My Stepbrother Is My Secret novel · Chapter 7 of 32

Chapter 7: Adjoining Doors

We left Laredo at six Thursday morning in his black pickup.

Pilar stood under the arcade in her robe and waved us off like we were going to summer camp.

For the first ten miles of I-35 neither of us said a word.

Then he reached for the radio.

"Don't," I said.

"I haven't done anything yet."

"You were going to put on the jazz."

"It's not jazz. It's a podcast about bridges."

"That's worse, Ibarra."

He looked at me sideways. Then he handed me his phone.

"Fine. Your truck, your music."

"It's your truck."

"Then it's my rule," he said. "You pick."

I put on the Tejano station my grandfather used to play in his office with the door open.

I turned it up loud and sang, badly, with my feet on his dashboard.

He didn't tell me to take them down.

Somewhere past Cotulla he started tapping the steering wheel.

By Pearsall he was singing the chorus.

It was the first time we'd ever been together in daylight with nobody watching.

I kept looking at him to make sure it was real.

"Can I ask you something?" he said, near Devine.

"No."

"The plumb bob." He nodded at my right wrist. "Why that? Everyone else gets a heart or a name."

I looked at the little tattoo, the weight on a line.

"Abuelo gave me a real one when I was eight. Brass. He said a plumb bob can't lie. You hang it and it shows you what's straight, and it doesn't care what you want." I turned my wrist over. "I got it when he died. So I'd stop lying to myself about things."

"Did it work?"

"I'm in a truck with my stepbrother, Mateo."

He laughed out loud.

"Your turn," I said. "Your dad."

His hands moved on the wheel.

"He was a bridge inspector for the state. He took me under every bridge in Harris County. He died when I was twenty. Heart." He was quiet a second. "He used to say my mother could sell a house to the man who owned it."

"Was he right?"

"She sold him one," Mateo said. "Twice."

The bid was at two o'clock in a cold conference room on the hospital's top floor.

Five other builders had presented before us.

I did the schedule.

I didn't use a single note.

I told them how we'd pour the decks in sequence so the hospital never lost more than forty spaces at once.

Mateo did the structure. He drew the post-tension layout freehand on their whiteboard, and the hospital's engineer leaned forward and stopped checking his phone.

At one point the facilities director asked about night pours.

I started to answer, and Mateo started to answer, and we both stopped.

"Go ahead," he said.

"No, you."

The director looked from me to him and smiled.

"How long have you two been working together?"

"Monday," we said at the same time.

At 4:40 the director called my cell in the parking garage.

We'd won it.

I screamed so loud in the garage that a security guard came to look.

Mateo picked me up off the concrete and spun me once, and then remembered where we were and put me down fast.

The hotel was on the River Walk.

The clerk slid two key cards across the counter and said, "Adjoining rooms, as requested."

I looked at Mateo.

He looked at me.

"As requested by who?" I asked.

"The reservation was made by a Mrs. Pilar Varela."

In the elevator, I said, "She's testing us."

"I know."

"She wants to see if we use the door."

"I know, Cass."

My room was 1412. His was 1414. The connecting door was in my wall, beside the TV, with a deadbolt on my side.

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