happy to change the subject. “Remember that picture of me as a baby? The one that was on the mantel?”
She wrinkled her face in confusion and glanced at the fireplace. “I guess, yeah. Where is it?”
“There was another photo underneath it.” I went to my room and returned with the photo of Granddad in uniform. “This one.”
“Is that…?”
“Yeah.” I placed it next to the only other photo of Granddad I’d been able to find in the box, a high-school portrait of him in a wide seventies style tie and brown jacket.
“Huh.” Amy said.
“Did you know he was in the service?”
She shook her head, but didn’t seem to be shocked by the revelation.
“Nan always told us he left,” I said. “She never mentioned anything about this.”
“Nan had no obligation to tell us every detail of her life. And she never told us he left. She just said he was gone and refused to talk about it.” Amy shrugged and reached for the remote, about to drag me into another pointless hour of The Bachelorette.
“Why do you just stop talking about someone?” I prompted. “When they break your heart.” I answered my own question.
“I guess,” Amy agreed half-heartedly, pressing the power button.
“I’m calling Britta tomorrow. She’ll know.” If she was back from her retirement-center field trip.
Was I making too much of the discovery? Why did it feel like it mattered so much who Granddad had really been? Why did I care? And why in the world did it feel so much more important now that Rob was gone?
“Hey,” I said, interrupting Amy’s wide-eyed television coma. “I need the number of that carpenter you mentioned.”
“Sure,” she nodded, eyes still on the television as she picked up another cookie. “I’ll grab it at the commercial.”
I went to bed with a phone number and a painfully bruised heart.
Chapter Nineteen
Rob
When people talk about going home—especially to a place they haven’t seen in a long time—there’s an assumed sentiment. You’re expected to feel something close to nostalgia or fond remembrance. It wasn’t like that for me. Going home was like going backward, like traveling back through time. I felt myself devolving as the snarled traffic around the border unfurled down the long coastal road. When we turned inland, toward the valley where my family lived, where I’d grown up, I became ten years old again. Caught in the middle. Between my two brothers, between my parents, between who I might want to be and who I was told I was supposed to be. And I didn’t like it.
As we drove, I tried to concentrate on the landscape, the other cars, anything to avoid thinking about Dani. About leaving her. About the way her eyes had filled with fear when I’d lost control. I tried to focus on the world outside the car because the one inside
my mind was torn apart.
“Not much different,” I observed. The land was dry and brown, hills rolling to the north. To someone who hadn’t lived some hard and confusing years here, it might be beautiful.
“You’re wrong. Everything is different,” Mateo said, his voice dark. He had been quiet. Through the long drive out of San Diego and across the border, the atmosphere in the car had grown heavier.
“Just tell me.” I said. No point letting it fester anymore.
“I tried. You’ll just have to see.”
If he wasn’t talking, that was fine. I’d see. I turned my head to watch the short dry scrub turn to long elegant rows of vineyards as our tires left pavement for gravel and finally dirt. The sign for Bodega Buena Vida had been repainted, and it looked friendly and new. The black sign with white lettering swung on its post as we turned toward the big white house.
Despite the dread bubbling in me over the idea of returning, part of me loved seeing the big blocky white house where I’d grown up. My childhood wasn’t ideal, but until I was old enough to understand the complications, it had been happy enough. And growing up here, with land to explore and brothers to do it with…I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that parts of it were magic.
Mateo pulled up the dusty lane to a parking lot that had been widened since I’d been here. And a patio extended off the back of the building that was new, too. We got out, and Mateo stayed quiet, leading me up the steps to the sweeping exterior deck. Tables and chairs were scattered about, and they held couples and families, laughing and enjoying the sweeping valley views and gentle breezes. And wine.
“Business is good,” I observed.
My brother just shot me a look and led me into the house. It seemed we would be getting right down to the matter at hand.
I followed him, but a girl just inside the door made me pause. She had dark hair and wide dark eyes, and they grew bigger as they saw me. She must have been at least seventeen, though the last time I’d seen her—if this was her—she had been tiny.
“Roberto?” she said.
“Maria?”
She nodded and grinned and threw her arms around my neck, surprising me. Unexpected contact still threw me off. I had to force myself to put my arms around her, hug her back. “You’re beautiful,” I said, letting her go and stepping back. She beamed.
“You’re okay, then? I heard…” she glanced at Mateo.
“I’m fine.”
My cousin Maria had been only seven when I’d left, and she was all long limbs and big eyes back then. I’d given her piggyback rides and participated in tea parties and Charrerias—Mexican rodeos—with her dolls and plastic horses.
“We’re going to see Papi,” Mateo said, his voice curt. “Seen ’Tonio?”
“He was in the barn, should I get him?” Maria untied an apron she’d had around her waist.
“Yes, please.”
I watched her race out the door, my mind reeling. Things had changed, I guessed.
Mateo took me upstairs to the room my parents had shared when I’d lived here. I could see the building had been expanded; more doorways branched off the hallway downstairs, and upstairs, too.
The big heavy door was closed, and Mateo rapped softly before pushing it open.
The air in the room was still, and the smell that hit me reminded me of the long months after my accident. Stale and fermented, with antiseptic around the edges. But this smell had an edge of something else. Something already dead and decaying.
Papi was small and white, his hair a shock of black around his head on the pillow. His skin was like thin paper, even from ten feet away, and his pale hands were skeletal where they rested on the blankets over his chest.
“Papi?” Mateo said, his voice soft and full of a love I didn’t think I’d ever felt for the man. Maybe when I was too small to know he didn’t love me back.
The old man opened his eyes and blinked at us as we walked in.
Antonio stepped in behind us. “Roberto,” he said, his deep voice warm. “About time you came home.” He pulled me into a hug, and held me longer than was comfortable. I tried to let myself relax into it, hug him back. My big brother. My blood.
“Hey,” was all I managed as he released me. He looked good, strong. He was taller than me, but not as tall as Mateo. His eyes were dark, and there were lines around them that hadn’t been there before. His dark hair was graying, just at the hairline around his temples, but it only made him seem more sure of himself, as it had my father had when I was small.
Whatever haze of sleep Papi had been in when I’d arrived had been shoved off during this short reunion. “Come here, hijo.” He could have been talking to any of us, but the demand was clearly for me. His voice was surprisingly clear and strong given the vessel that contained it. And the second he spoke, I was ten again. I was his dumb workhorse, the one he sent to carry, to clean, to build. Bile rose in my throat, and anger misted the corners of my mind reflexively, wanting to defend the kid I’d been who couldn’t defend himself. I tried to relax my shoulders as I stepped to his bedside.
“Hola, Papi.”
He turned his head slowly and fixed me with those dark rheumy eyes. I waited for the anger and disappointment I always saw there to appear, but he stared at me with something like wonder. “Sit down, son.”
I found a chair behind me and pulled it up as Mateo and Antonio settled across the bed. I was off-balance. Every cell in my body had been trained by this man to expect confrontation. I expected to feel small, maybe to be struck. But he was staring at me with the eyes of someone I didn’t know.
“I have missed you, Roberto. I was sorry to hear of your accident.”
I shook my head, my mind spinning. What the fuck? These were the words of a normal person, not a tyrant. I tried to find a response, but confusion swamped my head. I sat silently, staring at him, bewilderment rising inside me.
“Thank you for coming.” Papi reached a hand across the blankets that covered him, and left it, palm out, for me to take.
I stared at it, and then met Mateo’s eyes across the room. He shrugged.
“I’m sorry you’re sick,” I said, my voice thick and stupid sounding in the silent room. I kept my hands in my lap.
Papi actually laughed then, a thin watery sound that gave way to a retching liquid cough that sent every nerve in my body firing. I was on my feet before I realized it, as if he was going to die right here, right now.
“Sit down,” Antonio said, moving to Papi’s side and lifting him slightly off the pillows until the coughing stopped.
The old man wiped at his mouth with his sleeve and I continued watching him like some kind of sideshow attraction, something new and strange that I couldn’t wrap my head around. The voice was Papi’s. Everything else? I didn’t know.
The thin hand pointed past me as the eyes caught mine. “Get me my cigar?” He said.
Mateo’s face darkened. “No, Rob. He doesn’t need it. That’s what got him here in the first place.”
I swiveled my head to see the cigars and ashtray behind me on a low table. I’d never seen Papi without one in his hand, except when he was on a horse. And sometimes he smoked even then.
“What difference will it make now, Mateo?” Papi asked, sounding reasonable.
I handed him the cigar, cutting the end off for him as I had when I was a boy, holding the lighter.
He placed the ashtray on his chest and a glazed look came into his eyes. “Always a good boy,” he said.
I couldn’t help it, I shook my head. He’d never said that when I was young, when it might have mattered. “What is this about?” I asked, my voice harsh and angry.
Antonio stood up again, as if he thought I might leap onto the bed and strangle the man for whom I’d just lit a cigar.
“You,” Papi said, staring at me with an unsettling clarity. “I need to make things right with you.”
I shook my head in disbelief. Even though Mateo had pretty much spelled it out, I still couldn’t
buy that Papi had changed this much, that we could just wash our childhoods away with some new words and a hug. A piece of paper signed by a dying man. Forgiveness didn’t come that easily.
“I think it’s too late. I’m sorry you’re sick.” My words came out in the usual labored fashion and no one interrupted me. I stood and my voice seemed to hang in the air around us.
Papi nodded and coughed again, and part of me hated him anew for making me stand there awkwardly while he coughed. I had intended to walk out, but the coughing fit gave me time to realize I was being dramatic. It was hard not to revert to the injured kid I’d always been around him. I sat back down.
“It is. It is too late,” Papi agreed. “But when you die slowly, boys, you have time to think about your life.” He closed his eyes and I thought he had finished as a long minute ticked by. But then his mouth opened again and he continued, eyes still closed. “I see the boy you were, Roberto, and the confused, angry man I was. I needed help, and you were always there, always willing. And so strong, so talented with your hands. I exploited it. I used you. As families do. I used Antonio’s sharp mind, and Mateo’s eager personality, too. And I never thanked you. Never acknowledged how appreciated you were—not to you, at least.”
I shook my head. This was a lie. The will proved it. It wasn’t just that he forgot to acknowledge me. It was exactly the way I knew it to be. I was the middle son, the strong, stupid one, and his behavior and will reflected it.
“I never considered you could leave. I imagined you were bound here. By blood. By the land. But your mother…” Papi’s eyes found mine again. “I did that wrong, too.”
I stared at him. It was impossible to reconcile every memory I had of this man—huge, domineering, angry and terse—with the words coming from the benign dying man in the bed now.
“You are right that it is much too late. And so I do what I can to meet my God with a clean slate. I try to right my wrongs. I am sorry, Roberto. And the will, as your brothers have told you, has been changed.”
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