“Everybody was bringing something,” Connie explained. “Except us.”
It took me a moment to process what she was hinting at. “No,” I gasped when I did.
My sister nodded. “She’s bringing tres leches.”
Well, shit. That settled it. I could listen to anything for a little while if it meant tres leches cake. “Okay, let’s do it.”
“Who made tres leches?” even Zac asked suspiciously, hung up on it.
I’d forgotten he loved it as much as I did, or at least he used to. “Rico’s wife.”
“Rico with the neck tat?”
The neck tat that was a set of lips that made me laugh every time I saw them? “Yup.”
He blinked. “Let’s go.”
We piled into his BMW… after I ran for the front seat before Connie tried to steal it. Since she didn’t know what he even drove in the first place, it wasn’t a competition.
“Fucking cheater,” she gasped for breath as she slid into the back seat.
“I wondered if you two were the same… and it’s nice to see y’all haven’t changed a bit,” Zac said in a cheery voice as he turned on the car at the same time the kids slammed the doors shut.
I peeked at my sister in the back seat, and we both shrugged.
We hadn’t changed much. Her husband, Richard, had sighed over us nonstop during the time I’d lived with them. Connie might be hitting forty, and I might be close to thirty, but when we were together, it was like we made up for the fact we hadn’t been little kids together so we were going to do it from here on out.
“Uncle Boogie says they’re stuck at twelve,” my nephew piped in. “Then Mom says he’s eleven, and he laughs.”
“What have I told you about Uncle Boogie?” Connie asked.
“I’m not saying it!” Guillermo claimed.
I turned to Zac and could see him staring ahead, pressing his lips together.
“Tell me,” I whispered to my nephew, who shook his head. “Will you tell Zac?”
He shook his head again. “It has a bad word,” he tried to explain.
“Please. Tell me. I won’t tell Boogie you said it.”
The ten-year-old seemed to think about it.
“I’ll give you five dollars.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my eight-year-old niece shift forward and blurt out, “Mom says Uncle Boogie is a punk-ass. Can I have the five dollars?”
Zac choked, I started cracking up, and Connie laughed even after she said, “That’s the only time you can say that word, Luisa.” Then she glanced at me and said, “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“Yeah, you can have the five. You are wrong,” I laughed. “And he’s only a little bit of a punk. Not a total one.”
Zac snickered as he drove, and we listened to Guillermo and Luisa bicker the entire ride over to our aunt’s house. Of course, there were about a hundred cars parked on the street. He found a spot a few houses down. We piled out, and I spotted Boogie’s car as we headed over to the two-story house I’d been to about a hundred times over my life. The same one I had lived in while I’d finished high school and decided what I was going to do afterward.
At the front door, Connie rang the doorbell once and then threw the door open, not bothering to wait.
“I want to get food first and then go tell everyone hi,” I said over my shoulder. “Want to come with or are you going to look for Boogie?”
“Food,” Zac answered immediately, making me smile.
Except for a couple of kids hogging the living room who waved at us instead of actually getting up to give us a hug, there was hardly anyone in the house. Score for us. From the sounds of it, everyone was outside. My aunt and uncle had set up a trampoline in the back… even though they didn’t have a grandkid yet. In the kitchen, I grabbed a stack of paper plates and passed them around.
Connie followed after her kids, watching what they picked at and adding more to their plates. Zac followed behind me getting food. Just as I went to put a slice of cake on a small paper plate, a blur of a dark head came out of nowhere. A boy I recognized as Tony ran up to the tres leches and stuck his hand into the pan, scooping out a big mound of it and shoving it straight into his mouth.
“Eww, Tony, don’t use your hand. I’ll help you if you want some. Put it on a plate,” I griped, figuring I could cut the part out where his dirty little fingers had been. Seriously, they were dirty. Last time I’d seen him, months ago, he’d been digging boogers out of his nose and eating them.
The boy, probably nine-ish, sneered at me as he started to back up. “Mind your own business,” he said before running off.
I gasped even as my nephew said, “Mom!”
Staring after the little jerk, I could only shake my head. “I’m gonna fight a child today. I can feel it.”
Something warm landed on the back of my neck, and I knew without looking it was Zac’s hand. “You’re about the same size as one, so go for it.”
I looked up at him with a straight face. “You know what, Zac?”
Those blue eyes were locked on mine as he drawled, seriously, way too seriously for the sparkle in his eye, “Tell me, darlin’.”
“You’re a pain in the ass.”
His laugh filled my ears as he squeezed the back of my neck again. “Want me to pay your niece to trip him?”
I thought about it for a
