The Year the Swallows Came Early (7 page)

“G
osh,” Luis said, sounding a little surprised and kind of weird at the same time. “We didn't know you were in town. Did you come by boat?”

I could tell he knew Zoila right away. And I remembered the story about how she had married his father after his own mother had passed away from being sick when he was younger. How he and Frankie had become stepbrothers overnight, meeting only after their parents' wedding ceremony. He said he never understood how Zoila
had been able to talk his father into buying that big fishing boat, and then sail it all over the world when there was plenty of good fishing right here in our area.

“Yes and no,” Zoila told him. She wiped her face. It was easy to see that she was real nervous. “The boat was too long to dock at the marina here, so we left it down south. I took a taxi here to find Francisco.” She looked at Frankie, her eyes taking him in, top to bottom. Francisco who everyone called Frankie because
Francisco
never fit him. “Your father had to stay with the boat and do some repairs,” she said.

“Sounds like him,” said Luis. “That boat always meant more to him than—” He stopped suddenly and frowned.

Zoila looked down at the ground. She wiped her remaining tears with her forearm. Red lipstick smeared lightly across her brown skin. After a second she turned to me.

“It's good to see you again, Groovy,” she said in a new sparkly voice.

“You too,” I said. “You look different. I didn't recognize you at first.”

She smiled. “It has been a while. Francisco,” she said quietly, walking slowly toward Frankie this time, “I think we should have a talk, somewhere private.”

“I don't think so,” Frankie answered. But it didn't sound like him. “We're about to open up for business.” He backed into his stool so quick that it crashed to the floor and rolled sideways into the puddle of coffee.

“I'll get it,” I told him. But he didn't seem to hear me.

“Just a few minutes,” his mama said, and came even closer to him so that he could almost reach right out and touch her to make sure she was real after all this time. “I've only got a couple of hours before we go out to sea again. Please. This is important.” She waited, her fingers twisting the gold-chain strap on her purse.

“I guess you could use the apartment upstairs.” Luis pointed to the stairs. “Groovy and I will
cover the shop until you're done.”

“Thank you.” Zoila reached to touch his shoulder. But he stepped back just a little. Enough so she couldn't.

She looked at him like she was trying to understand something. Then she walked toward the stairs, checking behind her to make sure Frankie was coming.

“Go on,” Luis finally said to Frankie.

Frankie's face stayed stiff.

“I mean, she did come a long way,” Luis added, in a way someone might if they had ordered chocolate ice cream for dessert, and the restaurant only had vanilla left. The way they would say, “Oh, all right, I guess I'll have the vanilla.”

Frankie looked hard at Luis. Then he turned toward the window. I knew he was trying not to remember her carry-on suitcase, or her promise to be right back. I knew he was trying not to look at her on purpose. I knew it by the way he held his hand against his stomach and kept it there, like he needed an orange Tums.

Finally he walked up the stairs, slowly, heavily. He looked like a person who just got sent to the principal's office for getting into trouble.

It seemed like they were up there for hours. Luis and I covered the shop, tending to the cash register, making change for customers who needed quarters for the parking meters, and selling his famous tacos.

But the whole time, our eyes were saying to each other,
I wonder what is happening up there.
Then we'd glance to the top of the stairs at the same time, waiting for the door to open.

H
ere's what happened next. (In list form because things happened one after the other. Like dominoes falling. But separate.)

1. The door slammed open and Frankie came down the stairs.
   
2. I dropped a roll of quarters from being startled. They scattered everywhere, rolling into corners and spinning in half circles before tipping over.
   
3. Frankie's mama rushed after him, trying to keep up in her high heels.
   
4. Frankie pushed the front door of the Swallow wide open.
   
5. The bells chimed extra loud, hitting the glass so hard I thought it might break.
   
6. I yelled to Frankie to stop.
   
7. He walked to the taxi parked in front of the shop and stopped.
   
8. Frankie's mama caught up to him.
   
9. Luis and I ran to the front window to look out.
   
10. The taxi driver started his car again, getting ready to leave.
    

But Frankie's mama didn't get inside the taxi. Instead, she held her arms open at her sides with her palms up. Like a person does when they are asking what else they could have done.

I could see how Frankie had grown to look like her. How he had the same straight black
hair, the same nose, the same brown skin. Even the same hands. I could see how he might've been just like her in his ways, if he'd always lived with her. But she didn't even know his favorite kind of sandwich—grilled cheese on white—or that he'd been voted class vice president last year.

“He looks upset,” I told Luis in a quiet voice.

“He's got a lot to be upset about.”

“Maybe you should go out there,” I said.

Luis looked out the window again.

“Well?” I waited for him to go help Frankie.

“They need to work this out themselves,” he finally answered.

“But it looks like he really needs you.”

“God knows what he needs better than I do,” Luis said.

I walked to the glass door, thinking I would go out there myself, and pushed it open, but something made me stop. Maybe it was the way Frankie looked like he was going to cry if I came too close, or the way his mama sighed so loud just then; I could tell she was running out of things to say.

I backed into the shop, letting the weight of the door push me inside again. My hands gripped the silver bar as I watched them through the glass.

After a while, I saw her take a white envelope out of her purse. She tried to give it to Frankie. But he wouldn't take it.

“What do you think it is?” I asked Luis.

“I don't know. Maybe some more letters or money. But I'm only guessing.”

“Maybe some pictures,” I told him, and imagined it was a collection of photographs from all the places they'd been while sailing the world catching fish.

His mama begged him to take it, holding it between their bodies. Like a tiny drop of glue she hoped would keep them connected.

She kept talking to him, and when it seemed she finally knew that what she was saying would make no difference, she put the envelope back into her purse, stepped close to Frankie, and hugged him. And he let her. But he didn't put his arms
around her. Instead, his arms lay flat at his sides.

She hugged him real hard.

And by the way she held so tight to him, it looked to me like she was very sorry.

But then Frankie moved away from her. He started back toward the shop.

“What's he doing?” I asked Luis. I felt a panic inside.

Luis shook his head. “This is just like Frankie. I've been telling him that she would come back someday. I said, ‘She won't have you staying with me forever, you know.'” He sighed, and I could picture the two of them standing together on the jetty, Luis talking, telling him about his mother. Frankie, not wanting to care if she ever came back.

His mama leaned against the taxi like it was the only thing holding her up, like her legs had stopped working. Tears ran down from her black-asphalt eyes.

And that's when my stomach went tight, and my breath stopped, and a very bad feeling came
over me. Because it was plain to see that he had made up his mind.

I watched Frankie walk away from his mama that morning. And with each step he took, I knew he was carving a deeper hole into his heart.

I
've got another recipe for you, Groovy,
became Luis's favorite seven words. Every time I stopped in the Swallow on my way home from school, he was handing me a piece of paper with a different secret passed down from his Aunt Regina. Fried ice cream, tortilla soup, stuffed green chilies; you name it.

Don't get me wrong, I was thankful to have the recipes, and I taped each one carefully into my cooking notebook and all, but I was pretty sure it wasn't anything like formal training.

There was nothing in Luis's recipes about the things I wanted to know, like the exact proper amount of time to cool a cake straight from the oven before thinking of frosting it.

Even Ms. Dixon-Green, our school librarian, couldn't find the answer.

“I'll look into ordering a cooking reference book,” she told me. “But it could take a while.”

Every day at lunch recess, I'd wander into the library and make my way to her desk. “You found out anything yet?” I'd ask her, like my very life suddenly depended on knowing the correct number of minutes to cool a cake.

She never did.

One day she handed me an empty cake-mix box. “It's about ten minutes before removing the cake from the pan, and then it says to cool
completely
before frosting,” she said. “According to Betty Crocker, at least.” She pointed to the directions listed on the back of the box.

“I
know
what the box says,” I told her, as if
I
hadn't already memorized what Betty Crocker's
instructions were for cake baking. “But the
skin
of the cake is tender for a long time. I wish they'd tell us how long
completely
cool is.”

Ms. Dixon-Green sighed and looked again at the directions. “That's true,” she said. “I hate it when the frosting pulls up little bits of the cake.”

I stopped going to the library at lunchtime after that.

I decided maybe it was more of a heat-and-cooling scientific thing, and made plans to ask Miss Johnson instead.

When the case of strawberries came in to the Swallow from the fruit market, Luis delivered them to my house himself.

“Can't wait to try one,” he said. Which is exactly the kind of thing Luis would say.

“Thanks. I'll bring them over when I'm done,” I said.

It took me most of the afternoon to finish the first batch. Mama kept calling home from the salon. “How's it coming?” “Do you have enough chocolate?” “Don't burn yourself on the stove,
please.” I stopped answering the phone.

The whole time I was working, I kept thinking about how years from now, when I'd finally saved up enough money for cooking school, I would write in the front of my cookbook, where the dedication usually is, how hard work had dominated every second of my life, day after day, dipping strawberries into two parts dark chocolate and one part milk chocolate. Lining tray after tray of strawberries. And not just any strawberry, but the extra-big ones that take at least four bites to eat. The kind where the chocolate crumbles off after the first bite, making you catch it with your free hand and pop it in your mouth before it melts. The good kind.

When I got through most of the case, it was almost dinnertime. I watched the sun from our kitchen window as it lowered toward the line where the red-orange sky met the blue-green ocean while I ate three of my strawberries to hold me over until dinner. Then I covered the tray with tinfoil, pressing the edges of the foil carefully
around the sides so as not to crush anything.

You should have seen how slowly I walked to the Swallow. I'm here to tell you that turtles could've passed me.

As I neared the shop, I saw Marisol hunched over the sidewalk in front. She was drawing an enormous flock of birds flying in the sky. Felix was sitting on the yellow bench, his feet swinging wildly back and forth, eating a purple Popsicle.

“Marisol's sketching the return of the swallows today. We've been here since we got out of school,” he told me.

She stood up, wiping chalk on her shorts. “Luis said it would be nice since this is the area they come to and all.” She walked up good and close to me, looking at my tinfoil-covered tray. “What's that?”

“Nothing,” I told her.

Felix hopped off the bench and walked over. He lifted a corner of the foil back and peeked inside. “They're strawberries,” he said. “With chocolate on them.”

I looked at Marisol, feeling annoyed that she knew.

“What type of food are they?” Felix asked. His Popsicle was melting down his wrist, a thin line of purple tattooing his skin.

“They're a dessert,” I said.

“No, I mean what
type
of food are they? Like where would you put them in the phone book? My dad's restaurant is under
Mexican Food
,” he told me.

“They're a dessert,” I said again. “They don't have a category.” I made my way around him toward the front door of the shop, avoiding Marisol's sketch the best I could.

“You gonna sell those?” Marisol asked.

“Maybe.” I reached to open the door, balancing my tray with one hand.

“You ever sold any before?” she asked.

“Marisol sold one of her sketches in the restaurant yesterday. To a man with a good eye for art,” Felix said. “She gets to keep all the money.”

I stopped. My hand gripped the door handle.

“Really?” I asked her. “Someone bought one of your pictures? For real?”

She shrugged like it was no big deal, but her eyes said it was. “Yeah. I told you, people enjoy my art. I'm gonna be in galleries soon.”

I stood holding my tray, watching her, the happiness floating off her. The look on her face that said,
I knew this would happen all along.

A breeze rushed in, sending her hair across her face, making her blink. But I could still see it, the part of her that shone that I wanted to be too.

Standing there, I suddenly needed to tell someone my dream. Someone who drew pictures of birds on sidewalks because she loved to. Someone who wanted to be in galleries and sold her sketches to strangers. Someone who believed in almost impossible things happening.

I walked over to Marisol and slowly, carefully, lifted the tinfoil off my tray of strawberries. Felix stepped up, putting his face against the edge of the tray, his eyes as big as oranges.

“Those are nice,” he said.

“You see,” I said to Marisol, “I want to go to professional cooking school. I have since third grade. I'm hoping to sell these to save money so I can go when I'm older. I don't know how else to get there. I had a savings account, but it's gone now,” I heard myself say, and everything was quiet. Right away, I wished I hadn't told her so much.

Marisol looked straight at me. I could tell she was thinking about what I'd said by the way she squinted and tipped her head.

I was just about to put the tinfoil back over my tray and go inside the Swallow, when she opened her mouth to talk.

She didn't say
It'll never work
or
You should think up another plan.
She didn't even roll her eyes, or tell me,
Good luck.

She said, “How much are they then?” And she reached into her pocket and handed over all the money she had.