Hungry Hearts

by Elsie Chapman

  * * *

  “Thanks for the ride,” I said to Natalie as I unbuckled my seat belt. She was kind enough to stop by after her shift and wait for me to close the restaurant. Then we grabbed a bite at the diner across the street from Mallow Park that was open, mostly for restaurant workers getting out late at night.

  “Nice digs,” Natalie said, looking at my parent’s house. The lights were still on, which I thought was weird.

  “It feels like limbo,” I said. “But yes, it’s very nice.” I realized how stupid that sounded, since I was lucky to have a roof over my head. Residents in the neighborhood we worked in were being forced to move out, and no one seemed to be doing anything about that. “My roommates are still up.”

  “You don’t talk about them much,” Natalie said. “Your roommates.”

  I didn’t think it was fair to have this gorgeous girl drive me home after a double shift and then have me emotionally unload on her.

  “Well, none of us really talk a lot to one another. I didn’t turn out the way they wanted me to, so we’re . . . polite and quiet.”

  Natalie touches the tip of my ponytail lightly.

  “I don’t know. I think you turned out fine. Better than fine.”

  That feeling of nervousness Natalie gave me? Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was hope.

  “You’re going to be a heartbreaker at college,” I said. Why couldn’t I enjoy a nice moment? Why did I have to think about her leaving already?

  “You could be too. Though I kind of like the idea of neither of us breaking each other’s hearts next year,” she said as she let go of my hair.

  “I don’t know where I’ll be next year,” I muttered.

  “Well, I hope you’ll let me know where you end up. Then I can come find you. Don’t disappear on me again. Okay?”

  I nodded. Whatever the future had in store for me, I’d make sure I’d let Natalie Ribaldi, the most wonderful girl in the world, know.

  “I’d invite you in, but maybe when the roomies are more chatty,” I said.

  “Yes, you’ll have to give me a grand tour of your home sometime,” Natalie said a little suggestively. I was annoyed that a high school senior had more game than I did.

  “I think I’d have to take you out first,” I responded. “If you’d want to go out sometime.”

  “So long as it’s at a restaurant neither of us work at,” she said. She kissed me on my cheek. “I’ll pick you up in the morning, and we can ride in together.”

  We smiled at each other. I couldn’t remember why liking her had scared me so much. I’m glad I was still here to learn that.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said before I exited her car.

  I unlocked my front door, and as soon as I entered, Mom and Dad rushed over to me.

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone?” Mom yelled.

  “What?” I asked. I patted my jacket pockets, and my phone wasn’t in there. “I’m sorry—I must have left it in my apron at work.”

  “We’ve been worried sick!” Mom said, holding me by my shoulders. Dad stood behind her, stoic and with an expression I couldn’t read. “You know to text when you’re going to be late! Do you even think about us?”

  I took a breath to calm myself down. Yeah, maybe I should have texted them. But I finally had a nice night, and they knew my schedule was unpredictable. Why couldn’t they let me enjoy myself? When were they ever going to trust me?

  “I’m sorry. I am here. A friend of mine gave me a ride,” I answered. This time I looked at Dad. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he was pacing a little. “If you were worried, you could have come to the restaurant. Why don’t you come to see me there, Dad? Are you embarrassed that I’m working there?”

  “Laleh! What kind of question is that?” Mom asked.

  “He barely talks to me anymore,” I said to Mom, but I was still looking at Dad. “How long do you want me to apologize for? I’m trying to be better. I really am. You’d see that if you came to the restaurant. Amu Mansour sees it, and I’ve really helped turn the restaurant around. The one you helped start. He trusts me. Why can’t you?” When are you going to love me again?

  Dad walked toward me, and my mom backed away from me a little to give him some room.

  “You scared me,” Dad murmured. “Do you understand that? You scared me, and I didn’t want to think about what could have happened.”

  He looked like a little boy. My father, a man of industry who sacrificed so much and worked so hard, he looked like a frightened child. I did that to him. My stupid decision did that to him. Dad put his hands on his chest.

  “You’re my whole life,” he said, and his voice trembled. “Everything I do, every ounce of what I have to give is for our family. That night, those weeks after, you broke me, Laleh. The only reason I’m still standing is because you’re still standing.”

  Mom put her hand on Dad’s back. I thought about how he came here and met her at university. The life they built for themselves. The life they built for me. I almost ruined all of that. Almost.

  “But I’m here, Dad. Don’t be scared of me now,” I said.

  He took a breath. He also leaned back into my mom’s touch a little.

  “I’m careful. I’m always going to try to be careful. I need you to believe that. I don’t know how else I can show you, but I need you to believe that,” I said. We should have hugged or something, but we weren’t there yet. I bid them both good night and headed up to my room.

  * * *

  As the rest of the month went on, there were three things that really stood out while working at Manijeh’s.

  The first was that we had lots of new customers, and many of them didn’t work at Zia Sofia’s. Customers who had waited in line at Zia Sofia’s noticed the servers were eating at our place instead of where they worked. We finally got the foot traffic that had eluded us for years.

  The second change was the sign outside of Zia Sofia’s. They had a promotional banner hanging above their doors that read 10% OFF ALL PASTA ENTREES. I could sometimes see Terrence standing outside during the lunch shift to invite people in, but lately he didn’t have many takers. I guess the novelty was wearing off.

  “Hey, Laleh,” Natalie said, tugging lightly on my apron strings after I had run some plates to my table. “I seated table two for you.”

  The third change was our new staff member. Business was booming, and Arash finally had his weekends to himself, though he still helped out on Sunday evenings. We paid Natalie with money, not with ash-e-reshte, but my uncle gave her leftover food to take home after her weekend shifts.

  “Thanks, Nat,” I said as my girlfriend and I walked to the bar so I could get my guests water. “How many guests at table two?”

  “Just one. He requested you by name.”

  I stopped what I was doing and peeked from the bar over at table two. My dad was seated there, talking to my uncle Mansour, who stood beside him. He was looking up at the photo of his mother and brother that hung on the wall. When my dad smiled, he looked so much like his brother.

  “That’s my dad!” I said excitedly. My voice squeaked a little.

  “Your uncle talked to him on the phone from the host stand while I was up there. I assumed he was talking to your dad because my Persian language skills are nonexistent, but he said your name a lot,” Natalie said, her hand on the small of my back.

  “Could have been another Laleh. Super-common name around here,” I joked.

  “Only one Laleh around here who makes your uncle beam like that,” Natalie said, and Amu Mansour waved me over.

  “Want to meet my dad?” I asked, filling a glass with water for my father.

  “I’ll come around during dessert.”

  “Sweet.”

  Natalie rolled her eyes, and I laughed as I walked over to my dad’s table. I placed the water in front of him, and Uncle Mansour put his arm around my shoulder.

  “Do you know this wonderful young lady?” Uncle Mansour said, his chest
puffed out proudly as he stood next to me.

  “I’m very happy to say that I do,” Dad said, looking at me warmly, but he didn’t make eye contact for very long. “I called your uncle and made a reservation. The place looks great, Laleh. I should have visited sooner.”

  Yes, you should have. But we’re glad you’re here now.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  Uncle Mansour squeezed me closer to him. “Tell your baba about our specials!”

  Dad listened while I recommended our best dishes. I already knew what he was going to order before he made his decision. I made sure he got an extra-large serving of his favorite stew.

  When my shift was over, Uncle Mansour said I didn’t need to worry about my side work that night. He said I’d done more than enough.

  Panadería ~ Pastelería

  BY ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE

  Saturday is birthday cake day.

  During the week, the panadería is all strong coffee and pan dulce. But on weekends, it’s sprinkle cookies and pink cake. By ten or eleven this morning, we’ll get the first rush of mothers picking up yellow boxes in between buying balloons and paper streamers.

  In the back kitchen, my father hums along with the radio as he shapes the pastry rounds of ojos de buey, the centers giving off the smell of orange and coconut. It may be so early the birds haven’t even started up yet, but with enough of my mother’s coffee and Mariachi Los Camperos, my father is as awake as if it were afternoon.

  While he fills the bakery cases, my mother does the delicate work of hollowing out the piñata cakes, and when her back is turned, I rake my fingers through the sprinkle canisters. During open hours, most of my work is filling bakery boxes and ringing up customers (when it’s busy) or washing dishes and windexing the glass cases (when it’s not). But on birthday cake days, we’re busy enough that I get to slide sheet cakes from the oven and cover them in pink frosting and tiny round nonpareils, like they’re giant circus-animal cookies. I get to press hundreds-and-thousands into the galletas de grajea, the round, rainbow-sprinkle-covered cookies that were my favorite when I was five.

  My mother finishes hollowing two cake halves, fills them with candy—green, yellow, and pink this time—and puts them back together. Her piñatas are half our Saturday cake orders, both birthday girls and grandfathers delighting at the moment of seeing M&M’s or gummy worms spill out. She covers them with sugar-paste ruffles or coconut to look like the tiny paper flags on a piñata, or frosting and a million rainbow sprinkles.

  On the next cake, my mother holds out the knife. “You want to try?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  The piñata cakes give me the same twitchy feeling as getting powdered sugar under my fingernails. I can’t help thinking of what that cake must feel like, how it gets opened up just a little, and then all of its insides spill out.

  * * *

  My father doesn’t ask why I’m in the back after the first morning rush, making green and purple sugar paste for pan dulce. He’s working on a batch of unicorn conchas, his latest stroke of genius, pan dulce covered with shells of pink, purple, and blue sugar that sell out every weekend.

  All he asks, as he watches me stamp the pattern into the sugar paste, is, “Who’s it for?”

  I pat the edges of the sugar topping. “I don’t know yet.”

  He nods, because he knows sometimes that happens.

  Most of the time, I do know. Like when I brought Hania an ojo de buey, because she was working on something important, and I thought the sugary center might leaven her spirit. Like when I gave David a novia at the Hungry Ghost Festival, because he wanted to propose to his girlfriend; Charlie’s grandmother had already told him to just do it, and I knew that crumble of dough and sugar might hold the courage he needed. Most of the time, I know which man needs an oreja, the curled ear of pastry that will inspire him to call his mother, or which neighbors would stop considering each other strangers if they shared the pink crescents of sugared cuernos.

  I slide the pan dulce into the oven just as my mother calls, “Lila!” from the front room.

  She stands at the wall my father painted sky blue and hung with papel picado, the pink hearts and orange flowers and purple hummingbirds fluttering every time the door opens. The sound of Mariachi México de Pepe Villa warms the space, the music fuzzed by how old the speakers are.

  My mother hung nails and added wood-framed photos to the walls, faded-color pictures of our bisabuelos, our birthday parties, our church lighting luminarias for Las Posadas and farolitos for Nochebuena. At first, I rolled my eyes. Why would anyone care about our Easter dresses or our Christmas poinsettias? But my mother had been right, the same way she’d been right about the sign out front. The pictures make customers feel like part of our family, especially the old ones. They ask about the two-tone photos of my great-grandfather on a dust-covered road, or the hillside village where my great-great-grandmothers kept gardens of blue mejorana.

  As for the sign, all it says is PANADERÍA ~ PASTELERÍA, no other name to mark the narrow doorway, as though anyone walking by must come in for their candy-colored cakes and conchas now, or that teal-painted door might vanish overnight.

  But right now my mother is taking pictures down. Not the old ones, the newer ones. Ones recent enough that I’m in some of them.

  My heart pinches at the sight of the lonely nails.

  “You’re getting rid of them?” I ask.

  “Just putting a few away,” my mother says.

  “Why?” I ask.

  She hands me the stacked frames. “Because we must let people be who they are.”

  I don’t know what she’s talking about until that afternoon, when a boy I don’t know starts unloading bag after bag of tamales onto our front counter.

  “What . . .” is all I say before he goes back out to an illegally parked four-door and pulls more bags from his trunk.

  I watch the back of him, the not-quite-matched jean jacket and jeans combination that my cousin Mimi calls a Canadian tuxedo. When he leans down to the trunk, a little of his hair falls in his face, shadowing his brown forehead.

  The next time he comes in, I get the whole question out. “What are you doing?”

  “Your mom didn’t tell you?” He sets the bags down on the counter. “We’re gonna start bringing in tamales for your customers.”

  “Who’s we?” I ask.

  “Oh, sorry,” he says. “I’m Gael.”

  I blink at him.

  He smiles. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”

  Remember him? Did he go to my school? Did he live in the same building as us before the rents drove us out?

  “I used to see you at church stuff,” he said. “Your mom and my mom both taught Sunday school together? Before my family moved away? We just moved back into town, and your mom’s helping us out until we get a little more set up.”

  My eyes drift to the constellation of empty nails on the blue wall.

  The pictures.

  Gael.

  I don’t remember that name. I remember a different name, a name he seemed to wear like the scratch of a wool sweater.

  I don’t remember this boy. I remember a child with his same eyes and brow bone and hair, looking miserable in formal clothes.

  And I don’t remember us playing together, because we didn’t. We were both the kind of shy that repelled us to opposite corners of whatever holiday party forced us into the same space.

  My mother had taken down the photos because they showed a little girl who had never really existed, who had been this boy all along.

  * * *

  I find the right home for the green-and-purple pan dulce. Anna Wallis, a girl with a dark, messy braid (cute messy, not ten-hours-in-a-kitchen messy like mine), a love for forests that are home to tigers and coffee blossoms, and a heart that’s a little bit broken, but whose pieces are finding their way back to each other.

  Then I bring elotitos, sugared bread shaped like ears of corn, to welcome
a new family to town. They’ve renovated this building enough that I don’t know where anything is anymore, and I almost go out the fire exit; a pretty blond woman, no older than thirty, sticks her head out of her apartment door and glares, even though I stop a second before setting off the alarm.

  Maybe it’s the way the streets around here have changed, the café tables on the sidewalks and the apartments turned into town houses. But my brain feels fuzzy at the edges, like the music through my father’s old speakers. I almost don’t see a minivan turning onto Nettle Street. It brakes hard to stop short of me.

  Ming whirs by on her scooter, and we wave to each other. Despite how fast she goes, I catch the tilt to her head, like even at high speed she can tell I don’t look quite right.

  I shove through the teal door of the panadería as the light’s falling, and it’s not just the sky-blue walls or the smell of raspberry that greets me.

  It’s the crisp scent of cilantro and sweet corn. It’s the bite of tomatillo and chiles. It’s the warmth of calabaza and the earthy smell of black beans.

  A boy’s low laughter billows out of the kitchen.

  A boy’s laughter, braided with the familiar sound of my mother’s and my father’s, and another woman’s, a full-throated laugh I remember from when I was little.

  Instead of pots of dulce de leche and berry jams, the stoves are covered in tamal steamers. Instead of my mother swaying to the rhythm of the radio while she frosts a cake, my father humming as he kneads dough, they’re both listening to Gael’s mother. She has the glow of telling stories as she shoves pieces of tamal at them, the print on her dress as bright as her painted fingernails.

  “Tan linda!” Gael’s mother says. She stands back to look at me, and her face comes into focus. Familiar, not as much older as I expected, though her hair has gone half silver. “You’ve gotten so tall.”

  “Lila!” My mother throws me my sherbet-colored apron. “Pull your hair back. We’re almost at the dinnertime rush.”

  “We have a dinnertime rush?” I ask. The closest we get on Saturdays is tourists stopping in for dessert after an evening out. In the summer, my mother slices open the bright conchas and piles ice cream between the halves.