A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow

by Laura Taylor Namey

  “He’s a lute master,” Jules tells me. “Traditional British folk music is dying off and it’s a real shame. London’s all about new sound and rave. But Remy’s parents want to keep our history alive.”

  The first honeyed strums and lute trills drain the tension from my shoulders. Relaxed and loose, I listen, thinking of Miami youth regularly hitting up Little Havana salsa clubs or teaching younger cousins to play dominoes while snacking on plantain fritters. My culture also has too much wanting to die out in the new. We work to keep it growing strong, as tall as Cuban corn stalks in my great-uncle’s garden.

  After a couple of tunes, the crowd chants Jules’s name. Henry spots her and waves her over. I love how they know and recognize her. Jules-never-Juliana is one of Winchester’s gems.

  “Go on, love. Show Lila what else you got going on with those vocal cords,” Remy says.

  Jules waves it off. “Just a bit of fun,” she tells me then snakes out behind seats to consult with Henry.

  My mind catches up to the music. “Was I hearing things, or did parts of a couple of Goldline’s songs seem inspired by Henry’s tunes or the chords?”

  Orion nods. “That’s what Jules does. She’s the mash-up queen in her songwriting. She loves to reference old themes in her modern music. That train song you loved is a nod to old English lullabies.”

  We turn back when Henry plays a new intro. Jules sings less than two lines into this wood-paneled pub and my mouth falls open. She demos what must be years of training, her classically fierce soprano commanding a timeworn folk ballad.

  “This one’s from the sixteenth century,” Orion whispers, leaning in. “ ‘Flow my Tears.’ ”

  The tune floods over me. Haunting melody, bittersweet lyrics, and that voice. By verse two, I can’t stop a few of my own tears flowing down my cheek. Orion lays a hand on my shoulder, inviting me under his bent arm. I go without question, the way I fall into my bed. The way my hands curve into a ball of dough. Safe against the cotton of his black pullover, I meld into him.

  I peek up at his gentle face, finding I’m not the only one with misty eyes. I’d bet my bakery he’s thinking of his mum, who’d probably love to eat fish and chips and hear Jules sing tonight. I squeeze his side. I know. I get it.

  Orion’s lips sweep across the crown of my head as he shifts. Friends do not usually sit like this. Lately, I always seem to be touching Orion Maxwell. It doesn’t matter that my days are few here. He seems to always be touching me back, every single one of those days. With who I am, and where I’ve been, and where we live, what could it ever mean? What does it mean right now?

  * * *

  After more music and “pudding” and goodbyes, Orion and I are halfway to Millie before he halts. “It’s nice out, yeah? Want to walk back and Dad can ride the bike home?”

  I nod. “He rides Millie too?”

  He leads us down the little side lane pocket off High Street. “She was Dad’s when he was my age.”

  I smile at the image, but my insides still scatter with questions. From corner table to concrete pavement, he hasn’t let go. His elbow hooks into mine, our heads tipped so closely we can easily chat over the whirl of traffic and commerce. But Winchester is perfectly small. It’s not long before we merge into St. Cross with only the noises of trees.

  And I can’t stand it anymore. I’ve forgotten to remember I’m bold. I command kitchens! Can’t I take command of a question? Bold, that’s who I am. I’m not a helpless wonderer. “Orion.”

  “Lila.” A rumble against my side as we step and step and step.

  “What are we doing?”

  “We’re walking home, love.”

  One adorable word and my bold splinters. “No. You and me. What… is this?”

  Orion stops, swinging around to face me. But he is still so close because that’s all we are lately. A jester dances across his face; ugh, he knew exactly what I was onto before. Cheeky-ass ass!

  “Okay maybe we do need to hash out a few things,” he says.

  I nod.

  “First and always, you are my friend.”

  “You’re mine.”

  “Good, that’s good.” He smiles. “But how we are, the way we…”

  “Yeah, all that. I mean friends don’t…”

  “No, they don’t. So that means we’re…” He says this to the sky, stars paled by yellow streetlight.

  “But.”

  Pero.

  And there it is. One syllable in his language, two in mine.

  “But, indeed,” he says, back to me. “See this is where I’m terribly stuck.” He reaches out to touch my forearm, elbow to wrist. “If this were normal or usual…”

  We’re not completing sentences, yet I comprehend pages full. “Right. Only it’s not. Normal.”

  His hand drops into mine. “Not at all. I understand what you’ve been through and all you lost. I also get your ticket was never one-way.”

  Miami. The third heart on this pavement, trying to love me harder.

  “But you and me,” I say. “I really like us and I’m having fun—”

  He braces my shoulders. “I like us, and I’m having loads of fun. Way too much to walk away now.”

  “Don’t?” Don’t leave me too.

  “No, Lila.” He hugs me to seal it and stays to say, “So let’s do this. Let’s create a new category for our kind of us. We don’t have to define it. We’ll leave it blank and take things day by day.”

  “Is this what you meant by not asking too much of God or the universe or life itself?”

  I feel his nod. “Exactly what I meant.”

  “I’ve never done that. I’ve always demanded what I want from anyone who’ll listen. Even when they don’t listen I make it known, and that caught up with me. It brought me here.” I pull back so he sees me say, “But it also brought me here.”

  He exhales and slants his arm around me, leading us forward again. “Miami is waiting—lucky-arse city. And so are your family and your business,” he muses.

  “Yes.” The golden dove charm knocks against my chest.

  “And when it’s right, you can find someone again.” He tightens his grip. “But I have a few requirements for any future bloke. Hypothetically speaking, of course.”

  My laugh spurts out. I sniffle. “What requirements?”

  His look, like I’m dense. “Obviously, he has to have a motorbike. Now, I’m okay with him not naming it.”

  “How generous.”

  “I am that, if anything.” He shakes a warning finger. “And he must be able to make a decent cuppa. Because you need your afternoon tea now. And he’ll have to take you to just sit and look at this beautiful world, because you tend to work too hard.”

  “Deal.” My voice is a ghost. “Anything more?”

  “So much more, Lila.”

  * * *

  She’ll need to make him sandwiches. I jog through St. Cross, and not normal jogging—the kind where I run like a wildfire and hope the running leaves me hollow and sweated clean out like a tamal husk.

  Cate made me promise never to run at night, but I had to. When Orion left me at the Crow, we were resigned and cool with not defining tomorrow and overthinking ourselves. My head knows it’s best, but un-planning feels new for me. Un-plans are new for a girl who’s had her nameplate written in indelible ink for years: Lila Reyes, Head Baker. New for a girl whose life has been lovingly mapped, Cuban Lila, daughter and sister and niece, Miami born and destined.

  My heart didn’t have a clue how to work out Orion’s notion of day by day. I had to drag this onto the streets.

  I strike the pavement hard. Mist skirts around me and the settling fog tempers all the heat that rises onto my skin when I am extra bold with questions.

  She’ll have to bake him treats and pastries. My mind drifts here, onto this requirement. Muy importante. He loves lemon. They don’t have to be Cuban pastries, but they need to be decent. She’ll totally use too much sugar, this girl who will win Orion’s heart.r />
  But my mind shifts again as I change course down another fork. How many plans did I recently make that ended up exploding? An apartment with Stef and a carefully orchestrated trip to Disney for my eighteenth birthday? Poof. The future I carved into our kitchen, cooking next to Abuela and watching her go all-the-way gray? Shatter. Her headstone date is a monster.

  Orion and I are not going to plan or define. Maybe that will give it a real chance of working.

  Or, the opposite is true and, in a few weeks, time will be another monster.

  She’ll have to run with him. Around mile three, he will probably start slowing and definitely start whining. She’ll need to push his ass to get through mile four. He’ll make it, though. Then she’ll have to let him make her tea, this lucky, lucky girl.

  This lucky girl that I maybe even hate? Just for being her, for being here when my goals mean I’m always going to end up… there? Emotion burns my throat. No puedo. Tonight, there’s not enough pavement for me to work this all out, so I decide to try my best at Orion’s un-planning method. It feels like trying a new recipe.

  I work my body instead.

  Now it’s so late the trees are specters in the fog. I run inside an eerie night cloud that makes my spine tingle. I’m safe, though. For miles, all I’ve heard is the wraith-like breathing of leaves, my sneakers slapping, the metallic clink, clink, clink of my jacket zipper pull. But when I reach another fork, the one that leads either to town or onto a highway frontage road, a foreign sound carries around the next bend. Shhh shhh shhh, hiss. Then again.

  I slow to a walk and pull out my phone, just in case. I flank the retaining wall that curves around the corner. Turning, I see the outline of a figure in a hoodie. Then, streaks of black spray paint on a small section of brick—an infinity symbol. I’ve got them! I’ve caught Roth or one of his buddies in their graffiti game, something Orion has been trying to do forever.

  The figure turns, sucking in a noisy, startled breath.

  I see the face clearly. But… “You?”

  20

  Flora.

  “It’s you,” I repeat unnecessarily. For months, Flora Maxwell’s had her brother and half the town merchants on a useless chase. Roth and his gang and their bullying, my ass. The town vandal and graffiti artist, if you could call it that, has been eating the same breakfast cereal as Orion the whole time.

  I swear I can hear Flora’s heart drum. Her gaze fidgets left to right, like a rabbit about to bolt. But then she sighs, her shoulders drooping in defeat. I’m a fast runner with a working cell phone camera. I’ve got her.

  “Why?” I ask.

  She flinches. “You’re always right there, aren’t you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Flora drops the spray paint can, shoves her hands into her kangaroo pocket. “Every time I turn around lately, you’re there like a bloody shadow. At the club with Will. By the inn.”

  Is she actually trying to deflect? “Don’t put this on me. Now, I asked you a question.” Will I wait until tomorrow or should I drag her back home myself? “You hurt your town. Real people with businesses like yours. Orion was out there scrubbing walls and—”

  “Oh, God, please don’t tell him,” she begs and steps toward me. “Please, Lila.”

  Whoa. Okay. Was there a shift in some time-space continuum? Orion would know about those. I only recognize the look of Winchester-cold fear.

  “Please. I’ll stop. Just don’t tell Orion.” She trembles, her blue eyes wide and wolf-like in the filtered dark. “You don’t understand what it’s like. There’s so much. So much they’re dealing with already.” So much she’s dealing with.

  “I actually do know what it’s like. You have no idea what I’m coming from.” I exhale in slow motion and point to the obscure shape on the shoulder-high wall. “Can you just tell me why?”

  She stares at the ground, telling her shoelaces, “My dad and brother mean well, but they are always on me. Way more than my friends’ families.” She frees a hand, dashing it aimlessly. “All my steps, checked so carefully. Because of Mum.”

  The ice in my veins cracks.

  “I feel like a little kid sometimes. Like my wishes get lost and forgotten.”

  “So this is you outsmarting them?” I gesture at the wall. “Showing them they can’t control everything?”

  She shrugs. “It’s like… on the train into London, you can see all these stately buildings. But pass one that’s been tagged, and that’s the first thing your eye goes to, right? You see the building, but you really see the paint. The letters or symbols. I found the can in the tea shop storeroom and I remembered that… the being seen and known.” She approaches the wall and rubs. Still wet, the paint smears black on her fingertips. “Not forgotten.”

  Dios, the dementia. I reach for the thought of Orion, peacefully accepting all that life gives and not disturbing the universe, demanding more. Flora, with the same root of pain, lives the opposite. Her disturbance is the streak of paint over walls. Controlling it, changing it. See me. She fights a universe that denies her—one that brings a disease so cruel it makes her own mother forget her. I’m still here, the paint says.

  But Flora is still hurting herself, and others. I know this because I’ve done the same. I understand what it means to be on the grass, dehydrated, filthy, and tear-spent. I ran so far and hard into the loss that had run me over, because I could.

  Oh. I look over Flora and for the first time, I see Pilar looking over me at the park. My belly heaves with it, nausea swirling fast. I see myself through my sister’s eyes. I’d run so far. How much further and deeper would I go, hurting myself trying to outsmart my own universe of loss? Pilar had no answer that night, only fear. But she and Mami and Papi had England, a chance at a new place for me with a new purpose. Flora needs one too.

  “Please. Please don’t tell Orion.”

  He is not a person I want to keep anything from. But I study the weak and strong and resolute and destroyed face of a girl, begging me. Flora. Sneaking out, aching to be seen and remembered, marking walls and fences.

  I study a memory, nudging me. Lila. A girl sprawled out on Miami grass, miles from home.

  Would I lie for that girl?

  My family did worse in their eyes than lie. Something far over the edge of painful. They put me on an airplane, away from my everything. Away from them.

  With a sigh that makes me sound just like my father, I cross my arms at my chest. “I won’t tell Orion on two conditions.”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  “Promise right now you’ll stop tagging.”

  She nods rapidly. “I promise, Lila. I won’t tag again.”

  “Good. The other thing—three days a week, you will work with me in the Owl and Crow kitchen. I start at six in the morning.”

  Flora takes a deliberate step back. “I can’t cook or bake.”

  “I’ll teach you. Easy stuff at first.”

  “But I’m already working at Maxwell’s most afternoons.” She pokes her jaw out. “So now my mornings, too? Who wakes up that early during the holidays? That’s not…”

  Here she goes. Flora’s about to say my idea’s not fair and, no. Sympathetic circumstances or not, she still vandalized. “Three days a week. You’ll survive.” I tip my hand to her. “Up to you.”

  She stares at me until the look goes stale. “Whatever.”

  Sí, claro, that’s a yes. This is another language I know well. “Good. Monday, then. See you.”

  Flora picks up the paint can. “Don’t freak, I’m gonna throw it out.”

  “Do I look like I’m freaking?” I check my watch. “I’ll see you home, though.”

  “It’s close. I can see myself home.”

  I should make sure she gets to her porch. But when she said she felt smothered, I listened. Flora can make it four blocks home. I need to give her this. “Yeah. You can.”

  I let her flee then walk to the Crow on a close, parallel street, knowing Flora is doing the same. I’d hear anything
out of place. Planner that I am, I should probably decide what to say to Orion when he mentions the tagging and Flora’s new training experiment. Even the thought of keeping something from him rots in my stomach like spoiled food.

  When I reach the rose arbor, a few second-story lights show proof of life from guest rooms. The third-floor flat is dark, though.

  I’m familiar enough with the upper staircase to ascend while checking my phone. Late for me is the perfect time to call or FaceTime Pilar. I’ve had the sound off; I switch it back and notice the message bubble on my home screen. Busy with Flora (an understatement), I must’ve missed her text. I nearly trip over the next step. The name under the message doesn’t read Pilar Reyes.

  It says Andrés Millan.

  * * *

  Minutes later, my phone vibrates, but not from any setting. It’s me on my bed, shaking, reading Andrés’s text again and again.

  Andrés: Hey you. I know this is sudden but I wanted to check in

  Another message comes through.

  Andrés: Are you busy?

  My mind spins. I should block his number. I should hurl the entire device out the window. I do neither of these things. Even though feelings have rearranged and shifted, the shadow of Andrés is still there, dark and heavy with sweet memory. And I still fall for the hook.

  Me: I’m here

  Not even five seconds before he replies.

  Andrés: FaceTime?

  Me: Call

  He does. I answer with one, dusty old word dragged out of a dusty old trunk.

  “Hello to you too, Lila,” Andrés says in the voice I heard against my lips, and in the shell of my ear, and finally in a terrible goodbye.