She poured the eggs and overripe mashed bananas into the creamed butter and sugar and turned on the mixer, old Spinster. She watched Spinster’s paddles whirl. Spinster was a good old gal. Esther laughed. Gal. What a word.
Someone tapped on the window, startling her. Esther sighed. Not for the first time she regretted installing a window that left the kitchen exposed to the sidewalk. She loved the light, but not so much the rubbernecking mouth breathers. She needed to put up a sign: “Beware, Menopausal Baking Season. Please Do Not Tap Glass.” She plastered a smile on her face and looked up.
Beto Navarro stood at the window, straddling his bike. Roberto. Roberto now. He smiled and waved, and she waved back. She gestured to the door and mouthed, Come in, come in, and walked around to the front.
“Hi,” he said. “Esther.”
“Hey yourself. Roberto.” She tilted her head to look up at his sharp, lean face. She again felt that snaking heat from the night in the bar. “How long have you been this tall?”
“A while now,” he said, laughing.
“I guess I was sitting down at the Pickaxe. And a bit drunk to boot.”
He smiled. He pointed down Main. “I was at the shop, but we closed a little early today. You’re usually not here when I ride home.”
“No. I stayed later today,” she said, thinking, Does he look for me? She opened the door wider. “Do you want to come in? Are you hungry? I have some day-olds I was going to freeze.”
“I’m always hungry,” he said.
“You’ve come to the right place.”
He smiled, and Esther noticed a tender blue vein at his temple. She had the strange thought she would like to rest her thumb on that spot. Jesus, what was wrong with her? He had been her student.
They sat at a table in the break room, and she unwrapped the morning’s tray of leftover bear claws, apple fritters, and blueberry scones. He took one of each. She watched, a bit astonished, as he ate them one by one.
“These are delicious,” he said.
“I’m glad.”
He swallowed and wiped his mouth with a paper towel. “I’ve been wanting to ask you, why’d you decide to stop teaching?”
She waved her hand. “Oh, it was time. I’d been there twenty-three years. Literally half my life, and I was tired. I wasn’t doing the job I needed to be doing anymore. I looked around and realized I better figure something else out.”
“You were a great teacher,” he said. “Best one in the school. And you were so young to leave.”
“Thanks,” she said. “That’s nice to hear. About the teaching, not the youth. Although that’s nice, too.”
“It’s the truth.” He popped in the last bite of a scone. He looked at her, chewing, and then down at his hands. “I’ve often thought about you. Over the years.”
“Is that right.” Her pulse jumped, and she pressed two fingers against her throat. “That’s also nice to hear.”
“Okay.” He let out a shaky breath and checked his watch. “I guess I should get going. The memorial’s in two hours, and I should shower.”
“Right. I need to finish my banana bread.”
Neither of them moved.
He scratched his neck and then looked at her again. She looked, too, the heat wriggling around her belly.
“You’re thirteen years younger than me,” she said. “Is that right?”
“That’s right,” he said.
She rested her elbows on the table. He did the same, wadding up the paper towel between them. He clutched it, tearing at the edge. She watched the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed.
He said, “I walk by in the mornings, or ride my bike when I deliver the paper. Early. I see you in here. The lights are on, so you can’t see me, but I see you.”
“You should have stopped.”
“You were working. I was working.” He shrugged. “Then you came into the Pickaxe, and I thought, Maybe it’s a sign.”
Esther smiled. She used to believe in signs.
“You were my student,” she said.
“A long time ago.”
“People will talk.” She gave a wry laugh. “Although, who cares, right? Since when do I care what people say?”
A rhetorical question, but she answered to herself: always. She heard Grandmother’s voice in her ear. You don’t watch it, you’re going to end up washed up, a fat spinster with no one but that queer friend of yours for company. You’re going to die alone.
She leaned away from him, her smile fading. “It’s nice to see you, Roberto.”
He nodded and looked toward the door, a flush on his cheek. He stood up, his lanky frame seeming to teeter. “I better get going.”
She blinked down at her lap.
Instead of walking out the door, he walked around the table and crouched next to her. She heard his knee joints crack. He reached out and touched her cheek, surprising her enough she sucked in her breath.
“Your heart is an inferno,” he said.
She pressed her cheek into his palm and let out a small sigh. How nice. How nice it was to be touched. “Is that from a poem?”
“No,” he said. He laughed. “That’s you. You said that once.”
“I did? You’re kidding. You remember that?”
“Sure. I was an impressionable kid.” He ran his hand down her neck, stroked her collarbone.
“Beto—”
“Roberto,” he said. “I’m not a kid anymore, Esther.”
“No.” And he wasn’t, was he? The look in his eyes was not of a wide-eyed boy with a crush but of a serious young man with desires about which she knew nothing. Really, she knew nothing of him, nor he of her. He might as well be a stranger, as far as they had moved from those past lives.
He shifted to kneel and leaned close to her neck. “You smell like butter. And bananas.”
“This is bananas,” she said.
He kissed her neck.
“Christ.” She turned her face to his.
Well, this was a first. Making out with a former student in her bakery. He got to his feet and pulled her up from the chair, pulled her against his lean young body. She lost her balance and flung out her arm, knocking a metal tray to the floor.
“Wait,” she said, almost panting. “We can’t.”
“Why not?”
Indeed. Why not? If it was a mistake, so what? So what, as Iris had said about Sam. The one thing she did know these days, pushing hard into middle age, was how much she didn’t know.
Roberto bent down, wrapped his arms around her waist, and lifted her, straight off the ground. She cried out, “Don’t!” but then he set her on the counter.
“There,” he said. “Face to face.”
She blinked. And what a face he had. That forehead. She reached out and put a thumb on that vein at his temple and then dropped her hands to his shoulders. Never in a million years could she have imagined this. She leaned in, and her heart gave a funny little cough. There you are, old gal, she thought. She laughed. What a word. What a life.
*