Avis insisted that the food was fine, but the salty, greasy meat unsettled her stomach. The waiter ignored everyone at their table but Hector.
Brian gleaned from his new bosses that to lead a civilized life in Miami, one had to buy in the Gables: apparently Coconut Grove was for artists and related “marginals,” Kendall for Colombians, Doral for Venezuelans, Hialeah for Cubans, Pinecrest for multichild suburban dullards, and beyond the (frightening, inscrutable) downtown, there were ominous “ethnic” regions with names like Overtown, Liberty City, and sad Little Haiti. PI&B helped Brian and Avis find and finance their gracious home ($104,000—an astronomical sum to Avis, nineteen years ago), and when Felice was born, Avis pushed her stroller through the streets, trying to get her bearings. She crossed neighborhoods filled with pillowy silence, where landscapers roamed around waving herbicide wands, where the rare matron walking her borzoi might offer an arch, provisional “Good morning.” Five blocks from their front door there were houses on the historic register, manses with titles, “Villa Tempesta,” “The San Esteban,” ivy-circled palm trees, secret gated communities, limestone entrances flanked by stone unicorns. And, everywhere, polished sedans with blacked-out windows, gliding by like ghosts.
One day, after a year and a half of living in Miami, she was again out pushing Felice on their daily walk. At the end of one block, some women gathered around the stroller. “Qué linda! Hola, muñeca!” the women cooed, patting Felice’s thighs, “Hola, gordita,” while Felice frowned into the sunlight: a gorgeous child. They were nannies and housekeepers: they lived in cottages behind their employers’ homes — some of these servants’ quarters bigger than Avis’s house. Avis smiled uneasily, nodding, straining for bits of comprehension. One of the women had a smooth, young face, her hair gathered in a glossy chignon at the nape of her neck. Avis remembers the woman’s curiosity — the way she seemed to regard Avis as a sort of exotic creature. Despite Felice’s pale skin and lighter eyes, Luma did not assume, like the others, that Avis was her nanny.
She became Avis’s first assistant — initially, more of a babysitter for the children — once they started school, she began helping Avis in the kitchen — washing dishes, crushing walnuts, chopping cherries, scraping vanilla beans, measuring and sifting flour. After she left, claiming snidely there would be less work at the Au Bon Pain, Avis went through a series of assistants. They talked to the children in Spanish; they helped Avis with the infinite tasks of running a home bakery. Some became her friends — though rarely confidantes. This was, as far as Avis could divine, the way people did it in Miami: they were friendly but reserved, confined mainly to the close orbits of relatives. While Avis’s kitchen was increasingly taken over by her bakery, the assistants brought in home-cooked dishes—picadillo, moros y cristianos, ropa vieja, pastelitos—beef crumbled or shredded, fried nearly crispy and tossed with dark spices, served with rice or bread or stuffed into flaking, downy pies that, Avis knew, had to be made with lard. They took Avis shopping, taught the kids torchy, breathless Cuban love songs like Bésame Mucho and Adoración. Avis had no extended family, no old ties to the area: they explained Miami to her, the intricacies of the Cuban community, the warring clans that owned the city, the class nuances of the Gables neighborhoods — the “Platinum Triangle,” the “bohemian North End.” Rarely did anyone work for her for more than a year or two — they left to get married or have their own children: or they tired of Avis’s imperious, Gallic approach to baking. Or Avis fired them, tired of “Cuban time,” “Miami time.” The entitled pouting and eye-rolling of formerly wealthy or spoiled women.
ON THE CORNER OF ALTON and Lincoln Roads, Avis feels wobbly, as if the ground is stirring very slightly beneath her feet. “You okay?” Nina calls through the passenger window.
Avis is barely aware of having moved from the car. She turns to Nina and lifts her lips into a smile, then turns back. As she starts down Lincoln Road, she tries not to hold the bakery box too high. The pedestrian mall is fluted with trees, a late-summer flush over the simple, old Art Deco buildings. A ruffle of awnings and brick red table umbrellas, planters spilling over with arthurium, ginger, hibiscus, blooms in decadent colors, vermillion, magenta, sapphire. Grand date palms line the center of the walkway, their emerald fronds like starbursts and water fountains. Orchids and bromeliads tumble from crates hanging over store displays or secreted in the branches of trees. Avis hunches her shoulders and lowers her head — she doesn’t have the reserves to take in this exuberance. The stores and shoppers appear blurry, then break into clarity as she gets closer, as if moving along the sides of a fishbowl. There are shopkeepers rinsing their storefronts with garden hoses and waiters setting out chairs; shirtless men strut along the sidewalk; elderly women in pearls and black cashmere window-shop beside young girls who each in some way remind Avis of Felice. Couples push double and triple baby strollers, some of the mothers are also extravagantly pregnant. Avis believes that these women deliberately avert their eyes.
Four — almost five — years of erratic visits — perhaps twelve visits in all. No, Avis corrects herself; she has not lost track after all. There have been eight visits to date, no more no less. She has seen her daughter exactly eight times since she turned thirteen.
By the door of a restaurant, a girl with long beige hair steps forward, pushing a menu at Avis. “We’re offering out-of-towner specials,” she chimes, then seems to detect something on Avis’s face and directs herself to the next pedestrian.
At last, Avis reaches the outdoor café table where she will await Felice. It takes all of her effort to stay clear-headed and calm. She notes that the usual waiter is there, an olive-skinned man with drowsy eyes, who once exclaimed, “She is here at last!” when Felice arrived an hour late. Avis sits at a table, feeling fluish, gripping the tin of precious cookies. Will Felice eat these? Avis charges such exorbitant prices for her little pastries that her son told her it was “shameful.” But she doesn’t take the shortcuts of professional bakeries — nothing is rushed, each batch is constructed of pure ingredients, no factory lard or chemical fillers or cheap flour. She thinks of herself as an artisan, each of her pastries as delicately constructed as a piece of stained glass. And she has discovered that the more she charges, the more the customers want.
She orders an iced tea and tells the waiter she needs more time with the menu. He returns with a basket of rolls, a tin of purple jam, a round, peach-colored plumeria blossom among the rolls. Avis sits back, scanning each face in the stream of shoppers. She tries to avoid her watch but catches a glimpse, involuntarily, when she lifts her water glass: 12:08. She lays one hand on top of the other on the tin and tries to steady them.