“No shit. We’re all afraid.”
“You’re not. You’re the donjuán.”
“Oh yeah, I’m doing great. Forty-five. Unmarried. In love with my best friend’s wife. You didn’t even want to stay with me.”
“That’s not true.” Santiago shifted in his seat. He hated to lie.
“It’s okay, I get it. The worst part is, Jonah won’t come. I sent him a ticket and everything.”
“Why not?”
“He’s mad at me for leaving, I guess. I’ve been a shitty stepdad, or whatever I am to him. It’s not like I had the best examples. You know my parents have never once visited me in America? Twenty-six years I’ve lived here.”
Santiago’s own parents had been out just last year. They had embarrassed him by eating at his restaurant every night, loudly declaring they were his parents to any nearby diners.
Anders tilted his head back against the headrest and looked at the roof. “No one loves me,” he said. “Not really.”
Santiago thought about how at Slim Again, Begin Again the group talked a lot about why people ate, the hunger that was beyond food. They ate because it reminded them of their parents feeding them and the times they were taken care of. They ate because their parents did not feed them, and it’s how they learned to take care of themselves. They ate because they felt less alone when eating. Because they wanted to feel full, then wanted to feel nothing. Dominique said it was like that Bruce Springsteen song “Hungry Heart” from the 1980s. Everybody’s got a hungry heart. The trick is to learn when you’re eating to fill the heart instead of the stomach. Feeding the stomach, she said, is easy. That’s just diet. It’s learning how to feed the heart that’s hard.
Santiago placed his large palm on Anders’s shoulder. “I love you, man,” he said. “I do.”
Anders bent his head forward wordlessly. Then he patted Santiago’s hand and put the keys in the car.
“You’re just saying that so I drive you to the airport.”
Before his flight Santiago did something he had not done in years; he went to the airport chapel. Most people did not know that many airports had churches. But Santiago had been raised a strict Catholic, and his grandmother always insisted that he stop inside and pray for safe delivery before taking off. He never did, though he would promise her dutifully, but he always scanned the terminal signs for the chapel icon and crossed himself just in case.
LAX’s chapel was a long, unadorned room with two rows of wooden pews and a simple altar. The smell was what he noticed first. He could walk into any Catholic church blindfolded and know exactly where he was. From Lima to Los Angeles, they smelled the same. The lingering scent of incense and flowers, Murphy’s oil soap, furniture polish, candle wax, the cheap newsprint of the missalettes, and something musty and indistinct that was simply time. The room was cool and dark, empty of people. A message board informed him that they performed Mass every evening, but he had just missed the last one. He didn’t mind. He preferred to talk to God alone.
He squeezed into one of the pews and knelt. It had been a long time since he had been here. What should he say? Phrases from his childhood came to him, dusty and inchoate. Out of habit, he began reciting the Lord’s prayer, but the real thoughts, his actual prayers, interrupted before he finished. He asked for his grandmother to rest in eternal peace. He asked for God to watch over his parents. He prayed that Cleo not be in pain. He prayed for her and Frank to be happy again. He asked for mercy for Anders. He prayed that Lila be allowed to dance, wherever she was. His grandmother had always told him not to pray for himself, but at the very end he did. He prayed for the courage to talk to Dominique. He asked for love to come to him again. Finally, he humbly asked God for the strength to bear his hungry heart, the heaviest weight of all to bear.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Late March
Upstate, what little snow was left had hardened to ice. Cleo had pretended to sleep for most of the train ride from the city, eventually slipping into a shallow, dreamless doze for the last few stops. Frank had alternated between anxiously staring out of the window, anxiously staring at his phone, and anxiously staring at Cleo. She had been released from hospital that morning.
They took a taxi from the train station, passing frosted white fields and quietly dilapidated houses in silence. One of the houses they passed was surrounded by a shoulder-height pronged metal fence. Hanging over the side was something brown and furry. As they came closer, it became clear that a deer had unsuccessfully attempted to jump over it, lacerating its stomach on one of the sharp spikes in the process. It was torn wide open down the middle, suspended in a drooping arc, its front legs hanging over one side and its hind legs trailing down the other.