Best to cut this off at the pass.
“You keep talking about wrinkles and hiccups,” she said, and began walking again, passing a large palm tree at one end of the pool. “We’re not playing doctor here, Roman. What’s going on?”
Whatever she’d expected him to say, it wasn’t “Blackmail.”
Carmen stopped. Turned around. Walked back to the tree. She poked at the padlock and pile of chain beneath it with her toe.
This was the spot, then. Grand Gesture Central.
This was the woman who was blackmailing Roman Díaz?
Please.
“In order to be blackmailed,” she said, “you have to have done something wrong.”
She didn’t say And that’s not possible, because she didn’t need to. Roman knew as well as she did that he never did anything wrong. He parked between the lines, filed all his paperwork perfectly the first time, bought her flowers at just the right not-calculated-seeming times. He zeroed out his email inbox before he went to sleep at night. He knew where semicolons went and where they didn’t go. He could salsa dance.
Roman was perfect.
Usually. He’d gone strange on her the past few days, which was why she was here, inspecting his property, hoping to get this demolition back on track so her father wouldn’t find out what was going on.
This development meant a lot to Roman, and Roman was hers, so it meant a lot to Carmen, too. At least theoretically.
She had to admit, the reality was that she didn’t like these sad, sagging buildings, and she didn’t like how the air smelled like rot because of something dead on the beach, and she would prefer to wrap up and go home as soon as she could manage it.
Roman must have put his palm over the phone, muffling his voice, but she heard the beeping of a large truck backing up and the sound of someone who sounded like Roman but couldn’t be, because his disconnected words were too unhinged—stupid and don’t do that and Oh, Christ on a crutch, tell me you didn’t just—
And then a crash.
When Roman came back on the line, he spoke over the low throbbing chug of a diesel engine. “You’re right about blackmail generally,” he said, “but not in this case.”
She could tell that he was trying to sound calm, but an undertone of hysteria in his speech sent her back to when she was fourteen and she met him for the first time. When he’d had nowhere else to go, her father had invited him to stay at their house in Coral Gables for his spring break, and he’d seemed like such an exotic species to her—nineteen-year-old collegestudent Roman with his Wisconsin accent and his dog-eared Nietzsche paperback, his wild kinky-curly hair, his ideals. He’d spent the entire two weeks arguing with her father. Roman would fly into rages, declaim for minute after breathless minute, cite obscure sources and strangely specific facts.
He’d frightened her with his intensity, his passion, but her father had been delighted with him. Riveted by him.
She remembered, too, how devastated Roman had been when he moved to Miami expecting a job at her father’s office and instead been told he needed to earn it. Carmen could still remember Heberto’s cold proclamation. You have to work your way up from the bottom, he’d said. If you can’t do that, what good are you to me?
Roman had gone about it with feverish intensity, renting a shit-hole basement apartment off Calle Ocho and working construction jobs while he earned a contractor’s license, then a real estate license, finally a loan officer’s license. He’d cut off his hair, bought the best clothes he could afford, and started carrying building codes and binder-clipped zoning regulations around in the front seat of his car, flipping through them whenever he had five minutes to read.
Heberto had encouraged him, in his way—offering cutting remarks to puncture Roman’s pride, telling anecdotes about life in Cuba that were meant to deliver important lessons. When Roman told him proudly of his first big deal, Heberto had waltzed in and stolen it, then laughed when Roman seemed hurt.
Carmen rarely thought of Roman that way now—as a man who could be hurt.
It irritated her to think he’d backslid so rapidly.
“What’s all that beeping?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t tell her. Instead, he began to run through a litany of complaints. His truck stuck in the mud. An Airstream trailer, a road trip, hippies, an alligator.
Carmen listened, perplexed, while she searched the site for the contractor. His pickup was in the lot, but there was no sign of him out front, and she’d already checked the pool area, the beach—ah.
There he was, waving from the open door of the office. She began making her way toward him. Roman was going on and on about someone named Jerry, who had been hard to locate and then turned out to have a shotgun on the front seat of his truck, loaded, and no sense of physics whatsoever, even if he was a mechanical genius, and—
“Stop,” she interrupted.
Roman stopped.
“Tell me what she’s trying to blackmail you over.”