Chapter 4: Vovo's Table

Vovo took one look at me in the doorway and said something in Portuguese that made Tiago close his eyes.

"She says you're too thin," he told me.

"She said more than that."

"She did. I'm not translating the rest."

His grandmother was eighty-three and four foot eleven, in a black cardigan and an apron with a faded red rooster on it.

She took my face in both her hands and turned it to the light, left and right.

Then she kissed my forehead and pointed to a chair.

A bowl of soup was in front of me before I had finished sitting down.

It was Sunday, and the kitchen was in the Fifth Ward, in a narrow clapboard house with a fig tree in the yard.

It smelled of garlic and kale and sausage and old floor wax.

I had slept in Tiago's loft for two nights in a blanket that smelled of him, and eaten nothing but crackers.

I put my spoon in the soup and nearly cried.

"Eat," Vovo said, in English. "Slowly. You have the face of a girl who ate nothing since the funeral."

"It's been a while," I said.

"Tiago told me. The old lady of the big house. She died in the winter?"

"January."

"She was a hard woman," Vovo said, and crossed herself.

"She paid my husband to carry her down to the water on Lantern Night for thirty years. She never once said thank you. Eat."

I ate.

Tiago sat across from me with his sleeves pushed up, tearing bread.

He wasn't looking at me, and I knew exactly where he was not looking.

His knee was against mine under the table.

It had been there since the soup.

I let it stay.

Then I slid off my shoe and put my bare foot up the inside of his calf.

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