Saturday is birthday cake day.
During the week, the panadería is all strong coffee and pan dulce. But on weekends, it’s sprinkle cookies and pink cake. By ten or eleven this morning, we’ll get the first rush of mothers picking up yellow boxes in between buying balloons and paper streamers.
In the back kitchen, my father hums along with the radio as he shapes the pastry rounds of ojos de buey, the centers giving off the smell of orange and coconut. It may be so early the birds haven’t even started up yet, but with enough of my mother’s coffee and Mariachi Los Camperos, my father is as awake as if it were afternoon.
While he fills the bakery cases, my mother does the delicate work of hollowing out the piñata cakes, and when her back is turned, I rake my fingers through the sprinkle canisters. During open hours, most of my work is filling bakery boxes and ringing up customers (when it’s busy) or washing dishes and windexing the glass cases (when it’s not). But on birthday cake days, we’re busy enough that I get to slide sheet cakes from the oven and cover them in pink frosting and tiny round nonpareils, like they’re giant circus-animal cookies. I get to press hundreds-and-thousands into the galletas de grajea, the round, rainbow-sprinkle-covered cookies that were my favorite when I was five.
My mother finishes hollowing two cake halves, fills them with candy—green, yellow, and pink this time—and puts them back together. Her piñatas are half our Saturday cake orders, both birthday girls and grandfathers delighting at the moment of seeing M&M’s or gummy worms spill out. She covers them with sugar-paste ruffles or coconut to look like the tiny paper flags on a piñata, or frosting and a million rainbow sprinkles.
On the next cake, my mother holds out the knife. “You want to try?” she asks.
I shake my head.
The piñata cakes give me the same twitchy feeling as getting powdered sugar under my fingernails. I can’t help thinking of what that cake must feel like, how it gets opened up just a little, and then all of its insides spill out.
* * *
My father doesn’t ask why I’m in the back after the first morning rush, making green and purple sugar paste for pan dulce. He’s working on a batch of unicorn conchas, his latest stroke of genius, pan dulce covered with shells of pink, purple, and blue sugar that sell out every weekend.
All he asks, as he watches me stamp the pattern into the sugar paste, is, “Who’s it for?”
I pat the edges of the sugar topping. “I don’t know yet.”
He nods, because he knows sometimes that happens.
Most of the time, I do know. Like when I brought Hania an ojo de buey, because she was working on something important, and I thought the sugary center might leaven her spirit. Like when I gave David a novia at the Hungry Ghost Festival, because he wanted to propose to his girlfriend; Charlie’s grandmother had already told him to just do it, and I knew that crumble of dough and sugar might hold the courage he needed. Most of the time, I know which man needs an oreja, the curled ear of pastry that will inspire him to call his mother, or which neighbors would stop considering each other strangers if they shared the pink crescents of sugared cuernos.
I slide the pan dulce into the oven just as my mother calls, “Lila!” from the front room.
She stands at the wall my father painted sky blue and hung with papel picado, the pink hearts and orange flowers and purple hummingbirds fluttering every time the door opens. The sound of Mariachi México de Pepe Villa warms the space, the music fuzzed by how old the speakers are.
My mother hung nails and added wood-framed photos to the walls, faded-color pictures of our bisabuelos, our birthday parties, our church lighting luminarias for Las Posadas and farolitos for Nochebuena. At first, I rolled my eyes. Why would anyone care about our Easter dresses or our Christmas poinsettias? But my mother had been right, the same way she’d been right about the sign out front. The pictures make customers feel like part of our family, especially the old ones. They ask about the two-tone photos of my great-grandfather on a dust-covered road, or the hillside village where my great-great-grandmothers kept gardens of blue mejorana.
As for the sign, all it says is PANADERÍA ~ PASTELERÍA, no other name to mark the narrow doorway, as though anyone walking by must come in for their candy-colored cakes and conchas now, or that teal-painted door might vanish overnight.
But right now my mother is taking pictures down. Not the old ones, the newer ones. Ones recent enough that I’m in some of them.
My heart pinches at the sight of the lonely nails.
“You’re getting rid of them?” I ask.
“Just putting a few away,” my mother says.
“Why?” I ask.
She hands me the stacked frames. “Because we must let people be who they are.”
I don’t know what she’s talking about until that afternoon, when a boy I don’t know starts unloading bag after bag of tamales onto our front counter.
“What . . .” is all I say before he goes back out to an illegally parked four-door and pulls more bags from his trunk.
I watch the back of him, the not-quite-matched jean jacket and jeans combination that my cousin Mimi calls a Canadian tuxedo. When he leans down to the trunk, a little of his hair falls in his face, shadowing his brown forehead.
The next time he comes in, I get the whole question out. “What are you doing?”
“Your mom didn’t tell you?” He sets the bags down on the counter. “We’re gonna start bringing in tamales for your customers.”
“Who’s we?” I ask.
“Oh, sorry,” he says. “I’m Gael.”
I blink at him.
He smiles. “You really don’t remember me, do you?”
Remember him? Did he go to my school? Did he live in the same building as us before the rents drove us out?
“I used to see you at church stuff,” he said. “Your mom and my mom both taught Sunday school together? Before my family moved away? We just moved back into town, and your mom’s helping us out until we get a little more set up.”
My eyes drift to the constellation of empty nails on the blue wall.
The pictures.
Gael.
I don’t remember that name. I remember a different name, a name he seemed to wear like the scratch of a wool sweater.
I don’t remember this boy. I remember a child with his same eyes and brow bone and hair, looking miserable in formal clothes.
And I don’t remember us playing together, because we didn’t. We were both the kind of shy that repelled us to opposite corners of whatever holiday party forced us into the same space.
My mother had taken down the photos because they showed a little girl who had never really existed, who had been this boy all along.
* * *
I find the right home for the green-and-purple pan dulce. Anna Wallis, a girl with a dark, messy braid (cute messy, not ten-hours-in-a-kitchen messy like mine), a love for forests that are home to tigers and coffee blossoms, and a heart that’s a little bit broken, but whose pieces are finding their way back to each other.
Then I bring elotitos, sugared bread shaped like ears of corn, to welcome a new family to town. They’ve renovated this building enough that I don’t know where anything is anymore, and I almost go out the fire exit; a pretty blond woman, no older than thirty, sticks her head out of her apartment door and glares, even though I stop a second before setting off the alarm.
Maybe it’s the way the streets around here have changed, the café tables on the sidewalks and the apartments turned into town houses. But my brain feels fuzzy at the edges, like the music through my father’s old speakers. I almost don’t see a minivan turning onto Nettle Street. It brakes hard to stop short of me.
Ming whirs by on her scooter, and we wave to each other. Despite how fast she goes, I catch the tilt to her head, like even at high speed she can tell I don’t look quite right.
I shove through the teal door of the panadería as the light’s falling, and it’s not just the sky-blue walls or the smell of raspberry that greets me.
It’s the crisp scent of cilantro and sweet corn. It’s the bite of tomatillo and chiles. It’s the warmth of calabaza and the earthy smell of black beans.
A boy’s low laughter billows out of the kitchen.
A boy’s laughter, braided with the familiar sound of my mother’s and my father’s, and another woman’s, a full-throated laugh I remember from when I was little.
Instead of pots of dulce de leche and berry jams, the stoves are covered in tamal steamers. Instead of my mother swaying to the rhythm of the radio while she frosts a cake, my father humming as he kneads dough, they’re both listening to Gael’s mother. She has the glow of telling stories as she shoves pieces of tamal at them, the print on her dress as bright as her painted fingernails.
“Tan linda!” Gael’s mother says. She stands back to look at me, and her face comes into focus. Familiar, not as much older as I expected, though her hair has gone half silver. “You’ve gotten so tall.”
“Lila!” My mother throws me my sherbet-colored apron. “Pull your hair back. We’re almost at the dinnertime rush.”
“We have a dinnertime rush?” I ask. The closest we get on Saturdays is tourists stopping in for dessert after an evening out. In the summer, my mother slices open the bright conchas and piles ice cream between the halves.
“Here.” Gael puts a fork into my hand. “Try this.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“A trial run,” he says. “I only made a dozen, the rest we brought in are black-bean mole or squash blossom or queso fresco. Same as always. But I wanted to try something new.”
I want to ask him what, exactly, is wrong with black-bean and squash-blossom tamales, when he says, “Come on, you’re the deciding vote.”
“Deciding vote for what?” I ask.
“For whether I’m gonna make these again next week,” he says.
I twirl the bit of tamal speared on the tines.
I take it into my mouth.
The fine grit of the corn dissolves. The flavor spreads over my tongue, and everything brightens.
The string of lights in the window.
The orange of the papel picado.
The dark brown of Gael’s eyes.
The way he was just wearing a bakery hairnet with no trace of self-consciousness, even though the bakery hairnets make us all look like a Renaissance faire troupe.
The smell of cinnamon and tomato clinging to his hair and the shoulders of his jacket.
You like him, sing the bite and sweetness of the chiles.
You like him, agrees the soft give of the sweet potato.
You like him, chimes out the resiny warmth of the pine nuts.
You like him, whispers the spice that stays on my tongue, even through the crowd coming in for our first dinnertime rush.
* * *
I have always said in bread and pastry what I do not know how to say in words.
I welcome a man to Rowbury with cemitas, because I do not know how to say, I am glad you are here, even though I take a sharper breath every time I pass this building, now that my family cannot afford to live here anymore.
To a woman finishing chemotherapy, I bring magdalenas de maíz, because they might be both bland enough to keep down but with enough flavor to remind her that she can still taste. And because I do not know how to say, I believe you are going to live; we all believe it.
This is what I try to tell Gael:
With a puerquito, I try to say, The only other thing I think I remember about you is that you carried around that stuffed pig, the one with the ears gone soft by the wear of your hands.
With pan de muerto sprinkled in marigold petals, I tell him, I’m sorry you lost your abuelo last fall; I lost my abuela in spring three years ago, and I know the empty place it leaves in you.
With a concha sugared as teal as our bakery door, I whisper, I’m sorry I barely remember you, but I want to know you as you are now.
He thanks me, each time. Each time, he tells me that the town where he lived the last ten years never had anything like this, not even at the panadería where he and his mother bought bolillos.
But no flare or spark lights in his eyes the way I felt the spark and flare within my rib cage at the taste of those chiles and salt.
Gael understands none of the ways I try to speak in vanilla and sugar.
I may know how to nudge a man toward proposing, or how to hearten a tired mother. I may know who needs the sugar of violet pan dulce. But I don’t know how to fold my heart into dough or lace vanilla sugar with my secrets.
I don’t know how to sprinkle a little of what is in me, like the color of the nonpareils.
* * *
Today Flora Merriman’s husband is retiring. Tonight there will be a party with silver and gold balloons. But right now I know Flora and her husband are worried that once he’s home all day, they will have nothing to talk about.
I bring a box of cuernitos de crema to tell them they will love getting to know each other again, just as they did at the church dances when they met.
They accept the box with small, hopeful smiles, and I carry the lit-up feeling of that smile with me down the hall.
A door near the stairwell opens.
The pretty blond woman steps into the frame.
In her thin slacks and ballet flats that probably cost more than we make off a month of birthday cakes, she matches the remodeled building, the new flooring, the inset lights. Flora and her husband are among the few who’ve stayed, their rent control holding as the price for the other units climbs. The other apartments have been redone, the linoleum ripped out and replaced with chevron parquet, the chipped countertops torn away in favor of quartz.
“Do you even live here?” the woman asks, her perfectly lined eyes half closing.
I give her a sad smile I can’t help. “I used to.”
I wait for her to melt back into her apartment. I wait for the pinched look of those uncomfortable with the truth that them moving in means families like mine moving out.
“Well, you don’t now,” she says.
The words catch me, and freeze me.
In the pinching of her glossed lips, I understand how she must see me.
A girl with brown skin and hair tangled from hours in the kitchen, my lips flushed with plum lipstick I borrow from my mother’s purse, my footsteps skipping down the hall as lightly as if I lived here, because once I did.
Everyone around here knows my family’s pastelería by our teal door and the way the air around the front counter smells like sugar and raspberry. They know it by how we don’t have a menu, just bakery cases full of galletas and fairy cakes.
But they don’t know us. Sometimes it’s as though, when we step out from behind the register, when we take off our aprons or dust the flour from our shirts, we have ceased to be useful.
“So stop coming in here,” the woman says. “Next time I see you, I’m calling the super.”
“Hey.” A voice comes from behind me. “You can’t talk to her like that.”
I look over my shoulder.
The inside of me shrinks and crumples like baking paper.
The woman’s sneer tightens. “Excuse me?”
“You think because you come in with more money than us that you can talk to us like that?” Gael asks.
“Gael,” I say.
He looks at me, then at the woman.
Then at me, and back at the woman.
“Ya estuvo,” he says, throwing his hands toward the woman.
Ya estuvo. His way of telling her he’s done, she’s not worth arguing with, even though she will not understand the words.
By the time he looks back at me, I am already down the hall.
The ways I slip into buildings without being seen are the same ways I slip out.
* * *
When Gael finds me sitting on the swing set in the Mallow Garden playground, I don’t quite know if I wanted him to or if I was hoping he wouldn’t. The playground is empty, the overcast sky scaring families off for the day, so I can’t even pretend to see someone I know.
“You’re like a fairy or something, aren’t you?” he says. “I look away for one second and you vanish.”
I stare across Dill Street at the library.
Gael sits on the empty swing next to me. “I’m guessing that’s not the first time that’s happened?”
“What were you even doing there?” I ask, not looking at him.
“The Merrimans’ party,” he says. “I was bringing the tamales.”
I let the wind sway me, my feet dragging across the wood chips.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” he asks.
“I talk,” I say. “I just don’t like words very much. I don’t like how people use them.”
He laughs. “Yeah, tell me about it.”
Heat rises in my cheeks.
Of course he knows, better than I do, the way words cut and scrape. His family is Mexican like mine. And he is trans, which leaves him with raw, exposed places I can only try to understand, places he has had to harden against the world.
“But words, they can be good too,” he says. “Kinda like salt.” He sways back and forth, just enough that I can feel the motion of him. “Just because too much can ruin something, doesn’t mean it’s all bad, you know?”
* * *
Gael does not walk me home from Mallow Garden Playground. He seems to know, without me saying it, that I don’t want him to.
I find my mother in the kitchen, taking round cake halves from the oven for the Sunday orders.
My mother would be the first to look the pretty blond woman in the eye until she understood: I am not nothing. You and everyone like you will not wear us down into nothing.
My mother, who is unafraid to make cakes that spill out their hearts, because she has never feared doing the same.
“Can I try?” I ask as she picks up the knife.
She lifts her head toward the doorway, seeing me.
“A piñata cake,” I say. “Can I try making one?”
Her smile lights the kitchen. When she smiles like this, I can almost smell the blue mejorana my father adds to his coronas of rolls, bright as citrus and pine.
She sets the knife in my hands and guides my cautious hollowing-out of the round halves.
When my father comes into the kitchen and sees what we’re doing, he brings out every color candy we have.
* * *
The next time Gael comes in, I am not nervous and fidgeting. I do not shift my weight onto the balls of my feet.
The point, I realized as my father and mother and I filled the center of the piñata cake, is not what one boy may or may not understand.
The point is what I choose to say.
I show Gael the piñata cake, covered with pink and turquoise coconut.
I hand him a cake knife.
“You want me to cut it?” he asks, hesitating.
“It’s what it’s for,” I say.
“But it’s pretty,” he says, the apprehension of a boy more acquainted with making sure tamales stay together and taste as they should than with the careful decoration of cakes and galletas.
“It’s a cake,” I say. “You eat it. To do that, you have to cut it.”
“Okay,” he says, still unsure.
He slides the knife in.
On the second cut, he hears it, the rattle of bright candy at the center.
He looks at me.
I shrug at the knife, to tell him, I’m not telling you. See for yourself.
When he pulls the first piece away, revealing the inside, his breath in is low and quiet. But it’s enough of that same birthday-party wonder that I can picture him as a little boy.
“How’d you do that?” he asks.
And I smile my mother’s smile, glinting with secrets and mischief.
I wonder, just for a second, how it will taste on Gael’s tongue, the cinnamon and chile en polvo laced into our vanilla cake, the spice a little like what he adds to his family’s tamales.
But as he tries the cake, I do not look at him. I cut pieces for my mother and my father, so they can taste this first piñata cake my hands have ever had a part in. I put together a bakery box so Gael can take the rest of it home, to the mother who thinks I am tall, and to the father and sisters he stands alongside, their hands covered in masa.
I want them to know me, all of them. I want my mother and father to know the hidden heart of me. I want Gael’s family to know who I have become in the years that Rowbury has changed around us, becoming a place where family recipes and storefronts hold on, but so many of us have had to move out to where highways meet fields.
Gael’s soft laugh makes my fingers fumble with the box’s corners.
He’s staring at the space where the wall meets the floor, shaking his head like he’s realizing something he can’t believe he missed.
“What?” I ask.
He kisses me, the taste of sugar on my lips, and salt and spice on his.
This is my heart, says the warm sugar of the vanilla.
This is the inside of me, murmurs the cinnamon.
This is everything that hurts, confesses the bright edge of chili powder, and everything I miss and everything I hope for.
This is everything I do not say but that I hold in me, whispers that breath of salt at the end. This is my hidden heart of color and sugar, the things you might miss if I did not show you they were there.