“Ah. Big risk-taker, huh? I guess that’s why you want to develop this property. God knows there’s not much money in it. I mean, Grandma and I got by okay, but we ate a lot of those Cup Noodles when I was a kid, and I think maybe that’s not your thing. Where are you from anyway?”
“Miami.”
“No you’re not.”
“I live in Miami.”
“Yeah, but where are you from?”
“Can we not do this?”
She would be unbearable if she knew where he was from. If she knew the whole story.
“You promised to have honest conversations with me.”
“I didn’t promise to do it while we were hooking up the truck in the rain.”
“You have an accent,” she said.
“No I don’t.”
“You said ruf yesterday. You’re, like, Canadian.”
Roman bent over the trailer hitch. Water dripped from his forehead. “How do I jack this up?”
“Do you even speak Spanish?”
“Of course I speak Spanish.” Badly.
“Hasta el mes pasado, vivaba en Boliva. Hablo español bastante bien. ¿De donde eres, Honduras?”
“My parents were from Cuba.” He pronounced it like a Cuban—Coova—in the hope that she would accept that bit of evidence and shut up.
“Really? And they named you Roman?”
“Roman was my father’s name.”
“Weird.”
“Thanks.”
It barely stung. When you were named Libertad Roman Ojito Díaz—when you were a small, dark-skinned kid among a sea of Caucasian middle-schoolers in Nowhere, Wisconsin—you got used to comments about your name. Ashley’s “weird” was nothing compared to roll call on the first day of school. An annual visit to hell.
“But you’re not really Cuban.”
“I’m not, huh?”
“No, I mean you’re Cuban, but you didn’t grow up with Cubans.”
“Because I say roof wrong?”
“Because you had to think hard to translate when I spoke Spanish to you.”
She’d caught that.
She caught everything.
If he spent too much time with this woman, she would take him to pieces and scatter him all over, like the monkeys did to the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.