Coming Home to Texas
THE RED-CHECKED KITCHEN curtains hung askew, waterlogged and specked with dirt. Indoors and outdoors were all mixed together, with glass shards and china fragments scattered over what was left of the porch, and tree leaves covering the kitchen counters. The rafters didn’t look quite ready to fall down, but daylight shone through where the metal roof had peeled back like the lid off a sardine can. The little kitchen table where Dalia and Marcos used to jostle each other for space while doing homework was smashed to kindling beneath the porch swing, which had been driven straight through the window by hurricane-force winds—and the porch swing itself wasn’t looking too good. A calico barn cat perched on its remains, licking herself.
This was Dalia’s first good look by daylight. She’d arrived last night, three days after the storm, and she’d been hoping against hope that the damage would turn out to be not so bad after all, but no. Her mother’s kitchen, the emotional center of her childhood home, lay in ruins.
So did Dalia’s routine, for that matter. She longed for her own controlled, streamlined environment, where everything was where it belonged and she knew just what to expect. The loss of that felt like a physical ache, or caffeine withdrawal.
Her mom hobbled over on her crutches. “Can you believe this mess? I never in my life heard a wind like that one. It was like a freight train inside a tornado.”
She didn’t have to sound so gleeful about it, Dalia thought resentfully. She liked having such an exciting story to tell, and a captive audience to tell it to. Dalia had heard it all before, over the phone and in person.
“What are you even doing up, Mom? It’s not safe for you to be walking around here. This place is a disaster area.”
“I know! Isn’t it awful? The cleanup alone is going to take days. There’s so much to do, I don’t even know where to begin—and with the FFF just two weeks away.”
Ah, yes—the firefighter fundraiser. Dalia had been getting an earful about that, as well.
“Why not cancel the FFF this year?”
Her mom looked at her as if she’d said, Why not stop breathing oxygen this year?
“Or, you know, put it off,” Dalia added quickly.
“We can’t. There’s a reason we do it on that exact weekend in September. August is the Persimmon Festival, and everyone needs a few weeks to recover from that, and anyway, the FFF has to be in the fall for the pumpkin patch and corn maze to make any sense. But October is the county fair and Oktoberfest, and then Halloween, and the next thing you know it’s November and you’re right in the thick of the holidays. No, we can’t change the date.”
“Well, then let someone else host it for a change.”
“But we’ve hosted the firefighter fundraiser at La Escarpa for five years in a row! It’s never even been held anyplace else.”
“All the more reason for someone else to take a turn.”
Her mom shook her head. “We’re the ones who’re set up for it. It’s not like we can move the corn maze or the football field. We have the big cleared space for the tent, and most of the tables and things are stored in our tool barn.”
Dalia poked a lump of soggy insulation with the toe of her boot. “I understand that, Mom, but something’s got to give. If you can’t do it, you can’t do it—that’s all. It’s not your fault. It’s just how things are. You can’t help it that your house got wrecked by a storm.”
“Lots of people suffered storm damage. And the firefighters helped us all through it. They went right out into the teeth of it to rescue people—and now it’s our turn to support them. They need this fundraiser. They’re all volunteers, and their expenses aren’t covered by taxes. Most of their operating funds for the year come from what we raise at this one event.”
Dalia sighed. Her mom was right, of course. If the roles were reversed, Dalia would be making the same arguments. But her stomach sank as she saw the weeks of her visit to Texas unfurling longer and longer in her mind.
It wasn’t the work itself that was the problem. Dalia didn’t mind hard work. She’d gladly rebuild the kitchen herself if she had the carpentry skills... But she didn’t. All she could do in this case was facilitate things—run the household, take care of her mother, keep on top of the builders. The whole process was going to involve a lot of coffee and tea, a lot of poring over magazine pictures and catalog pages, debating the merits of various designs and materials and finishes in excruciating detail, then debating them all over again the next day. A lot of nodding, and shaking her head, and making sympathetic noises, and not tearing her hair out.
Eliana should be here instead of me. She likes this stuff.
But Eliana couldn’t exactly drop out of college for a semester to come hold their mom’s hand for the rebuild. Marcos was away serving his country, so he had an even better excuse. And as Marcos had been quick to point out, Dalia hadn’t been home in literally years—since her dad’s funeral, in fact. She was due.
Well, one thing at a time. “When does the builder get here?”
Dalia’s mom shot her a quick look. “Um, about that—”
Then her mom’s phone rang, and she actually answered it—answered it instantly, without grumbling about how the person should have texted instead, or even checking if she knew the number. She just swiped to answer and said, “Hello!” in that same bright, cheerful voice.
“Oh, hi, Carol!...Yes, she got in last night...Flew in to Austin and drove out in a rental car...She’s here for as long as I need her. She’s going to telecommute to her work in Philadelphia.”
Her mom said this like telecommuting was some futuristic marvel and Dalia was a good daughter, caring for her mother with joy in her heart and a song on her lips and not being at all grumpy or impatient or longing for peace and quiet and her own space.
The conversation rolled along. There didn’t seem to be any point to the call; they were just...talking. It was weird. Dalia had exactly one friend she cared enough about to keep up with. They texted off and on and had scheduled Skype sessions. But she’d witnessed half a dozen of these shooting-the-breeze phone conversations between her mom and her mom’s friends since last night alone.
They were talking over the storm now. “I know it!” her mom was saying. “When that wind came through, it sounded just like a freight train inside a tornado!”
Gah! Dalia couldn’t listen to it one more time; she just couldn’t. She had to get away now before she lost her last marble.
She picked her way through the gap in the wall where the kitchen door had been, onto the porch and down the steps to the sandstone walkway.
The Texas sky was perfectly clear, acting all innocent, like it had never hurled a late-summer hailstorm at Dalia’s ancestral home. She breathed in the cool morning air and kept walking, out the gate and onto the caliche drive. The sound of her mom’s voice faded to the point where Dalia couldn’t make out the words anymore.
Then she heard the crunch of tires on gravel, and here came a truck around the bend. The driver’s door had a decal with some sort of graphic that looked like a house. The builder!
Finally. Now we can get down to business. Make some plans. Set some deadlines.
The truck was an old stepside with a tomatoey orange-red paint job that looked original. A good sign. Anyone who drove a truck like that had respect for the past. He wouldn’t try to push any tacky period-inappropriate stuff onto the house.
The truck pulled smoothly into the spot by the stand of cedar trees where visitors always parked. The driver got out. There was something familiar about his shape.
He shut the door, and Dalia saw the lettering on the decal: Reyes Boys Construction.
She barely had time to think, Wait, what? before the passenger door opened and out stepped another figure, even more familiar.
Her heart gave a painful throb before her mind fully understood what was happening.
Oh, no. No. It can’t be.
But it was.
Anyone would have thought an old has-been washed-up jock like Tony would have lost his looks in the years since he flunked out of college and broke Dalia’s heart. That would only have been fair.
But no. The clean V shape of his torso, his crisp jawline, his outrageously full head of glossy black hair—it was all the same. If anything, he looked better than ever, with the physical maturity of his midtwenties giving solidity and dignity to what had always been a spectacular shape. He’d been magnificent enough back in the day, but evidently he hadn’t peaked until now.
From their late teens on, Dalia was always surprised by how big he was—six foot four, broad and powerful. It just didn’t seem right for a man’s shoulders to go out that far. She could still remember the physical shock she’d felt the first time she’d put her arms around him. There was so much of him.
He stopped in his tracks and looked at her with his head to one side, like he kinda-sorta recognized her but couldn’t quite place her. Wow. Talk about adding insult to injury.
While he stood there puzzling her out, Alex came over with arms wide open. He always had been a hugger.
“Dalia! I didn’t know you were in town.”
He looked enough like Tony for it to be unnerving—an inch or two shorter, and less massive, but with the same basic proportions, the same jawline, the same smile.
“Hi, Alex! Yeah, I just flew in last night,” she heard herself saying.
“Yeah? How long you here for?”
“Um, I don’t know yet. I’ll be helping my mom while her ankle heals. Overseeing the work on the house and all.”
“You’re here for the duration, then.”
Tony joined them. Dalia’s heart pounded. Up close he looked better than ever. Had she actually thought Alex resembled him? Ha! Alex was a pale imitation—Tony Lite. Tony was the real thing.
Copyright © 2021 by Brandi Midkiff