Page 78 of Levi

Dante: You’ll have the place to yourself.

Levi: I’ll try not to flood anything

Dante: Try harder.

Levi: No promises. Go make your money, Reyes.

Exclamation points. Punctuation he’d never risk on the other phone. I pocket the phone and board.

Miami takes me back all at once, with both hands. The heat’s different the second the doors open at the airport. Wetter, older. The Caribbean behind it instead of the Gulf’s flat shimmer.

I’m in the penthouse by ten Monday morning, running numbers I could run asleep. The buyer respects exactly one thing. A broker who doesn’t perform. By Tuesday afternoon we have a signed offer, a closing date, and a number that’ll lead the office board for the quarter.

I keep turning my phone face-up. The screen almost never changes.

Monday night it changes once.

Levi: gulf’s doing the sunset thing.

Dante: Send it.

A photo comes through. Bad framing, his thumb in the corner, the sky over the water gone orange and violet behind the rail. He’s never sent me a picture before. I stare at it longer than a sky is worth, then set the phone face-down so I’ll stop.

Tuesday night I end up where I always end up in this city, which is my mother’s table in Coral Gables. There’s no version of me home for two days that doesn’t end there. She heard I’d landed before my own office did.

The house is loud before I’m through the door. My father is in his chair with the paper, folded to the back page, glasses down his nose. My abuela’s on the phone in the kitchen.

The smell hits me in the hall and takes me back to my childhood in one breath. Garlic, cumin, sour orange. Black beans going low and slow. Plátanos hitting hot oil somewhere. A pernil that’s been in since morning.

My sister Mirta’s got two kids underfoot and a third on her hip. My sister Clara’s at the counter, stealing pork off the cutting board and getting her hand slapped for it by tía Rosa, who came the second she heard. Rosa does not miss a meal where there’s a nephew to inspect.

“He remembers us.” My mother takes my face in both hands, turns it left and right like she’s checking a melon, decides I’ll do, and puts me to work. “The picadillo. You. Your abuela’s hands are no good today and Clara can’t be trusted near a stove.”

“I can be trusted near a stove,” Clara says.

“You set fire to the arroz at Nochebuena.”

“I was nine.”

“And we remember,” says tía Rosa, and the kitchen laughs. I take the wooden spoon, because this is the one room in the world where I do what I’m told.

I stand at my mother’s stove with my sleeves shoved up, browning the meat, arguing with my abuela in two languages about how much cumin. Mirta’s kids climb me like furniture. Clara narrates everyone’s failings from the counter. My father drifts in to taste things and drifts out.

The cafetera goes on and off and on again, because in this house coffee is not an event, it’s a standing order. No one here has ever wanted a single thing off me but for me to eat more, call more, and bring someone home already. I get fed and teased and corrected and loved by my people. I don’t have to do one thing to earn it.

I’m good for most of the meal. Then my phone lights up by my plate and I turn it over to look. Nothing. I turn it back, and Clara’s watching me.

“That’s the fourth time,” she says.

“The fourth time what?”

“You keep flipping that phone over.” She points a fork at me. “Who’re you waiting on?”

“Work.”

Clara looks at me. Only a younger sister has that look. Hers has been stripping away my excuses since we were kids. “Sure,” she says, and pretends to let it go.

My mother sets down the platter and says it lighter than Clara, which is how I know it’s worse. “You’re somewhere else, mijo.”