The Book of Broken Hearts (12 page)

“Mari, don’t you want an empa?” I gestured toward them all Jedi, like,
This is not the traitorous sister you’re looking for
. . . .

Mari picked up a napkin, blotted her lips, refolded it, and smoothed it across her legs. “How did you two meet again?”

She feigned sincerity, but her eyes lasered us across the table. Emilio looked at me to respond at the same time Mari looked at Papi, who went on slurping his soup as if the Vargas name didn’t register. Likely, it didn’t.

“More salt?”
I said, This is not the traitorous sister you’re looking for! Hello!
I reached for the shakers and instead hit my glass, sending a tidal wave of iced tea toward Mari. She shoved her chair backward to avoid the spill, and in one fluid motion, Emilio flung his napkin at the puddle and mopped it up. Pancake had the floor covered, licking up iced tea, crumbs, dirt, bugs, toes, anything in his path. The whole thing was over in seconds. There were no survivors.

“God. Be careful, Juju,” Mari said.

“The kids are helping me with Valentina.” Papi stabbed another empanada from the platter and dropped it on his plate, unaffected by my clumsiness.

“Who the hell is Valentina?” she asked.

“The Harley,
querida
.”

“
Okaaaay
.” Mari steamed in her chair. “I just stepped into an episode of
The Twilight Zone
.”

“Yo, I love that show.” Emilio pointed at her with his fork. “Ever see the one where—”

“So, lots to do today, look at the time!” I bolted out of my chair and tugged Emilio’s arm.

“What about the Dark Moon magic stuff?” he asked.

“No time for coffee,” I said through gritted teeth. “We have to go out back. Let my father and sister catch up or . . . whatever.”

“Aw, don’t go. I want to hear
all
about what you’ve been up to this summer.” Mari flashed the kind of grin that used to send me scurrying into Mom’s lap. Now it just made me a little queasy. She went on glaring, the unspoken authority of the other Hernandez sisters blazing behind her eyes, once again uniting them in their lifelong mission to be the boss of me.

“Let them go, Mariposa,” Papi said. “You stay here with me. Tell me about your big-time book deals.”

“It was kind of last minute,” I said as we unpacked the tools. “I didn’t get to tell her much about you, and it’s . . . complicated.” I met Emilio’s eyes.
Does he really have no idea about our shared family history?

“Pass me that headlamp?” he asked.

I found the lamp on the workbench and handed it over.
Emilio dived into the bowels of the bike, which was now propped up on the lift we’d picked up at Duchess.

“It’s not just you,” I said. “She’s like that with everyone. Which is probably why she’s still single.”

“Probably.” Emilio held out his hand. “Allen key? It’s the black one that looks like an
L
.”

“Oh, the Twizzler wrench.” I pulled it out of the toolbox. “It looks like black licorice, don’t you think?”

“Twizzler wrench? Don’t ever let Samuel hear that. You’ll be in for a four-hour lecture on tools and their proper names. I sat through that shit once. Believe me, you don’t wanna know.” Emilio laughed, but then everything got quiet again as he focused on Valentina, the Twizzler-slash-Allen wrench clinking softly as he removed and inspected a hundred tiny things. He didn’t seem to need any more tools, so I snapped a few pictures for Papi and then busied myself in one of the teetering boxes along the side wall—a collection of fancy dessert books from Celi’s brief stint as a pastry chef.

“Wrecking Ball.” My voice shattered the comfortable silence, but Emilio didn’t flinch. “That was Mari’s nickname growing up. She’s got her good points. She just goes a little overboard. A lot overboard.”

Emilio grunted. I couldn’t tell whether it was an acknowledgment, a laugh, or an accident; he was so focused on his work.

I abandoned the books and pulled out a stack of old homemade CDs, most of them missing their cases. The labels were scrawled in black permanent marker with Celi’s loopy
handwriting.
Rainy Day Blues Mix. Hot Gangsta Mess. Microsoft Word.
The last one had to be Lourdes’s.

“It’s funny with my sisters,” I said. “They knew who they were the instant they were born, and they’ve never changed.”

“And you?” Emilio finally said. “Always the baby girl, right?”

I chucked the CDs in the recycle pile. “More like an only child. I was born in a totally different decade.”

“Me too. Thank God my bros are out of the house, tell you right now. If your sister’s a wrecking ball, those guys are like . . .” Emilio puffed out his cheeks and made an exploding sound. “Nuclear bombs.”

Yeah, hence all the crying at Casa de Hernandez, inspired by V-boy badasses Johnny and Miguel.

“So this is Valeria?” Mari snuffed out the last of her cigarette in an old coffee can and approached the bike. Guess Papi got tired of hearing about her book deals.

“Valentina,” I said. “Where’s Papi?”

“Asleep on the couch. What year
is
this clunker, anyway?”

“Sixty-one,” Emilio said. “Classic. She looks a little rough now, but once we’re done . . .” He trailed off, eyes alight with imagined possibilities. Mari circled Valentina, and he kept a close eye on her, shifting his body in front of the bike when Mari got too close.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, and I realized I was smiling.

“Probably high from all the fumes,” Mari said. “It’s like sniffing gasoline in here.”

“I’m surprised you still have a sense of smell,” I said. “Cigarettes can kill that, you know.”

“So they say.”

“You should quit,” I said. Emilio had gone back to work on the bike, but Mari wasn’t going anywhere.

“This again?” she said. “Juju, honestly.”

“I don’t want you to get cancer.”

Mari put her arm around me. “Enough about me. What’s going on with Zoe? Mom said you guys are having problems?” She eyed up Emilio as if he had everything to do with it.

“We’re . . . kind of doing our own thing this summer.” Zoe had finally texted me this morning about missing her rehearsal, all
no worries, no biggie,
but it
was
big to her, just like the bike restore was big to me, and all that big stuff was slowly building up between us, and soon we wouldn’t be able to cross it.

“You guys used to be inseparable.” Mari glared at Emilio again.

“Key words: used to be.”

Mari must’ve heard the tightness in my voice, because she shut her mouth and shook another smoke from her pack. She cupped her hands and lit it, the end crackling behind her Zippo.

“Chain-smoke much?”

“Not too much, since I’m still alive and everything.” She exhaled through a smirk and leaned against the wall, seemingly content to watch Emilio work. I knew the feeling,
but I also knew better than to joke with her about it. Mari would step in front of a charging bull for any of us, but her loyalty was blinding. Right now, that loyalty lay with Araceli, and I was the charging bull. Or maybe Emilio was the bull, which would make me . . . the pasture? No, the china shop.
Ugh
. Thank God SATs were over. I seriously sucked at analogies.

“He’s just here for the summer,” I whispered. “Mom doesn’t even know he’s a Vargas.”

Mari regarded me a moment, smoke rising from the cigarette between her fingers. “Why did you let Papi hire him?”

“I didn’t
let
him.” I picked up one of the dessert books and fanned the pages. “Papi can hire anyone he wants.”

Mari sucked in another drag. When she spoke again, her voice was hoarse. “If that were true, you wouldn’t have to lie to Mom about him being a Vargas.”

She was right, of course, and guilt sat heavy on my shoulders. Devil-Jude was playing in it, actually. Mom never came out to the barn—the piles of boxes stressed her out—but eventually she’d start asking about Emilio’s family, especially if she thought we were becoming friends.

“You’re telling on me, then?”

Mari shook her head, mouth twisting as she stamped out her cigarette. I bent down to retrieve it and toss it in the coffee can, and in that moment she stalked off toward Emilio.

“So, Emilio Vargas. Tell me about yourself. Your
familia
.” She stretched out that last word until it stung like a poison.

A slow and painful death, that’s how Mari would kill. I ached for her future ex-husband.

Emilio gave her the super-short highlights version of his life, ending with the job at Duchess and how he’d snagged the Valentina gig. He kept shifting around her to get to the bike, clearly in the middle of some important diagnostic, but Mari was undeterred.

“You’re what, twenty-one?” she asked.

“Nineteen,” he said.

Mari ran her finger down Valentina’s spine, and I swear the bike shivered at her touch. “Are you even qualified to work on this? Don’t you need special training?”

“This is the training right here.” He wouldn’t look at her, just wiped the bike with a soft rag where Mari had touched the engine.

“Can’t you get more experience at the dealership?” Mari asked. “I’ve seen all the tourists around here with their big fat Harleys.”

Emilio looked up at me and raised his eyebrows, like,
Get this
loca
off my back already,
but when I shrugged helplessly, he gave up and came out from behind the bike. He rubbed his fingers with an old bandanna from the toolbox, but they were permanently smudged, tattoos from the thing he most loved.

“Duke’s a solid guy,” he said. “Throws us extra work like this and doesn’t take a huge cut. I need all the cash I can get.”

“College?” Mari said.

“Road trip. Grand Canyon to start, soon as I’m done.”

“With your girlfriend here?” Mari asked.

“I’m not his girlfriend. And I’m going with Zoe,” I said defensively. “To the Dunes.”

Emilio caught my eye and smiled. “Road’s no place for a girlfriend, anyway. Might not come back. Just gonna go until I run outta gas, see where I end up.”

He winked at me, and before I could respond, he took a step closer and brushed the hair from my forehead, traced his finger along my eyebrow. It was such a small gesture, familiar and intimate. My cheeks flamed as if he’d pulled me into a passionate kiss.

I swatted him away.

Emilio leaned toward Mari and put his hand over his mouth, pretending to whisper. “She plays hard to get, but I know what this girl’s all about.”

“Seriously? Shut up!” I gave him a halfhearted shove, and he stumbled backward.

“I’m going to check on Papi,” Mari said. “You two have fun with your lovers’ quarrel.”

“We’re not quarreling,” I said.

Emilio laced his fingers through my hair, right on the back of my neck, and leaned in close. His breath tickled my ear, soft and sharp, all at once comforting and dangerous. “Does that mean we’re lovers?”

Emilio—probably just like his brothers—had the kind of voice that could give a girl goose bumps, and hours later his playful
words still hung in the air. Even after he’d cleaned up the tools and said his good-byes, they lingered. They echoed in my head when Mom got home and opened their second-best bottle of Malbec to celebrate Mari’s arrival. And finally, after I’d taken a hundred pictures and begged off dessert and crept into my room for some privacy, I’d just about stopped shivering, just about gotten him out of my system.

But then I pulled back the fleece blanket on my bed, and there it was, black and obvious on my bright orange sheets.

The Book of Broken Hearts.

I hefted the tome into my lap and traced the edges with my fingertips. Celi was the last to have it, and I’d long thought it lost, buried somewhere in the barn’s aging repository of boxes with her ballet slippers and
Veronica Mars
DVDs.

I’d given up looking for it a few years ago.

Yet here it was, pulling me back to the night of the oath, the words we’d uttered in the flickering candlelight like a spell. Nostalgia and regret emanated from the cover, straight through my fingers and into my heart. The effect was dizzying. I’d longed for this book for so many years that now, holding it against my bare legs, there was no way I wouldn’t open it, nothing I’d do to stop myself from traveling back in time. . . .