Page 85 of When We Believed in Mermaids

I swallow, looking away. Nod.

Thankfully, the server brings our appetizer just then, easing the mood at the table. It’s an envelope of thin, crispy pastry wrapped around tuna and a cooked egg that spills yellow onto the plate when I cut into it. The taste is sea and heat and comfort. “Ooh, that’s amazing.”

He smiles, closing his eyes. “This one is very good. I thought you would like it.”

I spear the fork into the egg yolk and a red paste that’s quite fiery, taste the two apart from the pastry. My tongue rejoices at the mix of heat and fat. “What’s the red?”

“Harissa.”

“It’s amazing.”

“It is such a pleasure to eat with you,” he says. “I think I would like your father, if it was he who gave you such passion.”

I nod. “Yes. And he would have liked you too, I think.”

“Is he gone?”

“Yes. He died in the earthquake.”

He waits, and I realize I didn’t even know I was taking a breath, bracing myself.

“The restaurant and the house were on a bluff above a cove, and when the earthquake hit, we were only a couple of miles from the epicenter. Both the house and the restaurant fell down the mountain. My dad was in the kitchen, which is where he probably most would have wanted to die.”

He swears under his breath. “Were you there?”

“I was in the house, but when it started, I ran out the front door. They always tell you to get out, so I ran out to the road. It knocked me down, and I just lay on my stomach with my hands over my head, waiting for the end.”

“Pobrecita.”He touches my back. “You must have been out of your mind with fear.”

“Yes and no. I was frightened, but I also knew”—I laugh without much humor—“because I was such a geek, that the shaking usually doesn’t last more than thirty seconds or so, and I just focused on the actual experience. You know, thinking about the amazing fact that the earth was moving against itself.”

His smile flashes.

“I did realize that this was a big one, and I started trying to estimate what it would be on the Richter scale—definitely a seven. Maybe even an eight, which would be super rare.”

“And were your estimates close?”

“They were.” The waiter approaches with our food, and I lean back to allow it to be set in front of us. “It actually only lasted fifteen seconds, officially, at six-point-nine, with seven hundred and forty-five aftershocks.”

The plates give off a grounding scent—a succulent roast chicken along with a big plate of vegetables, carrots studded with feta, a tomato salad, rice with lentils, and spinach. It smells of everything whole and homey in the world, and I barely notice the waiter taking away the empty dish, refilling our glasses, disappearing again.

“Allow me,” I say, reaching for the knife to cut and serve the chicken. Some for Javier, some for me. We dig into the vegetables, and then, as if we are puppets on the same string, we both put our hands in our lap and pause. Not a prayer but certainly a moment of gratitude. “It’s beautiful,” I breathe.

“Yes,” Javier agrees.

Across the table, my father sits down and plucks a tidbit of chicken from the plate, tastes it, nods happily.

We all dig in.

“When I was a boy, I liked disasters,” he says. “Pompeii, the Black Death, the Inquisition.”

“Cheerful subjects.” I savor a bit of carrot. “Do you remember the details?”

“Oh, sure. In seventy-nine AD, Vesuvius exploded with a force equal to a hundred thousand times the force of Nagasaki—”

“A hundred thousand?” I echo skeptically.

He holds up a hand in oath. “I swear. It sent stone and ash thirty kilometers into the air and killed two thousand people where they stood.”