The two jagged halves sizzled away on the pan and I started to gain a glimmer of hope. They smelled okay. I bent over the stove and studied them carefully, watching for signs that it was time to turn them. Then the warm corn smell turned to a suspiciously burnt smell. I used the spatula to lift an edge of one, but it didn't look burnt. I sniffed again, lifting the other one. Both were just turning golden brown. But something definitely smelled burnt.
Too late, I realized that while I studied the tortillas, I had laid the crumpled wax paper too close to the burner. As I watched, the red ashy edge along one side flamed to life and the whole ball went up. I screamed and threw the burning wad into the sink, then stood for a moment too long, chest heaving in fear that I would hit the curtains and burn Tony's house down, even as I saw with my own eyes that it was in the sink. I leaped over, turned the water on full blast and the flames sputtered out. I was dismayed, though, at the scorch marks that now marred Tony's white sink. Would that come out? I checked under the counter and found some powdered cleaner—a brand I hadn't seen before. Probably something from Tony's cleaning business—something only businesses had access to or something. I shoved the burned wax paper down the disposal and sprinkled the powder onto the burns.
I checked the clock. Still an hour before Tony would be home. I had time to erase the evidence of my clumsiness. I sniffed. The room still had a decidedly burnt smell, though.
I leaned over to open the kitchen window to let in some fresh air. The mid-November air rushed in with a gusty chill and the curtains blew into my face. I pushed them back, annoyed, but I thought I would only need to leave the window open a few minutes to air things out enough to be presentable again. If Tony noticed a smell, I could always pass it off as a burned tortilla. Those black marks, though—I had to get rid of them.
I found a scrub brush in a jar beside the sink and scrubbed the powder, encouraged that I could tell a difference almost immediately. Unfortunately, it smelled even more burnt, though. How porous were porcelain sinks? Could the smell be, like...baked into it?
I scrubbed some more and sniffed. Jeez-O-Peet . Had I done something to permanently stink up his sink? Would I end up having to replace the thing? How much did sinks cost?
I scrubbed some more, but it wasn't helping. In fact, it was making things worse—the air was acrid. I felt a moment of panic as I wondered if maybe this cleaner was something that reacted to the material of the sink in a harmful way. Tony had told me that you had to be careful with mixing cleaning chemicals. What if I had just created a toxic concoction and Tony would come home to find both me and Stump, dead on the kitchen floor?
But Tony was a very safety conscious guy, I reminded myself. If it wasn't supposed to be used on the sink, he wouldn't have had it under the sink.
The smell was getting worse, though—there was no denying it. I leaned forward and put my nose right to it. No, not bad. I straightened, then sniffed again. Yes. Bad. What the—
At that moment, several things happened in quick succession.
Tony pulled into the driveway.
Stump began to bark like crazy.
I turned to see what she was barking at, and instead saw a rather large conflagration in the cast iron pan on the stove.
I hadn't turned the “tortillas” off, and they were now in full blaze.
“Oh no!” I grabbed the handle of the pan with both hands and jerked it off the stove. I turned back to the sink.
The curtains blew in the wind. If I got near them with this pan, they would go up.
I spun around, looking frantically for something to do with this portable bonfire. The freezer? No. The fire climbed higher. Stump decided she would help by dancing around between my feet and barking furiously. Jeez-o-friggin'-Peet, it was one tiny ball of cornmeal, how could it be creating such a big fire?
Also, the pan was heavy. Heavier because I couldn't help but carry it at the very length of my arms. It's not as if I wanted to snuggle up to the thing. I was afraid if I took one hand off to open a door, I would drop it onto the floor and Stump.
So basically, here's what it was: me, spinning like a demented top in the middle of Tony's kitchen, holding a foot-high fire at arm's length, screaming “What? What? What?” because I was too freaked out to form coherent thoughts. All of this was accompanied by Stump's frantic agitation.
The front door opened.
Outside! I thought. I corrected course and set off for the entryway. I stumbled over Stump and almost dumped the entire thing in the middle of the dining room floor, but I managed to stay upright long enough to lunge, arms outstretched, into the entryway.
Tony, one foot in and one foot out of the front door, froze when he saw me, his eyes wide.
“Outside!” I shouted, because it was the only word my mind could form. I barreled toward him.
He leaped back outside, one hand on the screen door to keep it open, and I rushed past. I ran to the middle of the sidewalk, not sure what to do now. The wind was high. Would it carry a spark to the nearby trees, full of dead and dry fall leaves, and set Tony's entire neighborhood on fire?
I stood in the middle of the sidewalk and repeated my spinning performance from the kitchen.
“What is it?” Tony shouted.
“Fire!” I shouted back.
“I know! But...what was it?”
“Homemade tortillas!” I tried to say. But the word choked off with the tears suddenly clogging my throat. If you manage to mess them up...
He must have understood well enough, though, because he turned, pulled a water hose from a nearby pot, and turned the water on. “Put it down, Salem. In the middle of the sidewalk. Just put it down.”
The fire that had raged just seconds before was now visibly smaller. As I bent to lower it to the sidewalk, a black crumb rolled over and the flame went out. A second later, water splashed into the pan with a loud, steamy hiss.
Tony turned the water off, silently wound the hose back into the pot, and turned to me.
I chewed my lip. Finally, I said, “Your sister is going to be so impressed with me.”
Inside, Tony silently surveyed the kitchen. Now that the fire was gone, it didn't look too bad. I'd made a bit of a mess with the cornmeal and everything, but it wasn't the post-apocalyptic disaster it could have been.
“I wanted to surprise you by making one of your favorite things,” I said. “Juanita sent me her recipe for homemade tortillas and she said it was literally the easiest thing I could make.”
He nodded. Turned the bag of cornmeal and studied it, then the bottle of oil. Nodded again. Then, “She told you to get cornmeal?”
“Yeah, she said you preferred the corn kind to the white kind, so...” Something about that sounded funny, though. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and reread what Juanita had texted. I raised my head. “Corn flour. Which is the same thing as cornmeal, right?”
The corners of his mouth tipped up. “It's very, very close.”
My shoulders slumped. “Ugh. I didn't read it closely enough. No wonder they wouldn't behave.”
“It's okay. Salem, I'm a Hispanic man with five sisters. If I need tortillas, I can find tortillas. I promise.” He laughed and slid his arms around my waist, kissing the top of my head. “I just wanted to make sure she hadn't given you the wrong information.”
“No, this one is all on me.” I sighed.
“How about instead of making one of my favorites, you make one of your favorites?”
“My favorites are all take out,” I said.
“Then make something on your favorite things to make list.”
I leaned my head against his chest. Everything I'd made lately had been bland at best. My forays into Fat Fighter recipes hadn't been exactly mind-blowing gastric delights. What was my favorite thing to make?
“Cinnamon toast,” I finally said.
He drew back. “That sounds delicious, actually.”
“Really?”
“Really. It's been years since I've had cinnamon toast.
I have some sausages, and I think I have milk and orange juice.”
“Breakfast for dinner,” I said, leaning up to kiss him lightly.
“Breakfast for dinner,” he repeated, pulling me in for a deeper kiss.
We worked side by side in the kitchen, the window now closed, the acrid smell almost gone, and I was finally able to let the clench in my stomach ease a bit. I still needed to talk to Tony about Scott's phone call. But as we laid the table for our simple meal and sat, side by side, enjoying the juicy sausages and the crisp caramelized sugar and cinnamon, I felt such a strong, stable foundation under me that I could believe whatever lay ahead of us was something we could handle.
As we polished off the toast, I said, “Okay, confession time. I wanted to cook something special because I need to have a serious talk with you.”
He stopped in mid-chew.
Instantly, I felt the urge to backpedal. It had been such a lovely meal, even with the pandemonium that preceded it. Springing this on him now didn't feel like I'd been preparing him. It felt like I was sucker-punching him.
But I needed to be honest with him, and I didn't know how else to get to the truth without the whole truth.
“It's not that bad. But, it is about something that happened when we were apart.”
Tony swallowed and sat back in his chair. I could see him steel himself for what was coming.
I hated that he found that necessary.
“You have to listen all the way through, because I think once I've said everything, you're going to see that it's not as bad as it could be.” Good grief. That didn't sound the least bit comforting. I took a deep breath. “I'm just going to spit it out. You know Trisha and Scott Watson?”
“Of course.”
Of course he did. We'd all grown up together in the tiny town of Idalou, Texas, and it just wasn't possible to live in a town that size and not know someone the same age as you.
“I mean, you remember that they were together in high school and got married after they got out of college?”
He nodded.
“Well, here's what happened. The night before their wedding day—the day that was supposed to be their wedding—Scott's friends gave him a bachelor party. I showed up there. To be honest, I have no memory of how I got there. I'm sure we heard from somewhere that there was a party, and...and anyway.”
Tony remained frozen and my heart pounded. Things were going to sound a lot worse before they sounded better.
“You remember Rick Barlow? He was there. And he didn't really care for Trisha. He wanted to play a trick on her. A mean trick. So he got me and Scott into bed together and let her find us that way the next morning.” I reached across the table, not quite touching his hand, but almost. “Tony, nothing happened. I was very drunk, Scott was very drunk, we both passed out. Rick was there and he knew for a fact that nothing happened, but he let Trisha and Scott both believe that it had. She came in the next morning—apparently, he was late for his own wedding—and found us like that and assumed what anyone would naturally assume.”
Tony shook his head. “What an awful thing to do to someone.”
“She was devastated. They broke up. She moved away and cut off all contact with him. Eventually, they got back together because he just refused to let her go. He just...loved her too much to let her walk away. He followed after her and kept hounding her until she let him back in. They reconciled and got married, but it took two years of him pursuing her relentlessly.”
Tony was staring at the table now, his jaw clenched. He didn't say anything.
It hit me suddenly that maybe he'd heard that last bit as a condemnation of him. I had left him, and he'd let me go. He waited for me, but he didn't chase after me. The me of many years and many lessons ago had found fault with that, but I understood now and even admired what he'd done—or not done. It took a lot of faith to put an important part of your life on hold and wait for someone else to grow up, with no real indication that they ever would.
I reached further and took his hand. “Do you remember when Lucinda Cruz was found, and they used that horrible picture of me in the news story?”
He nodded, coming out of his reverie. “Sure. I thought that was weird.”
“That's how Trisha and I came back into contact. She saw on the video that I was the one who found the body, and she dug up an old arrest photo of me and ran the story with it. Which was awful, by the way. She managed to make it sound like I was under some kind of suspicion for Lucinda's murder. That's what people kept thinking—that I'd been arrested for murder.”
Again, I cringed. He knew firsthand what that was like, because he had been the one arrested and charged, in fact. Viv and I had been able to prove that he hadn't done it, which was when I found out that Tony and I weren't as divorced as I thought we were.
“I could have sued her and the station ten different ways for that, and I went up to the station to tell her just that, but in that confrontation, I learned about the whole nightmare with Scott. I had blocked out the entire thing. Even after she reminded me, only bits and pieces came back. I remembered vaguely being at the party, and I remembered the next morning when she found us in that bed. Her screaming and crying, throwing my shoes at me and pushing me down the sidewalk. The few years before and after that were so alcohol soaked that it didn't even stand out to me. Not until I sobered up, and it was years later, and I could see how much it still hurt Trisha.”
Tony took a deep breath and squeezed my hand, but he kept silent and let me finish.
“She forgave Scott, but she had no desire to forgive me, even though I was sincerely sorry and told her so. It wasn't until that night when Thomas and Rey had us in that car, with Rick, that he told me that nothing had happened. Everyone, including me, assumed the worst. But it hadn't happened. He was quite sure.”
Tony breathed then, and I realized he'd been holding his breath. Tony knew that I had not been faithful to him in the time we were apart. I thought we were divorced and hadn't considered it adultery. So, he knew on one level, of course. But the idea of my adultery and the fact of it—having a face to put it on, an exact time—those two things were worlds apart.
My heart caved into my chest and I wanted suddenly and fervently to be able to tell him that none of it had happened—none of the other guys, none of those years had been spent with me drinking my way through one relationship after another. I would have given everything I had to be able to say that.
But I couldn't. All I could do was squeeze his hand and let him know that I was with him, that I loved him, that I was his completely.
“The only reason I'm telling you this now, Tony, is that I need you to understand why it's so important to me to help Trisha and Scott. I kept them apart for two years.”
“Rick Barlow did that.”
“I was part of it. I know it wasn't my idea, but drunk or not, I went along with it.” My throat closed and I had to squeeze out the last part. “I didn't say no, Tony.” I remembered that I had actually protested, half-heartedly. But I was drunk, and Rick said it would be funny. I was all about the funny. Hey, get me! I slept with your fiancé. Ha-freaking-ha.
“Trisha and I have talked about this a few times. She's told me the hell she went through during those two years. She was destroyed. Her heart broken. Just imagine how awful that was—It was her wedding day. She'd planned for months and then had to call it all off at the last second. It took her two years to forgive him and trust him again. That kind of experience, Tony—it has an effect on a person.”
“I know that.”
Of course, he knew that.
Now it was time for me to take a deep breath. “So, you understand that when Scott asked me to do something for Trisha, I really wanted to do it.”
“What has he asked you to do?”
“Trisha is convinced that Peter Browning could not have committed suicide. She's offended by the very idea, in fact. It's as if the concept of Peter Browning choosing to kill himself is some kind of betrayal t
hat she can't get past. Scott says she's become obsessed by this suspicion that Peter was murdered, and the case isn't going to be fully investigated because the police are writing it off as suicide. Scott asked us—me and Viv—to look into it so maybe she would stop worrying about it so much. He's afraid she's going to harm the baby with all her worry.”
He sighed and remained silent, his dark eyes on mine.
“Tony, here's the thing. Scott said this morning that sometimes he'll catch Trisha looking at him like she's wondering what secrets he's hiding. This...” I shrugged, unsure on how to put into words what my concern was. “This fear that people are hiding things from her...” I felt my throat catch. “Maybe she's not thinking this on a conscious level, but I have to think that fear goes back to that awful bachelor party.”
He took another deep breath, frowning, but still didn't say anything.
“Look, you haven't come right out and asked me to stop doing these crazy little—investigations or whatever you would call them—with Viv. But I know you don't want me to do it.”
“I don't want you to do it.”
“Right.” Actually, I had kind of hoped that when push came to shove he would say something more along the lines of, 'No, it's your life, I'm fully supportive of whatever makes you happy.' But...
“But Scott is seriously worried about her. He would have to be for him to even call me. And I still feel some kind of...I don't know. Like I owe them.”
“That's guilt talking, Salem.”
“Well, yeah.” Of course, it was.
“You're not guilty. You didn't plan that.”
“No, but I was there. I was part of something that hurt her tremendously.”
“Salem, did you ask Trisha for forgiveness?”
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