The Book of Broken Hearts (7 page)

All the mechanics turned toward me with dopey boy-grins like they’d bought front row tickets to the show. But they had another thing coming. I was
not
there to be anyone’s matinee.

“Si quieren ver una película, traten
Netflix,” I said. Then I poked Emilio in the chest.
“Pasado mañana. No llegues tarde.”

Day after tomorrow. Don’t be late.

If I remembered the Spanish phrase for
jerkoff
, I would’ve added that too.

“
¡Adiós!
” I pushed past him and marched back into the shop.

Duke looked up from his reading. “Forgot you were back there, hon. You all right? Boys didn’t give you a hard time, did they?”

I shook my head and returned his smile, but something was off. . . .

Papi. Pancake.

“Where’s my father?”

Duke looked around the shop. “Huh. Must’ve stepped out.”

I paced the entire floor, even though it was obvious Papi and the dog weren’t there. Duke checked the restroom, but that was a dead end too. I stuck my head back through the doorway into the garage. “Has anyone seen my father?”

The guys shrugged and looked around, but Papi wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. He must’ve wandered out while I was arguing with stupid Emilio, who now looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and mild alarm.

I bolted out the front door.

“He can’t be far.” Emilio was right behind me, scanning the sidewalk in both directions. “Bookstore and Grant’s that way and the ice cream place down there—those are the most likely spots.”

“How do you know? He could be anywhere.”

Emilio raised a hand to shield his eyes from the blazing sun. “Those are the best choices.”

“It’s your fault he took off in the first place. If you weren’t so busy trying to show off—”

“Jude.” Emilio grabbed my arms. “Let’s find your pops, okay?”

I wanted to tell him I was certainly capable of finding my own father, but clearly I wasn’t, and Emilio had already taken off toward Uncle Fuzzy’s Creamery.

“Papi!” I almost collapsed as the worry dissolved into relief. “Where were you?”

Papi strolled up the sidewalk with Pancake and Emilio, spooning mint chocolate chip ice cream into his mouth. “Felt like a sundae. I didn’t know how long you’d be with the boys.”

“You scared me!” I smeared the tears leaking out of my eyes. Emilio must’ve thought I was ridiculous, crying on the sidewalk on a beautiful sunny day because my father—a grown man who’d once ridden a motorcycle all over South America without a GPS or anything remotely like a plan—had walked two blocks down the street with the dog.

Papi put his arm around me and hugged me close, his hand cold from the ice cream cup. “I’m sorry, Jujube. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

“You can’t do that, okay? You have to tell me. You can’t—”

“I’m
okay.
I’m all right,
querida
.” He patted my shoulder once more and trotted over to a bus stop bench with Pancake to finish up his sundae.

“You okay?” Emilio asked. “I gotta get back.”

“Yeah, I . . . sorry I snapped.” I kept my voice low, eyes on Papi. “I’m supposed to watch him. He’s . . . I should’ve been more careful.”

“What else?” Emilio asked.

I shook my head. “Just that I’m sorry.”

“Nah, you wanna say more. I can tell. Your lips press together when you’re thinking.”

“They do not.” I clamped my mouth shut, then immediately opened it. Closed it. Opened it. Then I didn’t know what to do because Emilio was probably right and
that
thought drove me nuts, so I just stood there with my lips slightly parted.

“Jude?” Emilio stepped closer, his body blocking out the sun, eyes serious, and my heart sank. I couldn’t handle it again. The looks. The whispers. The overbearing silences that crept in whenever people figured out that something wasn’t right with Papi. I didn’t even know Emilio, and I could already see it happening.

He put his hands on my shoulders, and I braced for the letdown.
Sorry, Jude, maybe next time. . . .

“We cool?” he said. “For the—”

“Sorry,” I said again. “The Facebook thing . . . my sisters . . . They don’t . . . um . . . live in town,” I finished up.

Random!

“That’s . . . nice. I’m talking about the bike. Still on for Wednesday? Shirt required?” Emilio smiled, and it was like, stubble, dimples, scar.

Damn.

“Wednesday,” I said with a firmness that I hoped masked the awkward. “Shirt required.”

I was still rubbing the morning from my eyes on Wednesday when I caught Papi’s silhouette in front of the patio doors.
GLASS DOORS
. → → →
SLIDE OPEN BEFORE WALKING OUTSIDE.

He turned toward me, squinting like I might be a shadow, and I took in his outfit: Gray pants with a crease above each knee from the hanger. Pale-green button-down, cuffs undone. Shiny black shoes, untied. His cologne took a moment to register.

Cologne.
That’s what had woken me up, I realized. The scent had become unfamiliar, a near stranger in our house revisiting after months away.

“Papi?” I stepped into the light.
“¿Hacerte un café?”
It was his favorite old joke, the power of suggestion he’d wielded for years when my sisters were still around.
Get yourself a coffee!
In other words,
Make me some coffee!

But he didn’t smile this time, didn’t wink and wag his finger like I’d finally beat him at his own game.

“No.” He looked at his hands, forehead creased with concentration. “I’m . . . I think I’m late for something. An appointment?”

“Your appointment is tomorrow. See?” I directed him to the dry erase calendar we kept on the fridge now. “You got the date wrong, that’s all.”

He checked his watch and looked back out the doors. Pancake nudged his leg and gave a short yelp.

“No big deal. I did the same thing the other day with Emilio, remember? I thought he was late and—”

“There’s a staff meeting.” Papi’s face was pained with the effort of searching, seeking something that would never be found, and when I finally figured out what it meant, a dark ache bloomed in my chest.

He wasn’t confused about his doctor’s appointment tomorrow. He’d gotten ready for work, same as he had every weekday for thirty years until a few months ago when they kindly suggested he take an early retirement—a diplomatic way of putting him on disability.

“You don’t have that job anymore,” I said gently. “Now your job is to hang out with me all day.”

He probably just needed a break. A day to mellow out, avoid the crowds of Old Town, take his mind off Valentina’s problems.

“How about a Scrabble rematch?” I said. “You up for getting your butt kicked,
mi viejito
?”

Papi stared at me so long I thought he was trying to place
me, to remember where he’d last seen my face. I’d been careful about giving him his medications, taking him for walks in the sun when he was up for it, just like the doctors instructed. But this was the second major misfire this week.

He was getting worse.

“I think I’ll watch some TV, maybe have some coffee. Okay?” He smiled, but his eyes were glassy. A blush seeped into his cheeks, and I turned to the pantry,
DRIED AND CANNED FOODS ONLY
, and rummaged for the coffee filters as if I hadn’t noticed.

Clint Eastwood was a familiar guest in our living room, and his signature rasp and gunslinging badassery blazed a trail through my skull all morning. After
A Fistful of Dollars
, I slipped out onto the front porch for a slightly less blazin’ coffee break, leaving Papi to watch his favorite—
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
—for the hundredth time.

I’d been out there a couple hours, drifting in and out of half sleep in the golden butter sun, when a once-familiar sight pedaled up the driveway. I thought I was dreaming, ten years old again, waiting for Zoe to get here after dinner so we could run down to the Animas and wash our dusty feet and Kool-Aid mustaches.

Zoe parked her bike alongside the house and clomped up the porch stairs with her backpack. I blinked at her in the sun, still halfway between awake and asleep, the hazy dreamworld where anything was possible.
Is she really here?
I scanned her face and silently counted her freckles, an old habit.

“Morning, sunshine!” Zoe beamed as she fished a stack of papers from her bag. “It’s the script! Help me read? I have to make notes and—”

“You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend,” Papi and Clint Eastwood simultaneously warned through the open windows behind me, the TV volume shooting up exponentially. “Those with loaded guns, and those who dig. You dig.”

Papi howled with laughter. It was his favorite part, right near the end.

“Hope you don’t mind a little competition on those lines.” I stood from my wicker chair and stretched. “This is a really good part. Wanna watch? It’s the end, but it’s funny.”

“No, but . . .” Zoe’s eyes darted around me to the window, and when Papi cackled again, she took a step backward. “Isn’t your dad, like, working on the bike? Where’s the motorcycle guy?”

“In the barn.” When Emilio arrived after breakfast, I’d sent him out back alone to give Papi his TV break. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now that Zoe was standing on the porch with all those questions, I wanted to be out there with him, passing him tools and listening to the sound of dust collecting on the old boxes.

“Zoe, it’s
Papi
,” I finally said.
The guy who built our tree fort and called in sick to work to camp out for our Angry Hermits tickets
. I let the thought float silently between us and watched Zoe crunch the numbers, predict the possible outcomes.
They’d played out across her face in the span of eight seconds, and by the time we hit nine, I was reaching for the door without her.

“I’m coming.” She slipped in behind me, and then she was through the entryway, marching toward the kitchen, straight past Papi.

“Hey, Mr. H.,” she called once she got herself situated at the kitchen table. It was a safe distance away. He didn’t hear her.

“I know she’s supposed to be this total psycho,” Zoe was saying, “but I’m holding back until the end. Do the super-polite thing all along, and then, BAM! Bring out the crazy. Totally unnerving, right?”

“Totally.” I dumped a box of pasta into a pot of boiling water as Zoe scribbled notes in the margins of her script.

“What about the off with her head bit? Like, should I go, ‘Off with her
head
,’ or, ‘
Off
with her head’? Or maybe, ‘Off with
her
head’?”

“Maybe the second one?”

“
Off.
Yeah, that’s what I thought too. What about—”

“Hey, girls,” Papi called from the living room. “Did you know they call these movies spaghetti westerns?”

“Yes,” we said in unison. It was the third time he’d made the proclamation and the whole reason we were having spaghetti for lunch—Papi’s request.

He muted the commercials and shuffled into the kitchen. He’d shed the dress shoes after breakfast and was rockin’ a
pair of Mom’s slippers, which were too small on him and covered in peach and yellow roses. “In the sixties the Italians made all these cowboy movies. They filmed them in Italy and Spain, and if you look closely, you can see some of the actors speaking Italian. They recorded the English after. Isn’t that something?”