The Book of Broken Hearts (22 page)

“Lots of mountains, like here,” he told Emilio. “And the storms? Boy. I was pushing Valentina to get us off the hill, but she wouldn’t have it. I got caught up there. Lucky I found some nice people to take me in, and they had a daughter about my age, so . . . it was a fun visit.”

“I thought you met Mom at the diner?” I asked.

“¿Que?”
Papi knocked on his head, ears suddenly red. “You know, I think maybe I got the story mixed up.”

“It
wasn’t
Mom?”

“It was a long time ago,
querida
. Let’s leave it at that.”

He laughed and Emilio returned to the bike, but I was still forcing images of Papi and another girl out of my mind. It was hard to remember he had a whole other life before he married Mom, before he had us.

I wonder who he’ll forget last.

“Don’t be sad, Jujube.” Papi pulled me into a side hug. “She’s fine. Needs a little time is all. She’ll come around.”

“Who?” Mari trotted in through the barn doors with Pancake at her side. They’d been out hiking most of the day.

“Emilio got the bike running,” Papi said.

“Almost,” Emilio said.

“That’s great!” Mari said. “I met someone on the trail today. A biker.”

“When’s the wedding?”

“Hilarious.” Mari turned to Papi. “I told him about the bike. He’s interested in looking at it, maybe making an offer.”

“Who says it’s for sale?” I asked. “It’s not even running yet.”

“I know, but . . . Have you guys thought about it?” Mari’s eyes flashed to Emilio, then back to me. “Can’t hurt to let him check it out, right? He said he’d consider it as is. You might get to take your road trip early, Vargas. How’s that?”

She grabbed Pancake and headed back to the house before I could find the words to talk her out of it, to come up with some logical, financially sound reason why we should keep a vintage motorcycle that Papi would never be allowed to ride. I didn’t know how to tell her I
felt
it more than I knew it, way
down in my bones and my heart, where medical research and doctors’ opinions didn’t matter: Getting rid of that bike meant surrendering to the demon. The end of Papi’s last chance. The end of everything.

I sagged against the workbench, wishing I could disintegrate and blow away with the dust, and across the barn, Papi and Emilio looked at me with the same wounded faces.

“Say something.” I was alone with Emilio after Mari had called Papi into the house for a nap. Or a snack. Or a drink or a pill or a crossword puzzle—I didn’t know anymore. And now I stood dumbly before Emilio, the bike between us like unhideable evidence of some heinous crime.

“You’re so different when she’s around.” He wouldn’t look at me, just gathered up his tools and assembled them back in the box. “You give me shit all the time. You stand up to those guys at the garage, dish it right back. You make Rosette crazy jealous. You put me in my place every five minutes. But Mari? You never say jack.”

I kicked the dirt floor. “She’s my sister.”

“So she gets to make the decisions, tell you what to do? How to live?” He ran a hand over his bandanna and shook his head. “Who to be with?”

His questions jabbed my chest. I wanted to defend myself, to defend Mari, to tell him how she’d always looked out for me. How she’d given me my first cigarette when I was in sixth grade because she knew it would make me sick and I’d never
want another. How she’d comforted Celi after Johnny broke her heart. How she’d read books about Papi’s illness so she could figure out the best ways to help him. How she’d kept her promise not to tell my sisters about Emilio.

Why can’t he see it?

When I opened my mouth, the words wouldn’t come. I saw a snapshot of how things had always been between my sisters and me, just as they had that night in Celi’s room five years ago. Lourdes, the oldest, picking up the pieces for everyone else. Celi, soft and romantic with a giant, open heart. Mari, the baby of the three, full of fire and impulse.

But that’s where everything got screwed up, because Lourdes should’ve been here helping with Papi—she’d know exactly what to do. And technically I was the baby, not Mari, and I’d spent most of my life living like the child of my three older siblings, wearing the clothes they’d given me, reading their books, listening to their advice.

Following their rules about boys.

I looked down at my body, clothed in an old tank top from Celi’s closet, faded olive cargo shorts from Mari’s summer stash. Even the flip-flops were hand-me-downs, some faded old pair with missing sequins I’d found in an unlabeled box of toys.

Emilio thought I let Mari make my decisions, tell me how to live. And maybe he was right.

Maybe I didn’t know how to do it myself.

“You let your pops think this meant something to you,”
he said. “I seen him watchin’ you. His face lights up like Christmas when you’re around. Now you’re gonna let your sister sell it out from under him? Before I’m even done? I thought we had a deal.”

A deal.
He was more concerned about the bike than anything else. About his job. His money. Heat boiled inside, sputtering into my throat. “Worried you won’t have enough cash for your trip now? Relax, Emilio Vargas. I’m sure my father will pay you in full.”

Emilio’s eyes widened, lips curling into a pained smirk. There was no more laughter in his eyes. Only disappointment, the dull ache of it spreading and blooming in my chest as he left without another word, half his tools still scattered on the floor.

“Another lovers’ quarrel?” Mari held a cigarette to the electric burner and sucked until it caught fire. It was a miracle the girl still had eyebrows.

“It’s not a lovers’ quarrel,” I said. Emilio had been working with Papi every day since our fight, five and counting, and so far we’d managed to totally avoid each other. Mari’s biker friend had stopped by yesterday, but other than eavesdropping on his enthusiastic visit, I’d spent my time indoors, putting the finishing touches on a scrapbook I was supposed to make months ago for Zoe’s birthday. “I just don’t want to talk to him.”

“So your big plan is to stare at him out the window all week?”

I backed away from the screen door and sat at the kitchen table. “I was looking for Pancake.”

Who, me? Me? Was it me, Jude? Me? Or do you have actual pancakes to share?
The dog, who’d been in the kitchen the whole time, trotted over and nuzzled my hand.

“Juju . . .” Mari leveled me with one of her no-nonsense stares. “Are you falling for him?”

I rolled my eyes. “Okay, first of all, you need to go on the patch. Second of all, you’re crazy.”

She blew a dragon plume out the window over the sink. “I read enough books about teenagers in love to recognize the signs.”

“Yeah, well. Emilio and I aren’t werewolves or fallen angels, so there’s that.”

“I’m just saying—”

“And where’s the other guy? Shouldn’t there be a love triangle of impossibly hot boys or vampires pining after me?”

“I’m worried about you, that’s all.” Her voice was soft, almost protective. “This is what Vargas boys do, Jujube. Things get heated, they bail.”

Emilio’s words echoed in my skull.
She gets to make the decisions, tell you what to do? How to live? Who to be with?

“Things aren’t heated,” I said. “He’s not bailing. He’s working.”

“You need to stop this before—”

“You smell like an ashtray from all the way over here. Papi’s gonna bust you.”

Mari narrowed her eyes, a warning shot that grazed my head. She crushed the butt in the sink, blowing out a last puff of smoke, and ransacked the cupboards and drawers like a psycho.

She emerged with matches and one of Mom’s old Virgin
Mary candles and sat down across from me, flame sputtering as she lit the dusty wick. I hadn’t seen the knife at first, but now she held it out over the fire. “Give me your palm.”

I sat on my hands. “I’m not getting stabbed again.”

“No one
stabbed
you. It was a blood oath. And obviously it didn’t work the first time. Palm.”

“I never should’ve signed that thing. It’s a relic, Mari. Nothing to do with me or Emilio. He’s not like Johnny.” I hated that I was crying in front of her, five years old again.

“What do you think will happen when things get bad with Papi? I don’t mean mood swings. I’m talking when he can’t go to the bathroom by himself. When he can’t remember your name. When he freaks because he thinks we’re strangers, that we’re trying to hurt him.”

I rubbed my hands on my shorts, my fingers tightening. Sadness rose inside me like bubbling tar. It coated my thoughts, my words, my heart, made them all heavy and black. “I don’t know.”

“Do you really think Emilio will stick around for that? And what about after that? After Papi’s gone and—”

“Don’t say that.”

“Juju . . .” Mari’s voice finally broke. “This is bigger than the oath, okay? And it’s not just about Papi and the next few months or years. There’s stuff we haven’t even considered yet.”

Her face held its familiar stubbornness, the know-it-all confidence that had settled into her eyes in childhood. But
there was something new there too, hiding in the shadows. Something powerful and dangerous that left in its wake a girl even younger than me.

Fear
.

“What stuff?” I asked.

Mari held my gaze for only a moment, then it was gone, the fear I’d seen no more than a ghost in her watery eyes. “I’m just saying we can’t predict the future, and getting tangled up with a Vargas now will only make things harder later.” She scraped an old splotch of oatmeal on the place mat like it was no big deal, but her voice had betrayed her, cracked and uncertain. The Virgin candle fizzled out, smoke coiling like a serpent between us, and in that moment the fear I’d seen in her eyes filled my chest.

What stuff?
She hadn’t said, and I couldn’t cough out the words to ask again.

Mari returned the unused knife to the drawer. She filled a glass with ice water, and once she’d chugged it, everything bad was erased, and she turned to me with a bright smile.

“The guy e-mailed about the bike. His wife is cool with it. He’s interested in making an offer. Papi doesn’t really know what it’s worth, but I checked around. I think we can get a nice chunk of change.”

She stood there with her jutting hip and her smoky “essence of Mari” and rambled on about the specs and collectors’ editions and Blue Book values until the bubbling black tar inside me finally boiled over.

“A nice chunk of change? Are you serious?” I shouted. “I’ve been here all summer, all year, and you swoop in for a few weeks and suddenly you know what’s best, right? Did you even ask Papi if he wanted to sell Valentina?”

Her eyes widened, but I plowed on. “Your way or no way. My whole life it’s been like that. You’re—”

“I can’t believe you.” She slammed her glass on the counter. “You act like you know something, but
you’re
a spoiled little—”

“At least I’m not—”

“Mariposa
y
Jude Hernandez!” Papi’s voice boomed through the kitchen. He pushed open the screen door and loomed in the doorway, filling up the space in a way he hadn’t since the diagnosis. He towered over everything in sight. Even Pancake scampered under the table.

“Enough is enough is enough!” Papi let the door slam behind him and squinted at the Virgin candle. “I don’t know what kind of séance you’re doing in here,
mi brujitas
, but this bickering has to stop. And don’t let your mother catch you using her church candles.
Dios mío.
”

“
Sí
, Papi,” we said simultaneously.

“Emilio is done for the day. I’m going upstairs,” Papi said. “And you two will work this out like adults.
Ay
, it’s like the Wild West in here. You’re sisters,
queriditas
. No more fighting.”

“
Sí
, Papi,” Mari said again.

“And another thing.” He looked from Mari to me and back to Mari again, the air as thick as gravy. This was usually the
part in the conversation where the demon woke up and gave him a good zap, reminding him he had no business having a rational adult discussion, playing the authority figure.

But Papi’s eyes were clear, his directive focused. “E-mail your friend and tell him thanks but no thanks on the bike. I’ve made my decision. Until I start wearing diapers and drooling, Valentina is
not
for sale.”

“Don’t talk like that, Papi.” Mari’s voice was faint and frail.

Papi swatted her words out of the air. “Don’t be so sensitive, little butterfly. Just remember,
soy tu padre todavía
.”

I’m still your father.