Small Damages by Beth Kephart Page B

another party?”
    “For to prove that you can. How was Seville?”
    “They were throwing flowers from the rooftop.”
    “Of course, and what else?”
    “They put oranges in their bathtubs.”
    “Not so strange, and what else?”
    “And I met Adair.”
    “And?”
    “And,” I say. “And.” I lift my shoulders, let them drop.
    Estela flips the anchovies, sandwich by sandwich; nothing sticks. The fried-oil steam rises, sags up her hair. “Everybody loves Adair,” she says, finally, and I am sure that it is true, and I understand why it is, but there is too much to say, so I say nothing, and something about Estela changes in that nothing, some wall comes down, some gentleness—some understanding, maybe. She looks at me, and I don’t look through her. She doesn’t force me to conclusions about Adair or Javier or any of it. She doesn’t say,
So, have you had your questions answered?
    The herbs have been rinsed and dried and cut into their pieces. The prosciutto has been slivered thin. A round of beef is sitting out, soaking in some juices. Estela finishes the last anchovy sandwich, wipes her hands down her apron, and pulls out a chair at her tiny, beat-up table. She lets her elbows drop and her big arms hang, and now she traces her finger over a long trench in the wood. “This table,” she says at last, “is old as I am. Older, maybe.” She shakes her head, pulls her fingers through her hair. “So much,” she sighs, “losting to the old days.”
    “Like what, Estela?” I ask. I pull out the second chair, sit at an angle to her, grateful that she is not angry, grateful that she is talking, not instructing, grateful that she is sitting here—not banging, not slicing, not rearranging, not testing, not glaring out on the Gypsies who have messed with all her parties. Maybe the storm has washed through her. Maybe something has happened with Luis. But Estela isn’t angry, and she isn’t demanding, and I want her to tell me a story. I want us to stop bitching at each other.
    “Like the puppets,” Estela goes on, “that would come through town—Don Cristóbal and Miss Rosita. Like my mother, splashings of Jerez on her dress. Like the
churros
that they sold in the streets. Like the baskets of figs on the boys’ backs. Like the girl I saw once, being carried from town to town—her hair braiding and her best dress on, and she was dead, but she was floating. Good God,” she says, sighing loudly. “
Santa Maria, madre de Dios
. All of it gone.”
    “But Luis is still here. And you are.”
    “We were young once,” she says. “Oh, we were young. Young and foolish, and then Franco came, and no one could be young again, and there were priests without churches and landowners without land, and teachers selling charcoal in the streets, and Spain wasn’t ours anymore, and there were no wicker boats, and I couldn’t find Luis.” A wide tear settles in the corner of Estela’s eye. She puts a fist to it. She sits, not talking, and I don’t talk either, and a fly has come to the trench on the table that her finger has been tracing. Outside, in the courtyard, I hear the Gypsies settling in—someone laughing, someone pulling out the drum, someone making a
rasgueado
and turning around the sound, and when I look through the open door to the earth beyond, I see Rafael stomping at the dust at his feet and the dust rising like fog.
    Estela has turned her head too; she’s watching the courtyard. Watching Joselita and the drum, Angelita and her dress, Arcadio with his long-necked guitar. Now she pushes back her chair and stands. She moves her fingers through her hair, tugs at the lobe of her ear. “Something came for you when you were gone,” she says. “I left it on your dresser.”
    “Do you need help, Estela?”
    “No,” she says. “We’re done.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “I am sure. Go find your note. Go get some rest.”
    The dresser mirror is a flat plate of rusty glass that freckles my face with its