by Holley Trent
“Yeah. Ma, this is December. December, this is my ma, Lola Perez.”
December held out her hand to the woman to shake, but instead of speaking some suitably congenial greeting to the grandmother of her child, what actually came out of her mouth was, “Do you know my last name, Tito?”
The moment the words left her lips, she registered how petty the question was, but it had slipped out reflexively. He should have known what his daughter’s last name was, but then again, she’d always misjudged how close she and Tito actually were. He’d obviously meant more to her than she had to him.
He rubbed his eyes and leaned against the doorframe. “Farmer.”
All she could do was blink and then stare, because she’d convinced herself he wouldn’t know.
He did know.
How does he know?
“I never forget a name.” He cleared his throat and looked at his mother again. “You want a cup of coffee or something?”
Mrs. Perez’s stare was coolly assessing in the same way that lady at Cruz’s preschool had been when December had waited until the last possible day to apply for a discounted rate. She hadn’t wanted the subsidy, but without it, she couldn’t afford the tuition.
“You know what? It’s hot,” December said in a rush of overwhelm. “You should get her in out of the sun, and I’ll just … I’ll come back.” She backed away from the door, waving slightly. “I’ll come back in an hour.”
“You shouldn’t fret over me,” Mrs. Perez said in a quiet voice. “The sun is the least of my worries.”
“True.” Tito passed an impatient hand through his short hair and glared at his mother.
She glared back.
What’s going on with them?
If they had drama, December wanted no part of it. She had enough of her own to offload.
“You sure you don’t want to come in, December?” Tito asked. “The place is a mess but clean enough for you to sit down, I guess.”
“No, I—”
“I’ll watch your car,” Mrs. Perez said.
“Ma, the neighborhood ain’t that bad,” Tito said. “Haven’t had a theft report in two, three months.”
She shifted her cane again, and tapped the rubber end a few times against the stoop’s concrete.
“What?” Tito asked.
“I said I’ll watch her car.”
“I heard you. I just don’t see why you would need to.”
“Perhaps December has cargo she doesn’t wish to have molested.”
Tito pushed up one dark eyebrow and turned to December. “That it? You worried about your stereo being stolen or something?”
“Um … ”
Mrs. Perez gave December an eloquent look. She couldn’t have been plainer if she’d said aloud, “I see what you have.”
December nodded. She couldn’t shape words, but she could nod, and then she squeezed past Tito and into his cluttered living room—into the mess he’d promised.
The room was crammed with bric-a-brac and mismatched furniture, and the dark violet paint job probably contributed a great deal to the immediate feeling of crowding. The space was homey, but claustrophobic.
Instinctively, she put her hand over her chest and forced herself to breathe.
Too much stuff.
She didn’t like that. She needed room to walk and pace. Being at work and squeezing between the tables in a crowded room was one thing. She’d pretty much grown up in bars and restaurants. Her parents had owned a tiny seafood shack back in Rhode Island, and maybe still did. Even in the off-season, the place had always been full of hungry people, and sometimes December and Alicia were sent out to fill drink orders. When December wasn’t at work, being cramped made her nervous—made her worry about finding exit routes, because, far too many times since, she and Alicia had run when had they felt unsafe. Two young girls who hadn’t been able to fight worth a damn, and still couldn’t, really, but at least Alicia had gained a husband who fought most of her battles for her.
December had lost hope of ever having such a champion of her own.
The storm door slammed shut, and the floorboards creaked under Tito’s weight.
Closer.
And closer still.
The hairs on her neck stood on end, making her crane her head to the side and rub her nape. His presence made her spine curve, prickling as if her back had been bombarded by sand spurs carried on the wind.
Can’t turn. Can’t look.
She kept rubbing, kept breathing.
If she looked at him, her tongue would probably go dumb again.
“Sorry about Ma,” Tito said. “She’s hard to figure out, even on the best of days. Most folks around here are used to her ways, though. You’d think she’d have a harder time sneaking up on people, but I guess she has stealth in her DNA.”
December huffed a nervous scoff. She knew something of stealth. Too many times, she’d opened her eyes in the middle of the night to find Cruz leaning over the bedside and staring down at her. Every time, December would scream, because that was what normal people did when they were startled. And every time, Cruz would blink big hazel eyes in that innocent way she always did, and ask, “What’s wrong, Mommy?” as if the fact wasn’t perfectly obvious she’d just scared the ever-loving piss out of her sleeping mother.
“Right,” December said softly. “Stealth.”
Almost as bad was how the child could quietly enter a room and be sitting there for an hour while December was otherwise distracted. Too many times, Cruz had sneaked into the living room long after she should have been in bed. December would be watching television, and suddenly a little voice would pipe up some unsolicited opinion about the shows. December fully expected to be at the doctor’s office begging for anti-anxiety drugs within the next few months. The child was going to give her a heart attack.
December snapped her fingers and propped her hands on to her hips.
Cruz.
Cruz was why she was there.
She turned rapidly on the heels of her boots and opened her mouth to just spit out the words already, but his smile unhinged her, the same way it always had.
The noise that came out of her mouth was more croak than language.
“Weird seeing you here,” he said. “I mean, I’m glad to see you. I just didn’t expect to.”
She nodded. Swallowed. “Uh.”
“I meant to get back down that way, but things have been so busy here. Got a new job and stuff.”
“Yeah. I saw.” She rocked back on her boot heels. “So, when’d you stop driving trucks?”
“About a year ago.”
“Oh.”
So what was he doing to be so busy during the four years before that?
She didn’t ask, just nodded again, and licked her lips. Bad habit. They were starting to crack.
“Plus, Maria is a hotbed of drama in general,” he said. “We’ve got biker gangs here, just like what used to bother you at the bar. And also drunk cowboys. Lots of small-town politics to wade through.”
“It’s … cute.” December’s voice was half croak and half rasp, so she swallowed and took a deep breath. Then she closed her eyes so she didn’t have to look at him. The confrontation might have been easier if he, like the mop head she’d been practicing her “pay up” speech on, hadn’t had a face. “Maria, I mean. I drove through downtown.”
December had driven through downtown three times that morning, and had even parked in front of the diner for a while. She’d considered calling Sean and using him as a sounding board before showing up at Tito’s. She’d had Sean’s number. His family owned a woodworking business that was well publicized. She could have called and asked him to play intermediary, but in the end, decided that she needed to confront Tito on her own, which was probably for the best if he hadn’t been passing on her messages. Anyway, she’d made the choice to sleep with Tito, and she would be an adult and tell him what the consequence was.
And she was going to tell him.
“I—”
“You want a cup of coffee?” he asked. “No, no. Scratch that. You don’t drink coffee.”
Her mouth opened and closed, but her brain hadn’t caught up and she didn’t know what to say. He’d remembered. She’d told him that one night at the bar—just a throwaway comment when she’d been pouring some for him.
“Tea? I think I have some bags left, but they might be old. Pretty sure there’s some juice in the fridge, too, but I’m almost certain that carton is expired. I get most of my meals either at the diner or out at the ranch.”
“The ranch?”
“Yeah, the Double B. Sean’s ma owns the spread. Folks just show up sniffing around for food, and she begrudgingly feeds us all. She’s used to the hassle, though.” He chuckled and rubbed his eyes.
He’d been asleep when she’d knocked. Graveyard shift, he’d said, because he’d become a deputy, of all things.
“Why did you become a deputy?”
“Kinda got drafted into the gig. Never saw myself being a cop, but the sheriff needed to clean house last year and he recruited folks he knew he could trust. Hey, you want a bowl of cereal or something? I know the milk is good. I just bought that yesterday when I got off work.”
“No, thank you.”
But Cruz needed to eat soon, and December couldn’t imagine her happily chomping on cereal in the kitchen of the father she didn’t know December was in Maria to see.
“Listen, I came here to—”
“Tito.” A woman in a brightly patterned skirt and flowy white blouse that fluttered from a rare desert breeze rapped on the screen door.
Tito groaned impatiently and peered at the door.
December waved him on. “Go ahead. Talk to your guest.”
Let me work up my nerve again.
Tito walked to the door, but the woman waved him away and craned her neck, leaning to see December.
“She’s awake,” she said.
“You mean … ”
“Woke sneezing.”
Damn.
December unglued her feet from the floor and then hurried through the door. “Where did Mrs. Perez go?” she asked no one in particular as she trekked down the walkway with the lady at her heels.
The big boat of a car Mrs. Perez had pulled up in was no longer at the curb.
“She had an emergency,” the stranger said.
Cruz was sitting in the driver’s seat with the door open and her legs dangling out the side of the car.
“You feeling better?”
Smiling, she nodded. “You didn’t tell me Mrs. Estobal lived here.”
“Mrs. Estobal?” December knelt beside the car and tried to remember why that name was familiar. Cruz had mentioned it before, but she couldn’t remember in what context. But then again, Cruz had a tendency to say a lot.
Period.
“She works at my preschool, Mommy. She said she was in the neighborhood visiting her friend here and saw me in the car.”
December turned to the woman, who was smiling serenely at Cruz. “I volunteer a day a week at the school. I used to live in Tucson. I still get down there pretty often because it’s on my sales route. I’m a rep for a very small pharmaceutical company. My territory sprawls a bit more every day.”
“Ah, that explains it,” December murmured. “I was going to say that’s quite a drive.”
“Yes, my time at the school is important to me. Hard to be everywhere at once, though.”
“I’ll say,” Tito muttered uncharitably as he joined them at the curb.
He gave Mrs. Estobal a hostile side-eye and then fixed his face before looking at Cruz.
December pondered how the two knew each other and if their relationship was always so contentious. They’d never had a chance to talk about any of his friends, besides Sean, and that was only because Sean had sometimes accompanied him.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“Cruz,” Cruz said.
December rubbed her throbbing temples and muttered, “Here we go.”
“That’s a nice name,” Tito said.
Cruz shrugged. “I didn’t pick it.”
“Who did, then?”
Cruz shrugged again. “Mommy, probably. Mommy, did you pick my name?”
December rubbed her temples harder, lifted her eyebrows, and then tried to put on a smile for the child. “Mm-hmm. Yep. I did. Named you after my grandfather.”
She could feel Tito’s gaze boring into the side of her face, but she didn’t dare look until she caught him turning in her periphery.
He looked at Mrs. Estobal again, who had her chin cocked daringly at him.
“You got somethin’ you wanna say?” he asked her.
“Do you have something to say to me?” she asked.
“Yeah. A lot of somethings, maybe.”
December cleared her throat loudly. Maybe Tito was an absentee jerk, but she’d never known him to be a jackass. She didn’t know how much more she could bear to witness.
“Maybe I should find Cruz some lunch.” Mrs. Estobal leaned around Tito and smiled at Cruz. “Would you like to walk to the diner with me? They have quesadillas, though they are a little bland.”
“Can I go, Mommy?”
December cringed, uncertain. She didn’t know the lady, but obviously Cruz did, and Tito, too. Although he and the lady seemed to be at an impasse over something, that didn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t trustworthy. And the conversation she needed to have with Tito would certainly be better done without an audience.
“She won’t let nothin’ happen to her,” Tito said.
“No, I’d die first.” Mrs. Estobal took Cruz’s hand before December could respond one way or another to the odd comment, and got Cruz moving.
And Cruz got talking, broaching three different subjects before they even got as far as the end of the block, and then they turned the corner.
December turned to Tito.
He leaned an elbow atop the car’s roof and pinned a questioning gaze on her. “You never told me you had a daughter.”
“You never gave me a chance to.”
“How old is she?”
“Five.”
“So, you were pregnant when … ”
December gave her head a hard shake and slammed the car door shut. “No. I wasn’t pregnant back when we were doing whatever we were doing.”
“So, you met someone after?”
“I’ve been meeting a lot of someones for a few minutes at a time. That’s my social life in a nutshell lately. If you’re asking if I dated anyone else in almost six years? Not really, not that my private life is any of your business.”
“I’m just trying to—”
“You’re not trying hard enough, for god’s sake, or maybe you’re trying hard not to put the pieces together. That’s your daughter. Cruz is your daughter. I’ve been trying to find you for all this time to tell you. You never came back. You never called, so I had to drive up here stalking you like a madwoman, because it’s not fair for her to only have one parent. I didn’t sign up for that!”
She clapped a hand over her mouth and squeezed her eyes shut tight. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t shriek, and she’d shrieked.
Damn it. Way to go.
He took a deep breath and drawled, rebuking her, “December—”
She dropped her hand, opened her eyes, and shook her head hard. “This isn’t going the way I planned. This isn’t how I wanted this to go. You were supposed—no, I was going to say … ” She growled and closed her eyes again. “Just … tell me what you’re going to do about it!”
“What I’m going to do? You just dropped a hell of a bomb on me, and you’re expecting me to have a plan of action?”
She opened her eyes once more, promising herself she’d keep them open for good. He was still so damned hard to look at. She wanted to be angry with him, but couldn’t be. Not when he was close enough for her to see his dimples.
She took three big steps backward and put up her hands, ho
ping he wouldn’t take that space away from her. “I’ve been the one doing all the planning for the past five years. Maybe it’s your turn now.”
“What do you expect me to do? Is this about money? Because if you want money, we can work something out.”
She clamped her lips shut and shook her head again. Alicia had told her to take what she could get and go—she’d said that December shouldn’t expect anything after all that time, and that she’d be lucky if she could get twenty bucks out of him.
But she’d hoped for more than that. She’d hoped Tito would be happier. She’d thought he’d be eager to connect and would want to have a relationship with his little girl, but he was standing there with his hands in his pockets wearing the blankest expression she’d ever seen on a human face. He should have been running after Cruz. If he had a shit to give, he certainly wasn’t showing it.
“You know what?” She shrugged. “I don’t know why I bothered. I know where you are now, so we can just deal with this through the court system.”
If that threat scared him, he sure as hell didn’t show that, either.
He didn’t say anything, and didn’t move an inch when she walked past him toward the corner Mrs. Estobal had rounded with Cruz.
She was going to get her kid and go home.
“Shouldn’t have come in the first place.” She clamped her arms over her chest and rubbed her arms, chafing against the sudden chill on the breeze. “Stupid truckers in stupid bars.”
She looked back over her shoulder as she stepped off the curb and saw that Tito had gone. She didn’t know where he’d gone—maybe into his house—but the fact he hadn’t followed was all that mattered. Being a little tongue-tied was expected, given the news she’d delivered to him, but she hadn’t expected him to not care.
Cruz had too few people caring about her already.
She was about to cross the dotted yellow line in the road when a newer full-sized SUV careened around the corner and nearly into her.
She was frozen like a deer in headlights; gaze pinned on the opening rear door and the man leaning out of it.
“Whoa, babe!” A man yanked her by the back of her shirt and onto the sidewalk.
The SUV continued past, and she saw the vicious knife the passenger held, and also his wicked grin and numerous facial piercings before he rolled up the tinted window.
