The Book of Broken Hearts (2 page)

I peered into the garage. Guys were stationed at different motorcycles and dirt bikes, most of them dressed in jeans and raggedy T-shirts, bare arms coated in grime. The
conversation was muffled by the glass, but their easy banter was unmistakable.

Duke thumbed through the glass at a dark-blue bike, most of which had been stripped to its steel bones. A guy knelt before it—a little younger than the rest, maybe, but equally sure of himself. One arm was deep inside the bike, the floor around him littered with tools and rags.

“That’s him in the bandanna,” Duke said. “Good kid, knows his stuff. But like I said, barely got his training wheels off.”

“Doesn’t look like a kid to me.” I subtly shifted my hips. Damn. These cutoffs were on a
mission
; my ability to concentrate was becoming seriously compromised. “Besides, we don’t care how old he is. Just that he can do the work for cheap.”

Papi nodded, but his eyes were still far away.

Duke tapped on the glass and waved the young mechanic forward.

The guy got to his feet, wiped his hands on a rag that hung from his back pocket. His head dipped low as he opened the door and I couldn’t see his eyes. Just stubble. Dimples. Scar across the bottom of his chin. His arms were etched with jagged white scars too.

Dangerous stuff, this biker gig.

“How long you been working on these bikes?” Duke asked him.

“Eh . . . forever?”

“
Here
, smart-ass. For me.”

“Like, two or three months, I guess. Why?” All his attention was on the boss, but my skin tingled like I was being watched. Not in a creepy way—a familiar one. Like maybe I’d seen this guy before, but with the bandanna and the grime, I couldn’t place him. Definitely not from school or summer theater. Someone’s cousin, maybe?

“Not ready, junior.” Duke was totally baiting the poor guy. “Not for a sixty-one hog.”

“You
kidding
me? A sixty-one?” He finally turned to face me, a grin stretching across his face. His dimples were kind of disarming full-on, but I stood my ground as he looked me over.

My skin heated under the scrutiny. I really wished Zoe had helped me prepare this morning. I didn’t even like Van Halen, and she would’ve smartly pointed that out.

Dressing the part? Really, Jude. Someday your theatrics will be your undoing.

“Sixty-one panhead,” I finally said.

His eyebrows jumped in either surprise or appreciation. Maybe both. “You
ride
?”

“No. It’s—”

“She’s mine,” Papi said, his mind returning from its little side trip. “And as far as I’m concerned, if you want the job, it’s yours.”

The mechanic started yammering at his boss in Spanish, deep and low. Puerto Rican, the accent was, faster and less meandering than the Argie stuff I’d grown up with.
He was trying to convince Duke that he could do the job. Needed the
dinero
for some big bike trip this summer.

“Gentlemen,” I said. The mechanic looked up at me again, but I kept my eyes on Duke. “We’re not asking for a museum piece. We just need to get this thing rebuilt. So if he can help—”

“I can help.” He turned back to Duke, his scarred forearms flexing as he gripped the counter. “I rebuilt my own hog last year.”

“That’s an eighty-seven, kid. Sportster besides.”

He shrugged. “Aside from the kickstart, mechanics ain’t changed much.”

“Duke, please,” I said. “We
have
to get this thing running.”

Without permission, those on-call waterworks pricked my eyes. Maybe it was ridiculous to put so much hope in restoring the bike, in believing it could really fix Papi. But it was our last shot—the one thing the doctors had overlooked, the faint glimmer of
maybe
that the medical research and case studies had somehow missed.

I cleared my throat and tried again. “What I mean is . . . it’s imperative that we complete the restore as planned.”

Papi shook his head, his smile finally returning. “My daughter . . . she has a way with words.”

Duke eyed me skeptically, but he was clearly under the spell of our father-daughter charms. Even the toothpick stopped shuffling. “Okay, what the customer wants, the customer gets. Even if it’s the kid.”

“It’s the kid,” Papi confirmed. He was beaming again, totally back in the moment. “You’re hired.”

“You won’t be sorry.” The boy shook Papi’s hand and then reached for mine. I pressed my palm to his automatically, but as my skin warmed at his touch, something clicked inside, something familiar and dangerous, and I jerked my hand away and stared at it as if I’d been stung.

Freak show!

My cheeks flamed, but before anyone could question my bizarro reaction, Duke grabbed the boy’s shoulder. “You’d better be ready for this, Emilio.”

Emilio?

My head snapped up, jolted by a flash of recognition. “What’s your name again?”

“Emilio.” His lips formed the word, each syllable sliding into my ears with a rush of memory and white-hot guilt. Those caramel-brown eyes. Black hair curled up around the edge of that smudged bandanna. He wasn’t smiling now, but the dimples were still there, lurking below the surface like a dare.

I’d been warned that those dimples would be my undoing. Trained to avoid them most of my teen life, a feat made easier when he’d bailed inexplicably out of Blackfeather High two years ago, a month before he was supposed to graduate.

Yet there he was. More grown up, scruffy along the jawline, filling out his T-shirt in all the ways he hadn’t before. Practically almost
ogling
me.

That real bang-up day I was having?

Crash. And. Burn.

The only guy in all of Blackfeather who could help—the guy we had just so desperately hired—was the only guy in all of Blackfeather I was bound by blood, honor, and threat of dismemberment from every female in the Hernandez family to unilaterally ignore.

I’m not kidding about the blood part. There was an oath and everything, carefully scrawled into an infamous black book that once held all my sisters’ secrets.

I almost laughed.

Of
course
it was him.

Emilio fucking Vargas.

I, Jude Hernandez, vow to never, ever, under any circumstances within or outside of my control, even if the fate of humanity is at stake, even if my own life is threatened, get involved with a Vargas. . . .

Back in the blissfully boy-free zone of our kitchen, I stabbed a tomato until its guts leaked out. It’d been five years and I was the only Hernandez sister left in the house, but the ancient oath echoed clear as a hawk in the canyon.

“Rotten,” I whispered.

“Oh, they’re just a little soft.” Mom shook a saucepan of peppers and mushrooms into a sizzle behind me.
¡CALIENTE! ¡CUIDADO!
OVEN AND STOVE FOR COOKING ONLY. DO NOT USE ALONE
. The index card on the range hood curled in the steam. “How was Papi today? Did you guys fish?”

Ugh.
Fishing and board games—Mom’s idea of summer fun. It was only June, and Papi, Pancake, and I had already fished every living thing out of the Animas. And
Viejito
totally
cheats at Scrabble. You should see the words he makes up for triple-letter scores.
Hola
and hello,
amigos
. Some of that stuff isn’t in the English
or
the Spanish dictionary.

“We went into town for breakfast,” I said. “Walked around Fifth, checked out some of the stores.”

Mom’s pepper mix sizzled a bit louder. “See anything cute?”

And the award for the understatement of the year goes to . . .

“No one. Nothing.” I turned on the faucet,
RIGHT FOR COLD/
FRÍO
.
LEFT FOR HOT/
CALIENTE
. “We ended up at that motorcycle garage. Papi hired a guy, this kid who works there.”

Once Papi and Duke had agreed on an hourly rate for Emilio and signed the paperwork, I rushed us out of Duchess, and Papi hadn’t said another word. When we got home, I changed into my normal clothes and he parked himself on the couch for a cowboy movie marathon. Now I needed to get Mom’s stamp of approval on the motorcycle plans without actually naming names. I was pretty sure Vargas was still a four-letter word in our house.

For those of us who remembered what it meant, anyway.

“Mi amor.”
Mom’s accent got stronger when she was worried or upset, and I turned to watch her lips, just in case. “Maybe you shouldn’t plant seeds in his head about fixing that old junker. It’s expensive, and Papi . . . It isn’t good to have strangers at the house all the time.”

Recently she’d started discouraging visitors—mostly well-meaning neighbors and Papi’s former office buddies—telling
them Papi was tired, busy, unavailable. Now she mentioned “strangers at the house” again like I’d been nonstop ragin’ it every day since graduation. Sure, those Scrabble matches got intense sometimes. And one day, Pancake knocked his food right out of the bowl, spilling it all over the floor.
Cray
-cray!

“Don’t worry,” I said at the sink,
PRESS DOWN TO TURN OFF WHEN DONE
. The whole thing tied my stomach in knots too, just not for the same reasons. Still, this wasn’t about strangers and it wasn’t about some oath and an evil boy. It was about taking care of Papi. “I’ll keep an eye on things. And Papi’s really excited to work on it—something to do this summer besides fishing.”

Mom sighed and lifted the pan, flipping the veggies perfectly. With everything still steaming, she spooned the mix into circles of dough and folded each expertly, sealing the edges with the tines of a fork. I hated that she worked so many hours only to come home and cook, but that was her thing, she’d insisted. Her anchor to normal. Papi used to say that he fell in love with her cooking first, her soul second, and maybe that’s why she still did it. I’d pinned my hopes on the motorcycle, but maybe Mom thought the empanadas would help him remember, that the half-moon sight of them would bring him back.

“Hmm. We should ask your sisters about the mechanic,
queridita
. No?”

“No! I mean . . . They’re, like,
super
busy, and we don’t need to stress them out over my summer plans with Papi. I can totally handle this, Mom.”

Mom finally nodded and I returned to my mushy tomatoes. They reminded me of hearts, and I blinked at the hazy memory of Lourdes’s prom corsage crushed in the garbage. And then, seven years later, Araceli’s face, streaked with tears.

That whole family is cursed,
Mari had said on Araceli’s night.
Dark hearts, every one.

Thou shalt never, ever, get involved with a Vargas? It was one of those things we were supposed to accept without question from that night forward, like the way Mom pressed a fork into her empanadas because that’s how Abuelita taught her. It didn’t matter if there was a better way, something new to try. It was just how it’d been handed down, as much a part of the family history as our olive skin and long brown tresses.

Well, Mari chopped her tresses and went bombshell blond, but not every tradition could be overturned with scissors and a box of Nice ’n Easy number 104.

The oven door creaked open, heat washing over my bare legs as Mom slid in the empanadas.

“Twenty minutes,” she said. “How’s the watercress coming?”

I layered red onion rings over the tomatoes. “Done.”

“Looks perfect.” She winked over my
ensalada de berros
as if she’d known it would be perfect all along.

If our house was ever attacked by zombie bunnies, Pancake would totally sound the alarm, but for now the coast was clear,
and he lounged on the floor with his nose against the screen door and eavesdropped on our dinner conversation.

Papi was saying something for the third time about the blueberry pancakes we’d eaten at Ruby’s, and the poor dog kept snapping his head back and forth between Papi and the door, Papi and the door. Pancake-
bunnies
-pancake-
bunnies
-pancake-
bunnies
.

When Papi got to the part about Duchess, I gave him the hush-hush symbol before he could name Emilio, and he stuck out his tongue and tugged his ear like we were umping a baseball game.

“Are you okay?” Mom asked him.

“¿Que?”

“Okay?” she said louder. “Something wrong with your ear?”

He waved her off and dug into the watercress with his silverware.

“
Dios mío
, use the tongs.” She abandoned her chair and dished out his salad, poured the oil and vinegar too.

Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to fly away, as far as I could, like Lourdes and Celi had done, first chance they got. Not just Denver, where I was supposed to go this fall for college.

Away
away.

“
Ay
, Rita. Not so much dressing.” Papi dumped the excess onto her plate. He smacked her butt and she shooed him off, but she was totally smiling.

“You never make empanadas anymore.” Papi manhandled a few more onto his plate.