The Book of Broken Hearts (18 page)

“She likes me.”

“She thinks you
stupid
,” Samuel said. “And she right.”

Marcus cocked an eyebrow and licked his lips, more dazzling mirror work, and leaned in for another proposition. “When you’re ready to graduate from a boy to a man, you call me.”

“How about I call when
you’re
ready to graduate from a boy to a man?”

The other guys howled, and just when I decided this game might be kind of fun, Emilio was at the bench, tugging a shirt over his head.
“Vamos, princesa.”

He led me out a small door in the back, one I’d seen him use before. I’d always assumed it led to a break room or smoking area, but it opened onto a sidewalk with a crooked, sun-splashed path that forked into the woods behind Fifth Street, and I followed him, eyes on the white bandanna dangling from his back pocket. I wondered what happened to the blue one.
Not that I was launching a police investigation of his backside or anything. I mean, that bandanna was like a beacon.
Look! Look! Look!

“No bodyguard today?” he asked as we hit the path. He turned and waited for me to catch up, obscuring the view of his butt. Bandanna. Whatever.

“She’s at lunch with my father, so you’re okay for now.”

His dimples vanished. “What’s up with her? I get that she’s worried about your pops, but damn.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I’d been tiptoeing around it since we met, but there’s no way he didn’t know, and I was sick of pretending otherwise. “Araceli . . . Johnny totally dicked her over!”

His face changed, forehead crinkling beneath that mop of hair. It clearly wasn’t new information for him, but it was like he’d never considered it, never imagined it would affect the present day.

“Shit’s got nothing to do with me,” he said, continuing up the path. “And it was a million years ago. That’s seriously why she hates me?”

“She doesn’t hate you. She just . . . extremely dislikes you. Distrusts you. No, dislikes. Maybe both.”

“Because of my douche of an older brother?”

“Technically, there were two douches.”

“A douchette?”

I laughed, but only for a second. “Miguel dumped our sister Lourdes at their prom a few years before that. There’s a picture of them in your house.”

“Hold up.” Emilio stopped in his tracks and grabbed my arm. “How many sisters do you have, and please tell me the story ends there.”

“That’s it. Three, plus me. And two of them got their hearts broken by your family. Obviously Johnny was the big one.” I thought again of the wedding, the lilac dresses. I’d already had one fitting, and it was my favorite dress ever. I felt like a princess in it. A real one. I probably would’ve had to dance with Emilio during the bridal party song since we were closest in age. “Think about it. They were supposed to get
married
. Imagine?”

“Yeah, I know.” Emilio kicked a bleach-blond tumbleweed that had lodged itself on the path. “My mother was so pissed at him when she found out.”

“After that . . . Okay, this might sound crazy—”

“You? Sound crazy? No way. Better call the news copter.” Emilio grinned. “Okay, hit me with the crazy.”

I took a deep breath, let it out slow. “That night, after Celi and Johnny broke up, I made a promise that I’d never get involved . . . like, I wouldn’t hang around a guy in your family. Ever.”

“We’re not ax murderers.”

“Just heartbreakers.” I smiled, but Emilio was shaking his head, and I rushed to explain the rest. “I took an oath. A real one.” I told him the whole sordid tale.

Emilio turned to me at the end of the story, eyes fiery and intense. “Lemme get this straight. You and your sisters burned a
bunch of my brother’s shit, stabbed yourselves with a knife, and swore an oath against my family over a Saint Michael candle?”

“He was an archangel, not a saint. And it was just against your brothers. All the males, actually. Your mom is probably fine.” I kicked the ground, dust swirling on the path. “Actually, I’d have to read it again to be sure.”

“Did you put a curse on us?”

“No.”

“What about future kids? Or my uncles? Anything I need to warn my aunts in Puerto Rico about?”

I shook my head.

“What if I see a black cat or a ladder? Do I have to watch my back on Friday the thirteenth?”

“Yeah, okay, but I was twelve. They were looking out for me.”

Emilio shook his head. “You stabbed yourself with a knife and burned your hair in a church candle. Where I come from, we got a word for that:
loca.
You were right. You
are
crazy.”

“But your brothers—”

“You think I’m like them.” It wasn’t a question. His voice lost its playfulness; he was suddenly edgy and cool. When I looked into his eyes, I saw something else there too. Hurt.

“Not anymore,” I said. “Not after getting to know you this summer. And being at your house, seeing you with your mom . . . I just . . . you’re not what I expected.”

He started on the path again, silence chilling the air between us.

“I’m sorry. All I remembered was seeing you at BHS,” I
said. “All those girls following you around, hanging on your every word. ‘Oh,
Emilio
! You’re so cute! We love you,
Emilio
!’ ” I’d meant it teasingly, but the words floated on a current of jealousy, and I silently cursed them. My cheeks flamed.

Emilio was laughing though, and the hurt I’d seen in his eyes vanished. “Can’t help it if everyone falls for me. I’m charming, what can I say?”

“You’re annoying, that’s what you can say.” I tried to punch him in the arm, but he caught my hand and held it. Heat crept slowly up my arm.

“I’m not, you know.” He took a step closer.

“Not . . . annoying?” It was only a whisper, but it shook like the aspen leaves overhead.

Quaked, that’s what it’s called. Quaking aspens.

“Not like my brothers.” He took another half step. His dimples deepened as the space evaporated between us.

I looked at the path again, focused on a shiny black beetle making its way across. It stopped when it reached Emilio’s foot. “I’m . . . I came here to say sorry for the weirdness. I didn’t want you to think it was your fault. Or to stop coming around—”

“Why would I stop coming around?”

A little blue flame flickered in my stomach, but I snuffed it out. “All the craziness with my family. I figured you’d bail.”

“Not a chance,
princesa
.” He smiled, eyes lingering on my mouth. “You’re paying me.”

I tried to laugh, but it got twisted into a nervous hiccup, so I tugged out of his grasp and started back toward the garage.
Immediately I felt his hand again, warm skin against warm skin. He stepped in front of me and grabbed my other hand too, all his fingers lacing through mine.

“Do you trust me?” he asked. “I need to know if you trust me.”

He was dead serious, and the question lingered, binding us with invisible thread. For that one moment we were both vulnerable, both achingly honest. Even the trees seemed to hold their collective breath, waiting to see who would speak first.

“My father has Alzheimer’s.”

There it was, a whispered confession floating into outer space, where it would live on for eternity. Unlike us.

“When they first diagnosed him,” I said, “I didn’t think it was a big deal. I figured he’d forget stuff. Stupid stuff like when you space and put the milk in the cupboard or your socks don’t match.”

Emilio was speechless, still holding my hands, still looking into my eyes.

“Mom and I used to tease him. I mean, before we knew. He’d go to the kitchen to microwave popcorn for movie night, and we’d find him making omelets or pie or some crazy thing.” My voice cracked, but I pressed on. “We called him Señor Olvidadizo, Mr. Birdbrain. Mom teased him that he used up his smarts at work every day so there wasn’t any left for us when he got home. We had no idea. . . . He’s not that old.”

“Fifty?”

“Fifty-two,” I said. “But looking back, we remembered him doing other weird things even a few years ago. Stuff that we
thought was, like, midlife crisis. One time, totally out of the blue, he used some of their retirement savings on a Caribbean time-share, and he couldn’t understand why Mom was upset that he didn’t discuss it with her. He thought she was being ridiculous. But later that month he broke some stupid generic wineglass, and he cried like he’d ruined this family heirloom or something. He was apologizing for days. It made no sense.”

“How did you finally find out he was sick?” Emilio asked.

“One night he called me from his office, totally panicked.” I let go of Emilio’s hands and we sat down in the grass. “He babbled on and on, and I was like, ‘Papi, are you drunk?’ He was stuttering. He finally made this coughing sound, then he said real fast, ‘I don’t know the way home.’ ”

“You serious?”

I yanked out a clump of grass, sprinkled it over my bare legs. “He’d been sitting in the parking lot for twenty minutes. I thought he was messing with me, but then he got super serious. Mad. Even then, he sounded so . . . freaked out, I guess.”

“What happened?”

“My neighbor drove me down to get him—I made something up about Papi getting the flu, so they dropped me in the parking lot. Papi had the truck. That’s when I learned how to drive stick. Crash course.” I yanked up more grass, dropped it again on my legs. “When we got home, he wouldn’t look at me. All he said was, ‘Jude. Not a word to anyone.’ And I knew he meant it, because he never calls me Jude. Always Juju or
querida
.

“I was scared and I kept my mouth shut, but it happened
again the next day, and I had to tell Mom. She took him to different doctors, months of appointments. They gave him antidepressants and told him to cut back at work. Didn’t help.” My stomach twisted as I remembered the frustration, the lack of answers. “It felt like forever, not knowing anything. Finally they got him to see a dementia specialist. They did tests and scans to rule out other stuff. Early onset Alzheimer’s, they told us. I never heard of it before.”

“How do they treat it?”

“Medications, healthy eating.” I shrugged. “They say they’re trying to slow the progress, but there’s no cure. Mari says he’s supposed to do puzzles and exercises. Who knows. They can’t predict shit. It feels like a guessing game.”

“Is that why you take pictures of me and
el jefe
all the time? Like, memories or something?”

“Yeah. I’m really
not
trying to launch your modeling career.”

“I don’t need you for that.” Emilio nudged my knee with his. “But . . . working on the bike is good for him, right? Keeps his mind busy?”

“That’s the weird part. The Harley . . . sometimes he can’t remember what he had for breakfast, or where his shirts are, or that it’s summer. But ask him anything about the bike, and it’s like he’s back in Argentina with his crew. He remembers everything about his old life. It’s insane.”

“Definitely not insane.” Emilio brushed the grass off my knee. “Your pops is mad cool.”

“Seriously?”

“Jude. He was in a motorcycle gang. He biked around South America. He has a 1961 panhead, for chrissake. Dude’s a living legend.” Emilio laughed, and when I saw his face, open and genuine, unchanged from the moments before I’d confessed the family secret, I knew I’d made the right call in telling him. He must’ve known Papi had something like that—Alzheimer’s, dementia, memory loss. But it felt important to say it out loud, to trust him with the fragile, eggshell words.

Warmth spread throughout my insides. I had an ally again, a friend. A real one who knew the truth and wouldn’t freak out, wouldn’t bail.

I wanted to thank him, to tell him how much that laugh meant, how all the stuff he’d said about Papi made me feel safe and happy and somehow okay. Instead, I slipped my hand in his and squeezed it once, and he squeezed back, and pretty much everything about that moment rocked my grass-covered socks until I realized, with utter dread, I was late for meeting Mari.

Araceli smiled at me through the split screen of Mari’s laptop. On the other side, Lourdes watched on from her kitchen in Mendoza. Occasionally her husband passed through, Alejandro, a blur of light blue and white in his lucky
fútbol
jersey. It was tournament season, and Argentina was kicking butt.

Mari still hadn’t said a word about me being twenty minutes late this afternoon. I’d brought Papi home for a nap—he’d been snoozing ever since—and the moment Mari got back from Witch’s Brew, we Skyped my sisters. Now we were updating them on Papi’s medications and his daily regimen and everything Mari had read in the literature.

Lourdes nodded solemnly. “What did we decide about the test?”

“Papi does a hundred tests every time he goes to the doctor,” I said. “Which one?”

Lourdes shook her head. “The—”

“We’re still getting information,” Mari said. “Mom’s in touch with the doctors. We don’t have any details yet, but I’ll let you know.” Mari’s eyes widened and Lourdes clamped her mouth shut. A strange look passed between them, almost like a warning. Mari was used to running the show, despite Lourdes being the oldest, and one little family tragedy wouldn’t change that.

I waited for the conversation to turn to Transitions, for someone to finally let me in on Mom’s plan, but no one mentioned it, and I didn’t have the heart to ask.

Thirty-seven minutes in, according to the Skype countdown, Celi finally said the
M
word:
motorcycle
.

“Papi’s pretty into it,” Mari said. “They’re out there almost every day working on it.”

“What about the chemicals?” Lourdes asked. She’d been in Mendoza for more than a decade, and she spoke with a faint accent that made her sound both familiar and strange. Familiar, like my mother. Strange, because she wasn’t Mom, but she was getting closer. It showed in her voice, the lines around her mouth, the firm set of her shoulders. “Isn’t it bad for him to be exposed to that stuff?”

“Right now they’re just taking it apart and seeing what it needs,” I said. “No chemicals.”

Celi raised her eyebrows. “Who’s they?”