Brighter Than the Sun, page 11
“Thanks, Sol,” he replies, but I can tell he doesn’t believe me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
BREAKFAST WITH MY FAMILY ON SATURDAY MORNING is both similar and different from last week. It’s similar because Abuela made bacon again, because some of the hope that my first paycheck brought still lingers in the air. It’s different because Luis didn’t get up early today, because Diego and my grandmother are much quieter than usual, and because Papi doesn’t seem to be in a rush to head out. He eats slowly, sipping coffee between bites, and turning every now and then to stare out the window at the lime tree in our backyard.
By the time we get to the restaurant, things feel different around here, too. There’s none of the excitement from last week, none of the noise and movement. Now that Independence Day has passed, the place is every bit as quiet as it has been over the past few months.
“Do you need any help?” I ask Papi when I step into the kitchen. After dinner last Saturday, when we all helped him clean up, the place was left spotless, but now I can see some of the signs of disarray that have become normal lately. The sink is filled with dirty dishes, pots, and pans. The floors are in desperate need of sweeping and mopping, and there’s a smoky smell in the air that I recognize—the lingering stench of burnt meat.
“I’m good here,” he says. “You can help with the dining area.”
I go to the closet to grab cleaning supplies. Taking a quick lap around the place, I notice that things in this part of the restaurant have also taken a turn for the worse. The floor is every bit as dirty as it was in the kitchen, and there are salsa stains on tables three and four that look several days old.
I’ve barely started wiping the tables when Diego looks up from his homework and asks if there’s anything he can do, so I hand him the broom.
“How was everything around here this week?” I ask him while we work.
“All right, I guess,” he says. The broom is normal-sized, but it looks big in his small arms. “Papi was in a better mood.”
“How about you? How have you been feeling lately?” I ask.
Diego shrugs. The bruise beneath his eye may be all but gone by now, but there’s still something in his gaze that reminds me of the day I got back home to find out that he’d gotten into a fight—something that tells me there are things happening deep inside him that he’s unable to speak out loud.
Before he can answer, Papi’s loud voice comes from the kitchen.
“¡No me jodas!” he shouts. He used to curse a lot less—mostly because Mami didn’t like it—but he’s been slowly going back to his old ways.
Diego stops sweeping, turning to look over his shoulder at the entrance of the kitchen.
“Should we go check on him?” he asks in a whisper.
“No,” I say quickly. “Let’s leave him.”
I drop the cloth on top of another table to start wiping it, but a second later we hear it again: a curse, even worse than the previous one. And then, suddenly, a hissing sound comes from the back, followed by two loud bangs.
“I’ll go,” I say to Diego.
The second I step into the kitchen, Papi curses again.
“What’s wrong?” I ask him.
“This damn fridge,” he says, giving it a small kick with the tip of his foot.
I use a hand to cover my mouth and nose while the refrigerator—the big, industrial one we’ve had for as long as I can remember—makes a sputtering sound. There’s smoke coming from the back, which seems to be turning thicker and darker with each passing second.
“Can you fix it?” I ask, even as another coughing sound comes from the refrigerator.
“That’s what I was trying to do,” Papi says, leaning forward to get a look at the back of the fridge. “It’s been acting up for weeks, but I don’t know what’s gotten into it today.”
Before I can say that the fridge has had a long life—that it’s probably not meant to last more than fifteen or twenty years—Diego’s voice comes from behind me.
“Some customers just walked in,” he says. “What should I tell them?”
Papi turns sharply toward him. “To take a seat! What else is there to say?”
“But can we even make food right now? The entire restaurant smells like—”
“Sol, you go take care of the customers!” Papi growls at me while he sticks a hand behind the refrigerator.
I don’t argue. I don’t say that what he’s doing probably isn’t safe, that it’s not Diego’s or my fault the refrigerator is not working. I turn around, and as I walk out of the kitchen, I squeeze my brother’s shoulder, trying my best to remind him that I’m here for him, and that we should leave Papi alone when he’s in this type of mood.
“Bienvenidos,” I say to the new customers, a family of tourists. “The menu of the day is milanesa de pollo with—”
“Is everything okay back there?” the mom interrupts me in heavily accented Spanish, staring at the back of the restaurant with wide eyes.
“Yeah, yeah. Everything’s fine.”
The dad crinkles his nose. “Are you sure? Cause it smells as if—”
“I’ll just, uh… crack the door open to let some air in.”
In the end, they take a quick look at the menu and leave, saying they weren’t too hungry after all, and then the restaurant is as empty as it was a few minutes ago.
I keep sneaking glances at the door, wondering if the smell of smoke has filtered out, scaring any potential customers away. Because, even as the clock keeps ticking, there’s no one. No one except for me and Diego, who keep sweeping, and mopping, and wiping while smoke continues to swirl out of the kitchen.
“I’d say it’s a goner,” Luis says, sneaking out from the gap between the fridge and the wall. The corner of his lip twists downward in a way that makes him look sad, but it disappears so quickly that I’m left wondering if I only imagined it.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
My dad’s face crumples into a frown. “No puede ser,” he says. “Your abuelos installed this refrigerator themselves. It’s worked perfectly for decades!”
Luis shakes his head.
“So how can it not be working all of a sudden?” Papi hisses, throwing his hands up.
“Well, maybe because it’s been here for decades,” Luis says with a shrug.
Papi remains silent for a long time, staring at the refrigerator with a frown on his face. “We should ask someone else. Maybe there’s a way to fix it.”
There’s only one person he can think of—that is, only one person who won’t charge him for coming to take a look: Samuel. Among his many odd jobs, he once worked as a helper to a property manager, so during the months he spent as a waiter at the restaurant, he helped us fix a few things here and there.
“It’s the compressor, Mr. Martínez,” he says.
“Can you fix it?”
Samuel lets out a long sigh, running a hand through his hair and leaving a dark spot on his forehead without noticing. “I think so. I know a shop that sells used parts. I’ll have to run out and find a replacement, but even if I manage to fix it, it might not last long.”
“How much time, do you think?”
“It’s hard to say,” Samuel answers. “Maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months. You’ll most likely have to buy a new refrigerator in the end.”
“How much would that cost?” I ask Papi, but he doesn’t reply. I guess we all know the answer already: more money than we can afford right now.
“Muy bien,” Papi says, nodding slowly to himself. “Samuel, how long will it take you to find the compressor?”
“If I go look for it right now, I could be back in a couple of hours.”
“Okay,” Papi says after a long silence, nodding to himself. “Okay. Thank you, Samuel.”
“Anytime, Mr. Martínez.”
Samuel gives me a small smile as he walks out of the kitchen, and then it’s just us—Papi, Luis, Diego, and me. It’s strange, the way the kitchen remains silent long after Samuel has left. Papi keeps staring at the fridge, rubbing his forehead and shaking his head to himself, as if praying for a miracle. Luis crosses his arms, frowning deeply, and Diego looks right at me.
For a while, it’s as if we’re in mourning. And maybe we are, because this is the last thing we need right now. Staring at my father’s and my brothers’ faces, I can tell they’re all thinking it—that this might be the moment we’ve feared all along. From the day Mami stepped down, we’ve been afraid that the restaurant would fail without her. And now, with an empty dining room, a broken fridge, and no food cooking on the stove, it feels as though it has finally happened, and none of us is quite sure what to do or say.
“I’m gonna need your help,” Papi says all of a sudden, rolling up his sleeves. “All of you.”
He asks Luis to go buy a bag of ice from the convenience store down the street. Meanwhile, Diego and I go back to the dining room to finish our cleanup, and Papi remains in the kitchen, trying to air out the smoke and carry on with preparing the menu of the day.
When an older couple walks into the restaurant, I sit them at the table that’s farthest from the kitchen, with the hope that they won’t catch the lingering smell of smoke. They take an extremely long time looking through the menu, and then they ask me to bring them two Coronas and a guacamole, which is at least a simple enough order.
A few more customers come and go, and I have to make a few last-minute corrections to the menu as people order things we can’t make right now. For the most part, though, we’re able to manage until Samuel returns to the restaurant a couple of hours later with a triumphant look on his face.
“Well?” Papi asks when he sees him.
“I found the compressor, Mr. Martínez,” he says, nodding at a big box that he’s carrying in his arms.
“Samuel, I don’t know how to thank you. We’re so—”
“I’m happy to help.”
While he works on the refrigerator, the rest of us try our best to remain focused. I look after the tables, sneaking my head into the kitchen every now and then to place orders with Papi and Luis—a menu of the day for table two, quesadillas fritas and tostadas for table four. But the entire time, I can’t stop thinking about how different things were barely a week ago. I can’t help but feel stupid for being hopeful then, because a broken fridge is something that a paycheck from Wallen’s and a few batches of pozole simply can’t fix.
The people at table four pay their bill, and the ones at table two follow soon after. Once the dining room is empty again, I start to worry about it more and more: the fact that our dream of saving the restaurant might end up being just that—a dream. An unachievable illusion that is meant to fall just beyond our reach.
“What are we gonna do?” Luis asks during dinner that night.
“About what?” Papi answers.
“Are you gonna buy a new fridge?”
Papi brings a piece of chicken up to his mouth. “Not right now.”
“When, then?”
“Whenever it becomes necessary.”
Luis lets out his breath in a way that seems to fill the entire house, but he doesn’t say anything else. Samuel was able to fix the compressor in the end, but before he left, he gave Papi about a million warnings—not to overstuff the refrigerator, not to keep the door open for too long, not to push it too close against the wall. His final warning was what he had already said: the fact that there’s no way to know how long the compressor will last, and that buying a new refrigerator will end up being the only reliable solution.
Shortly before we closed the restaurant for the day, I did a quick search online of how much a new commercial fridge might be, and I couldn’t find anything under four thousand dollars—or at least not anything that was similar in size to the one we currently have. That comes to around eighty thousand pesos. Eighty thousand. I can’t even wrap my head around the idea that a fridge could cost that much money.
“I should start looking for other jobs,” Luis says suddenly, and we all turn toward him.
I think about a few weeks ago, when he said the exact same thing. I’m waiting for Papi to tell Luis he can’t—that he needs to be at the restaurant. I’m sure my dad is about to explain how he can’t be chef, waiter, runner, dishwasher, and busser all by himself, and that if we ever hope to bring the restaurant back to its former glory, he’s gonna need the extra pair of hands.
But as the silence stretches on, I realize Papi isn’t going to say any of that. He’s not gonna try to fight Luis this time, because we all know we could use an extra paycheck—now more than ever.
For the rest of dinner, we’re mostly silent. After a while, I start noticing the way Diego’s gaze keeps shifting to his right every few seconds, to the empty chair that belonged to Mami, and suddenly, I’m overcome with a million emotions that hit me like a train at full speed.
Because if she were still here, we wouldn’t be in this situation. She would know what to do about the restaurant, and how to pay back our debts, and how to carry on whenever we’re feeling most hopeless. But maybe her absence has really, truly broken us forever. And now that she’s gone, there’s nothing left for us to do but to accept this brokenness.
I put my fork down, pressing my lips together to stop myself from bursting into tears. Looking around the table, I can tell no one has noticed that I’m not breathing, that I’m struggling to hold it all in.
Everyone keeps eating, while I sit here missing Mami—missing her warmth, missing the safety we used to feel when she was with us, missing the way life used to be.
It’s hard to believe that just yesterday, I was eager to get back home. Now, all I want to do is leave. I want to go back to California and eat dinner next to Ari and Nancy, and spend my mornings and evenings in the stockroom. I want to escape from this silence, from this uncertainty, from this grief.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I HEAD BACK TO CALIFORNIA RIGHT BEFORE SUNSET on Sunday evening. It isn’t too hard to justify it to Papi—I tell him I’d much rather leave tonight than wake up early tomorrow morning, and that getting a good night’s sleep at Ari’s is exactly what I need before the start of the week.
It’s also true that the wait at the border is much shorter on Sundays. I hurry through the bridge and make it to the end of the line quickly enough, where a US border agent greets me with a blank look on his face. He looks down at my passport, then back at me, and then at his computer screen.
“What were you doing in Mexico?” he asks me.
“I was visiting family.”
“And what will you be doing in the United States?”
This isn’t the first time this has happened—not the first time I’ve been asked questions about who I am, or what I’m doing, or what reasons I could possibly have to want to enter the United States. It’s just the first time in a while. It doesn’t matter that I have an American passport, that I was born on that side of the border. To some of these agents—especially the new ones, like Officer Coughlin seems to be—I’m just a Mexican girl, crossing over into a country that doesn’t belong to her.
“I go to school here.”
There’s always been a deep fear in the back of my mind—the fear that I’ll get sent to secondary revision, that they’ll decide I could be carrying drugs, or suspect me of doing something wrong.
“Don’t argue with them,” Mami used to tell me when she warned me about all the things that might happen, back when I first started making the trip across the border. “And, whatever you do, don’t let them see that you’re nervous. That’ll only make things worse.”
I hold my breath as Officer Coughlin types something into his computer. When he finally hands back my passport, I wait until I’ve walked out the doors and into the soft twilight before letting all the air out. At least today wasn’t the day when I’ll be sent to secondary revision, when I’ll have to explain myself even though I’ve done nothing wrong.
Once I’m on the trolley, the relief starts to turn into guilt. I should be having dinner with my family right now, and washing the dishes with Abuela afterward, and wishing Diego a good night before he goes to sleep. I just couldn’t spend another minute inside my house, couldn’t sit with the thought of the refrigerator, or Luis’s job search, or the restaurant a second longer.
While I stare out the window at the road flashing past us, I wonder what Nancy will be cooking for dinner tonight. I can’t wait to be sitting next to her and Ari at the table, or on the couch watching a show together, and to be able to just forget about everything that’s going on at home, if only for tonight.
“Where’s your mom?” I ask Ari the moment I walk into the house. I can’t quite put my finger on how I know this, but there’s a stillness in the air that tells me Nancy isn’t here—not even inside one of the bedrooms. It’s probably the fact that the TV is off, because Ari’s mom likes to always have it on, even if it’s just in the background.
“She’s still at the salon. Sundays are usually busy days for her.”
Nancy used to have her own shop back in Tijuana, but ever since they moved to Chula Vista, she’s been working at a salon not too far from their house. You’d think that with Nancy being a stylist and all, she and her two daughters would have the most amazing hair, but they don’t. Ari has always had the same blunt shoulder-length haircut, and Nancy usually just ties hers back into a ponytail.
“Should we make dinner for ourselves, then?” I ask. It looks as though Ari’s been sitting at the kitchen table for a while, because she’s surrounded by a big mess—open books, loose sheets of paper, empty cups of coffee, and plates filled with crumbs.
“I have a better idea.” Ari’s smile widens. “Let’s bake a cake.”
Baking was always her older sister’s thing. Growing up, Ceci had one of those Easy-Bake Ovens that I always longed for, but she would refuse to share her creations with me and Ari. After a couple of years, Ceci moved on to baking in a real oven and Ari inherited the Easy-Bake, but we’d pretty much outgrown our obsession with it by then. Maybe the appeal was mostly in the fact that Ceci had it when we didn’t.
