My Stepbrother Is My Secret novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: Iturbide Street

On Saturday morning, three of my crew showed up at the Varela house at seven with two flatbeds and a cooler of Topo Chico.

Lupe came in her own truck with her hoops in and a bag of carnitas from the place on Saunders.

"I brought breakfast and opinions," she said.

"I only asked for breakfast."

"They come together."

We carried my whole life out of my childhood bedroom in four hours.

My grandmother's dresser.

My books.

Eleven hard hats I'd collected since I was nineteen.

The brass plumb bob Abuelo gave me when I was eight, wrapped in a sock.

My father carried boxes in his guayabera.

He kept stopping in the hallway to look at the marks on my doorframe where he'd measured me every birthday.

"Dad, you'll throw your back out."

"I carried you out of this house in a car seat," he said. "I can carry a box of books."

His eyes were red.

I pretended not to see it.

Pilar didn't come out once. She waved from the kitchen window.

At eleven a black pickup pulled into the drive.

Mateo got out in a T-shirt and jeans and work gloves.

"Ruben said you needed help with the bed," he said to me. To all of us.

Like a stepbrother.

"Ingeniero!" one of my guys called. "You going to measure it first?"

The whole crew laughed.

Mateo laughed too. "Only if it's off by two inches."

We carried my bed frame out together, him at the headboard and me at the foot.

We went down the west arcade and across the courtyard under Pilar's camera.

Eight days.

Eight days since Abuelo's office, since we stopped.

He hadn't touched me once. Not at work. Not at dinner. He moved his chair at the table and didn't move it back.

Now we were carrying a bed between us in front of my father, three of my crew and his mother's camera.

His forearms were flexing four feet from me, and I couldn't look anywhere else.

"Left," he said. "Cass. Your left."

He'd called me Cass in front of everyone.

Lupe heard it. She raised one eyebrow at me over a box of books.

Nobody else noticed.

The house on Iturbide Street was small and yellow with a chain-link fence and the lemon tree out front.

By three o'clock it was full of my boxes.

The crew set the bed frame up in the bedroom and realized I'd left the bolts at the Varela house.

"Mattress on the floor tonight, boss," one of them said.

"I've slept on worse."

My father hung my grandmother's mirror in the hall and stood back to look at it.

"It's a good little house, mija," he said. "Your mother would have liked the lemons."

Then he hugged me so hard my feet came off the floor.

Everyone left at dusk.

Lupe went last.

"He watched you all day like you were a sandwich," she said at the gate.

"Go home, Lupe."

"I'm just reporting what I saw. I'm the lookout."

Mateo had left an hour before, with a nod to me and a handshake for my father, like a stepbrother.

I ate cold carnitas standing up in my new kitchen.

I took a shower in my new bathroom, in my new hot water, which ran out after four minutes.

I put on my sleep shirt and lay down on my mattress on the floor and looked at the ceiling.

No camera.

No heels in the hall.

No forty-one steps.

Nobody.

At 11:04 someone knocked on my front door.

Three soft knocks.

I lay very still.

Then I got up and went down the hall barefoot and looked through the little window in the door.

Mateo was standing on my porch in running shorts and a T-shirt soaked dark with sweat, under the yellow bug light.

I opened the door.

"Did you drive?"

"No." He was breathing hard. "I ran. My truck's in her garage. She'd hear it."

"From the house? That's four miles."

"Four point two."

"Mateo."

"I know we stopped." He didn't come in. He stood on the porch with his hands at his sides. "I know you said your birthday. If you tell me to go, I'll go. I'll run back. I just needed to see your door. Your own door."

I looked at him under the bug light.

"Eight days," I said.

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