This most recent Christmas in LA, she’d invited Jane over one night. She’d introduced her to Willy as “my best friend,” though in truth they’d hardly kept in touch. A distance between them Fiona felt acutely, marked by unspoken things, added up. She knew the contours of Jane’s life, not its interior. If Fiona moved back to LA, what would their friendship be like—no longer held aloft by the nostalgia for their high school years, the romance of their present distance?
A fire truck blasted its urgent sirens a few blocks up. It was moving away, not closer. Everywhere she looked people walked in pairs, holding hands, filling the street with their smiles and knowing, intimate glances. Where the sun touched her face, her body, Fiona seemed to feel more and more alone. Cars passed up and down the streets she crossed. Every once in a while a yellow cab stopped on the corner and someone got out, and another passenger waited to slide in, then slammed the door shut. Her eyes followed a bike messenger riding up Broadway, weaving through the traffic, until she lost him to the distant horizon.
She thought of Gabriel. How might her mother read his features? The prominent curve of the Cupid’s bow on his upper lip, those high cheekbones, his laughing brown eyes. Did color matter? What fortunes might her mother glean from Gabriel’s burnished-copper complexion? Then she shook her head, remembering Tish’s warning about her tendency to settle into relationships, careening from one man to the next. You don’t know nothing about him, babe. Trying to fall in love with his teeth? It occurred to her that she didn’t even know Gabriel’s last name.
Fiona forgot about her mother’s vitamin business proposal until she lay down to sleep that night. She breathed in the dark. Her mother wanted five thousand dollars. She thought of the money she gave her mother, the night before she boarded the plane to New York. Fiona had kept the other half of the inheritance from her grandfather for herself. Of course she didn’t have it anymore; that money had been spent long ago, many times over. And now, Fiona didn’t even have five dollars to spare.
* * *
? ? ?
Wednesday night, Fiona texted Tish she might meet up later, depending on how her date went. Gabriel had suggested a Cuban place on First Ave. When she was out of the subway and above ground again, her phone beeped with a new voicemail message. She listened to it, walking toward the restaurant.
“Ona,” her mother’s voice rasped. “Call me, okay, honey?” A pause. “Don’t forget, tonight is the deadline.” Another pause. “This is Mommy.”
Fiona stuffed the phone back into her purse and made her way down the block. She saw him first, before he noticed her approaching. Gabriel leaned against the wall next to the restaurant’s entrance. He had on the same newsboy hat. There was a slight chill in the air, but it wasn’t cold enough for a proper coat—he wore a black puffy vest over a long-sleeve button-down. They hugged, and Fiona smelled something woodsy and citrus on his neck. Gabriel was taller than she remembered, or maybe the heels she wore on Saturday had cut their height difference.
“Glasses,” she said. “Are those for real?” She lifted her hand to his eyes, index finger extended, as if she meant to tap on the lenses.
“I’m blind as a motherfucker,” he said. “Astigmatism and everything.”
“Reading by candlelight?”
“Damn, how old you think I am?” he said, laughing. “Watching TV like this.” He held up his palms an inch in front of his nose. “Only reason I’m not a NASA astronaut, you know. Otherwise I’d be up there, discovering aliens and whatnot.”
“I thought maybe you wouldn’t recognize me . . .”
“You look nice. Did I say that already?”
She smiled. “We were a little bit not sober the other night.”
“I don’t black out when I drink,” he said. “I always remember everything.” The way he said it made her blush.
They went in and followed the hostess to the middle of the dining room. The walls in the restaurant were painted dark red, and votives on the tables cast dots of light through the room, little fires reflected in the mirrors that hung on the walls. They sat down with the menus.
“My kids are reading Love in the Time of Cholera right now,” he said after a moment. “You know the part when he begs the restaurant owner to sell him the mirror?”
Fiona looked up and shook her head.
“Oh, never mind.”
“Tell me,” she said. “Please.”
“I can see the side of your face in there,” he said. Fiona turned to the beam next to the table, where an oval hand mirror with an ivory handle hung from a nail. “So brother is mad in love with this woman, Fermina. She’s married to a rich doctor, he’s doing his thing with other girls, whatever. But he spots her at a restaurant and after she leaves, get this.” He paused for effect. There was that gap in his smile. “He buys the mirror off the wall because her reflection was in it.”