Buried (Hiding From Love #3) (26 page)

I stand up, run a hand through my hair, and mute the TV. When I swing the door open, I find my father standing there, looking uncomfortable. He’s holding a bottle of port and two glasses.

“I thought perhaps we could have a drink?” he asks.

I raise an eyebrow but decide not to push it, so I gesture for him to come in.

He goes to the bar and pours out the dark, thick liquid. I shut the door, go back to the sofa, and throw myself down without making any effort to be welcoming. Apparently he’s set on changing the rules we’ve been surviving by, but I’m not in the mood.

He brings the glasses over and puts them down on the coffee table before taking a seat in an armchair.

“You were rude to Miss Candelaria at dinner.”

“Miss Candelaria is nothing but a high-class hooker looking to catch herself a rich man. She doesn’t seem to realize that I’m not a rich man, just a rich man’s gangster son.”

“Juan,” he admonishes, scowling.

“What? You think you can push women on me like you pushed the business? Well, it’s not going to work like that.”

My father looks shocked, his mouth opening and closing a couple of times before he speaks. “We had an agreement, and I’ve done nothing more than expect you to uphold your side of it. You agreed to learn the business if I returned Ms. Garcia to her family. I don’t see how that’s pushing the business on you.”

“No, you’re right. It was an arrangement and I’ve stuck by my end and I’ll continue to, but fucking associates’ nieces or daughters was not part of that arrangement. You can bring a whole damn cathouse of Miss Candelarias in here and I won’t negotiate on that. No women.”

“Son,” he says quietly. “I really only meant to provide you with some company your own age. I can see that you’re unhappy since Ms. Garcia left. I thought some other young people might cheer you up. I do not expect to dictate who you sleep with.”

I huff out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, unhappy. That’s one way of putting it,” I mutter. “Well, you don’t need to worry about my happiness. That’s not part of the agreement either. My social life, my bedmates, my moods—those are all my business, not yours.” I stand up and walk to the door. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

My father sits and looks at me for a moment as if he’s trying to see past my skin down to my very bones. Then he stands slowly, looking weary in a way I’ve never noticed before.

“Very well. Goodnight, Juan.” He walks through the door I’ve opened for him.

I swing the door closed a little more firmly than necessary. Then I collapse on the sofa, unmute the TV, and close my eyes so I can remember the feel of Beth’s skin under my hands.

My father spends the next few days tiptoeing around me like I’m a bomb waiting to explode. And maybe, in a way, I am. When I sent Beth back, I was so certain I was doing the best thing, and I still know it was the only choice to make for her, but I’m starting to question whether I really thought through the choices for myself well enough.

I didn’t know it was possible to miss something as much as I miss her. It’s like someone took a piece out of my body. I have this hole inside me and it doesn’t get any better. It’s raw and ragged and it stings and aches and throbs all day, every day. At night, it bleeds. It bleeds in my sleep, it bleeds in my bed, it bleeds in my soul. I wake up each morning a bloody mess, and I spend all day trying to ignore it. I thought it would get easier with time, but it doesn’t. If anything, it’s getting harder.

I don’t know what my father would have done if I’d tried to keep walking over that bridge to the US. I assume the slew of henchmen I had with me had been given instructions to keep me in Mexico, but would they have shot me? I felt, at the time, like it wasn’t a risk worth taking. The fact is that, even if I’d managed to get across the border, he’d find me, and then he might bring me back under less pleasant circumstances.

I could try to make a run for it now and turn myself in when I get to the US, end up back in Huntsville. It might be the only place he can’t get to me. I think a lot about whether it would be better to be in prison than here. It’s a choice I always thought I had the answer to. Now, things simply aren’t that clear. Yeah, here is like a high-end hotel, but the isolation is almost more than I can stand. Spending my days learning just how much product the Santos Mexicanos are putting out into the world doesn’t help. The idea that I’m supposed to help create hundreds of thousands of drug addicts, wrecking families, health, and entire lives, is revolting on a good day and unbearable on a bad one.

I’ve just come back from a meeting with a petty local pimp who we use to move product in and out of Guanajuato, the nearest big city. The guy makes my fucking skin crawl, but his girls are very good at stuffing bags of heroin places the sun doesn’t shine so they can get it past roadblocks the police sometimes set up at the major roads into the city.

I enter my father’s office and find him sitting in an armchair, looking out the window at the swimming pool.

“The meeting went well?” he asks absentmindedly.

“Yes. He wanted to up his fee by twenty percent, but I told him I’d only do it if I gave it directly to the mules. I’m not going to pay his filthy ass more to continue treating his girls like shit. As soon as I said that, he didn’t need more money after all.”

My father chuckles quietly. “You have a very original way of doing business,
mijo
, but it’s effective. You put your own stamp on these dealings. I enjoy watching it.”

I don’t answer—just lean against the wall parallel to where he sits.

“You played
fútbol
in high school, yes?” he asks, completely off topic.

“You mean American soccer? Yeah.”

“I played too,” he says, glancing at me quickly.

“Huh. I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned anything about growing up.”

He smiles sadly. “I grew up in Guanajuato. We were poor, there were a lot of kids—all the normal things you’d expect from a Mexican family in the 1970s. But I got a scholarship when I was thirteen to attend the Catholic school. I was a good student like you were. And they had a
fútbol
team. In my neighborhood, we played all day long in the roads. If we had a ball, that was good. Most of the time, we made balls out of garbage that we would smash together and wrap in some sort of plastic or tape. We made do.”

“I’ve seen pictures of the kids in South America doing that,” I say, moving over to a chair now and sitting down.

“At the Catholic school, we had real balls and a team. One of the priests saw me playing in the schoolyard before class and told me to try out for the team. I made it and then played the rest of the time in school. I was a striker. Goal scorer. And you?”

“Center mid.” I look at him. “Playmaker.”

He laughs a big, hearty laugh, not his usual restrained, controlled self. “Of course you were. It explains everything. You are always looking around you, figuring out how to set up the people and the events the way you want. Anticipating how the other players will move, respond, behave. It’s a different way to lead than mine but just as valuable.”

I sit silently for a moment and digest what he’s said, fascinated that he was able to assess me so accurately when I’ve never even thought about myself that way.

“The men often play a game of
fútbol
after dinner in the evenings,” he tells me as he stands. “Tonight, the Ybarra men will join them and we’ll see how the playmaker and the goal scorer work together.”

That night, after dinner, I follow my father out to the big lawn at the front of the house. Half of the security staff is out there, some of them just in shirtsleeves and bare feet, others in shorts and T-shirts. I’ve changed into a pair of track pants, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes. I’m not sure how well I’ll play without cleats, but no one else has them either, so I guess I’m not at a disadvantage. The fact is, my greatest weakness right now is that I haven’t played in years. There were a few guys in the RH who’d screw around with the ball once in a while, but it’s been at least five years since I’ve touched a soccer ball.

There are several balls lying around on the grass, so I grab one to start juggling just trying to get a little touch back. In a few minutes, I’m dribbling around trees, maneuvering, feeling awkward and stiff when suddenly a flash comes from my right and Ryan skims past, grabbing the ball neatly from me as he runs by. A cheer erupts from the men, and I see my father raise one eyebrow at me in challenge. Without another thought, I charge down the field. Game on.

It takes me about ten minutes to get back in the swing of things, but once I do, very few of the guys stand a chance. I was a star player as a teen, playing on the top club team in the area and four years on varsity in school. We won State my junior year and probably would have again my senior year if I’d been there to play. Unfortunately, that was another dream interrupted by the INS.

By the end of the game, I’m dominating the play, feeding my father ball after ball that he then slips past the other team’s goalie. He doesn’t have the power I’m sure he once did, but he’s damned accurate, able to place a ball in the tightest spots you can imagine. It’s possible that the guys are so afraid of Miguel that they always let him win, but I doubt it. Most of them haven’t had much in the way of formal soccer training, and my father doesn’t lose at many things in life.

After we’ve all exhausted ourselves entirely, we collapse on the ground, everyone sweaty and happy. Clara sends some of the staff girls out with big jars of ice-cold water and
1
horchata
, and we all drink up.

“We work well together,” my father says as he sits near me, wiping sweat from his forehead with his arm.

“Yeah,” I concede. “We do.”

“You love this—the
fútbol
.”

“I did. A long time ago.”

“Our true loves never die,” he says. “We can ignore them, forget to nourish them—despise them, even—and they won’t die. They wait patiently for us to find them again. You’ve rediscovered one tonight. Others may be waiting for you as well.”

With that, he stands, says goodnight to his men, and leaves. I realize there may be depths to my father that I haven’t wanted to see.

1
Horchata = a sweet, rice milk drink

I
T’S
been a week since I spoke to Uncle Max, and I finally know what I have to do.

I remember that my oldest brother Tomás once told me, “Family comes first, but you can’t help your family if you’re not being true to you.” Tomás is a very smart guy, and all of us have looked up to him our whole lives.