“Oh, thank you, thank you. You must tell me everything. You’re okay? Tell me—you’re okay?”
“Juan Manuel, I’m fine. I’m very well indeed.”
“Good,” he says, exhaling. “Very good.” He grabs my shoes and rubs at the soles as if a genie were going to materialize from them. His aggressive polishing mercifully concludes and he puts my shoes and the cloth away in the closet. Then he hugs me. I’m so surprised by this sudden display of affection that my arms flail out and I forget that the correct thing to do is to hug back. Just when I realize this, he lets go.
“What was that for?” I ask.
“For getting home safe,” he says. “Come. To the kitchen. I prepared a small dinner for us. I tried to have hope, Molly, but I was worried. I thought maybe the police would come and take me away or maybe you would never come back. I had bad, bad thoughts about if they…” He trails off.
“If they what?” I ask.
“Rodney and his men,” he says. “If they…hurt you the way they hurt me.”
I feel the room tilt thirty degrees at the very thought, but I breathe deeply to settle myself.
“Come,” Juan Manuel says.
I follow him to the kitchen, where he’s laid out a spread. It’s the leftovers from the Olive Garden, put together beautifully on plates for each of us. He’s even lain Gran’s black-and-white-checkered tablecloth for additional Italian ambience. The effect is charming. Our tiny kitchen nook is transformed into a scene on a tourist postcard. It feels as though I’m in a dream, and it takes me a moment to recover my voice.
“This looks so lovely, Juan Manuel,” I manage to say. “Do you know that for the first time in a long time, I think I can eat a full meal?”
“We eat, and you tell me everything,” he says.
We sit down together, but no sooner than he’s seated does he spring to his feet once more. “Oh, I forgot,” he says.
He hurries to the living room and returns with one of Gran’s candlesticks and a matchbox. “Can we light this?” he asks. “I know it’s special, but today is special, too, no? Today, they catch the right man?”
“Yes, they drove him away in a police car,” I say. “And I hope this means good things for both of us.” Even as the words leave my lips, doubt creeps in. One thing is to have hope; another thing is to trust that all will end the way it should—for Juan Manuel, and for me.
He places the candle between us. Just as we’re about to pick up our forks, my phone rings in my pocket and I practically jump out of my chair. It’s Charlotte. Thank goodness.
“Charlotte?” I say. “This is Molly. Molly Gray.”
“Yes,” she answers. “I know. Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m quite well. Thank you for asking. I’m here at home with Juan Manuel and we are about to take a Tour of Italy.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s not important. Can you tell me how things went inside the hotel? I saw it happen, from the coffee shop, but did the plan work? Did they catch Rodney in flagrante?”
“Things went very well, Molly. Listen, I can’t talk much now. I’m at the police station. Detective Stark wants me in her office. You and Juan Manuel stay right there, okay? Dad and I will be your way as soon as we can. This will probably take a couple of hours. And I think you’ll be very pleased with the results.”
“Okay, yes. Thank you, Charlotte,” I say. “Give my regards to Detective Stark.”
“You want me to…are you sure?”
“There’s no reason to be impolite.”
“Okay, Molly. I’ll say hello from you.”
“Please tell her I can read nods.”
“You can what?”
“Just say that, please, exactly that. And thank you.”
“Okay,” Charlotte says. Then she ends the call. I put my phone away.
“I’m terribly sorry for the interruption. I’ll have you know that it’s not my usual practice to take calls during dinner. I don’t intend to make a habit of it.”
“Molly, you worry too much about ‘this is right’ and ‘this is not right.’ I just want to know what Charlotte said.”
“They caught him in the act. Rodney.”
“En flagrante delito?”
“In flagrante, yes.”
A smile spreads across Juan Manuel’s face and into his dark-brown eyes. Gran once told me that a real smile happens in the eyes, something I never really understood until right now.
“Molly, I never had a chance before to speak with just you, to say sorry. I never wanted you to be involved in any of this.”
I have picked up my fork, but I immediately put it down.
“Juan Manuel,” I say, “you tried to keep me out of this. You even tried to warn me.”
“Maybe I should have tried harder. Maybe I should have told the police everything. The problem is I don’t trust the police. When they look at people like me, sometimes all they see is bad. And not all police are good, Molly. How can you tell who is who? I worried if I talked about the drugs and the hotel, maybe things would get even worse—for me and for you.”
“Yes,” I say. “I understand. I’ve had my own troubles telling who is who.”
“And Rodney and Mr. Black,” he continues. “I no longer cared if they killed me. But my mother? My family? I was so scared they’d hurt them. And I was scared they’d hurt you too. I thought, if I just take the pain, if I stay quiet, maybe no one else gets hurt.”
His wrists are on the table, not his elbows. I’m struggling to focus on his face because all I can see are the scars on his forearms, some healed over and one or two still raw.
I point to Juan Manuel’s arms. “Was it him?” I ask. “Did Rodney do that to you?”
“Not Rodney,” he says. “His friends. The big ones. But Rodney gave the orders. Mr. Black burns Rodney, so Rodney burns me. This is what I get for complaining, for saying I don’t want to do Rodney’s dirty work. And for having a family I love when he doesn’t have one.”
“It’s so wrong, what they did to you.”
“Yes,” he says. “It is. And what they did to you.”
“Your arms. They look sore,” I say.
“They were. But today, they’re okay. Today, I feel a little bit better. I don’t even know what will happen to me, but I still feel good because Rodney is caught. And we have a candle to light. And so there’s hope.” He takes a match out of the matchbox and lights the candle. Then he says, “We shouldn’t let the food get cold. Let’s eat.”
We pick up our forks, and we enjoy the meal. I have ample time, not only to chew the correct number of times but also to savor each and every bite. Between bites, I recount every detail of the afternoon—how I sat at the coffee shop, how I waited and worried, how I saw myself on TV, how the cars screeched to a halt, how it felt to see Rodney’s head being unceremoniously pushed into the backseat of a cruiser. When I tell him about the woman at the coffee shop recognizing me from the news, he starts to laugh out loud. For a moment, I’m frozen. I can’t tell if he’s laughing at me or with me.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
“She thought you were a murderer! In her shop. Drinking tea and eating a cake!”
“It wasn’t a cake,” I say. “It was a muffin, a raisin-bran muffin.”
He laughs even harder at that, and I don’t know why, but what becomes clear is that he’s laughing with me. Suddenly, I find myself laughing, too, laughing at a raisin-bran muffin without even knowing why.
After dinner, Juan Manuel starts clearing the dishes.
“No,” I say. “You were very kind to serve dinner. I’ll clean up.”
“Not fair,” he replies. “You think you’re the only one who likes to clean? Why do you take away my joy?”
He smiles again in that way of his, and he grabs Gran’s apron from behind the kitchen door. It’s blue-and-pink paisley with flowers, but he doesn’t seem to care. He loops it over his head and hums to himself as he ties the string. I haven’t seen that apron on anyone in so long; even Gran herself was too ill to use it in her final months. And to see it become three-dimensional, to see a body give it shape again…I don’t know why, but it makes me look away.