Page 67 of Rooster's Remorse
And it's?—
It's nice.
That's the word my body keeps handing me.
I keep turning it over because I don't trust it yet. It's nice.
The bread comes warm, the wine's good, and I stop at half a glass because half a glass is where I stop now.
The candle throws light up under his jaw, and he's telling me about the club—Compass murdering a carburetor, Ruby running the kitchen like a woman who's fired men for less than a dirty spoon—and I'm laughing.
I'mlaughing.
I catch it happening and it startles me, the sound of my own laugh, because I couldn't tell you the last time.
Finn hears it and stops dead in the middle of his sentence and looks at me like I set something down in his hands.
"Don't," I say.
"Don't what?"
"Don't look at me like that because I laughed. It's mortifying."
"It's the best thing I've heard in years." No softness on it, no push, just flat and true. "I'm going to look at you like that every time you do it, and you're going to have to make your peace with it."
That's when the dog comes in.
He comes through the open doors at a flat run—a brown street dog, tongue out, no collar, wearing an expression of total joy—and does one full lap of the dining room with a waiter chasing him, cutting between tables while people laugh and lift their wine out of the way, and then he's gone, back out into the dark as fast as he came.
I'm laughing before I know I've started.
"Cricket," Finn says.
And it knocks the wind clean out of me.
"Oh my God." My hand comes up over my mouth. "Cricket."
"You remember him?"
"I remember your mom's rosebushes never came back the same." I can't stop laughing and there's water rising in my eyes right along with it. "He got down in the creek behind our houses?—"
"—after it rained?—"
"—and came home looking like aswamp creature?—"
"—andyoulet him in the house." Finn's grinning now, all the way, and it's the grin I haven't seen in years. "You opened that back door and you let a dog made out of pure mud into your mother's clean kitchen."
"I was seven!"
"Your mom comes around the corner with the tortillas in her hands and she just—" He throws one hand up in the air,"—¡Camila Rosalba Bacani, saca a ese perro de mi cocina ahora mismo!"
And I'm gone.
I'm laughing so hard I have to put my head down, both palms flat on the tablecloth, because he's got her exactly—the pitch of it, the way she'd swing my whole name like achanclawhen I was in trouble, theahora mismoshe tacked onto everything to let you know she meant it.
I can hear her. I can actuallyhearher.
Finn's across the table still doing her hand, and it's the first time in over a year that reaching for my mother doesn't feel like reaching into broken glass.
