The Book of Broken Hearts (16 page)

Susana and I had been trying to instill order for twenty minutes, but so far, Emilio was wearing and eating more
dough than he was baking, and Samuel was playing a zombie game on his phone.

“Ooh, I like this girl, Emilio.” Susana laughed as she rearranged the kitchen to accommodate the new plan. “She’s smart. Knows you need discipline.”

He flopped into a chair next to Samuel at the kitchen table. Towering stacks of white bakery boxes dwarfed them both. “If you two are doing all the work and we’re sittin’ pretty over here, who’s smarter?”

Samuel high-fived him, but before they finished snickering, Susana was looming over them. “Back to work,
charlatánitos. Ahora!
” She held up a wooden spoon like a threat, and the two “little clowns” scattered into place.

“Trust me,” Samuel said when we’d finally lined up at our stations. “You gotta add grated chocolate. It’s the secret ingredient.”

“Grated chocolate?” Susana said. “This one thinks he’s high society over here!”

I laughed and dumped a bag of chips into the bowl. “Like we trust a guy wearing a pink Kiss the Cook apron anyway.”

“If it helps get me some sugar, I’ll wear it.” Samuel tugged at the ruffles running along his chest. “Takes a real man to rock pink,
mama
.”

“He givin’ you his ‘real man’ speech again?” Emilio tossed a pot holder at Samuel’s head. “Takes a real man to shut up and work.”

Eventually we found our groove. Susana had the radio on
low, some kind of salsa, and she hummed and shook her hips as she mixed the batter, pausing during commercial breaks to tell me about the fund-raiser.

“My summer school kids don’t get as much opportunity for trips like the kids do during the year,” she said. “So this time I ask the district, if I raise the money, can I take them?”

“Notice she didn’t ask me to go,” Emilio said. “I just got volunteered to do all the work.”

She shot him a mom-glare. “I already said you’re coming with us,
mijo
.”

“Yeah, to babysit.”

She reached behind me and swatted him with the dish towel again, all without missing a beat at the mixing bowl. “Anyway, if we sell all these cookies, the school will give us the bus and driver. I’m taking them to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe. I think it’ll be good for them. For this one, too, spending all day in that garage.” She nodded toward Emilio. “Señor Motocicleta could use some culture in his life, no?”

At that moment Mr. Motorcycle had his mouth open, catching gobs of dough that Samuel flung from the other side of the kitchen.

“Definitely,” I said, but Emilio was too busy goofing around to hear us, and as soon as the music returned, Susana was dancing and humming again.

“Update,” Samuel said through a mouthful of cookies. “Five hundred down, five hundred to go. Uh, not counting the ones I ate.”

“
Ay
, we’ll be here for three days,” Susana said. “Back to work,
niños
.”

“What are you guys making? It smells so awesome!”

We’d just started on cleanup when the girl appeared. She must’ve let herself in the front door, and now she flung herself at Emilio with glittery arms around his neck and a big glossy smooch right next to his lips.

“
Hola
, Rosette.” Susana didn’t make any moves to hug the girl. Instead, she stuck her dry hands back into the soapy sink water.

“We’re baking cookies for Ma’s school,” Emilio said. “Just finished.”

“Ooh, I want one!” She made puppy eyes and opened her mouth seductively.
Dios mío
. She was already prancing around the kitchen with her ginormous long hair and a handkerchief for a shirt. Now she was panting over our goods?

This girl was a walking health code violation!

Emilio handed her a plate with a few extras. “Help yourself.”

She hopped up on the counter and nibbled on the edges of a cookie, feet dangling and kicking the cupboards underneath. Her eyes finally locked on me.
“¿Quién es esta chica?”

“Soy Jude,”
I said.

“Esta es la novia de Emilio,”
Susana said through a polite smile. She gave me a wink that only I could see, and I knew she’d called me Emilio’s girlfriend on purpose.

Rosette’s eyebrows rose. I’d made an enemy for sure.

She looked me up and down again, then hopped off the counter. “I have to get home,” she told Emilio. “We hanging out tonight?”

He made a noncommittal grunt, but she leaned in for a hug anyway, fake-whispering in his ear. “See you later,
chillo
.”

Once the dishes were done, I rinsed the soap from my hands and asked Emilio to point me to the restroom.

I made my way down the long hall that joined the living room to the bathroom and back bedrooms. The walls were covered in photos, a monument to the lives of Susana’s sons, babies to teenagers to men.

I’d never
really
known Johnny or Miguel; I had only vague memories of their comings and goings, picking up my sisters for dates and dropping them off again. It was strange to see them on the wall now, growing up before my eyes: teddy bears, school pictures, fishing the Animas, graduations, dirt bikes, surfing off the coast of what was probably Puerto Rico.

I stopped short when I found a pair of familiar eyes gazing back at me from the past.

Lourdes, smiling in her yellow prom dress. Her arm was linked in Miguel’s.

My throat tightened. A few hours after the photo was taken, Miguel left her on the dance floor, crying and bewildered.

There were no pictures of Celi, and I was grateful. Maybe Susana removed them when she heard I was coming over today. Maybe she removed them five years ago.

Just like at home, there weren’t many pictures of the siblings together. But Emilio looked a lot like his brothers. They all had that same flirty attitude, the dimpled smile that was more like a dare than a greeting. There was no denying their charm.

The bathroom was the last door on the left. There were four other open doors on the way, and I poked my head into the first—Susana’s bedroom. It was immaculate and covered in flowers—on the bedspread, on the curtains, in a vase on the dresser. The walls were yellow and looked recently painted, and I remembered the matching paint splotches on Emilio’s shorts, the ones he’d picked at after our driving lesson. In the far corner, a glass saint candle flickered on a short bookshelf. The rest of the shelves were covered with dried flowers, framed pictures, and toys—cars and planes, LEGO blocks. It looked like a shrine, and suddenly I felt like a trespasser. I moved onto the next room.

It was definitely a boy’s room—two, maybe, because there were bunk beds—but there wasn’t much to it. A few swimsuit models tacked to the walls, textbooks on the shelves. An old computer and cables collected dust on the desk, and a model airplane hung from the ceiling, but that was about it.

The next room was a cache for all the stuff that didn’t have a place anymore: sewing machine table, bolts of fabric,
arts and crafts supplies, books, stacks of CDs and videos, tubes of wrapping paper and ribbons, dresses in dry cleaner bags, cardboard boxes of who knows what. It was a lot like our storage barn.

In other words, normal. Homey. Regular, nonevil people stuff.

I inched into the last room, knowing it had to be Emilio’s. My stomach got fizzy at the idea of seeing his personal space, where he slept at night, where he woke each morning. I hoped he hadn’t left anything gross—e.g., Rosette’s lacy underwear—on the floor.

His scent enveloped me—the leather jacket draped over the desk chair, the fabric softener his mother must’ve used on all his clothes. His room was messy but in a totally cute way—blankets thrown haphazardly on the bed, a stack of folded T-shirts toppling sideways from the desk. His shelves held old motorcycle manuals, and the walls—instead of the babes on bikes I’d imagined—were covered with maps. All different colors, different styles, some laminated, some with folds and staples from magazines. The one over his desk had a series of red thumbtacks that stretched from Blackfeather to California, looping in and out of towns and cities from the mountains to the sea.

His road trip route. It had to be.

I crept in for a closer look and imagined what it would be like to ride on the back of his bike, see the road with him. It was a silly fantasy, one that would never leave this room, but
for a moment my arms and legs buzzed with anticipation, and I swear I felt the wind in my hair.

Below the map in a silver frame on the desk, a photograph caught my eye. Two boys, both around ten or eleven, maybe. They had their arms around each other, and there was a huge lizard thing—one of them dangled it by the tail. The other one was Emilio—those dimples were a dead giveaway.

They were covered in mud, totally soaked. It reminded me of summers near the river, all the trouble Zoe and I would get into digging for worms and letting the ground squirrels eat our trail mix.

“That’s Emilio and his cousin.”

I jumped at Susana’s voice. “Sorry. I didn’t . . . I was looking for the bathroom and I just . . . I saw the maps and the picture.”

Susana came into the room and took the frame from my hands. She rubbed the glass with her apron and stared at it a moment before she spoke again, her fingers lightly stroking their faces.

“They were supposed to be raking leaves,” she said. “I promised them ten dollars each just so I could have some time alone in the house. Imagine my surprise when they came back with this little dragon. And they look like they got into a mud wrestling match.” She laughed. “
¡Ay Bendito!
I almost had a heart attack.”

“Did you let them keep it?”

“Only to take the picture. It jumped out of their hands and ran away. I said, good riddance! Did they listen to me? No.
They chased it down again. I had to tell them it was poisonous. Just a little white lie, right?”

I smiled. “How old are they here?”

“Emilio is ten and Danny is twelve.” She shook her head. “They were always wild, those boys. Emilio was the worst—that kid hated being told what to do. He was packing his own lunch and walking to school by himself in the first grade, and he dragged Danny around everywhere he went,
pobrecito
. Always getting him into trouble.” She set the frame back on Emilio’s desk, adjusting it until it was exactly where it belonged. “Don’t tell him this, but I used to follow them in the car to make sure they got there safe.”

“Sounds like Emilio,” I said. “He’s so stubborn. Oh—he’s really good with the bikes, though. I just mean that he’s . . . you know. Independent.”

“
Sí
. Can’t tie that one down for more than five minutes, that’s for sure. Always had one foot out the door, just like his Papi. Ah, but we love them anyway. It would be easier if we didn’t, but what can you do?”

All Emilio had ever said about his father was that he lived in Puerto Rico, that it was kind of a weird situation. I’d never heard anything about Danny, either, and I wondered if they were still close, or if Danny had moved away like Emilio’s father and brothers. I wanted to ask Susana, but she seemed lost in her own memories. I held my tongue. No family was immune to heartbreak, and it wasn’t my business to go mucking around in someone else’s.

Susana tugged playfully on my ponytail. “Okay,
cariño
. Let’s go check on them before they eat all our hard work.”