Page 28 of Every Step She Takes
But I also know myself. I know that comforting is my romantic gateway drug, and if I hold Sadie now while she cries, it will only be a matter of time before I want to hold her in other ways too.
I can’t let myself go down that road with her, and not just because I’m swearing off Romeo-antics. Sadie is a fragile baby gay, a gosling who’s only now learning how to walk, and I don’t want to be the asshole hawk that swoops in and traumatizes her.
I’m great at falling in love and horrible at staying in it, and in the end, someone always ends up hurt. I wouldn’t want that person to be Sadie.
So, I don’t comfort her. Instead, I say, “I’m going to give you some space,” as I’m already halfway out the door.
“What are you doing here?” Inez asks me, switching seamlessly into Portuguese an hour later.
I gesture at her across the table with my Super Bock beer. “Enjoying a beer with an old friend,” I answer back, though my Portuguese is hardly seamless these days.
Inez casts a glance around the mostly empty lobby of the hostel. “I don’t meanhere. Why are you on this tour?”
“I told you. I got dumped.”
Inez narrows her eyes, like she’s trying to read my aura to uncover the truth behind my usual bullshit. “I was sorry to hear about your dad,” she finally says.
“I wasn’t.” There’s a bottle of Vinho Verde in front of Inez, the label printed with my last name and the logo of Portugal’s coastline. That logo, the wine within that bottle, and the company it represents… those were the only things Valentim Costa cared about.
When I came out to him, he told me, in no uncertain terms, that I couldn’t be both gay and his daughter, and I took him at his word. I’ve spent the twenty years since that rejection embracing my queerness and disavowing the part of me that was him. I rejected all the Costas—my paternal grandparents, my aunts, my cousins. I rejected any ambition, any sense offamilial duty, any love I might have had for Portugal or wine or him. I used my trust fund to travel the world and fall in love with as many women as possible, because I knew that would really piss him off.
And I always fall out of love with those women before there is any possibility of being rejected again.
“Yet you came home after all these years,” Inez says now.
“This isn’t home. And I came to do the Camino,” I correct her. I snatch up the wine bottle and begin to pick at the label. “The Camino helped me once. I’m hoping it can help me again.”
“Did it help? It seems like it only taught you how to run.”
“Youwalkthe Camino,” I joke.
Inez watches me peel off the wine label in tiny, sticky pieces that litter our table, and I wait for her to call out my bullshit, to push me to be honest with her, the way Michelle would.
But she never does. Inez is not Michelle, and I’ve trained her to never expect genuine vulnerability from me. Like most people in my life, Inez accepts what I’m willing to show her. That’s how I want my friendships. Usually.
Tonight, though, I’m thinking about the woman on the plane who confessed all her most precious secrets to a stranger. I’m thinking about the statues of grieving women. I’m thinking about all the things I haven’t let myself feel.
“He left it to me,” I hear myself say.
“Who left what to you?”
“My father. Valentim.” Bits of the label stick to the pads of my fingers, and I try to wipe them on my clothes under the table. “He left me Quinta Costa. The entire business, his entire fortune. A dozen vineyards, the majority shares, just… all of it.”
Inez stares at me blankly at first, as if we’re not speaking English or Portuguese, but some third Martian language that resembles neither. “You said he disowned you. Why… why would he do that?”
“That’s the question that’s been haunting me since I got the news.”
It’s not like my dad completely cut me out of his life after I came out to him. He sent birthday cards with extravagant gifts each year; he called me to complain about the family of finches living in his fireplace at the vineyard in Vigo; he emailed me random articles about things I’d loved when I was ten years old. For all intents and purposes, he acted like the fight never happened, even if the unspoken chasm between us was evidence that it had. We never talked about anything real, we rarely saw each other, and we never mentioned the fact that I’d spent the first eighteen years of my life preparing to take over the family business, then spent the next eighteen years drifting aimlessly from job to job, from country to country, from woman to woman.
I hated him for it—for rejecting me and acting like he hadn’t—but I kept picking up the phone when he called, unable to fully sever that fragile connection.
He never told me he was sick. Up until the bitter end, he was leaving me voicemails about a Cabrera vole that kept sneaking into his vegetable garden. And then he was gone, and I was getting a phone call from a stepmom I’d never met, telling me what happened, telling me about his trust. None of it was going to her. All of it was coming to me.
Even in death, Valentim Costa saddled me with his emotional baggage.
“Does this mean you’re now CEO of Quinta Costa?” Inez asks. “Should I start addressing you as ‘sir’? Or ‘Your Majesty’? What is the appropriate form of address for a capitalistic overlord?”
“The board named Valentim’s fifth wife as interim CEO while I figure out what I want to do with the company.”
