What Goes Around

Chapter 8 — Cracks

Daniel started the fight on a Thursday, which was stupid, because Thursdays had always been Carla’s favorite night and she made her chicken enchiladas and nobody was supposed to start anything on enchilada night.

It began, as these things always begin, with nothing.

Miguel was talking about the wedding — a venue he’d toured with Sofia that afternoon, a converted barn outside Katy with string lights and a long oak table for the head table, the whole Pinterest vision Daniel had heard about for three weeks straight. Miguel’s face was lit up the way it used to get when he talked about Little League, all shine and no doubt, and Daniel watched his son across the dinner table and felt something sour rise in his throat.

Carla was refilling everyone’s water, smiling at Miguel the way only mothers can — like his happiness was something she could hold in her hands. The enchiladas were perfect. The evening was perfect. Everything in Daniel’s life was perfect, and it was rotting from the inside, and nobody at this table knew it but him.

“That’s the third venue this month,” Daniel said.

Miguel blinked. “Yeah. This one’s the one, though. Sofia loves it.”

“The one. Last week it was the hotel downtown. Before that it was the ranch in Brenham.”

“Dad.” Miguel laughed, a little uneasy. “That’s how it works. You look at places.”

“You’ve been engaged six weeks.” Daniel set down his fork. The sound was too loud in the sudden quiet. “Don’t you think you’re rushing this?”

Carla stopped chewing. She looked at Daniel the way she’d looked at him through the garage window — that same still, watchful expression — but Miguel was already frowning.

He saw the warning in her eyes and ignored it. The words were already climbing up his throat, hot and unstoppable, twenty years of swallowed truth looking for any exit it could find. If he couldn’t say the real thing — if he could never say the real thing — then this would have to do. This ugly, senseless, safer thing.

“We’re not rushing anything. We’ve been together two years.”

“Two years of what? Dating?” Daniel heard his own voice and barely recognized it — flat, cutting, mean in a way he hadn’t been mean since his twenties. “You’re twenty-three, Miguel. You don’t know who you are yet, let alone who she is.”

“Daniel.” Carla’s voice was low, a warning.

But the thing was out now, and Daniel couldn’t stop it, and maybe didn’t want to. “I’m serious. This girl walks in, six weeks later there’s a ring, and suddenly we’re booking barns in Katy? What’s the hurry?”

“She’s not ‘this girl,’ she’s Sofia.” Miguel’s ears had gone red — the tell he’d had since he was seven, the one that meant he was past listening. “And we’re not booking anything yet. We’re looking.”

“Looking.” Daniel laughed, a short ugly sound. “She’s got you wrapped around her finger, son, and you can’t even see it.”

The kitchen went very quiet. The enchiladas sat cooling in the center of the table, steam curling up and dying.

“You don’t know her,” Miguel said quietly.

“I know enough.” Daniel stood up. His chair scraped the tile. “I know she’s got a whole life you know nothing about. I know she asks questions nobody asks unless they’re digging for something. I know —” He caught himself. The edge of the table was under his hands and he was leaning over it, breathing hard. “I know you’re my son and you’re throwing your life at a woman you met at a coffee shop.”

“A bookstore,” Miguel said. “We met at a bookstore. You’d know that if you ever asked me anything about her.”

Carla stood. “Both of you, sit down.”

“No.” Miguel was on his feet now too, matching his father across the table, and for a terrible second they were the same height, the same set of the jaw, two men in a kitchen built for a family. “You don’t get to do this, Dad. You don’t get to sit in judgment of the best thing that ever happened to me when you can’t even tell me what your problem is.”

“My problem is I’m trying to protect you.”

“From what? From being happy?” Miguel’s voice cracked on the last word, and that was worse than the anger — the hurt underneath it, raw and real. “She’s kind, Dad. She’s good. She’s the first person who’s ever made me feel like I could be more than just your son working at your company. And you — you’ve been cold to her since day one, and I don’t understand it, and honestly? I’m starting to not care why.”

He grabbed his keys off the counter.

“Miguel,” Carla said.

“I’m going to Sofia’s.” Miguel stopped at the doorway and looked back — not at Daniel, past him, like Daniel was furniture. “You don’t even know her, Dad.”

Then he was gone, and the front door slammed hard enough to rattle the windows, and the silence he left behind was total.

Carla stood at the table, staring at Daniel.

“Twenty-four years I’ve been married to you,” she said, very quietly. “And I have never seen you be cruel to our son.”

She walked out of the kitchen. She didn’t slam anything. That was worse.

Daniel sat alone at the table with the cooling enchiladas and listened to his family fracture around him like ice on a lake in spring — slow, then all at once — and he couldn’t tell anyone why, and that was the worst part of all.

He heard Carla’s footsteps on the stairs. He heard Miguel’s truck start in the driveway and pull away too fast, tires chirping on the cul-de-sac. He sat there until the ice melted in his water glass and the kitchen went dark around him, and he thought about the man he’d been at twenty-three — Miguel’s age — and the split-second decision that had made him into this: a man who picked fights with his own son to keep from telling the truth.

“You don’t even know her, Dad,” Miguel had said. “What’s wrong with you?”

Daniel had no answer. That was the answer.