Page 85 of The Secret Dinner

“I don’t pry into my friends’ relationships, Mom.” I was blunt enough that she didn’t push it further.

“And what about you? Are you dating anyone?”

“I’m very much single but doing just fine.”

“Jorge seems happy,” she said, calling Piglet by his first name, as she usually did. She let out a sigh, lowering her voice as if telling a secret. “Well … nothing against her, but … don’t you think he and this Cora make a bit of an odd couple?”

“An odd couple?”

“Oh, Dante, you know, he’s a big boy, and she’s such a bombshell. It just seems a little…”

“Cora’s amazing,” I said. “She’s a published poet, and she works at a restaurant.”

“I guess life really is full of surprises. I never would have imagined that Miguel, always such a good boy, would be gone so young, and Jorge, with all his problems, would be sitting pretty.” She rested her elbows on the table, leaning in closer to whisper. “Is he still religious?”

“Yeah.”

Her face tensed up. My mother didn’t care at all for Piglet’s obsession with Bishop Lygia, how he intentionally ignored that the woman had been his late mother’s mortal enemy.

“What about all his trauma? Do you think he’s been able to work through it?”

“Piglet’s strong, Mom. He’s found his own way to overcome it.”

I didn’t tell her that my friend spent most of his life living in an imaginary world, or that I kept the letters he periodically wrote to his mother in my drawer.

“That whole thing was so hard, Dante. I’m glad to hear that Jorge’s gotten past it,” she said with a sigh. “People spread so many horrible lies about his mother back then. I get goose bumps just thinking about it…”

I could tell she wanted to tell me something but was waiting for me to ask.

“What are you talking about, Mom?”

“Before the fire, I mean … a few months before … somebody called in a report against the brothel and the police opened an investigation. The only reason I know all this is because the detective was a friend of your father’s.” She fixed her eyes on me, gulping down the rest of her coffee. “Lots of truck drivers would stop there, of course. And some never left.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, apparently Madam Adélia and the other prostitutes used to kill the truck drivers and steal their cargo to resell,” she whispered. “Some really did disappear, and the police found their trucks stripped bare.”

“I’ve never heard that story.”

“The whole town was talking about it, but you were still so little back then.”

“It’s got to be a lie … a group of women killing a bunch of burly, muscly truck drivers?”

“They said the women wore these platinum teeth, you know? Then when they’d go to bed with the poor guy, they’d bite his jugular. Others kept razor blades under their tongues, they’d act like they were going in for a kiss, then slice his throat. Some even put rat poison inside their vaginas. Then, when the man went down there with his mouth … well, you know … they were poisoned to death.”

“If that’s all true, why didn’t they shut down the brothel? Why didn’t they arrest Piglet’s mom?”

“They couldn’t prove anything. They never found the missing truck drivers’ bodies.”

“So, sounds like it was nothing more than a rumor…”

“I’m not so sure. Not long after the rumors started, one of the prostitutes got into a fight with Jorge’s mother and she started telling everyone that it was all true, that Madam Adélia used to serve the truck drivers for dinner at the brothel. Anything to get rid of the bodies.”

I went pale, and my mother gripped my hands.

“Now you understand why it wasn’t easy having Jorge live here with us,” she went on. “It always used to make me nervous seeing him overweight like that, I’d think about how that poor little boy might have been eating human flesh all those years, not knowing it. He was just a child, can you imagine? It’s awful, isn’t it? Just awful.”

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