by Mia Hopkins
But this isn’t the place I remember either. The mural on the side of the building, La Virgen de Guadalupe, is faded and peeling. The windows are all boarded up. There’s a handwritten sign on the door that says Closed for Remodeling.
I stand in the doorway of the bakery where I’m sheltered from the rain. I fold up my new Dora the Explorer umbrella and lean it against the wall where it can dry off. The arms of my hoodie are soaking wet but the hood is dry, so I put it on over my head and wait.
I’m starting to feel giddy about seeing Carmen again when I spot the car.
Nine
A gray Monte Carlo. Its tinted windows and nice rims can’t distract from the dents or patches of primer.
Slowly, like a lazy shark, it pulls up to the curb in front of me. My feet are concrete blocks as I walk up to it.
The passenger-side window rolls down. I look inside.
The driver, Spider, is the shot-caller for our clique. Fresh from the barber shop with his shaved head and sharp goatee, he gives me a nod. He’s dressed in a loose flannel and an oversized Ben Davis jacket. He’s strapped, no doubt.
I’m about to say something when the back window rolls down.
Ruben—my father’s best friend, our former shot-caller before he disappeared six months ago. No one knew where he went—that’s why Spider took over. Spider and my brother have some kind of arrangement. Spider is the reason why Sal has been able to leave the gang, and the reason I’ve been allowed to lay low since I got out.
But with Ruben back, my standing in the gang is unclear. Who is the shot-caller now?
I look between Spider and Ruben and realize the truth.
Chauffeur and boss—it’s Ruben.
Ruben is dressed in a Pendleton with sharp creases along the sleeves. The old cat wears a pair of Locs—dark sunglasses—even in the rain. He takes them off and stares at me, hard.
“Long time no see, Trouble.” Ruben’s deep voice sends a shudder through me. I’m afraid of him. He knows more about my father than he pretends. I know a man doesn’t survive thirty years in ESHB without having a steel spine and a dead heart to match.
“Oye,” Spider says, and I catch a flash of regret in his eyes. He’s been demoted—he can’t protect me from Ruben, and we both know the score. “We have a special errand. Ruben thinks you’re the right one for the job.”
“Okay,” I say, because that’s what you have to say.
“Noon tomorrow.” Spider continues. “At the place. Be there.”
Before I can respond, the car windows roll up and Spider and Ruben drive away. I go over the message. The place—one of the gang’s many crash pads, an abandoned house by the freeway that also serves as our arsenal. An errand—but what?
I’ve been doing my best to stay away from the gang. With all the heat ESHB has been drawing in the last year, it hasn’t been hard to lay low. But now Ruben is back. He’s issued the order, so I have to show up. I have to do what he says.
A sick feeling bubbles up in my stomach. Rain slides down my neck and I shiver, but this has nothing to do with the cold.
I’m still on the sidewalk when Carmen pulls up in her car. She parks and turns off the engine. When she steps out of the car, she goes straight to the covered entrance of the bakery.
“Why are you standing out in the rain?” she asks.
I blink and turn my attention on her.
She’s wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a dark sweatshirt. Her hair is in a long braid and she’s wearing a Dodgers cap over it. I blink. This is the first time I’ve seen her in civilian clothes. The jeans show off her long, muscled thighs and pretty hips. I’ve seen this woman butt naked, but for some reason, seeing her in her own clothes turns me on and I’m hard by the time she says, “Eddie? Are you all right?”
The rain is still pouring down on me. I snap out of it and go to her. “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”
She’s putting keys in the door when I bend down and kiss her lips. A quick peck—but it warms me from my head to my toes. I feel better immediately, and I push my problems aside for now.
“Good morning, Lady Chef,” I say quietly.
She smiles a little and turns the key in the lock. The glass door swings open. We walk inside and my eyes adjust to the darkness. With the windows boarded up, the only source of light is the open door.
We walk over the worn-out tile floor. The glass cases are all empty—no bread, no conchas, no elotitos. Tongs and trays are piled on the counter. In the large back room, the ovens are cold. The equipment is covered with sheets of clear plastic.
Carmen bends down to pick up the junk mail that has piled up on the floor by the door. “My dad told my mom not to come back here. When the cops finished their investigation, my dad was still in the hospital. That’s when she and I snuck back and cleaned everything up.”
“Hold up,” I say. “What happened to your dad?”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“I guess I assumed everyone in the neighborhood knew what happened.” She walks behind the counter and flips a few switches. The fluorescent lights flicker on. “He was beaten. Badly. In the parking lot.”
I’m confused. This is East Side Hollenbeck territory. Nothing happens here without us knowing about it. If something goes down without our permission, we break heads. People pay the price. “What the fuck? By whom?”
She sighs. “Las Palmas.”
Las Palmas is another gang. Their territory starts just across the avenue. It’s a longtime rivalry—even my grandfather beefed with Las Palmas. But the avenue has been our border for generations. We don’t cross it, and neither do they. At least, that’s my understanding—the reality might be different.
“They’d been harassing him for months,” she continues. “Trying to collect taxes. They threatened him. He told them again and again he was under East Side Hollenbeck’s protection. He told every homeboy in ESHB who would listen. He even called the cops. But nothing changed. Last October, a couple of guys from Las Palmas cornered him and beat the shit out of him in the parking lot after closing time. One of his employees scared them off with my dad’s handgun. If he hadn’t…” She trails off. “The employee who witnessed the crime was afraid to be interviewed—he left town without telling anyone. He was undocumented and didn’t want the police to hand him over to ICE. The detectives in charge of the case took their sweet time following up. The investigation went nowhere. So no one was arrested. No one was prosecuted.”
I can feel the bitterness in her as she tells me the story. But everything about what happened to Slim feels wrong. What really happened here? Did Spider know about this? Did Ruben?
“Is your dad okay?”
“Sort of.” She looks away from me. “Anyway, the last few months before all this, investors visited regularly to see my dad about selling the building. Rich people with expensive cars. There’s a lot of money pouring into this area, ever since the Metro station opened.”
That’s something I noticed as soon as I got out of prison—old buildings coming down, new ones going up. There are tons of fancy new condos just across the river on the downtown side. It was only a matter of time before all that money began to flow eastward, gathering around the new train station in Mariachi Plaza.
“My dad held out,” Carmen says. “This is our family business. Our ‘bread and butter,’ he called it. He had hoped I’d take it over, eventually—but I wanted something different. When I went to cooking school, my mom and dad decided to work here until they were old enough to retire, then pass it on to one of their employees. But after my dad got hurt, he said, ‘Get rid of that place. I never want to see it again.’”
There’s a little dust on the glass refrigerator that used to hold the cakes and cupcakes present at every cumple, baptism, and graduation in our neighborhood. Carmen traces her fingertip over the glass the way she touched the tattoos on my chest, as if she’s trying to learn something she can’t see with her eyes alone.
A car pulls up
outside the front door. Automatically, I stand in front of Carmen and reach for the gun I don’t have. Then I feel stupid—Carmen’s story and my run-in with Spider and Ruben have put me on edge.
I turn my attention back to the street and notice that the car is a late-model Mercedes Benz with tinted windows. Two men come out. I can’t tell what race they are, but they’re dressed in expensive suits. The license plate holder is from a car dealership in the San Fernando Valley. One holds an umbrella for the other as they approach the door.
“The guy on the left is one of the investors who’s interested in buying the property. The one on the right is his accountant,” Carmen says to me. “My parents wanted me to see them today.”
“Why am I here?” I ask quietly.
“Moral support,” she whispers. She looks at me sideways. I’m a head taller than her and twice as wide. At last I get it—she wants muscle. Backup. Okay. That I can do. I tip my head back and put on my best gangster mug.
As soon as the two men walk in, Carmen stands up straighter and her eyes get hard. There she is—Chef Centeno. She shakes their hands and introduces me as her business associate, Eduardo Rosas. They don’t tell me their names.
The men begin to ask her questions about the bakery.
“How long has your family owned this place?”
“Since the forties,” she says. “It’s been continuously owned and operated until we went on hiatus last October.”
“Why are you interested in selling now?”
“My father has decided he’d finally like to retire.”
She leaves out the part about gangsters and extortion. Wise move.
As Carmen easily handles the buyer, I walk slowly around the bakery, taking it in. Plastic trays and tongs are stacked by the front door where customers could pick them up. They’d choose whatever rolls and sweets they wanted, then bring them to the cashier to pay. The back room is enormous with high ceilings, multiple vents, and industrial fans. There’s a giant mixer in the corner, big enough to prepare cement for a driveway. Baking pans are stacked inside tall rolling carts.
I run my hand over the beat-up workbench where all that bread was made, year after year after year. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the bread baking.
I look through the small pass-through window between the kitchen and the front of the bakery. That window was for sandwiches—Slim made delicious Mexican tortas. I remember. He sold them at lunchtime along with ice-cold beers and sodas from the little refrigerator by the cash register.
I stop.
Wait a second.
Beer.
Holy shit.
The bakery has an existing beer and wine license.
“Has Slim considered renting this place out instead of just selling it?” I ask, interrupting Carmen’s conversation with the investors.
Carmen looks at me with a confused expression. “What?”
My brain is humming now. “Instead of selling it, why doesn’t your father rent it out?”
The two men glance at me as if I’m a fresh turd they’ve both accidentally stepped on.
“My parents and I haven’t discussed that possibility,” Chef Centeno says. “We’ve only discussed selling.” Her voice is cold, a warning.
“You should think about renting.”
“Why?” she asks.
“If it were me, I’d hang on to the property a little longer. Think about it. Fifteen years ago, everyone was investing in downtown LA, buying up property left and right. Now downtown is too expensive for most investors, so they’re moving east, across the river. It only makes sense that would happen here too, right?”
“I don’t follow,” Carmen says.
“It’s simple.” I direct my smile toward the investors. “Just wait a little. These gentlemen are here because they’re counting on bigger buyers coming through in a couple years. Am I right?” When the umbrella-holder mad-dogs me, I add, “What’s the word? Gentrification? Yeah. That’s it. They’re counting on gentrification.”
When Carmen frowns at me, I back down. I walk into the kitchen and sit up on the workbench, flashing my smile at the investors whenever I catch their eye. When they shake Carmen’s hand and leave, she storms into the kitchen. I’m ready for her.
“Don’t be mad, Lady Chef.” I hold up my hands in a gesture of don’t shoot.
She smacks the counter with her hand. The sound echoes against the high ceilings. “Why can’t you act normal, just for a few minutes?”
“I don’t know. Because I’m a gangbanger?”
That riles her up. “Eddie, I swear—”
“They’re one of many offers, right? If they don’t buy, others will. It doesn’t matter. We owe them honesty, not good manners.”
She growls at me—straight-up growls, like a Rottweiler. “We don’t owe anyone anything. We choose to show good manners because we’re courteous, professional people.” She throws up her hands. “I don’t know why I’m lecturing you. It’s not like you’re even listening to me. Travieso.”
Travieso—troublemaker. There’s a little smile mixed in with her frown, so I think she’s only playing at being angry.
“I am listening to you,” I say calmly. “I just have an alternative for you and your folks, if you’ll hear me out.”
Her chest rises and falls as she takes a deep breath and lets it out. “Okay. What?”
Carmen folds her arms and listens as I tell her about Sal and Vanessa’s delivery route, and my brother’s struggles to balance expansion, production, and rising demand for Eastside Beer.
“Where does he make the beer now?”
“At his mentor’s brewery, Bay City Brews, all the way out in Santa Monica. He has something called an alternating proprietorship, meaning two different breweries share the same facilities. Vanessa borrows an old pickup to deliver the kegs. I help them out with deliveries twice a week.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.” I repeat Sal’s most common complaint about selling his beer the way we do. “The beer is good—you’ve tasted it. But we’re competing for tap handles and shelf space with breweries that have a lot more resources than us. If my brother had a larger place to brew and store the beer, and if we had a spot to serve it and introduce it to new customers—here, on the Eastside—I think that would help us get ahead of the pack.”
Carmen nods, absorbing what I say.
“Even if it doesn’t work out for my family,” I say, “your family can hold on to the building a little bit longer and sell when prices are even higher than they are now.” I smile. “What do you think?”
As I speak, Carmen moves closer and closer to me, as if she can’t resist what I’m telling her. To be honest, I can’t resist it either. It sounds so good, I can’t believe the idea is coming out of my mouth.
I take her hands and pull her forward until she’s standing between my knees. She tips her head back to look at me from under the brim of her baseball cap. Her dark eyes narrow as she studies my face.
“Are you really serious about this?” she asks.
I rest my hands on her shoulders and run them down her arms. “We have to look at the numbers. I don’t know if it will work,” I say, “but I know two people who can tell me if it will.”
Ten
I call Sal, but he doesn’t pick up. He’s probably in class. I call Vanessa. She answers on the first ring. She’s at her office downtown—I can hear people talking quietly and phones ringing in the background.
“Hey, can I come over tonight for dinner?” I ask.
“What?” She sounds busy. “Why are you even asking?” She pauses. “Why are you acting weird?” I never had an older sister, but I imagine she’d be just like Vanessa.
“I’m not being weird,” I say. Carmen watches me. I wink at her to reassure her. “Listen, there’s someone I want you to meet.”
Vanessa squeaks. “Wait, is it a girl?”
Bait taken. “Yes.”
“Oh my God, Eddie! That’s awesome. Of course you can br
ing her over.” She pauses. “But I didn’t clean the house—and I didn’t buy food. The house is a rat’s nest and she’s gonna starve to death. Couldn’t we take her to a restaurant instead? This is really short notice.”
“Are you kidding?” I snort. My brother is slightly obsessive compulsive about cleanliness. I know—I used to live with the motherfucker. “Sal keeps your place spotless. And as for food, don’t worry. I’ll bring us all something to eat.”
“What? You? Bring food…to our house?”
“Yeah. What’s wrong?”
She’s quiet for a second. “Sorry, I just had to look outside the window to see if there were any pigs. You know. In the sky. Flying around.”
“Ha-ha,” I say in a sarcastic tone. “What time should we come over?”
“We’ll all be home at five.”
“Okay. See you guys then.”
I hang up the phone. Next task. “So, one day out of the kitchen. You must be missing it,” I tell Carmen.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you must miss being in the kitchen, cooking. Giving people joy through food.”
Carmen stares at me. “Are you…did you…just volunteer me to make food for your family?” She shakes her head. “The balls on you. I swear.”
“Be honest, Carmen. Doesn’t cooking bring you joy? I mean, you are a chef, after all. This is your life’s work. Your calling.”
She rolls her eyes at me. “How many people?”
“Including you and me, five adults. One kid.”
“How old is the kid?”
“I don’t know. Little?”
“Eddie, I hate cooking for kids. Kids are picky.”
“You don’t even blink when you cook for a big-time food critic but cooking for a kid has you shook? Really?” I slide down off the counter and take her hand. “Come on. Let’s go to el super.”
With a fat chunk of my last paycheck, I buy everything Carmen wants. We load the groceries from the cart into her car and drive to Vanessa’s house. We arrive at five on the dot. Vanessa opens the door and greets Carmen with a big hug as the evil wiener dog barks his damn fool head off. Vanessa’s grandmother and daughter crowd Carmen as I carry all the bags into the kitchen and unpack everything.
