The Comeback Route Page 6

  I shrugged. “I talked to a lot of people. I met tourists, people who live and work around here, other business owners. You know, it would be fun to set up a promotion with the coffee shop across the street. Their pastries look terrible, but their coffee is good. And it lasts a long time.”

  She handed me a glass of water, which I guzzled. “You have a lot of ideas,” she said.

  “I guess I do. I never thought of business stuff before but concepts keep coming to me. I have a lot of ideas for my other job, too. Life coaching,” I clarified. “But my client isn’t acting cooperative, so it’s difficult.”

  “Life coaching wasn’t on your résumé.”

  “It’s a fairly new position. Since Wednesday,” I explained. “I’m fixing Nico Williams, the football player. He’s been acting like such an asshole, but I know that he isn’t really.” Lucy wasn’t as up on sports gossip as her nephew the cabdriver had been, so I filled her in. “In the first week that Nico was here in Florida, like the first or second day, he got a speeding ticket. For going 110 miles an hour on I-95. Then he had a party and a woman overdosed—she was ok, but the police came, and it turned out that other people there had guns, and there were a few underage drinkers, too. And then…” It sounded pretty bad when I got into the weeds of the details of the crap that Nico had been up to. I had finished the glass of water and drunk a refill by the time that I was done.

  Lucy whistled. “And this Nico is a good person? You’re sure about that?”

  “Yes. I’m absolutely sure,” I said firmly, but she didn’t look like she believed me. “Ok, here’s an example. The football league, the United Football Confederation, is always trying to make the players do charity stuff for publicity, so it looks like they’re all big Santa Clauses in their downtime, right? Nico’s old team, the Woodsmen, had a PR person who pretty much solely devoted himself to forcing the players to do good deeds which he then promoted. But Nico did all kinds of stuff without telling anybody. Like, he filled a school library with new books and paid for a librarian to work there when he heard that kids were trying to raise money for it. He still pays for the woman’s salary, anonymously.”

  “How do you know if it was anonymous?” Lucy asked me suspiciously. “He must have told somebody.”

  “It got out a little, but Nico wanted it to be secret, because he wasn’t doing it for attention. He didn’t let the PR guy publicize it, or any of the other charitable stuff he did, either.” My father owned a share of the Woodsmen team, and he had always dug around the players’ lives in ways he wasn’t supposed to. Likewise, I wasn’t supposed to be able to get into my dad’s computer to read the information there, but it was how I had found out about Nico, a whole lot about Nico. My father used the same phrase for his passwords that he had on the license plate of the car that disappeared on me from the airport parking lot: HOTDADDY. Getting into his password-protected stuff was like taking a palmera from a baby.

  “And this Nico Williams suddenly invited you to move to Miami to be his life coach? I don’t get it,” Lucy said.

  “It’s a long story,” I hedged.

  She got up and disappeared into the back, then came back out with a cup of coffee for me. Then she put some of the cookies from the display case on a square of waxed paper. “Those are suspiros de Pajares,” she told me. “You’re going to need to know the names of everything if you’re working the counter. I have a feeling your talents would be wasted in the back, baking with Josefa.”

  “Really? You’re rehiring me?”

  She nodded. “You already worked for free for three hours. It’s the least I could do. Tell me about how you became this guy’s life coach.”

  I took a bite of cookie, unsure of where to start. “Didn’t it sound like he needed it?”

  “He needs a swift kick in the ass,” she agreed. “But why you? Why did he hire you?”

  “He didn’t exactly hire me. It wasn’t like he was hiding where he lived, though. His address was perfectly visible if you managed to get ahold of the unredacted police report on the party I told you about, so if I came down to Miami and happened to show up at his building—”

  “Wait a minute. You just appeared at his door? He didn’t ask you to help him?” Lucy stared at me. “And he let you stay?”

  “Exactly!” I said triumphantly. “I showed up at his apartment uninvited and he didn’t even tell me to go! Not too many times, anyway. So no matter what he says about how we never had a relationship and we don’t have any kind of connection, he’s wrong.”

  “My God,” Lucy said, and shook her head. “If my daughter acted the way you are, I would kill her. Don’t you have a family telling you to stop this nonsense?”

  “It isn’t nonsense. I’m going to fix Nico. You’ll see,” I told her angrily. I didn’t need a doubter, a naysayer.

  “Ok, ok. Finish your coffee.” She stood to help a customer. “Tatum, come watch me so you start to learn the register.”

  I watched very carefully, and I took notes in my notebook so I wouldn’t forget what to do. “How old is your daughter?” I asked Lucy as she put the bills in their little slots.

  “Chara is seventeen. A junior in high school. She’s supposed to help out at the bakery after school, so you’ll probably meet her.” Lucy sighed, and I recognized the sound. I’d heard that same sigh over my own behavior from numerous adults over the years. She wiped her hands on her apron again. “Come on. I’ll introduce you to Josefa and the rest of the people who work here. Mucho gusto, that’s what you want to say when you meet them.”

  “Mucho gusto. Ok, got it.”

  “Didn’t you take Spanish in high school?” Lucy asked me.

  “Well, I didn’t have to take a second language, because a lot of people there thought I already spoke Albanian. It’s a long story,” I said. I thought back to high school and some of the things I had done. “How do you say, ‘My name is Zana and I’m from Tirana, the capital city’ in Spanish? Is princess just princess with an A on the end?”

  “Why would you want to say any of that?”

  “Oh, no reason.” She went ahead and introduced me as Tatum, and I said, “Mucho gusto.” It went well.

  I spent the rest of the day learning more about how the front of the bakery ran, carrying trays of delicious smelling goods out to the display cases, and chatting with the other people who worked there. I hadn’t given anyone my new phone number except for my friend Daisy and now my boss Lucy, but I found myself checking the little screen throughout the day anyway, out of habit. Before, I had been on a bunch of group texts and pretty involved in all my social media. It was strange, really strange, not to have it alerting me to new stuff all the time. I realized the day seemed a lot longer, like there were more minutes in it.

  Or maybe the day seemed longer because my feet were so tired. By the time I got back to the apartment building from the bus stop after the shift at the bakery, I was really dragging. It would have been much worse if I had actually gotten there at three AM. I still wasn’t sure if Lucy was telling me the truth about starting work that early—it seemed preposterous.

  The elevator to the penthouse opened into noise. It sounded like a party, but every voice was male. “Hello?” I asked. I walked into the living space. “Hello?

  The room was full of oversized men eating and drinking. “Hi there,” one of them said to me, stopping mid-step on his way from the kitchen. Someone must have ordered in, as Nico had suggested for our own meals, because this guy was carrying a plate laden with delicious-looking nachos. Everyone else at the bakery today had either brought their own lunches or gone out for a quick sandwich. I had declined their invitations to buy something when I thought about the calories from the samples I had eaten and also from the cookies that Lucy had given me during our talk about Nico. I had also considered the fact that I wouldn’t get paid for two weeks (I had remembered to ask). And now I was ready to gnaw on my own arm.

  “Hi,” I answered, my eyes on the nachos. “Are you all teammates
of Nico?” They had to be football players, judging from the size of them.

  “We are. I’m Galen.” He held his plate of food in one hand and put the other out to me.

  “I’m Viv—”

  “Tatum,” Nico said. He stepped in between me and the nacho plate. “Where have you been?”

  “Work,” I said breezily, and leaned to look around him. “Galen, what position do you play?” I sidestepped Nico and we walked together into the living room, where Galen introduced me to the other guys there. Someone handed me a beer, someone else sat down on my other side on the concrete couch with a bag of popcorn. Yeah, this wasn’t too bad at all. I sat across from Faris, the player who Nico had known in college.

  “Nico told me a little about himself in high school. What was he like when you played together?” I asked eagerly.

  “He was shy,” Faris told me. “I never really got to know him very well because he kept so much to himself.”

  “Really? He was shy?"

  Nico spoke up. “Yeah, right. Miss Smith, you’re eating those nachos like you’ve never seen food. Are you hungry?”

  I removed my fingers from Galen’s chips. “I’m starving. I ate my weight in baked goods today but they didn’t seem to make a dent.”

  “You ate your weight? That’s nothing,” Galen told me. I smiled at him. I liked him more and more.

  “Let’s get a late lunch for you. I know you’re a whiz with quesadillas,” Nico said, and took my hand to pull me up along with him. I let him lead me into the open kitchen, and I could feel with my innate man-radar that Galen was checking me out as I went. “What did you just get on me, sour cream?” Nico asked. “And guacamole.” He wiped his hands with a towel, which he then used to dab at my face. “You were practically eating off Galen’s fingers.”

  “I was hungry. So that’s the O-line, huh?” I asked as I made a leap up onto the kitchen counter. No more standing today. “Did you work out with all of them?”

  “Yep.” Nico leaned into the fridge. “They’re not bad.”

  I beamed. “See? You’re making friends! Now, onto the next step.”

  “Eat now, coach later.” He handed me a sandwich from a big deli tray they had bought, then belatedly, a plate. “How was the bakery?”

  I swallowed the giant lump of bread and roast beef in my mouth. “Good. Well, it started out bad, because I got fired when I first arrived, but then it was great, because I got rehired and made friends with the owner, Lucy, and some of the other people who work there. So it averaged out to be good.” I shoved in more sandwich.

  “Sounds like quite an experience,” he said, grinning. “I meant to wake up and wish you luck on your first day.”

  “But you slept in, due to being busy last night,” I said.

  “Tatum, about how our dinner ended. I’m sorry. I think I hurt your feelings, with what I said to you in the car when we got back here.” He cleared his throat. “What I said about our relationship. The lack of one.”

  “Yeah, I knew what topic you were referring to.”

  “I just wanted to make sure that you understand. Sometimes you embellish the truth. I mean, at times I’ve heard you say things I feel could be false,” he said, and glanced at me. “Do I need to give examples?”

  “Maybe I’ve done that now and then,” I said snootily. “But at least I know what’s true, and what isn’t.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I was too busy chewing to answer, so I just shrugged. He’d figure out soon enough how he really felt about me, and then wouldn’t he feel silly?

  “As long as you’re not upset.” Nico looked over at me again but I looked away. “I thought about you today, working in a hot kitchen. I was hoping you didn’t get confused about what the oven was and try to crawl inside.”

  “As it turns out, my skill set is more suited to the front of the house. I’m going to sell, not bake. Listen to my ideas.” I pulled my handy notebook out of my back pocket and filled him in on a few quick thoughts I’d had already. “I’ll probably come up with some better stuff tomorrow,” I said, sighing a little. “I got pretty tired at the end. Did you know, they want you to work almost every day?”

  “I had heard that. News to you, though?”

  “Well, you don’t have to go to your classes in college every time they have them!” I exclaimed.

  “You do, actually,” Nico said.

  “Also, you literally have to be at work for hours. Hours and hours, all at one time."

  “Yeah, I knew that too. Tatum,” he said, then shook his head. “Sometimes when I’m with you, I feel like I fell down the rabbit hole. Know what I mean?”

  “Totally. It’s really dirty down there, and lots of poop and fur.” I wiped my mouth delicately with my fingers and hopped off the counter. “I’m going to go for a swim in the pool. Are you hanging with these guys?”

  “For a while, anyway.” A voice yelled to him from the other room. “Yeah, I’ll grab one for you,” he called back. As I walked to my bedroom, I heard another voice ask him how he knew me.

  “She’s a friend from Michigan,” Nico answered. “She’s staying here for a while.” There was a mumbled response I didn’t catch. “Yeah, a friend,” he repeated. “But don’t you go messing with her.”

  I waited to hear if there would be any more discussion of me, but they went back to talking about sports, mostly, so I continued to my room to change.

  “See you later, Tatum,” Galen said to me when I came out in my bikini and sarong. I gave a general wave to the crowd and also a little hip twitch as I walked to the elevator. It wouldn’t hurt to make a new friend or two.

  “Hey.” Nico walked over quickly. “Aren’t you going to get cold or something? You could wear my sweatshirt.”

  I looked down at what I had on. “I don’t think I’ll need it, but thanks. It’s seventy-five degrees outside. I almost melted in my chef coat at El Asturiano.” I adjusted my beach bag. “Lucy told me not to wear that tomorrow. I guess it’s a little formal for the bakery and I look cuter in a sundress, anyway.”

  “Yeah, you look pretty cute. I’ll walk you down to the pool.”

  “No.” I pushed him on his chest. “You stay here with your new friends, and try to move into phase two.”

  “Which is?”

  “Let them help you get in good with Coach Cattaneo.” Now I patted his chest. “That’s going to be the ticket to your success with the Cottonmouths.”

  “That guy’s an asshole.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Move into phase two! I’ll be back soon.” I took the elevator down and walked out to the pretty pool behind the building. There were a few other people there also sunning and swimming and enjoying the beautiful day. It was February, I reminded myself. Freaking February! I submerged and drifted around in the warm water, soaking up the sun and thinking hard. The pool seemed to be a good place to meditate and consider all the problems I had to work on in my life and in Nico’s.

  “Ma’am. Ma’am!”

  I opened my eyes, realizing the authoritative voice was talking to me.

  “You need to move back to the shallow end. And you have to pay attention to my whistle, please.”

  I squinted up at the lifeguard. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you. I was deep in thought.”

  “Sure. But could you…” He pointed to the other side of the pool.

  “I have a lot of pressing issues on my mind. Like I just started a new job today, and I want to make it a success. I’m having family problems. And problems with my boyfriend! He’s not falling into line like he should,” I explained. “Maybe he’s starting to improve, but he still has these strange ideas about our relationship.”

  “Right, but—”

  “How bad do you think it would be to start going after another man if you’re already living with someone? I should clarify that the guy I’m living with used to be my boyfriend and he will be again, but we’re not really together yet. Anyway, I met this other guy just now, and it seems like he
could be interested in me. But I’m really thinking that just in terms of karma, it would be a bad move to go after him.”

  “Ma’am, you really need to swim to the shallow end,” the lifeguard told me. “And I agree, I think that kind of karma would bite you in the ass. You should move out, then see the other guy.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, slowly kicking to the other side of the pool. “My name’s Sweetie Todd. I’m a hairdresser, originally from London,” I introduced myself.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Bastián. Do you need me to tow you?”

  “I’m fine.” I was just really slow, and after a while, I took the float he threw out to me.

  “I would say that you have to go for it,” I was in the midst of telling Bastián the lifeguard a while later, when I saw Nico walking out of the building and towards the pool. “If your dream is to become an underwater exotic dancer, then, why not? I’m sure you can hold your breath for a long time, right? Isn’t that some kind of lifeguard requirement?”

  “I really do have great lung capacity,” Bastián answered. “Sweetie, is that the guy you live with? The one who isn’t your boyfriend yet?” He nodded towards Nico, who was approaching fast.

  “That’s him.”

  “He’s the new receiver for the Cottonmouths! The one who was in that club when it got raided because there was a huge meth operation in the basement.”

  “Yes, that’s Nico.” That had been his second legal entanglement after arriving in Florida, a few days after the giant speeding ticket.

  “He looks sorta pissed. I’m going to go check the pool filters.” Bastián jumped up and left me sitting on the steps of the lifeguard chair.

  “Are you distracting the lifeguard from his job?” Nico greeted me.

  “No, Bastián is very conscientious,” I assured Nico. We both looked across the pool as the lifeguard conscientiously applied sunscreen to the back of a topless woman.

  “Yeah, he cares a lot about his duties.” Nico laughed. “Did he help you oil up yet? You’re looking a little pink.”

  Bastián had been wrong; Nico didn’t care at all that he had walked up on me having a heart-to-heart with another man. “I don’t need sunscreen, because I’m naturally bronzed. See?” I held my arm against his. “My family on my mom’s side was Greek. That’s where I got the good skin and the dark eyes.”