Page 82 of The Maid

“Okay, yes. Thank you, Charlotte,” I say. “Give my regards to Detective Stark.”

“You want me to…are you sure?”

“There’s no reason to be impolite.”

“Okay, Molly. I’ll say hello from you.”

“Please tell her I can read nods.”

“You can what?”

“Just say that, please, exactly that. And thank you.”

“Okay,” Charlotte says. Then she ends the call. I put my phone away.

“I’m terribly sorry for the interruption. I’ll have you know that it’snot my usual practice to take calls during dinner. I don’t intend to make a habit of it.”

“Molly, you worry too much about ‘this is right’ and ‘this is not right.’ I just want to know what Charlotte said.”

“They caught him in the act. Rodney.”

“En flagrante delito?”

“In flagrante, yes.”

A smile spreads across Juan Manuel’s face and into his dark-brown eyes. Gran once told me that a real smile happens in the eyes, something I never really understood until right now.

“Molly, I never had a chance before to speak with just you, to say sorry. I never wanted you to be involved in any of this.”

I have picked up my fork, but I immediately put it down.

“Juan Manuel,” I say, “you tried to keep me out of this. You even tried to warn me.”

“Maybe I should have tried harder. Maybe I should have told the police everything. The problem is I don’t trust the police. When they look at people like me, sometimes all they see is bad. And not all police are good, Molly. How can you tell who is who? I worried if I talked about the drugs and the hotel, maybe things would get even worse—for me and for you.”

“Yes,” I say. “I understand. I’ve had my own troubles telling who is who.”

“And Rodney and Mr. Black,” he continues. “I no longer cared if they killed me. But my mother? My family? I was so scared they’d hurt them. And I was scared they’d hurt you too. I thought, if I just take the pain, if I stay quiet, maybe no one else gets hurt.”

His wrists are on the table, not his elbows. I’m struggling to focus on his face because all I can see are the scars on his forearms, some healed over and one or two still raw.

I point to Juan Manuel’s arms. “Was it him?” I ask. “Did Rodney do that to you?”

“Not Rodney,” he says. “His friends. The big ones. But Rodney gavethe orders. Mr. Black burns Rodney, so Rodney burns me. This is what I get for complaining, for saying I don’t want to do Rodney’s dirty work. And for having a family I love when he doesn’t have one.”

“It’s so wrong, what they did to you.”

“Yes,” he says. “It is. And what they did to you.”

“Your arms. They look sore,” I say.

“They were. But today, they’re okay. Today, I feel a little bit better. I don’t even know what will happen to me, but I still feel good because Rodney is caught. And we have a candle to light. And so there’s hope.” He takes a match out of the matchbox and lights the candle. Then he says, “We shouldn’t let the food get cold. Let’s eat.”

We pick up our forks, and we enjoy the meal. I have ample time, not only to chew the correct number of times but also to savor each and every bite. Between bites, I recount every detail of the afternoon—how I sat at the coffee shop, how I waited and worried, how I saw myself on TV, how the cars screeched to a halt, how it felt to see Rodney’s head being unceremoniously pushed into the backseat of a cruiser. When I tell him about the woman at the coffee shop recognizing me from the news, he starts to laugh out loud. For a moment, I’m frozen. I can’t tell if he’s laughing at me or with me.

“What’s so funny?” I ask.

“She thought you were a murderer! In her shop. Drinking tea and eating a cake!”

---