Page 6 of A Dish Best Served Hot

“For now, I’d like to start giving him some fluids here, but he’s being difficult about getting an IV. I was hoping you could come talk to him, maybe help calm him down a bit.”

“I’m in a meeting with Fonseca over at The Center right now. Could I just talk to him on the phone?”

“Give me a second. I’ll see if I can get him on, but he was adamant that he wasn’t going to talk to anyone.”

The sounds of Latin jazz came on the line and Lola took the time to lower her phone and massage her temples, but she had to pick it up again quickly when the song cut off and Benny’s voice irritably asked, “¿Que tú quieres?”

“I want you to let Tanisha take care of you,” Lola responded. “If you have the stomach flu, you can very easily get dehydrated and you can end up in the hospital.”

“I’m trying to tell her that I don’t have a stomach flu,” he growled. “Papo Vega poisoned me!”

Since she wasn’t in the room with him Lola allowed herself to roll her eyes. Her abuelo was apt to blame everything on Papo Vega, the man he called his nemesis. He once blamed the guy for eating his butterscotch pudding at the table they shared in the cafeteria only to find out later that Papo hadn’t even been at lunch that day. Benny hadn’t backed down. He’d been adamant that he’d seen Papo sneak his dessert. That was Benicio “Benny” León for you, all bullheaded opinions and adamant action.

Lola had inherited that from him along with her social justice warrior tendencies. Her grandfather had been a member of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party since his late teens. He’d proudly taken part in the revolts of the ’50s protesting the United States’ continued control over the island. He and those like him wanted out from under the US’s colonial regime. The regime that kept them poor, undereducated, and without recourse. The same hypocritical regime that made it illegal to speak of freedom, sing or whistle their national anthem, “La Borinqueña,” or own a Puerto Rican flag. Benny had fought tooth and nail toward the independence of Puerto Rico even after his new wife had convinced him to move to Humboldt Park where her brothers had found good jobs. His persistence sparked that same fire in Lola. So from the age of twelve, Lola spoke out, she fought, and she remained stubbornly dedicated to her cause—to champion the underdog at whatever cost. Meanwhile, Benny stayed dedicated to his new cause—to hate Papo Vega.

“Benny,” she sighed.

“No, no,” he interrupted, shutting her down before she could launch into her we-can’t-blame-Papo-for-everything-just-because-we-don’t-like-him speech. “This time he really did it. He poisoned me! He put that caca medicine in my juice. Como se llama? Es-lax?”

Okay. That didn’t sound like Benny’s usual paranoid delusions. She could feel the ever-present flame inside her growing, threatening to become an all-out fire. “He put Ex-Lax in your juice?”

“Sí.”

“How do you know that? Maybe you just have a stomach flu,” she said in an attempt to calm herself before she lit shit up like the Great Chicago Fire.

“He told me!” Benny burst out, offended. “He laughed about it!”

Oh hell no. Lola felt her body heat. She felt like the Human Torch, completely engulfed and ready to burn the bad guys to a crisp. “I’m on my way,” she told her grandfather.

2

The old-school salsa music blared out of the even more old-school boom box, causing the one wonky speaker to rattle and buzz. Saint didn’t know how that wasn’t driving everyone else crazy. Maybe it was because the whirling sounds of the electric drills and the hum of the circular saws that echoed through the worksite—a Tudor-style lakefront home they’d taken down to the studs—camouflaged the sound for everyone else. However, Saint had always been sensitive to sounds. For him the rattle and buzz was distinctly out of place and therefore extremely irritating.

He wished he’d remembered to grab his noise-canceling headphones from his bedside table that morning, but his four-year-old daughter had decided to play sick. She’d mixed mustard and pickle juice—two things she absolutely hated—into her morning OJ before chugging it, which caused her to gag and eventually vomit all over the kitchen island, herself, and him. By the time he’d gotten everything cleaned up and the two of them ready to go, he’d been rushing out the door. All while Rosie hung on his leg, begging and crying to not go to school. He knew that there was an adjustment process to the whole going-to-school-for-the-first-time thing and he couldn’t wait until they finally finished it, because dropping off a sobbing four-year-old at his sister’s place every morning was exhausting.

“Junior, have you listened to literally anything I’ve said in the past four minutes?”

“Don’t call me that,” he commanded as he shook off his thoughts and turned back into the very one-sided conversation his cousin Alex was having with him.

“Ha. I knew that would work,” Alex said in triumph. She knew, much like everyone in his family, that he’d hated being called Junior since he was a kid. “I said your name about fifteen times and you weren’t answering, so I had to get creative.”

“What were you saying, Alexandra?” he asked, purposefully using her full first name.

Her light green eyes narrowed with menace. “Call me Alexandra again and I’ll have all the guys calling you Junior for the rest of your life.”

Not only would she do it, but it would actually work. Her father, his tío Luís, owned the construction company they both worked for, but it was Alex who held the real power. At twenty-two she had better command of her crew than some of the officers he’d seen when he was a Green Beret. Whatever she said was what they did, not just because she was Tío Luís’s daughter, but because she was smart, she knew what she was talking about, and she was almost always the first one ready to jump in and do whatever needed to get done.

“Seriously? You still aren’t listening to me!”

“What are you doing here anyway? Shouldn’t you be in class or something?”

Alex was a senior at the University of Chicago. She should’ve been graduating at the end of the spring semester, but thanks to some bad advice from her counselor she was stuck there for another semester, which she’d been complaining to him about for the hundredth time right before he’d gotten distracted by the boom box speaker.

She just shrugged her small shoulders and Saint marveled once again that such a tiny person worked construction. She was barely over five feet tall and if she weighed more than one hundred and twenty pounds he’d eat her tiny work boots. She seemed to constantly be drowning in her loose-fitting jeans and flannel shirts and yet he’d seen her lift concrete slabs and carry loads of lumber. Like the other women in their family, she was a force to be reckoned with and Saint appreciated that about her.

The damn speaker let out another buzzing rattle and Saint was just about to ask Alex if she heard that, but she started talking again first.

“Anyway, as I was saying before you started ignoring me. My dad is up to something.”

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