Chapter 10: Twenty Years
Gus stared at the stone.
It sat on the counter where her hand had left it, smooth and blue-green in the afternoon light, thumb-sized, worn soft by twenty years of somebody's pocket. He knew every vein in it. He had walked up out of the Superstitions with Elena the day they found it, both of them laughing about how she would carry it for luck, and then he had carried it in the register for ten years after she died, and then he had given it to a nine-year-old girl at this same counter with words he had not spoken since.
"Keep it in your pocket," he said now, because his mouth moved before his brain caught up. "When the world gets loud, you hold it and remember somebody in Juniper Flats believed in you."
The woman's chin wobbled. "You remember."
"Girl, I'd know you in a burning building." His voice came out rough and he didn't care. "Sadie Quinn."
She laughed through the tears and it was the laugh, the same quick bright laugh she had had at nine, and Gus came around the counter before he even decided to, and she met him halfway and hugged him hard enough to rattle his ribs.
"Careful," he said into her hair, which smelled like highway dust. "Old man's got a creaky frame."
"You look exactly the same," she said, stepping back, wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand. "That's a lie. You look older. Rosa!"
Rosa came through the kitchen door with a coffee pot and stopped dead. "Ay, Dios mio."
"Hi, Rosa," Sadie said.
Rosa set the pot down and crossed the room in three strides. "Let me look at you." She held Sadie's face in both hands the way she had done when Sadie was nine and had jammed her finger in the booth latch. "The same eyes. The same stubborn eyes."
"She's got a man's grip on my ribs," Gus said. "Somebody feed this girl before she kills me."
"Sit," Rosa ordered, and Sadie sat at the counter on the same stool, the second one from the register, and Gus would have sworn he saw the nine-year-old ghost of her there for a second, legs swinging, too short to reach the footrest.
"Green-chile stew?" he asked.
"You remember that too?"
"I remember you ate three bowls once and Marcy Tillman nearly had me arrested for overfeeding a minor."
Sadie laughed, real laughter this time. "She made me drink a whole glass of milk to balance it out. How is she?"
"Retired. Moved to Sierra Vista to be near her grandkids." Gus ladled the stew. "Four other foster kids she had after you. Wrote me a Christmas card last year. Handwriting got shaky."
"And Big Sal?"
"Still driving. Still complains my coffee's too strong." Gus set the bowl down. "Mrs. Abernathy still grades everybody's grammar. The town's the same, kid. That's the trouble with it."
They talked. The afternoon slid past the windows. Sadie told him about Tucson first, the group home, a house mother named Delores who kept a garden and taught her to drive a stick shift in a church parking lot. She told him about the scholarship, Arizona State, nights in the engineering library with vending-machine coffee and the stone in her pocket.
"You kept it in your pocket?" Gus asked.
She fished it off the counter and held it up between two fingers. "Every exam. Every interview. I wore the finish off one side."
"You didn't wear anything off. That stone was worn the day Elena found it." But his chest felt full and strange, like his heart had outgrown his ribs.
She looked down at it in her palm. "I said I'd come back for you."
"You did."
"And you said you'd be here."
He spread his hands at the counter, the whole faded room. "And here I am."
Sadie nodded, and her eyes went bright, and she closed her fist around the stone like she was nine years old and it was the morning of the goodbye.
"And after?" he asked.
"Internship. Then full time with the state." She twirled her spoon. "I'm a civil engineer, Gus. I design roads."
He grinned. "Roads. Our girl builds roads."
"Our girl," Rosa echoed from the kitchen doorway, dabbing at her eyes with her apron.
Sadie told him about Phoenix, the apartment with the balcony, the terrible roommate with the iguana, the first job site where the foreman assumed she was the secretary until she corrected his grade stakes in front of the whole crew. She laughed telling it. Gus did not laugh. He filed it away with the anger he kept for people who underestimated his people.
"You showed him," he said.
"I showed him," she agreed, and there was steel in her grin that made him prouder than the laugh had. Then the promotion last spring. She asked about the cafΓ©, and Gus told her about the roof leak, Benny the line cook, and the jukebox that died in 2019, which he had not replaced because the silence was cheaper.
"You look tired," she said quietly.
"I'm seventy-seven," he said. "Tired is the job description."
"You should hire help."
"I've got Rosa."
"Rosa's got arthritis and a grandson in Yuma she wants to visit."
"Listen to you," Gus said. "Gone twenty years, back five minutes, already running my business."
They both laughed, and it felt like old times, like the stone had folded the years in half and set them down at the same counter in the same light.
Then Gus asked the question, easy, the way you ask about any job. "So what's the project? What are you building these days?"
Sadie's spoon stopped moving.
She looked at him, and something crossed her face, quick as a cloud over the desert, and Gus felt the warmth in the room develop an edge, like the first cold air before a storm.