“What’s the deal with her?” Eduardo asked. “She the housekeeper?”
“Of course not.” Avis pulled out a tray of scallop-shaped molds for madeleines. “I don’t think,” she added quietly, pouring batter into her molds.
Eduardo didn’t speak for a long moment. “Haitians were the first ones — you know — to throw a revolution, kick out the colonizers.” He lifted his chin, apparently at the neighbor. “Those kidnapped Africans — they’d adapted to Haiti but they never forgot who they were — they knew they were free people.”
She slammed the cookie molds on the counter, settling the dough. “Huh.” She set those aside, then stooped to pull a ring of strawberry génoise from the lower oven.
“Though, of course, it’s kind of funny…”
She glanced over, took in the slight asymmetry to his face, flattened lower lip, shadowy outlines of the tear troughs beneath his eyes. “What?”
“Well. Just. Here you are, still a slave to the French.”
Avis straightened, hands on her hips. “I work for myself. That’s hardly slavery.”
“Hey, we all choose our own masters.” He turned to the window. “Have you seen anything magic going on over there yet?”
She laughed and placed the springform pans into the cooling rack, bits of parchment lining jutting up like feathers around the edges. On the top rack is a cooled and decorated seven-layered opéra cake. Her client — the Peruvian ambassador — had requested a “tropical” theme for a dinner party dessert. Avis had based the decoration on the view through the kitchen window, re-creating in lime, lemongrass, and mint frostings the curling backyard flora, curving foliage shaped like tongues and hearts, fat spines bisecting the leaves.
Eduardo edged closer. “You don’t believe it?”
She began pouring chocolate pastilles into the bowl of her double boiler. “I thought you said voodoo was just another type of religion.”
“It is. Religion with extenuating circumstances.” He leaned over the stove.
“Uh-huh.” Avis adjusted the flame.
Eduardo moved to another corner, trying to get out of the way. “Let me tell you something. About ten years ago? I was a production assistant for a crew that was filming on Haiti. It was supposed to be a documentary called Flowering Heaven—about home gardens in the Caribbean. I just went to hang out on the beach. Anyway, when we were there, we met all kinds of people who went to witches — like, instead of doctors? They had curses broken and got cured from all kinds of weird diseases and problems. We met people who used those little dolls, and spell-casters…”
Avis hummed and stirred the melting chocolate, watching it turn black and glossy as it liquefied, seeding it with bits of chopped pastilles. “Oh right,” she murmured. “And the people they cursed, they’d get weird aches and pains, right?”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Hey, you really think there’s an explanation for everything?” His voice was intent and confiding. “You think the world is only what you can see and feel?”
Avis dipped the tip of her spatula into the melted chocolate and brought it close to her lips, checking the heat. “Our senses tell a lot more than we realize.”
“All I know is we saw things there…” He shakes his head. “All kinds of people said they’d attracted their husbands and wives with charms.”
“Sure, love potions.” She scraped a few more bits of chopped chocolate into the liquid to bring down the temperature. “Do you know what I do for a living?”
“One man told me he woke up in the morning with this woman’s face in his mind. He’d never seen her before in his life, but he became obsessed with finding her. It turned out she lived miles away, in another town. She’d seen him once, at a market, and made a love charm to call him to her. A few days later, he was knocking at her door.”
Avis looked up at the wobbly reflections in the stainless steel cabinets lining the walls. Sometimes when she baked, she thought she caught sight of some odd movement in the corner of her eyes — but it was always this reflection flashing from surface to surface. “So how did this guy feel about that? About the fact that she’d used a charm and tricked him into it?”
Eduardo shrugged. “They got married. He loved her. I don’t think anyone particularly cared how it happened.”
STANLEY IS GOING ON about work, how they might have to expand — the property developers circling Homestead like vultures — a reproachful look at his father. She observes the formal way he holds his cup on a saucer — letting everyone know that he too is a guest in this house. His voice has a buzzing tonality that irritates her. Makes it hard to listen to him: buzz, buzz, buzz. Whenever they visit him at the market, she’s noticed his customers and employees hang on his words as if he were some sort of saint or the head of a cult. People tell her: “Your son is amazing, Mrs. Muir. How did you do it?” She rubs her thumb over her knuckles, listening to Brian making chitchat, quizzing them gently. Nieves crosses her arms, lets her head tip back, watching Brian.
“When did you two start seeing each other?” Brian asks.
The girl smiles. “Seeing each other?”
Stanley takes her hand. “Actually, Dad, Nieves and I are living together.”
Brian gives a sort of huff at the same time that Avis feels something tighten, a bone pressing against her heart. “You’re living together?” he asks.
Nieves’s crossed leg bobs up and down. Stanley has an odd, guilty expression now, his cheeks flushed. “She just moved in. This month.”
“To your apartment?” Brian is openly astonished. Stanley lives above the market in a bleak one-bedroom in downtown Homestead. Attached to the apartment is a small studio he uses as overflow for the market’s storeroom. Brian and Avis used to joke about Stanley being married to his work. How quickly things change, Avis thinks. Brian squeezes her limp hand. “Now, but don’t you think you kids—”
“We’re having a baby,” Nieves interrupts.
“What?” Avis is breathless. “You mean someday?” But of course — it rushes in on Avis — she doesn’t mean “someday.” At last Avis understands what she’s been seeing all along — the blue shadows under the girl’s eyes and her puffy face. Avis turns to Stanley — who is staring at Nieves — and it’s like peeling back a series of transparencies. There are the sloping bones of his adult face; there is the sugar-milk skin of Stanley at four. “Stanley?”
Stanley lowers his gaze to the floor, forearms balanced on his knees. He’s the picture of remorse and Avis feels an almost pleasurable impulse to scold him. She reminds herself, he isn’t much younger than she’d been, barely twenty-seven, pregnant with him. “Obviously the timing isn’t the greatest,” Stanley mutters. “With the business taking on all this new debt, plus the tax hike…”
“How pregnant, or, I mean — far along — are you?” Brian asks Nieves. Avis hears a bounce in his voice. “Are you taking folic acid? Have you seen a doctor?”
Folic acid! Now Avis reaches for her husband’s hand. She wants to protect him. Nieves looks at him warily. She’s dressed in low-rise jeans, shiny sandals with just a filament of leather over the toes, a satiny, clinging top that looks like underwear, and a pair of sparkling loop earrings. “I’m probably due in the winter I guess.”
“It was pretty, you know, unexpected,” says Stanley, as if he’s learning all of this for the first time. “We’re still figuring things out.”
“It’s marvelous!” Brian blurts; he turns to Avis: his eyes are damp. “We think it’s wonderful, of course,” he says. “Congratulations, you two.”