I’m standing with Wendy and my sister in a tiny room, looking out at the Sparky’s stage.
We watch the men of Cactus Wine set out instruments and get tuned up.
When Manny told the group guys about the show, they mentioned Charlie’s bluegrass band. So Manny asked if they’d open for Xochitl.
But when Manny told Xochitl about the event, he lied and said Cactus Wine was the headliner and he asked her to open for them. Xochitl agreed to play, like, Janis Joplin and Johnny Cash—a couple songs to get the crowd warmed up.
She’s got her guitar strapped on. Cracking jokes. Hopping around. Trying to keep everyone loose.
I am the opposite of loose. Because who knows how Xochitl’s gonna react to what’s about to happen? And I got huge stuff I need to tell Wendy before she goes. And Mami and Papi’s flight got delayed. And Lou’s grandson—Lou promises he’s a video “expert.” But is he really? If he doesn’t get Xochitl on camera with good sound, we’re screwed.
One positive is we’re not going to owe Sparky’s any money. The place is packed. The group guys were our marketing team. They loved the idea of a fund-raiser for vets, so they got the word out to the community. The VFW. The VA. The newspapers. Wherever they could find vets. So the crowd is full of men and women in military baseball caps and jackets telling everyone what branch, unit, and war they fought in. There are a couple of vets in wheelchairs. And one dude with a missing arm. Wounded Warriors. And they brought their families. Kids. Grandmas and grandpas. They all came out to show their support.
The Sparky’s stage manager gives us the sign.
Wendy nods to me.
This is it.
I look over to Manny standing at the stage doorway. He volunteered to emcee this thing. It’s his moment. Time to get onstage. Time to walk through that door.
But he’s frozen. Desperate breathing. Trembling. Looking gone.
“You’re on, Man,” I say.
No response.
Xochitl throws me a look. She’s thinking the same thing I am. It’s Florence Frank’s front door all over again. We’re outside the church door in Delano all over again. Outside Elena’s front door. He can’t walk through.
Xochitl scoots up to Manny’s side. Takes his arm in her hands.
I grab his other arm. Feel his shakes. Those frantic breaths.
“Manny?” Xochitl says.
He doesn’t look up. “Yeah, Xoch?”
“We’re walking through this door together. We’re going up there with you.”
He looks at her blank.
“We’re not going to leave you alone,” she says.
“I need you to leave me alone,” he says.
Xochitl tells him he doesn’t have to emcee. She’ll do it.
Manny starts laughing. I can’t tell if it’s funny laughing or crazy laughing. “I’m nervous,” he says.
“I know you are,” she says.
And he says, “Nervous as hell. So I’m going to take five more breaths. Then I’m gonna shake myself onto that stage. And I’m gonna talk to the people. But I need you to step back and give me space.”
We step back.
We count Manny’s deep breaths.
After the fifth, he turns to us and shoots a wink.
And he walks through that door.
Alone.
There are some hoots. Some claps.
Manny wrestles the mic from the stand. He holds it out to the crowd and lets them see it shaking. Then he says, “That’s not so much because I’m nervous about talking to you. It’s because I’m always nervous. And sometimes I’m so nervous I can’t function.”
He has to stop and take another deep breath.
Someone shouts, “You got this!” Claps and hoots of support.
Manny nods his head in thanks. “There’s a lot of action over there. You have a job to do. Buddies to protect. People counting on you. You have to be relentlessly alert. Your mind gets locked into survival mode. Because it has to.”
Manny pulls the mic away. Clears his throat.
“Then you come home. And that kind of vigilance is no longer required. Life is about doing the mundane, everyday things normal people do to get by. But men and women who come back like me—with a brain that’s been knocked around too much, a brain that can’t stop being at war … we have a hard time.”
Manny talks to families now. He tells them there are men and women in this room who are alive because of them. Manny looks offstage at me and Xochitl, then points at us. We point back at him. And he asks the vets in the house to give it up for their families. They do. They clap for a long time and it’s real emotional.
Manny says families can’t do it alone. He talks about the good people at the VA struggling to give care under tough circumstances. He talks about the support groups and he thanks Tío Ed and the guys. And he talks about the Wounded Warrior Project and organizations like it. “We need a big village to make it. And that’s what this night is about.”
Manny freaking nails it. Xochitl flashes me a huge smile of relief.
“Now,” he says, “I think we all came here to eat some famous green chile cheeseburgers and barbecue and listen to some amazing music.”
Huge applause this time.
Xochitl leans toward the stage, about to walk on.
I block her way and say, “Change of plans.”
Then I get in Wendy’s ear and whisper, “You’re up, Martinez.”
Manny sets up a chair and grabs a tuba I hid behind the stage.
I grab the music stand and the sheet music for “Andante and Allegro”—Megan told me the name of Wendy’s solo piece and I rented the tuba from a music shop in Las Cruces.
“Now,” Manny says, “it’s my pleasure to introduce tonight’s opening act—all the way from Washington State—Vancouver’s premier high school tuba soloist, Wendy Martinez!”
The audience politely applauds Wendy.
She gets in my face and says, “You are dead.” Then she walks onstage.
After a too-long period of mouthpiece licking, silent air blowing, music stand fiddling, and tuba adjusting … the bloomp-bloomps start.
And I think it’s good?
Good or not, with red balloon cheeks and eyebrows scrunched—the way she’s hugging that tuba and bouncing those buttons with her fingers, cheek-puffing her heart out—Wendy is one hundred percent foxy.
Xochitl laughs and gives me a thumbs-up. She whispers in my ear, “Nice move, T. Very sneaky.”
“There’s more where that came from, Xoch.”
Wendy finishes up. The crowd gives her a polite round. She walks right at me.
And she punches me hard in the shoulder.
Then she hugs me and gives me a kiss on the cheek. “I am furious with you, Teodoro Avila … but that’s maybe the sweetest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
I tell her I been waiting a long time to hear her play.
Manny takes the mic again. “Thank you, Wendy Martinez! That was a low blow, if I ever heard one. Right, folks?”
He waits for a laugh.
Doesn’t get one.
“All right, everybody, put your hands together for … Cactus Wine!”
Charlie and his guys walk on from the other side of the stage.
Xochitl turns to me. “What the hell is going on?”
Manny races off the stage, right at her. He closes the side door fast but quiet. “There have been some changes, Xochitl. I heard these guys rehearse and it turns out Cactus Wine is the absolute worst. You have till the end of this song to get yourself ready, because you are now the headliner.”
“What the hell, Manny?”
“Truth?” he says.
“Now!” she says.
Manny points at me. “Your agent promised SubPop we’d send them video of your road-trip songs. So there’s a camera rolling out there. They need to see you play those songs before they let you go on tour.”
Xochitl busts out a stream of s- and f-bombs, and there is a good chance this night is going down in flames.
Manny says, “You’re going on tour and T’s going to stay and be my wingman.”
Xochitl’s face is fire red and there’s a vein pulsing hard on her forehead. “That wasn’t your decision to make, Manny.”
“You’re wrong. I need someone sleeping in my room at night and it can’t be you because you snore like a freight train. So you are out and T is in.”
Xochitl looks at me. “You’re dropping out?”
“Nah. Turns out they have schools down here. So it’s all good.”
Manny grips her by the shoulders and says, “I love you. I love every single thing you’ve done for me. Now I need you to do me one more. Get out there and sing your songs and blow some people away before they turn hostile and run me out of town because of that.…” He says it pointing out at the stage, at Cactus Wine.
You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you,
Please don’t take my sunshine away.
There are a couple isolated claps. A squeal of feedback. And silence. It’s like folks are trying to figure out how a classical tuba solo and an out-of-tune rendition of “You Are My Sunshine”—completed after two restarts—fit into this special night of music.
Manny rushes onto the stage and Xochitl charges at me, poking her finger into my chest. “You snuck into my e-mail!”
“Yes, I did.” I hand over her journal. “This, too. You might need it for lyrics and stuff.”
“That’s private, T!”
“It shouldn’t be. It’s awesome, Xoch!”
“You lied to me. You lied to a bunch of people. Why didn’t you just tell me what was going on? Why didn’t you just tell me the truth?”
“Why didn’t I just tell you the truth?”
“YES, T!”
“Well, Xochitl Avila, I did not tell you the truth because, if I had”—I take a big breath and let it out—“you never would have come.”
And, my God, those are some satisfying words.
“Thank you, Cactus Wine!” Manny shouts, smiling huge and clapping hard. “Ladies and gentlemen, that heartbreaking performance is more proof of the dire need for ongoing PTSD research. And the need for improved care that our vets so truly deserve.”
A slurping sound as some kid sucks up the last of his Sparky’s milkshake.
“Moving on! Let’s welcome our headliner, an up-and-comer who will soon be singing her heart out on stages all over this great nation and around the world. Give it up for Xochitl Avila!”
Manny walks off to unenthusiastic applause.
Xochitl heads on.
Manny stops her. “You got this, Xoch.”
Xochitl approaches the mic. Looks out at the crowd. She lifts the guitar and pulls the strap over her head. She lays it down in the middle of the stage and bolts right at Manny and squeezes the hell out of him. Then she rockets offstage and she squeezes me and plants a big kiss on my cheek. She does the same thing to Wendy.
Then she leaps back onstage. Slips her guitar back on. Sets her journal on a music stand off to her side. She strums a couple chords. Does some fine-tuning. Thanks the crowd.
Then she looks right at the video camera and says, “I’ll be seeing you all real soon.”
She smiles when she says it, but this is the first time I’ve seen my sister look like this onstage. Xochitl looks scared.
I get close to Wendy. She takes my hand. We watch as Xochitl’s eyes drop down to her guitar strings. To her fingers. No strumming. She sings to her guitar real quiet.
I dreamed I was acting on a stage
The cast were all people I knew
I was terrified, I didn’t know my lines
In a play that was the story of you
Xochitl looks offstage. Her eyes find Manny.
I turned to run—Thank God you were there
I said, What the hell do I do?
You just froze, looking scared as me
Said you’d forgotten the story of you
Xochitl lets the echo of her voice die and the words sink in.
Then she starts strumming hard and fast, her eyes locked on the strings.
People scoot their butts to the edge of their seats, leaning in to get closer, like they want to get inside the song with Xochitl.
And when she knows she’s got every one of them …
She lifts her eyes.
Inhales the crowd.
And her voice is a bomb.
So I took your hand and away we ran
We ran, drove a car, hopped a bus
Hoping maybe if we just retrace our steps
We could rewrite the story of us
The place erupts as Xochitl tells our story.
And this …
This is her night.
But because she’s Xochitl Maria Avila, everyone in this place feels like it’s their night.
They came to Sparky’s. They gave their money to a good cause. They tasted the best burgers in the world. They were treated to an odd tuba solo and had their ears assaulted by the worst band to ever walk across a small-town stage. And all that will be part of this memory they’ll keep forever. The memory of the night they saw Xochitl Avila, a future star with a voice that plunges into your guts and mixes ’em up like a blender, a voice that’s a hand wrapping its fingers around your pulsing heart. And tonight she’s doing it with songs she wrote.
There’s the “Brother of Mine” song, one about Manny’s shaky toast the day he came home. She sings the Sally song. One about Manny and Elena holding each other. One about Manny telling his desert story—the one from the ditch in California.
It’s all so damn personal. But Manny’s not hiding. His head is up. His chest is puffed. He’s looking proud as hell. Cuz he knows these songs aren’t just ours. Xochitl wrote songs that belong to every person in this room.
I look at Xochitl and she’s still singing and strumming, but now she’s jumping and pointing over the audience all the way to the door.
We crane our necks and we can tell someone’s dancing.
It’s Mami and Papi, holding each other, moving to the sounds of their daughter’s voice.
They notice Xochitl noticing them. They blow kisses. Xochitl blows them back.
Wendy and I just stand and watch.
Xochitl launches into “Con los años que me quedan,” Mami and Papi’s song they danced to when we were little.
Con los años que me quedan
Yo viviré por darte amor.
With the years that I have left, I will live to give you love.
Wendy rests her head on my shoulder as we watch Mami and Papi dance again.
At one point, he nods to her.
She nods back.
They freeze on the same beat.
And Papi freakin’ dips her.
She looks up, into his eyes, smiling so big she can’t hold back a laugh.
I squeeze Wendy’s fingers tighter. She pulls me close till we’re face-to-face. I wrap my free hand around her back. Wendy rests her hand on my shoulder … and we move to the slow beat.
She looks into my eyes. I look into hers. She lifts her head so her cheek touches mine. I feel her breath on my ear as she says, “I am going to kiss you now.”
She does.
We do.
And it’s different than it ever was. I don’t know how, exactly.
Nope. That’s not true. I do know.
Wendy takes her hand off my shoulder.
And reaches into my pocket.
How’d she know?
She pulls out a battered little box. She gives it to me. And she holds out her hand.
I’m a trembling mess as I pull the bracelet out and slip it over her wrist.
As we kiss, my mind flashes to that first night in Florence.
I really thought that’s what it was supposed to feel like. But that wasn’t it at all.
This is it. This is what it feels like to love Wendy Martinez.
So I say the words.
And she says them back.
Then she hands me another little box. I open it. It’s a string of flat, connected turquoise squares. Wendy puts it on my wrist. She rests her head on my shoulder and we dance all the way through the night till the final verse of Xochitl’s last sad, slow, quiet song.
Everyone asks
How’s he doin’?
All I think is
wish I knew
I just say “He’s doing
the best that he can”
Then they ask “And
how are you?”
I say, “I’m fine”
But I wish I knew
I tell myself I’m doing
the best that I can
I watch his face
Listen to his voice
The way he says, “I’m fine”
I know, I know
the best that I can
ain’t enough, no
The best that I can
ain’t enough