Friends With Benedicts - Staci Hart Page 0,3
we lost touch—I was virtually inaccessible at my station in Zambia where I worked helping make a cluster of villages sustainable, and just weeks after I made it home, we learned Mom’s cancer had come back. So off we went to our home in Houston where she could get the best possible care, first through chemo, then a double mastectomy, and then the fight to ward off the spread into her lungs. We’d only been back in Lindenbach for a month, just enough time to make sure Mom and Abuela were happy, healthy, and settled before leaving for another Peace Corps tour to Zambia at the end of the summer.
A summer that’d be blessed with Presley.
Never did a luckier man exist.
I trotted across Main Street to Abuelita’s, our family restaurant, in search of food. The bell over the door chimed, though no one could have heard it over “Hermoso Cariño”. Or over Abuela singing along from behind the hostess stand.
She didn’t stop when she saw me either. Instead, she really put her weight behind it, which was slight considering she weighed a solid ninety pounds with her coat on and a couple rolls of quarters in the pockets. When she brought her hand up, palm first, I filled it with my jaw per her unspoken request, and she serenaded me, only stopping to kiss my cheek.
“Hungry, mijo?” she asked.
“Can’t a guy just come say hello to his abuela?”
“Sí, but you’re here for sopapillas.”
“Sopapillas and a kiss.”
“Well, you got your besos, so go get your food. Tell Manny I said to make your avocado rellenos.”
One of my brows rose. “Off menu at nine in the morning? You want me to get hit?”
“He won’t hit you,” she said with the wave of her gnarled hand. “He’s too afraid of me.”
I laughed. “He’s afraid of la chancla.”
“And who throws la chancla?” she asked. Her sandal was already in hand, the motion so fluid, I didn’t even see her do it.
“Fair enough,” I said with my hands up in surrender.
When I walked by, she thwacked me on the butt with it as a reminder of its power. “Wyatt is in the booth by the kitchen trying to get Manny to notice him, if you want company.”
“You won’t come sit with me?”
“I’m busy working.”
“Busy working on sudoku.”
She slapped her sandal against her palm and gave me a look.
“I’m going, I’m going,” I said, hands up again as I turned for the dining room.
The restaurant was busy, even this early. Abuela’s had brunch fare to rival Bettie across the street, a friendly competition between a couple old friends. In the back where she said he’d be was Wyatt, who was too busy glancing into the kitchen to notice me walk up.
“You’re gonna twist your neck trying to get a good look.”
Startled, he straightened up, meeting my eyes with an easy smile. “If Manny would buy shirts that fit, I wouldn’t have to creep on him.”
I slipped into the booth across from him and hung my arm on the back. “You ever gonna ask him out, or are you just planning on pining indefinitely from your booth?”
“I’ll do what I damn well please, Bastian.” He pointed his fork at me before tucking back into his huevos rancheros.
Wyatt Schumacher was six feet and six inches of strapping ranch hand, complete with a tan Stetson, Wranglers tighter than I imagined was comfortable, and a closet full of cowboy boots. He could rope a steer in a couple of seconds from the back of a horse, had won enough rodeo trophies to span a wall, and was as gay as the day was long.
“Presley’s back,” I said with that goddamn smile that belonged only to her on my face.
“I know,” he said with his mouth full. “You forget I’m the one who told you she was here.”
“I’m gonna see her tonight.”
He chewed for a second, watching me. “Marnie’s not gonna like that.”
Just like that, my smile was gone. “Well, Marnie doesn’t get a say, does she?”
“I mean, does anybody want their ex-wives to have a say? Pretty sure they make their say known whether you like it or not.”
“She left me. Not the other way around. I don’t really see how that grants her power of opinion.”
“She left you because you didn’t want to have kids, not because she didn’t love you.”
Guilt rumbled through me. “She knew I didn’t want kids since we were juniors in high school, so I’m not sure how that’s my fault.”
With a sigh, he rolled