“Here.”
Letty pulled a packet of gummi bears from her pocket and shook it into Luna’s cupped palms. She dumped them into her mouth.
“But I’m hungrier than this,” Luna slurred through a mouth full of the chewy animals.
“Well, we can’t go back yet. We just started.” Letty had seen miner’s lettuce already, and she realized then why she wanted to explore: there were probably dozens, if not hundreds, of ingredients growing wild in her backyard. She wanted to take inventory. Searching her mind for a way to keep Luna on the trail, she said the first thing that came to her: “We haven’t even found the blackberries.”
“Blackberries?” There wouldn’t be blackberries this time of year, but Luna didn’t know this, and the idea of them kept her walking for another five minutes, looking for the tangled brambles she knew from Mrs. Puente’s garden at the Landing.
“We’re never going to find them,” Luna said after a while, her voice on the edge of a whine.
“Not if we give up we’re not.”
Luna groaned. She stopped walking and scrambled up a rock, so that she stood a good two heads taller than Letty. Her arms crossed, she planted her legs in a wide V. She wasn’t moving.
“Come on, just a little farther.”
“We already went a little farther.”
“Just a little more.”
Luna shook her head, braids spinning like blades.
“Let’s pretend we’re lost in the woods, and we have to find our next meal.”
“I can’t. I’ll starve to death.”
“Fine,” Letty said, frustration bubbling up. It was supposed to be their perfect day together. “I’m going hiking. You stay here and starve to death.”
“I will,” Luna said. “Watch me.”
As Letty watched, Luna collapsed dramatically, her head hanging off the rock and her eyes rolling back in her head, so that only the whites showed. Her tongue poked out the corner of her mouth.
Despite herself, Letty laughed. “Oh, don’t die!” she wailed, and Luna started to laugh too, squirming out of her mother’s faux-desperate grasp and rolling off the rock. Letty fell on top of her, pinning her down. In a tangled embrace, they laughed harder than the situation deserved, relieved not to be arguing on their one day off a year.
When they calmed down, Letty tried one final time: “Five more minutes. I promise. I’m looking for something.”
“What?”
“Ingredients. Something edible.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Luna sprang up.
“Where are you going?” Letty called out after her, but Luna was already gone, running down the path in the direction they’d come. Letty took off after her. “Hey—how can you run so fast when your feet hurt?”
As a response, Luna kicked off her boots and kept running. Letty stopped to pick them up and then sprinted after her. When she finally caught up, Luna lay flat on her back in the manicured rose garden separating the cottage from the main house. Her chest rose and fell under her sequined sweatshirt.
“Edible,” she panted with a grin, pointing at the roses all around her. Letty smiled. She’d taught her daughter this, on the first morning in their new home. Rose petals, rose hips—the red fruit shriveled by the cold: all edible.
Letty flopped down on the ground beside her daughter.
“You’re edible,” she said, pretending to nibble her cheek. The sky was bright and clear; the last of the roses hung over them like paper cutouts, pressed against the blue.
They lay until their breath returned to normal, and then Letty disappeared around the back of the cottage, returning a few minutes later with a pair of gardening shears and a bucket. Letty trimmed rose petals from the bushes while Luna pulled the last of the pomegranates off the tree, and then they spent a messy morning at the kitchen table. With a book open on the counter, Letty followed the directions, making grenadine from scratch with the pomegranates and then dropping dandelions and pine needles into swing jars full of vodka. When they were done, they lined their creations up on the windowsill, the sunlight illuminating the dark purple grenadine and lighting up the plants suspended in liquid.
“Pretty.”
“They are pretty. And they’re going to be delicious too.”
“Can I try?”
“This one you can,” Letty said, pointing to the grenadine. “When it’s ready.”
“Why can’t I have it now?”
“Because it’s not ready. And besides, we have to make cookies.”
They had lunch first, then made a batch of chocolate chip cookies, and Letty had just sent Luna outside to lick a nearly empty mixing bowl when she heard a car pull into the gravel driveway. Luna shrieked when she saw it, and Letty’s first (irrational) thought was that her parents had returned; but when she ran out onto the porch it was Rick, climbing out of his Highlander. Luna jumped into his arms, trying to feed him a wet glob of batter from the tip of her sticky finger. He turned his head away, tickling her through his refusal.
“How did you know where we live?” she asked when he set her back down.
“A little bird told me.”
Luna puzzled this over: “My grandpa?”
Rick wrinkled his brow and lifted his chin toward Letty, asking her to explain, but she just shrugged. As much time as they’d spent together in the past few months, she thought, there were still so many things he didn’t know. Luna held his hand as he walked to the porch.
“I heard you were sick,” he said.
Letty shook her head no. “Sick of Flannigan’s.”
She stepped inside, and Rick followed her, kicking off his shoes and lining them up by the front door, next to Luna’s boots. “I know the feeling.”
“Don’t you work today?”
“Not until five. They asked me to come early to cover for you, but I told them I was busy.”
“Busy doing what?”
“What does it look like?” he asked. “Checking on you.”
She turned to hide a smile and walked to the kitchen, where she was greeted by the disaster on the table.
Rick followed her. “What’s all this?”
“We were getting ready for Christmas.”
“Already?”
“My mom always makes tamales and freezes them. I was going to do the same, but then I realized I don’t really like tamales. So we made cookies instead. And drinks.”
“That’s not much of a Christmas dinner.”
She’d had the same thought earlier, when they were baking, and it had given her an idea. She flashed him a sly grin. “Didn’t I tell you? You’re making dinner.”
“They better be some good drinks, then.”
He helped her carry the dirty dishes to the sink and then stood behind her as she turned on the water, his hands rubbing her shoulders for only a moment before Luna burst into the room. Stepping quickly away, Rick asked her to tell him about their morning, and he was still listening, sitting at the table with Luna on his lap, when Letty finished the dishes ten minutes later.
“Yum,” he said, after she’d listed the ingredients in each bottle. “Please tell me you’re planning to share?”
Luna wrinkled her nose.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, to which Rick started to tickle her and Luna shouted, “Yes! Yes! Yes!,” breathless when he finally stopped. “I will,” she exhaled. “But they aren’t ready. Mom said.”
“Well, Mom’s the boss,” Rick said, winking at Letty and making room for Luna to wriggle away.
On her tiptoes she washed her sticky hands, letting them drip across the kitchen while Letty chased her down with a cloth. “What are we going to do now?”
“We’re making a pie,” Letty said, looking at Rick, who nodded at the suggestion. “Want to help?”
“I’m tired of cooking,” Luna said.
“Well, you’re on your own, then.”
“But there’s nothing to do.” This had been her complaint since they moved in. Letty hadn’t brought their old TV be
cause there was no room for the oversize box, but also because she’d felt guilty, all these months, plopping her daughter down in front of the screen anytime she needed to do anything, or anytime she needed a break—which was a great majority of the time. Maria Elena had rarely let the kids watch TV, and she’d managed. But now, after spending an entire morning with her daughter and with Rick in her kitchen, Letty wished she had the option.
“How about this,” she said. “If you can prove to me that you can entertain yourself without a TV, I’ll look into getting one. For the occasional times when there really is nothing else to do. Which will be almost never.”
Luna nodded solemnly and stuck out a hand to shake.
“Now get yourself outside. Build a fort. Look for birds. Something.” The screen door opened and banged shut. “Stay where I can see you!” Letty called after her, but Luna had gone no farther than the bottom porch step, poking her fingers into the joint of earth and wood, where the pill bugs liked to gather. Letty turned back to the kitchen and started to collect the ingredients for a pie: apples, flour, butter, sugar, cinnamon, washing the mixing bowl while Rick washed his hands and opened the bag of flour. He was already dressed for work in his black button-down; the white flour clouded and drifted in dusty marks onto the black.
“Do you mind?” he asked, unbuttoning his shirt to reveal a white undershirt beneath it.
“Of course not.” Letty said, but her heart raced, watching him disrobe in her kitchen. She remembered their first kiss, and their second, which had lasted long enough that she’d been late to pick up Luna—a mistake that had cost her fifteen dollars in fines. He hung the shirt on the edge of the bench and leaned over the cookbook. Poking out from the top of his T-shirt were the scripty letters of his tattoo.
“You don’t seem like one to have a tattoo,” she said, turning on the oven and leaning over the recipe beside him.
“I know,” he said. “I’ve thought about having it removed, but I’ve had it so long. I can’t really imagine myself without it.”
“How long?”
“Since I was eighteen. So, almost twelve years, I guess.”
Letty thought of the photo on Rick’s driver’s license while she handed him a peeler and a bag full of green apples.
“Are you going to tell me what it says?”
He pulled the neck of his undershirt down, so she could see the Latin; Letty stepped closer to read it. The ink was fuzzy at the edges, a shaky hand or cheap ink seeping into his skin, but she loved it anyway, the blue-green mystery painted across his body.
“I might,” he said, lifting one eyebrow. “It depends.”
Stepping toward her, he grabbed one of her hands and lifted it to his skin. With the lightest touch, he traced the words, translating them as he moved her fingertip across his body: the origin of our identity is love.
Just then Luna raced into the room. Letty dropped her hand, but not before Luna had seen, and she saw her daughter’s cheeks bloom red as she ran into their bedroom and out again, a blanket in her hands. With the slam of the screen door, she was outside again.
Letty got to work on the crust. Drying the mixing bowl, she measured the flour, silently stirring in salt and cutting in butter, adding water a tablespoon at a time while Rick peeled apples in perfect circles beside her.
“So, what’s the story?” she asked finally.
He sighed. “Do you really want to know?”
“I do.” Setting down the peeler halfway through the last apple, he told her: there was a girl—a woman, really. He had met her working at his father’s restaurant, just after his eighteenth birthday.
“I fell crazy for her,” he said. “The way you only can when you’re young, you know?”
“Oh, I know.”
She regretted saying it. Rick looked at her and asked: “How old were you?”
“Sixteen when we got together. Eighteen when he went to college.” With her hands she began to work the dough into a ball, waiting for Rick to continue, and when he didn’t, she prodded: “Tell me about her.”
“She was beautiful. Although sometimes I wonder if I saw her now, if I’d still think so.”
Letty thought of Wes the afternoon he returned, his tangled hair streaked over one eye, his sun-spotted skin smooth. “You probably would.”
“Maybe. But she was ten years older than me—the closing chef when I was managing. Not classically beautiful, but confident. She’d get naked under the fluorescent lights of the walk-in as easily as in the total dark of a hotel room, and the fact that she flaunted her body—God, I loved that. The girls at my school, they were all sticks, had their nails done every week and always looked like they were on their way to church, but Mel—that was her name—she was kind of sloppy. And loud, and fun. She made me fun, and funny, and daring, and romantic, and all these other things I didn’t know I was before I met her. Thus the tattoo.”
“You were a deep eighteen-year-old.” Letty smiled, thinking of herself and Wes at that age, full of similar prophetic declarations.
“Something like that.”
“We would have liked each other.” The dough was dotted with flour, but it held together. From the cabinet she pulled a cutting board and floured it. “And then what happened?”
“And then she moved to Connecticut with her husband.”
“Ouch.”
There was a pause in the conversation, while Rick finished the final apple and dumped the peel into the trash.
“So why do you still have it? Why didn’t you have it removed right then?”
“I don’t know,” Rick said, thoughtful. “I guess I just still thought it was true, even after what she’d done.”
“It is true. And it’s part of you,” she said. “You should keep it.”
She handed him a knife and watched him cut the apples into careful cubes. From where she stood she could see only the middle word: amor. Love.
“Did you ever see her again?”
Rick shook his head no. Letty flicked a wet blob of flour into the sink, her mind on Wes.
“I never thought I’d see Wes again either.” It was a leap, from his scar to hers, and Rick nodded, following. “After the first few years, I stopped even imagining trying to explain.”
“Explain what?” She’d said it on purpose, the need to purge greater than the desire to conceal her worst self, and before she could second-guess her decision, she heard the story pouring out of her. The unplanned pregnancy, the shock of it and Wes already gone, and how she’d meant to tell him and all the reasons she couldn’t bring herself to do it, and then the shame, the horribleness that was her as a mother. “It was a stupid, awful, selfish decision. Now that I’m a parent—really a parent—I understand what I did to him. And it makes me sick.”
“What do you mean—really a parent?”
“Oh, God, Rick, don’t you remember me when we first met? I had no idea what I was doing.” While he tossed the apples in sugar and cinnamon, she told him the second secret, the secret she couldn’t even bring herself to tell Wes, the years and years she’d stood by as her mother raised her kids, missing everything that mattered. She hadn’t told anyone, ever, and she felt it like a physical weight, lifting.
When she was done, Rick washed his hands and turned to her. “It makes sense, now. The first time I bought Luna a licorice rope, you acted like I was Houdini, escaping an underwater burial.”
“It was practically the same thing,” she said, and then, remembering: “Oh, my God, do you even remember that day?”
“I am NOT fine!” Rick mimicked, his fists banging his thighs in a spectacular impression of her daughter. Letty laughed so hard Rick had to hold her up, and when he finally let go, her eyes were watery.
“Seriously, Rick. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
He reached out and wiped a tear away with his thumb. She backed up until she hit the counter, and he pressed himself onto her, the full length of his body against hers. Weakly, she tried to wriggle out f
rom underneath him, but she couldn’t and she didn’t want to—so he was already kissing her, and she was kissing him back, heat in her body, when she finally succeeded in forcing herself to push him away.
“What’s wrong?” He glanced out the front window, to where only Luna’s feet were visible under a rosebush fort.
Letty sighed, trying to find the words. “I just don’t want to mess this up.”
“So you push me away?”
“I’m not,” she said, but her flour handprints were still on his chest, white against white. “I’m just trying to keep you above the fray. At least until I can figure things out.”
“It’s way too late for that,” he said. The flour flaked off his shirt and landed on his black socks. “Is it Wes?”
Letty nodded, then shook her head no. “I don’t know.”
“You have to know.”
“But I don’t.”
Rick studied her face, looking for the truth. “Well, I know,” he said and waited for her to ask what, but she didn’t, too sure, all at once, what was coming.
“I’m falling in love with you,” he whispered. The words hung there, unrequited. She looked out the door, trying to find Luna in the roses, and he took a step back before he continued. “But I’m not just going to sit around while you see if you can work it out with someone else. I won’t be your backup, Letty.”
“I don’t want you to be my backup.”
“So what do you want, then?”
What did she want? She didn’t have an answer. All she knew was that everything good that had happened in her life in the last few months had happened because of Rick. If it weren’t for him, she would still be stuck slinging crap drinks, making no money, and living in an abandoned apartment building at the Landing. But instead he’d walked into her life, seen her struggling and messy and incompetent, and somehow—impossibly, it seemed—fallen in love with her anyway.
She turned away from him and scanned the recipe, looking for something to hold on to, but the next direction was a dead end: refrigerate for four hours. Giving up, she thrust the bowl with the ball of dough into the refrigerator and slammed the door. Turning back to Rick, she placed her hand on his stomach, then the button of his jeans, pulling him toward her.