Page 79 of Levi

“I’m right here. I cooked the picadillo.”

“You cooked it good. And you’re somewhere else.” She sits, unfolds her napkin, doesn’t look at me while she says it. “I haven’t seen this on you. Not for a business deal. A deal you bring home and put on the table for your father to be proud of. This,” she tips her chin at whatever she sees on my face, “this you’re carrying off somewhere alone. Who is it?”

“It’s the house in the Panhandle,” I say. “I’ve got a difficult listing.”

“The house,” my abuela repeats, in the tone she keeps for a story she isn’t buying. She says something to tía Rosa in Spanish, too fast for the kids, and the two of them laugh. I let them, because the alternative is answering, and I don’t have an answer that fits in this kitchen.

I keep seeing Levi sleeping outside on a deck chair so I could have the warm throw. Boots kicked off, one forearm over his face against the morning, too long for the chair. The shirt ridden up over his stomach, the long stretch of his legs crossed at the ankle. I know that picture in more detail than a man who only glanced has any right to.

None of that goes on my mother’s table next to the pernil. I take more rice I don’t want and turn it onto Mirta’s kids, and the meal rolls on over and around me. I let it carry me. It has my whole life.

But my mother’s got her eyes on me now, on and off, the rest of the night. She raised three of us. She knows the difference between tired from work and a head that’s been left in another room.

Late, the kids go down and the rum comes out, and the grown people settle into the part of the night where the stories get older. I step out onto the back porch, into the wet Miami dark, and call the phone I gave him.

He picks up on the second ring, like he was sitting with it in his hand.

“How did it go?” he asks.

“The deal closed,” I tell him.

“Course it did.” I can hear the waves behind him, the city behind me. “Did you get the price you wanted?”

“Full ask.”

“Knew it.” I can hear the grin in it. He’s genuinely happy for me and it warms me from the inside. “You’re having a hell of a week.”

“Yes, guess I am.” Inside, through the glass, my father says something and the room laughs at once. “I’m out at my parents’ house with my sisters and their kids. My mother made me cook. I’m standing outside because it’s too loud inside with them. You should hear it in there. My abuela spent an hour on the phone trying to win an argument with an old classmate.”

“Did she win?”

“She never loses. The other person dies first and she counts it as a win.”

He laughs. It carries down the line, and I stand there to keep it going. “What’d you make?” he says. “You said you’re cooking.”

“Picadillo. My mother won’t let anybody else near the meat.”

“Picadillo.” He repeats the word. “I don’t know what that is.”

“Ground beef, olives, raisins, the works. I’ll make it for you.” The silence on the line after it runs a little long.

“I’d like that. I’ll eat anything you want to cook. You’re a man of many talents.”

We talk for a while. Easier than we ever get in a room. A phone in the dark lets us say things we’d never say across a table. Then somewhere in the back half of it, he starts to say something.

“Dante,” he says. “Listen, I—” And stops.

I wait.

“There’s a—” He stops again. I can hear him breathing. He takes the run at it and pulls up short. Twice. Whatever it is, it’s big enough to have him by the throat.

I don’t push. I decided a while ago I wasn’t going to pry with him. You don’t pry a shut door. You wait by it or you leave it.

“Forget it,” he says finally, light, sliding off it. “It’s not important.”

“They’re still at it in there,” I say, watching through the glass. “They’ll sit at that table till two in the morning. Nobody wants to be the one who says good night first.”

“Sounds like the best problem a man could have.”