Ready to Roll (3 page)

All the brothers had daughters, but Anna Lucia was the youngest, and the undisputed ruler of them all.

And her bright pink bandaids made Janice laugh.

And, best of all, Mami’s fussing had somehow landed him with a handful of Janice’s slim, firm thigh. Her muscles jumped beneath his palm, but she didn’t otherwise stir. It made him think of her using that force of will, later, naked, thirty feet down the hall. In his bed.

“Mami,” he said firmly. “Stop. My hand’s fine.” He extricated himself and Mami settled herself on the opposite sofa. Miguel sat back, and Janice finally squirmed a little, but he didn’t stop palming her leg.

“Did you come over for something, Mami?”

“Eh, Micky? No. Well, I wanted Sophie’s address. I have a care package I’m making for her.”

“You don’t have it?”

Mami reached up to fiddle with her hearing aids, a sure sign of evasion if Miguel had ever seen one. “Eh?”

He rolled his eyes just a little and leaned into Janice to pull his cell from his back pocket. She took advantage and slid aside, but thanks to the burn Miguel had to use the other hand to call up Sophie’s contact info anyway. “There, I texted it to you.”

“Eh?”

He gave Mami a narrow look that she just answered with a lifted chin and a smile.

“Gracias,
bebé
. I’m going over to Joe’s to see Anna Lucia’s report card. You seen it?”

“She told me all about it this afternoon. Called me at work. Tell Joe and Krissy. I know they’ve told her not to call me at work unless it’s an emergency.”

“All A’s, Micky. That’s worth an interruption, surely?”

“Si, si, I told her I was proud. But she still broke the rule, and I warned her her mom would hear about it.”

Mami sighed and stood up, all slow and achy like just after her surgery, never mind that she’d been full of energy when telling Janice the story about him and Max and the drainage ditch earlier. Still, Miguel eyed her carefully before deciding that she was totally faking to get his arm to lean on as she headed to the door.

Didn’t mean he wasn’t walking her to the door anyway. To lock up after he closed it, if nothing else.

“
Janice es una buena chica, hijo. Se cortés con ella.
”

"Yo soy siempre cortés,
” he protested.

“
No le mientas a tu madre. Te oí maldecir cuando vine.
”

But Miguel proved he was, indeed, polite, at least long enough to not voice his thoughts while he gave Mami a kiss on the cheek and saw her to the street. Anna Lucia was in her front yard, dancing one of her spinning-ballerina dances, clearly looking out for her
abuela’s
arrival.

Without so much as a glance over her shoulder, Mami hustled across the street, already telling Anna Lucia how pretty her hair looked and asking what had happened at recess that day.

Miguel locked the thumb lock. And the deadbolt. And latched the door chain.

Janice was sitting on the sofa still. Her toe was tapping a mile a minute.

Miguel smiled.

Janice was practically never, ever still. Over the years, he’d found her tell spots. Sometimes it was the tapping toe. Sometimes she drummed her fingers on the nearest surface. In meetings, she tended to swivel a few degrees left and right in her chair, though her supreme core control allowed her to do it and never move her head and shoulders from wherever they were focused. Sometimes—and this was his favorite—if she had to be utterly sedate and polite, say at a client meeting, her cute little nose would twitch.

Her nose wasn’t twitching now. Her whole self was thrumming with the need to go back into battle. Miguel was armed and ready.

“Come to the table. Everything’s done.” Well, almost. He’d preheated the grill while Mami was grilling Janice, and all he had to do was throw the steak on it while they enjoyed his empanadas.

He took Janice’s hand and pulled her easily up to him. Best to get her moving again, get her out of the zone where she’d talked with his mother. He couldn’t think of a less romantic interruption. But he’d recover the mood; he tugged her through his bedroom onto the back deck, where his grill was. And he didn’t miss her eyes lingering on his neatly made bed, either, no matter that he was balancing a dish full of marinated meat as he guided her along.

Miguel positioned Janice so his body blocked access to the door, but she could still see his bed through the window. He’d learned some lessons over the years, one of them being about the power of suggestion. And having Janice where her gaze was going to fall on the sleep pants he’d left tossed casually on the foot of his bed was just the suggestion he wanted. His stripping, his being in bed, her doing much the same.

Let her squirm now, he thought, forking the steak in place over the hot grill. It sizzled immediately, the flames leaping up to sear the flesh. Enticing smoky scents filled the air around them, and Janice was bouncing on her toes again, eyes darting around the small deck area and out to the dark yard beyond.

Yeah. She was exactly where he wanted her.

“Miguel?”

And calling him by name, never mind the slip that he’d let slide earlier. “Janice?”

She cleared her throat. He crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back against the deck rail to better enjoy every micro-movement of her fidgeting. Dios, she was lovely. In the dusky light, her eyes and hair were the same enchanting brown, though in the sun, he knew, strands of gold wove through her hair. He always thought of ice cream bars: a hard outer shell, but crack through it, and a man would melt for the sweet cream inside.

A quick jab to his bicep got him focused on Janice’s words again. “Eh?”

“You sound like your mami.” She eyeballed him, challenging, knowing just how well he was inclined to take that comment. “I asked, who’s Sophie?”

And it wasn’t like he’d change the answer, or withhold the answer. It barely occurred to him that Janice wouldn’t know about Sophie.

It wasn’t until Janice went completely, eerily still that Miguel considered the impact of his rolling-off-his-tongue words: “Mi hija.”

It probably was just two seconds
, the time it took Janice to replay his words, translate them to be sure, and play them again. She was no more ruffled than a hen at roost time when she spoke again. “Didn’t know you had a daughter, Toots.”

Known him five years. No birth announcements, no school pictures on his screen saver, no kid dropping by to visit daddy at work. Not that she’d seen.

Wasn’t like Janice spent all day trailing round behind Miguel like a motherless calf desperate for milk. He could be interacting with this Sophie any time that Janice was in the offices, or visiting with a vendor, or having lunch with friends. Janice wasn’t Miguel’s keeper.

She leaned back against his window. His bedroom window, not to be too specific about it. She was a few feet further along the porch than him, and between the light spilling out from the house and the glow of the grill, Janice had a decent enough view of Miguel, just perched there on his deck rail like a man who’d never kept a secret in his life.

“Well,” he said.

“Well?” she asked when he failed to go on with informative details.

“I have a daughter. We all do, my brothers and me. Have daughters, I mean. No boy cousins in the lot; Mami says it’s our payback and her reward for raising up five sons.”

“Right, you said about Anna Lucia before.” Anna Lucia, now, Janice knew all about her. Knew about Miguel missing happy hour because he had to go to her first-grade play. Knew she’d had the part of a cricket, and even though her entire class was crickets, she wanted to be a ladybug like the kids in one of the other classes. So Miguel’s whole family went and had to brag on how Anna Lucia was the best cricket they’d ever seen. Janice had thought it was sweet, Miguel loving on his little niece so much, and being so involved in her life.

But she had no idea what part his own daughter had in the school play.

Or, oh yeah, that he had a daughter at all.

He was kicking his heel against the deck rails, his lips pursed up in a line that took away any of that fullness she’d been damnably guilty of staring at earlier. When she wasn’t staring at the green striped p.j.s on his bed. Or wondering if he had any in red, which was her favorite color on Miguel.

“Okay, look, come inside, I’ll show you.” And without, this time, holding her hand against the possibility of her getting lost in a house with one long hallway going from front to back, Miguel ushered Janice to the only room she hadn’t seen. It was opposite his kitchen, between the bedroom and living room, and had a closet like it was meant to be a second bedroom. But the sliding closet doors were missing, and Miguel had a desk and bookshelves set up in that space. There was a futon under the window, but most of the room was taken up with a dining table, already set with two placemats and forks and knives and all that. And flowers. Not tulips, but a wildflower mix of mostly yellows and greens.

Miguel turned a couple of the dining chairs to face his computer desk. A little bit of button pressing and his laptop was awake and Miguel was double-clicking on a jpeg.

“That’s Sophie at graduation last year.”

It sure was. The girl wore a grin three times as wide as any she’d ever seen on Miguel, but otherwise they were pure reflections of each other. Her red cap and gown, of course, looked lovely on her. Red was clearly their color.

“She’s how old?” Janice asked, then remembered those manners her mama once tried to teach her. “She’s real pretty, Miguel.”

“Yeah.” And there was that tender thing in his voice again. He cleared his throat. “She’s eighteen now. She’s almost done with her first year at UNT. Studying romance languages, if you can believe it.”

“Why wouldn’t I believe that?”

“No, no, you would. It’s just I never know what to expect of her.”

Janice wasn’t sure where exactly the train was headed, but suspected they were getting off track. “Toots. How do you have an eighteen year old kid?”

“Are you complimenting my boyish good looks?”

She rolled her eyes. Janice knew good and well he was in his mid-thirties. Maybe early thirties, depending on where that line was drawn. Technically old enough to have any number of teenager daughters, but then again, so was Janice. Difference was, Miguel actually did have one, and Janice didn’t.

“Hang on. She is your only daughter, right?”

“Do you see any other kids around here?”

“Well, Toots, I don’t see Sophie, either.”

“She’s up in Denton, I told you.”

“And I’m real proud of her, but I’m still curious how I never met her before.”

Miguel closed the picture of Sophie so fast Janice’s suspicions rose like quills on a porcupine’s back.

“For that matter,” she added, “I’m curious how I never heard of her before.”

“
Ella no es un secreto.” He shrugged. “I guess I don’t talk about her at work all the time.”

Janice snorted.

“Okay, okay. I don’t talk about her much at all.” He glanced back at the now-dark screen and said, “She grew up mostly in Dallas, with her mom. And her stepdad.”

Janice hid her wince at his subdued tone, but her hackles were more risen than her heart was empathetic. “You maybe want to go back to the beginning with this story?”

To his credit, Miguel only rubbed his forehead for a minute before nodding and shifting the chair to face her fully. “I was in high school. Obviously. I mean, we both were, Alicia and I. She was sixteen and I was fifteen and we were dating a little.”

A little. Hell if Janice would call impregnation ‘a little’ dating, not at that age. Her thoughts clearly showed on her face, or maybe this wasn’t the first time Miguel’d told this same story over the years. All eighteen of them.

“We weren’t mad in love, not even the kid version of mad in love. It wasn’t Romeo and Juliet or nothing. But we didn’t date other people, and we saw each other a lot, in all the same classes, and lived on the same block. My brothers Pablo and Max both were in the same school, they’d drive us home if we got to the parking lot before them. They thought it was funny to take off without us, but if she and I were together we didn’t mind walking home so much. We were latchkey kids, all of us. And my oldest brother, that’s Rick, he was twenty-three by then. Four big brothers, you know? Plenty of sex talk, not a lot of safe sex talk, you understand?”

Janice could picture it. Not as easily as she’d pictured the cute toddler version of this brotherhood earlier, but he made sense.

Still.

A dad at fifteen?

Not that people didn’t get pregnant more than occasionally in her little country high school. Where Janice’d grown up, someone showing off a new pickup truck counted as major weekend excitement, so, yeah. Kids had sex. Kids had kids. And if they didn’t have them at sixteen, they did at nineteen, or twenty-two. Her ten-year high school reunion, Janice’s classmates could practically figure out which ones had stayed in town and which had moved to a city just by surveying to see who had elementary-age children.

So she was no stranger to the concept. And not in the least inclined to judge. But if frankly pissed her off, that she’d known Miguel for half a decade without knowing that he had a teenage daughter from the day they met.

And Janice’s defenses must have been more down than she thought, or Miguel was better at reading her than she counted on, because next thing she knew, Miguel was answering the very question Janice hadn’t yet voiced.

“
Sophie no es un secreto, pero...cuando estoy contigo no soy un padre. Cuando estoy contigo, yo soy un hombre.”

Well, send her to hell in six handbaskets. Rudimentary as her Spanish was, Janice got the point. Being around her made Miguel feel not like a father, but like a man.

And the tadpoles were aswim down all her limbs again.

Miguel pasted his tongue
to the roof of his mouth, not willing to say more on the subject of his manhood. About Sophie, sure. He was a proud father, no matter how little he got to see his girl. It helped that Alicia often said how fully her own person Sophie was—and he’d seen it, too, that their daughter didn’t look to anyone for clues of how she herself could be. Independent and smart and responsible and amazing, so fully herself from day one, it seemed. No one ever had to teach Sophie anything. No one ever had to guide her or push her to explore her world and her capabilities; she just did it all on her own. Alicia and her husband and Miguel all were constantly asking Sophie where in heaven she came from. She always said, “I’m a mermaid and I came from the sea,” because that’s the answer she gave when she was four and none of her parents ever got tired of it.