She pestered him until one Sunday morning they drove out to the coast, stopping at the first market they passed to buy pan dulce and hot chocolate. The clouds hadn’t burned off and it started to drizzle, so they stayed in the car and just drove around. He said he was going to take her down “memory lane.” He pointed out where he went to school, where he used to play soccer, the playground where he got his first kiss, yet these were all the things she had shown him in Woodland, as if he were simply repeating her memories and pointing.
But then he would throw in stuff such as, “That’s the alley where we jumped my cousin Rafa,” and laugh. “In high school, I used to deal from that apartment right there.”
“Stop playing,” she said.
Then he drove to the outskirts of the city and his tone become more somber: “We used to live in a trailer out here on the farm where my parents worked, and my dad, he would walk home from the bar every night. And one night he didn’t come home, so my mom went looking for him. She found him dead on the side of the road. A hit-and-run. Can you believe that?”
“I’m so sorry!” she said. “I didn’t know.”
But then Vicente began laughing and she thought he was teasing her again.
“Don’t do that!” And she slapped him on the arm. “That’s not even remotely funny.”
She assumed that after driving around they were going to end up at his house and she was going to meet his family. But after circling around a picturesque central plaza with a kiosk, he took the main road out of town and got back on the 101 heading north.
“Aren’t we going to visit your family?”
“My family?” He chuckled. “You don’t want to do that.”
“Do what? Meet them? Of course I do. If it’s your family.” Then she stopped herself. They had only been dating a few months. Maybe he wasn’t ready for that step. “All right,” she finally said. “No pressure.”
Before getting too far, they pulled over at a roadside fruit stand and she picked up a basket of strawberries. “I know these are your favorite,” she said. She took a strawberry out of the basket and went to put it in his mouth.
“What makes you say that?” he asked, backing away.
“Uh, if it’s not your favorite fruit, why do you have a tattoo of one on your back?”
The first time they had hooked up, she noticed a tattoo of a strawberry near the base of his neck. It was so delicate that she almost laughed. It was sweet, and so like him too, like a stamp on his taut skin.
He chuckled. “Oh, yeah, that’s right. I forgot.”
She laughed too, and attempted again to place the strawberry in his mouth. “Open up,” she said.
“Perhaps it’d be wise to wash those first,” he said.
She had already eaten half the basket. “Whatever, live a little.”
A few weeks later, out with her girlfriends, they got on the topic of things they found odd or gross about their lovers. When it was Marcela’s turn, her friends joked that they should just skip her because Vicente was clearly a gift from God. She wanted to share something so she told them about his strawberry tattoo. “Isn’t that weird?” she said.
Her friends laughed politely and said it was “adorable,” but one of them asked, “Isn’t he from Watsonville?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I mean, I think that’s a gang thing. In Watsonville it’s the strawberry, in Salinas it’s a freaking lettuce head. Somewhere else it’s an artichoke. My students, I swear, they teach me the randomest shit.”
Marcela tried to laugh it off. The idea that Vicente’s tattoo was gang-affiliated seemed so ridiculous that she didn’t intend to give it any further thought. But later that same night, she went home, poured herself another drink, and googled variations of “beautiful thugs” and “hot gangsters.” She found the results entertaining if nothing else.
It was her own romantic history that caused her worry. It was lined with two kinds of men: machistas who infuriated her, and one harmless white guy whom she eventually grew bored of. She had married the latter, but had suffered the torture of plenty of the former. Vicente, she thought, was a departure for her. Finally she had learned from her mistakes. She wasn’t doomed to repeat herself. Didn’t she deserve someone beautiful and kind with an air of mystery?
Marcela heard a loud pounding at the hotel door followed by, “Police department, open up!” She looked over at Vicente, who hadn’t stirred in an hour. The towels of ice remained covering his face. The pounding on the door resumed and she rushed to answer. Two officers filled the doorway.
“We’re looking for Vicente Cuellar.”
“Yes, he’s here,” she said. “But he’s sleeping.”
“I’m Officer Fernandez. This is Officer Halston. If you don’t mind, we’d like to ask him a few questions about the incident in the downstairs bar. If we can just wake him up, we won’t be long.”
Marcela hesitated in the doorway. The officers couldn’t see the bed from where they were standing. Were they really asking her permission?
“Let them in. I’m up,” Vicente called from inside the room.
Marcela stood aside and the officers walked in. As soon as they saw Vicente’s face, they looked at each other, then pulled out their pocket notepads and began writing.
“Well, he sure got you good,” Officer Fernandez said.
“You should’ve seen the other guy,” Vicente quipped.
The officer looked up from his notepad. “Uh, we did. He’s in handcuffs right now. And he’s fine.”
Vicente chuckled. “It was a joke. Look, officers, let the guy go. It was just a misunderstanding. We were drinking. Tempers flared. I said some things I shouldn’t have—”
“And what did you say, exactly?” Officer Fernandez cut in. “The other guy just said, ‘Stuff.’”
“It doesn’t really matter. All I can say is that I’m over it. We got it out of our systems. I’m sober, he’s sober. No need to make it a bigger deal than it is.”
“Well, you see, we’re staring at your face and it looks like a pretty big deal. If a man is capable of doing what he did to you, then he might be capable of doing that to someone else. It makes us feel like we’re not doing our jobs.”
“I appreciate what you’re saying, sir, but see, the issue is—” Vicente stopped. “I thought I recognized you, Fernandez.”
The officer looked up from his notepad. “What was that?”
“It’s me, Cuellar. You used to be a guard in juvie, right?”
The officer looked closer. His face brightened. “Holy shit. It’s you! I thought that name sounded familiar! What the hell, man! It’s been years.”
“I know, I know,” Vicente said. “You gave up on the little homies or what? After the real bad guys now?”
“That was just my first job. Jesus, I was barely a kid in there myself.”
Fernandez’s demeanor had relaxed completely. He shook his head in amazement and turned to his partner. “This kid ruled the hall. You would’ve thought he was Tony Montana.” He turned back to Vicente. “So you teach college now? That’s what they were saying downstairs in the lobby. I couldn’t believe the other guy was a teacher. Looked like a thug to me. And now you, I can’t believe it — they letting every banger go to college now? But that’s good, Cuellar. I’m proud of you.”
Vicente nodded his head. “Look, that guy downstairs. Me and him are cool. We both got pasts, and today they caught up with us. We both spent too many years working to get where we are right now. I wouldn’t want to mess that up for him over a little skirmish.”