set up his tablet so that he could continue reading his e-mail during the whole dinner.
“Well, Max Delgado is handsome.” Of course, her mother was back to that.
“I hadn’t noticed.” Letty looked down at her plate to avoid her mother seeing the obvious lie on her face.
“What’s he like?” Her mother couldn’t be deterred in her nosiness. “The Delgados are a good family—though the mother is—”
Her mother’s eyebrows went up as if to convey something bad. Letty couldn’t help being curious and tried to fight off the urge to ask more. And failed. “His mother is what?”
Lowering her voice as though what she was about to say would conjure something evil, her mother said, “She’s just been to rehab.”
And that was a bad thing?
Instead of starting a fight with her mother, Letty said, “Well, it’s good that she got help.”
“Except now, there’s talk of divorce.” Her mother chewed a bite of her salmon. “And his father, even though he’s a bit of a downer, is not going to last long on the market.”
“Hmmm.” Really, what could she even say to that?
Her father had his markets that he watched and her mother had hers. Sometimes she felt sorry for her mother. Letty had never met her grandparents, but they must have sucked to have raised a woman so devoid of the ability to connect. And she often wondered how she and Elena had escaped the same fate. Their mother had been an only child, and her family had been dirt poor. Maybe it was because she and her sister had never known true want? Or maybe it was because they had each other? Or those few years of a normal, middle-class life before their father had become astronomically rich.
Had her grandparents made her mother feel like nothing so that she felt the need to prove that she was more than everything and her daughters were more than everything? Whatever it was, for the first time since before the time Simon had dumped her, Letty recaptured the bone-deep feeling that her mother’s neuroses—about Letty’s body and her relationship status—were not her own.
She didn’t know if it was finding a new job and knowing that she wouldn’t have depend on her family’s help—help that would come with desert-colonic-death-camp type strings—or the feelings that her new boss aroused in her that gave her enough confidence to ignore her mother’s mild swipes for the rest of the dinner.
Whatever it was, it got her through and even put a smile on her face as she drove away from her parents’ house that night.
* * * *
Letty might have kept all of her clothes on, but all the bending and picking up and stretching for things all over his studio had him feeling as though she’d done a daylong lap dance just for him. Good thing he could work with a hard-on or he would have to pull out of the gallery show for sure. Having been in New York for a decade, he had a short track record in Miami that he didn’t want to burn out because she’d turned back the clock on his libido to adolescence.
After she left, he realized that the sketches he’d made of her movements were going to work out into a centerpiece for the show. He’d already transferred several pieces to the gallery, but it had been missing something spectacular.
She wouldn’t recognize herself in the piece, but he would know it was her. Abstract art was satisfying that way. People saw what they wanted to see.
Sort of like they’d done with his family growing up. They’d seen the Delgado family as the image his father had wanted to project to the world. Perfect wife, perfect children—the perfect American immigrant story. But, behind closed doors, his father had punished every step out of line with consequences that ranged from a stern twitch of his mouth to a slap to the face.
His older brother, Joaquin, had borne the majority of the beatings. Mostly because he was gay and hadn’t bothered to conceal that fact from their father from about the age of thirteen. Not that their father hadn’t detected some difference in his oldest son that he believed would reflect poorly on him long before that.
Even though Max hadn’t escaped their father’s wrath, Max carried guilt about how much Joaquin had protected him from their father’s abuse. Mostly, he’d dealt with it by avoiding getting too close to anyone, including his family. Every time he got close to people, they got hurt. His mother and brother were prime examples. His sister was the only person in his family he hadn’t been close to growing up, and she was the only one who turned out fine. Now that their mother was in rehab and divorcing their father, it felt as though things had opened up for them.
It made Max both hopeful and wary. His mother would probably just go back to using. Or, even worse, go back to his father. He just couldn’t trust that things would stay on a good path, not with his career and not with his family.
Walking in the back door of his brother’s new restaurant on South Beach near closing time filled him with dread, but he couldn’t help the pride he felt seeing his brother bark orders at the more junior chefs. Through the culinary world, Joaquin had reclaimed the authority over his own fate that their father had tried to strip through his emotional and physical warfare.
Every time a green kid working the kitchen said, “yes, chef,” to Joaquin, Max felt it too.
Things were winding down for the night, but he met Joaquin’s gaze as he walked down the line. His brother was still expediting dishes, so Max motioned toward the kitchen door, which led to the bar.
A lot of the new concept restaurants in Miami had open kitchens, but that just wasn’t his brother. When he cooked, he sweated and swore and yelled at fuck-ups—like a gay, Cuban Gordon Ramsey. Some chefs might throw that in as a free show for his guests, but that didn’t fit with Joaquin. He was intensely private and only put himself on display through what he put on the plate. They were alike that way; Max could really only express emotion through his art.
Max posted up at the bar because only one seat was free, even after midnight. People were drinking here before they headed out to the club.
A pretty, blond bartender put his favorite bottle of local beer in front on him. He nodded at her but didn’t say anything. First of all, he wasn’t interested in having her linger and try to get him to take her home again. Second, after spending the day with Letty, he didn’t have it in him to flirt. His cousin Javi—at least before he’d gotten together with his wife—would have had her number about three split seconds after she’d put the beer down. But Javi and his other cousins had never had to keep secrets and keep up façades the way he and his brother had.
Even though they were second or third cousins—he didn’t even know—they’d grown up together. It was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the time he’d spent at the Hernandez house, seeing his Aunt Molly and Uncle Hector function so differently from his own parents—which was to say function at all—had filled him with a longing that he couldn’t extinguish as an adult. The desire to belong, to have someone who looked at him like he was worth something more than derision didn’t die no matter how much he wanted to kill it. Because seeing a family work just made him realize how broken his own had been. How broken he was.
The hoppy, bitter brew slid down this throat, dampening his mood. When he’d walked in, he’d been on a high from getting so much work done that day. Now, he was behaving like the morose motherfucker of his reputation.
He flagged down the bartender. “Do you have a pen?”
“Don’t steal it.” She pulled a ballpoint from her apron and presented it with a flirty flourish that made Max uncomfortable. “I know where to find you.”
Instead of smiling at her, giving her reason to hope, he nodded and grunted, trying to make it sound cranky.
Max grabbed a stack of napkins from the holder next to him. He immediately made marks on the flimsy paper that tore it, but he used it. He didn’t even know what he was drawing until Letty’s curves appeared out of the black marks and ripped paper.
He didn’t