“I’ll give you twenty points for dinner tonight. Another ten if we go dancing after,” Luna said.
Joe smiled. “Deal.”
The waitress brought their meals. They were at a Mexican restaurant, and the smell of warming corn tortillas made Luna momentarily ill. When she was a child in Nicaragua, her mother had made tortillas—grinding the corn, rolling the dough into disks, frying them over the open fire in the yard. It took all day, the tortilla making, and by the end of it her mother’s shoulders would curl forward, her back nearly parallel to the floor.
Luna sliced through the fancy dish and chewed without tasting. She hadn’t seen her mother in five years, her sister Mariana in five and a half. Now Luna bought her tortillas from the Cuban grocer on the corner where they wrapped them in plastic and charged by the pound.
After dinner Joe took Luna dancing. They drank Moët and slipped small pills the color of sky into their mouths and felt a universe of sensation expand with each driving bass note and shudder of strobe.
“Fifty points!” Luna called above the music. “One hundred,” she whispered into his ear.
At dawn Joe checked them into a suite at the Betsy Hotel, a quiet, cool space larger than Luna’s apartment. They left the lights on, but the solid raft of Joe’s back and his long-reaching arms surrounded her in darkness, and afterward she closed her eyes and slept as though she were at the bottom of the sea.
* * *
Joe told Luna everything. It was mundane and it was tragic. He’d fallen in love with Sandrine completely. After all the women, all the girlfriends, all the dates and hookups and one-night stands and never thinking it was enough. The more, more, more of it, skin, tongue, breast, pussy, my God, so many women, how could he choose just one? But everything about Sandrine was enough. Enough because hadn’t it become exhausting? It came down to the smells, the multitude of smells, all of them on him, bodies and perfume, the way a woman had one smell at her neck, another under her arms, another between her legs. And each woman was different! How could he keep up? He worried that he was losing it, his sense of smell, that soon every woman would register as the same, which seemed the worst kind of fate. With Sandrine he focused on each specific part of her: he knew what to expect on the inside of her wrist, her hair when they were going out. He found comfort in knowing with certainty who was beside him. In knowing what she wanted and what she could do. The knowing became more important than the surprise. He understood at last—at last!—what was enough.
But he had been wrong.
* * *
One night Donny followed Luna to the parking lot after her shift ended. It was 4:00 a.m., and a slight chill moved off the water. The restaurant’s dumpsters pulsed with stink. Usually Dima or Jorge walked her to her car, but tonight she’d been slow to clean up, slow to count her tips, and so Rodrigo left her the keys to lock up. Had Donny been watching the bar? How had he known?
“Luna,” he said. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Donny. It’s late. I’m going home. I’m tired.” She kept her voice steady. Donny’s gaze held a clear purpose that scared her, a sharpness that cut her into tiny, separable pieces. Behind her back Luna slid her hand into her purse and felt for her keys. Donny was roughly ten feet away, a distance covered in seconds if you moved fast. Luna remembered him as someone who worked out every day, and he still looked it: biceps that popped, thighs that pulled his jeans tight.
“You should get home, too,” Luna said. “Don’t you have work tomorrow? I’m sure you do.” Her hand closed around the keys, and she began to step backward to the car, a dented Subaru she’d bought last year. Two hundred twenty thousand miles, and still it ran like a dream.
“Nope,” Donny said, his voice friendly. “No work tomorrow. I’m partying all night. Come with me, Luna. Remember? Our parties?”
“Sure. I remember.” The key slid into the lock, Luna turned it and eased the door open a crack, then turned quickly and slid inside. He did, he ran, but she was faster. She slammed the door shut and pushed the lock, and all Donny could do was throw up his hands and say, “Come on Luna, come on.”
She waved at him through the window glass. He didn’t wave back but kept his hands raised, palms up, shaking his head. The bat on his wrist rose and fell. Luna’s hands were trembling so violently she had trouble putting the car into drive, but the gear dropped into place and the car jumped away.
* * *
Joe and Luna are asleep. They do not go to Joe’s condo on South Beach, which he is embarrassed to show her because of the mess and the unpacked boxes, but again to the Betsy, to a suite that Joe cannot afford yet books nonetheless because it is the biggest and the best. Once he could have afforded it, and his habits have not changed. The bed is king-size, a raft of white cotton and silk duvet, down pillows that sink slowly beneath the weight of their heads. They sleep without trouble, dreamless, Joe’s right hand clasped loosely around Luna’s right wrist. She twitches and turns, and Joe turns with her.
* * *
On their tenth date, Luna told Joe this story about her mother and her sister:
Mariana has been gone for three weeks when Luna’s mother first talks about going back to Matapalo.
“Back?” Luna asks. She’s eighteen years old and a senior in high school.
“I miss home,” Luna’s mother says. “Maybe Mariana did, too. Maybe she went there.”
Luna is getting ready for work, pulling her hair into a ponytail, slipping into the loose black trousers she wears in the kitchen. “She would never go back,” Luna says. “Never.” She knows what happens to women and girls there. Mariana is younger; she doesn’t remember as much, but she remembers enough.
Her mother has just come home from her job cleaning rooms at the Betsy Hotel and is standing by the door, still in her uniform with the frilly white skirt. She sighs extravagantly and kicks off her shoes, then sits on the couch and stretches her legs long, spreading her bare feet with their thick yellow nails and calluses.
“Mami, put your feet away,” Luna says, and her mother slides them off the couch.
“But maybe for the jobs,” her mother says. “Tourism—everything is changing now. Rosa keeps telling me. Or maybe for Papi. She loved him, it didn’t seem to matter what he did. And she had that friend Sofía, remember her? They were like sisters.”
“I’m her sister,” Luna says, but her mother seems not to hear.
“I don’t know, it’s harder there, but it’s easier, too. Do you understand?”
Easier in that you had no choices, that your future was the same as your mother’s, and her mother’s, on and on. They call you bruja if you try for something different. Say that you have no respect or love for your family or your friends, say that you deserve all the bad luck God will deliver upon you. Go back to that?
“No, I don’t understand,” Luna replies, but she does in a small, secret way. There is a smell she remembers from Matapalo, a dry burning, tortillas cooking, gas from the stoves, a collection of different odors that together form one, and it is not immediately attractive, but it is specific. It is home.
The last time Luna saw Mariana, the bruises on the girl’s face had shaded already to yellow. Mariana spent a week on the couch, watching cartoons and sipping milk shakes through a straw. Her boyfriend, Davie, claimed she fell out of the car, not that he’d pushed her, and who could say? Mariana herself had been so high she barely remembered the night, only the flashing lights and the handsome ER doctor who handed her pamphlets on drug addiction and alcohol abuse. They pumped her stomach, took her blood, and told her all the things they’d found there. Mariana was fifteen years old.