My Father Gave Me a New Big Brother, and the Only Man I Could Run To Was the One Who Put Him There novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Lamb at the Back Door

Gorka tells her to be gracious while a vet with a stray lamb takes her bruised wrist in the kitchen; Aitor hands back the pantry key and sets her curfew, and she leaves with the vet instead.

Gorka's grey department Ford pulled to the curb before I had finished shaking.

He got out in his tan jacket, with his badge on his belt.

He put his arms around me on the sidewalk in front of the whole Block.

He smelled of coffee and wool, the way he has smelled since I was six.

"Tell me," he said into my hair.

I told him in four sentences: the phone, the three friends, the curfew, the wrist.

I held out my arm.

Red marks stood on the skin in the shape of four fingers.

Gorka took my hand and turned it in the streetlight and breathed out through his nose.

"He's strong, that one," he said. "Elko men grip."

"He held me in a doorway and told me to nod."

"And you locked him in a pantry." The corner of his mouth moved. "Mija, the man is in there with the flour."

"He's calling people."

"He called me. Which tells you he's not hiding anything." He squeezed my shoulder. "Come around the back. We'll do this quietly, no show for the Block."

He walked me down the alley beside the pelota wall.

At the kitchen door he took out his own key and let us in.

He has had a key to the back door of my family's house since before I was born.

I had never once thought about it.

The kitchen was loud with plates and steam.

The cook stood at the stove with her back to me, and I understood she had decided to see nothing.

At the steel counter by the heat lamp stood a man I didn't know.

He was in his early thirties and broad, with dark curly hair and a day of stubble.

His canvas jacket was crusted with mud to the elbows.

In his arms he had a lamb wrapped in a green towel.

It was no bigger than a loaf of bread, and it was screaming.

"Don't mind me," the man said to the kitchen in general. "I'm a vet, and I'm only here because your cook is a better nurse than my clinic."

"It's a stray, off a stock truck at the yards," the cook said, without turning. "He brought it to my stove, so it's my lamb."

"It's nobody's lamb," the man said. "It's a client who can't pay."

Then he saw my face.

He stopped being funny.

He laid the lamb in a box under the heat lamp.

Then he took a bag of ice off the counter and held it out.

I took it with my left hand.

He was holding his own right wrist against his chest.

"My wrist," he said, nodding at it. "It's sprained. Yours?"

"I'm fine."

"That's not what it looks like from here."

He took my arm anyway.

He did it gently, with a light dry hand.

He turned my wrist in the glow of the heat lamp and set his thumb across the inside of it, right on the pulse.

It was exactly where Aitor's thumb had been.

The bruise there was dark already.

I felt my pulse knock against his thumb, and I could not make it slow down.

He felt it too.

He didn't look up from my wrist for a moment, and when he did his eyes were brown and level and very serious.

"Who did this?" he said quietly.

"Mateo Salaverria," Gorka said from the doorway.

It could have been a greeting or a warning.

"Your father's friend's boy, from Grand View. I'd heard you were back on the Owyhee side."

"Detective Beitia," Mateo said. He hadn't let go of me. "Good to see you again."

"Rali is upset. A family matter. Do you mind?"

Mateo let go of me, slowly, one finger at a time.

Gorka held out his hand to me, palm up.

"The key, mija."

I gave it to him.

I don't know why.

He had asked in the voice that has asked me for things for twenty years.

My hand had done it before my head said no.

Gorka crossed the kitchen and unlocked the pantry.

Aitor stepped out brushing flour from the front of his shirt.

His phone was in his hand and his face was perfectly calm.

"Gorka," he said. "Thank you for coming so fast."

"Aitor." Gorka clapped him on the arm. "Glad you're in one piece."

Aitor hung the key on its nail himself.

Then he looked at me across the kitchen, past Mateo, past the lamb.

"I'm not angry," he said.

It was the worst thing he could have said, and he knew it.

"Everyone in that room saw you smile at me tonight. You're a good girl, and you had a bad moment. We'll go home, and we'll forget it."

"Eleven o'clock, little sister. I'll leave the porch light on."

The cook put down her ladle.

Gorka said, "Go on, mija. Go upstairs and sleep on it. It looks bigger tonight than it will in the morning."

I looked at the two of them, my godfather and my adopted brother, standing in my kitchen on the same side.

Then I looked at the lamb, who was not agreeing with anyone.

"This lamb needs a bottle every two hours," I said. "It has to be warm, it has to be goat's milk or a replacer, and someone has to hold it upright."

"That's right," said Mateo slowly.

"My grandfather raised bottle lambs in this kitchen. I know how." I took off my server's apron and put it on the counter. "I'll go with Dr. Salaverria to help."

"Maialen," Aitor said, soft.

"I'm going to a clinic to feed a lamb," I said. "You can write it on the list."

Nobody moved.

Mateo picked up the box in both arms, wincing, and nodded to the cook.

The cook said to the stove, "Take the good towels."

I walked out the back door past Gorka, who didn't stop me, and past Aitor, who smiled.

Mateo's truck was in the alley with its engine running.

I got in, and the lamb's box sat on my knees, warm and kicking.

We were at the corner of Grove and Sixth before I let go of the breath I had held in the kitchen.

"Is your wrist all right?" he asked.

"It's my brother's grip."

"I don't think it is," he said. "I think he's something else."

My phone buzzed in my jeans pocket.

I took it out.

A blue dot sat on the map in a sharing app I had never installed.

It showed me in a truck on Sixth Street, and it had been showing me all week.

A text from Aitor came in under it: Eleven.

I opened the settings and turned the sharing off with my thumb.

It was the first thing I had chosen for myself all night.

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