“Thought Cubans were white.”
“The white ones are.”
Stanley grunted.
Ashley looked toward Roman again. He’d sat back on his heels, the toes of his lightweight hiking shoes bending where they met the ground. He held something cupped in his palm, and with his right hand he ground it into a fine powder between his fingertips.
How many times in his life had Roman had to answer that question—What are you, black?
She’d asked it, too. Where are you from? Just a slightly more genteel version of the same damn thing. As if the answer would sum him up somehow, make him comprehensible.
The truth was, she’d started getting to know Roman when he sat down in front of her with a bag full of sandwiches he wouldn’t let her eat. When he’d consumed them with deliberate care, wiped his fingers on a napkin, and walked away—and then sat in his car all night, making sure she stayed safe.
Roman had revealed himself when he put on mirrored sunglasses at seven o’clock on an overcast morning and rode through a hundred miles in silence, his posture so stiff that she’d worried about him.
He told her who he was when he did five hundred sit-ups. When he followed her to the pond and groaned at the grip of her mud-smeared fingers on his cock.
He showed his hand in fastidious silence, careful costumes, and the disciplined meanness he turned on himself.
“I guess he’s Afro-Cuban,” she said. “Mestizo, you know?”
“Mixed.”
“Everybody’s mixed, Stanley.”
He grunted again.
“Why does it matter?”
“Doesn’t.”
“Then why’d you ask?”
He looked at his cards. “Your move.”
Ashley had a pair of fours. “I fold.”
She shoved the pile of matches in his direction, and Stanley swept up the cards and began shuffling.
“Usually you’re like Michael,” he said. “Blabbing everything.”
It was true, she’d always blabbed to Stanley. When he’d started coming to Sunnyvale, she was fourteen and newly launched in the world, still adjusting to her grandmother and to the idea of happiness. She’d
blabbed at him all winter long, because he said so little. Because he was so different from her father, a politician who talked a lot but never meant any of the nice things—only the criticisms.
Stanley meant what he said. He let her talk. He didn’t judge.
Or if he did judge, he kept it to himself, which amounted to the same thing.
“Maybe I’m maturing,” she said.
He smiled at that and dealt the cards.
“You lose a tooth?” she asked.
“Need a new bridge.”
“Ah. Well, I need answers to a million questions.”