Small Damages by Beth Kephart Read Free Book Online

of beer cans where there’d been people before us, and a book someone had left; it was too dark to see which one. Kevin took off his jacket and spread it across the ground, Tim, too, and it was like the place was upholstered. We settled into a circle, almost. Ellie asked if there were bats.
    “Bats?” Kevin said.
    “They have wings,” Ellie said. “They hang upside down. They shit guano.”
    Nobody spoke after that. We all just sat, waiting and listening through the quiet of that night, to the sounds beyond the mill house. The fox, I thought. Or an owl on the prowl.
    “So this is it,” Andrea said at last. “The big class dance.”
    “This is it,” Kevin said.
    “What happens next?” Ellie asked, and all I knew was that I’d survived the biggest losing—that my dad was dead and I was still alive. That’s what I thought, anyway, except that I was weeks late, and it’s not like worse things can happen than your dad passing away. It’s just that other things can happen too. You can end up at Los Nietos in a room that isn’t yours, holding your boyfriend’s twenty-one words in your hand. You can end up wishing that time were a bendable thing, that you could take it back, do some of it differently.
    “You let Kevin go,” my mother said to me. “Look what good he’s done to you.” My mother, the greatest hypocrite in the land. My mother: she loved Kevin. I take little breaths. I count the cracks.

FOURTEEN
    When I open my eyes, she’s at the edge of my bed, a bowl in her hands, and a spoon.
    “You didn’t eat,” she says.
    “I’m not hungry.”
    “Sit up.”
    She looks into my eyes, and I look into hers, and she forgives me, for just that second, for sitting in the sun with Esteban. She forgives me, because she’s alone here too—because somehow or another, her party isn’t the party she was planning all this time to throw.
    Outside my window, in a puddle of courtyard moon, the Gypsies are singing some song. “Gazpacho,” Estela tells me, fixing the pillow behind me and fitting the bowl in my lap until she turns too, to watch Arcadio on the love seat, his guitar on his knee, his fingers running hard against the strings. Angelita pulls at her dress like it’s an animal she can’t trust; she works a pair of castanets. Joselita bangs at the half barrel, and whatever Bruno sings, Rafael chases with some turned-inside-out note of his own. The song is a black thing with wings.
     
    Come with me,
    Come with me,
    Tell your mother
    I’m your cousin.
    I can’t think straight
    When I see you on the street.
    I can’t think straight,
    And I keep on looking at you.
     
    “Eat,” Estela says.
    I take a spoonful.
    “What did the boy want?”
    I shake my head.
    “¿Qué?”
    “Twenty-one words,” I tell her.
    “Phhhaaa,” she says. “Numbers don’t count.”
    She smells like soapsuds and orange juice, like dill, sweat, and mint, like jam and like butter that has melted. I take another spoonful of gazpacho, and I think how famous Estela would be if she came to the States and opened a restaurant and served out dishes like this. She could teach my mother a thing or two. She could buy herself a new dress.
    “They ate my pork with their hands,” she says, nodding toward the courtyard, where now Joselita and Angelita are dancing with one another, their hands up above their heads, preposterously little hands, a preposterous dance, that thing still hanging from Angelita’s neck like a lettuce-leaf collar.
“Olé,”
Luis says, putting his hand up to his heart. The bed creaks under Estela’s weight. I take another spoonful of soup.
    “Because your food is irresistible,” I tell her.
    “Irresistible?” she repeats the word. “What is this, irresistible?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She rubs her eye with her hand.
    “You should go out there,” I say, “and join the party.”
    “That’s not my party.”
    “They’re your guests.”
    “Joselita, the horse trader’s daughter,” she