Page 74 of Dial F for Finance

She purses her lips, considering. “He can try. But I’ve already figured him out.”

“How so?”

“He has the same tell you do.” She looks up at me, eyes dancing as I look at her in question.

“I have a tell?”

She nods. “When you’re messing with someone, the corner of your mouth twitches.” She reaches up and lightly touches the edge of my mouth with her thumb. She does it so gently I almost don’t feel it, until her hand lingers at my jaw. “See?”

“Show me again,” I say, because I want her hand back there, and she does, and this time the touch is more deliberate—a thumb grazing the cut of my jaw, her palm just under my chin.

I know she’s aware the whole extended family is watching from the kitchen, but she doesn’t break my gaze.

“You’re doing it now,” she says, very soft, and somewhere behind her my mother is sighing like she’s been waiting a decade for this precise spectacle.

It would be completely appropriate to pull her in and kiss her, but I don’t. Not here. Instead, I put my hand over hers at my chin and turn my face to press my lips to the palm of her hand. “Come on, sweetheart. We’ve got a dinner to help get to the table.”

The kitchen only gets louder as dinner comes together. My mother has Jenna elbow-deep in a bowl of something wet and sticky. I hover near the door, beer in hand, and watch as the three matriarchs circle her, feeding her the way they’ve fed everyone since time immemorial.

Jenna glances at me occasionally, checking I’m still here. But she doesn’t cry for help.

Instead, she lets them teach her. I watch her posture adapt—shoulders looser, hands moving with their own confidence, matching the energy in the room. She doesn’t back away even when my mom corrects her technique.

On the third, “no, like this, watch,” I expect a mutiny, but Jenna just holds up her hands and grins, covered in dough to the wrists. She’s magnificent.

Every table is full by the time dinner starts. There are, by rough headcount, twenty-three people inside the house and another four in the backyard, plus two neighbor kids who show up whenever they please. A population density that would be illegal in most states.

The long table is set with a spread obscene even by Cruz standards. Lechón and pastelón hold the center, flanked by arroz congrí, yellow rice, yuca slick with garlic, fried plantains, salads in glass bowls, at least five kinds of beans, and whatever happened in the slow cooker that’s been at the center of the table as a kind of edible mascot since before I can remember.

I direct Jenna to a seat next to me. Dustin takes the chair on her other side and immediately starts dishing his favorite things onto a plate for her.

“Jenny,” he says. “Do you eat pork?” She doesn’t even answer before he loads three slices onto her plate, then some yellow rice, and then corrects her on the best beans. “The pink ones are the only real ones. Everything else is fake.”

Jenna grins. “I’ll trust your expert opinion.” She takes the pork, the rice, the beans—she doesn’t leave a single thing untouched—and settles in like she’s not standing trial at a table crowded with almost everyone I’ve known since the day I was born. My chest does a weird, elastic thing where it gets too tight and too loose at the same time. I’m so absurdly proud of her I want to pick her up and carry her around the block on my shoulders.

Halfway into the first plate, Abuela Carmen lifts a hand at the far end. She’s got the air of a judge deliberating. “Jenna. What part of Puerto Rico is your family from?”

Jenna finishes chewing before she answers. “Queens,” she says, with the deadpan delivery of the century.

Abuela Carmen looks at her for a second, then bursts out laughing, a dry, barking sound that tells everyone at the table she approves. “She’s funny, Nicky. Very sharp.” She points at Jenna with her fork. “Eat. You’re too skinny. You’ll never survive the winters.”

Jenna laughs and eats some more.

The conversation rolls from there. In my family, it’s less a dialogue and more a competitive sport—trading stories, talking shit, passing plates, calling out anyone who tries to leave early. Jenna holds her own, jumping in with a few jokes and even more deadpan observations, and by the time the pastelón is circulating, Mateo’s toddler is back and ends up half on her lap, half on the chair, and she keeps talking to Dustin over his head while calmly preventing him from claiming her fork to use as a weapon.

I watch her, loving every second of this. It’s so rare to see her with her guard down that I want to bottle this moment up and treasure it always.

My mother catches me watching.

She lifts one eyebrow.

I bounce a shoulder as if to say, I’m head over heels for the woman, what else do you want me to do?

Her expression softens.

Then my father starts with the stories, because, well, he’s my father and he loves to entertain.

“No, no, listen,” he says, already laughing. “This kid, eight years old⁠—”