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“Hey,” Lupe calls. “You want a sandwich?”
“No,” Jess replies, from the living room.
Lupe rolls her eyes at the lack of a thank you. She sets her finished sandwich on a plate.
“I’ll take one!” Maybelle chirps, walking into the kitchen in a yellow dress. She plunks down on a chair. “If you’re offerin’, that is.”
Truthfully, Lupe hadn’t been offering for anybody but Jess. She hadn’t even realized anyone else was downstairs—Carson, in a fit of well-provoked generosity, has begrudged them the day off, and most of the team has taken the opportunity to escape into town. Those left are devotedly renewing their vows to their pillows. For Maybelle, though, Lupe nods easily. She saws off four more pieces of bread from the loaf on the cutting board. Small chips of crust scatter across the counter.
“She seems mighty focused, in there,” Maybelle says, tipping her head towards the doorway that leads to Jess.
“Oh, yeah?” Lupe asks. With deft strokes, she passes the spreads from a butter knife to the bread. Cracking open the door to the fancy refrigerator with her elbow, wedging it open with her hip, she replaces the jars in a gap between Shirley’s rigorously and emphatically labeled containers. She nudges the door closed.
“Uh-huh. Almost cute, if you ask me.”
Jess? Cute? Lupe fills the sandwiches and halves them the way Maybelle likes them. She carries the plate over and sets it down on the table with a clunk.
Maybelle smiles, a broad flash of teeth. “Ah, this looks great! Thank you so much, hon.” She puts a hand on Lupe’s arm and squeezes.
Lupe can’t help the heat prickling her cheeks or her own small, fond smile. She clears her throat. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Oh, there is no worry here.” Maybelle picks up her sandwich and takes a massive bite. She closes her eyes, chewing. “Mm, God is a pitcher, I’ll tell you that right now.”
Lupe snorts. “It’s a sandwich, May.”
“The day I say a bad thing about a sandwich is the day I die, and you can hold me to it. Seriously, you can stake my heart yourself.”
Lupe raises her eyebrows and meets Maybelle’s eyes. Maybelle laughs into her next bite. She swats in her direction. “Alright, go, go, leave me to my new love affair with your cooking.”
“That is not my cooking,” Lupe grumbles, walking back over to the counter to get her own ham-and-cheese. She picks up the blue ceramic plate in one hand. “When you taste my cooking, you’ll know.”
“Careful,” Maybelle warns. “Or I’ll be the one holding you to that!”
Lupe shakes her head, walking through the hallway into the living room.
“Get this,” she starts. “Maybelle called you–”
She pauses. Jess is sitting on the floor, legs spread wide in front of her with her back against the couch, her forehead creased. Early afternoon sunlight slopes from the windows to her side, catching the splitting end of her braid and the glint of a needle in her hand. One of Esti’s skirts spills across her lap. Her long, strong fingers dip in fluid movements as she pushes thread through the pale purple fabric. Her teeth chew at her bottom lip.
Lupe stands for a few seconds, mesmerized by the confident way she pinches the seam and tugs the thread, never abrupt enough to snap. Then she frowns.
She walks over to where Jess sits, setting her plate down on the coffee table. She peers at the skirt. “That’s a mess.”
Jess frowns, looking up at her. “What?”
“None of your stitches are even. They don’t line up straight.”
“What’s it matter? It’ll hold together.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it will. And if it were you or me, that’d be all it needed to do. But it’s Esti’s, right?”
Jess dips her head, but now she’s frowning, too.
Lupe sighs, lowering herself to the sun-warmed carpet beside her. “Give it,” she says.
After a moment, Jess passes the skirt over. Lupe inspects the repair job and agrees with her earlier assessment. The sewing isn’t bad, per se—Jess has clearly done her share of patch jobs—but she’s overlapped the two edges of the cloth as she would a new piece of fabric, instead of treating it like the clean vertical tear that it is. She also seems to have a rough interpretation of where the “middle” of each stitch is; from the outside, the backstitches have varying lengths.
She holds out her right hand without looking up. Jess hesitates, then fits the needle between her fingers. Lupe takes one strand of the thread between her teeth, yanks sharply to break it, then pulls the needle to free the end. That done, she sets about slipping the point under all the new work to undo each loop. She can feel Jess’s eyes on her. She doesn’t look up.
When Jess’s stitching has all come loose, with only the tiny ball knot on the underside to keep it anchored, Lupe gets a proper look at the split in the skirt seam. She pokes two fingers through. Idly, she wonders how Esti tore it.
Around the needle held to the side of her mouth, she asks, “The kid too lazy to do it herself?”
“No,” Jess reproves. “I offered. She wants to wear it tonight when we go out. Terri and Ana dragged her to this curio market this afternoon.”
Lupe grunts. She pulls the ruins of Jess’s attempt free. “Thread?” she asks.
Jess measures her out a fresh span from a bobbin that she’d tucked in her shirt pocket. She clips it with her teeth and passes it over.
Lupe takes it. Automatically, she sucks the broken tip of the thread, preparing it for the eye of the needle. She registers what she’s done when she feels the slight damp on her lips, the place where it had touched Jess’s mouth. Her eyes flick up. Jess’s gaze meets hers.
Heat flares in Lupe’s stomach. A smirk tugs the corner of her mouth. Not breaking eye contact, she licks her fingers, wrapping the loose ends of the thread around them. Jess’s teeth whiten her bottom lip.
Lupe rolls the thread free, forming a new knot. Shifting to get comfortable, she spreads her legs, crooking her left leg, extending her right. Her right foot bumps against Jess’s left. Jess kicks up her leg, out of Lupe’s way, then lays it cavalierly back on top of Lupe’s ankle. She rests her elbow on Lupe’s shoulder. She makes for a solid, practical weight. Her skin is warm.
Ready, Lupe finds a point a half inch from the bottom of the split. She pushes the needle through.
Whereas Jess had been sewing like she was playing an instrument, Lupe has a more methodical technique. She uses tight, parallel stitches on both sides of the tear. Steadily, she works her way from one end to the other, broadening at the base and winnowing back at the top. Through, across. Through, across. She measures her stitches with the edge of her nail. Through, across. Through, across.
She’d resented sewing, as a kid. So many perfect baseball afternoons had been wasted pinned to her parents’ kitchen table, forced to stitch up her family’s clothes while her mother bent over other people’s, looking over only to nitpick. Lupe had sulked but held her tongue.
In her teen years, she’d started refusing. She’d been the bent older sister too long, the one who walked instead of having been carried, and she’d gotten so exhausted of trying to pull everything together only to be told she was doing it badly. A needle and thread had never been enough, anyway.
She couldn’t suture the bleeding parts of herself that stained. She couldn’t hem her baggy love for baseball into a cropped love for playing house. She couldn’t patch over the Mexican with American like her teachers wanted or the American with Mexican like her family wanted and she couldn’t tie her parents’ bodies back to their homeland like a couple of loose buttons.
She couldn’t undo the baby inside her like she’d undone Jess’s stitches.
Once she left home, though, she’d learned quickly that you couldn’t afford to be sewing-averse in a rented attic on a budget of around-the-town jobs. The first time she’d worn pants with a hole wearing in the knee around Doña Carla, whose house she lived above, the old woman had beckoned her closer. Had her mother never taught her? she’d asked, voice creaky and concerned. Did she need Doña Carla to do it for her, or maybe to show her how?
That had shamed Lupe. No, she’d admitted, thank you for offering. She could do it herself.
Ay, Doña Carla had said, of course, you must not have a sewing kit here. Did you forget it when you moved?
Lupe had actually pitched it at the wall in her parents’ house when they first told her they were taking the baby, the day that she had needed to break every girly, needed, wanted thing.
She hadn’t said so. The old woman had taken out her repurposed cookie tin while Lupe had gone upstairs to change, then brought out a project of her own that she pretended to do until she had supervised Lupe long enough to make sure she knew what she was doing. She’d told stories, then. She’d crossed before Lupe and her family, before the war. The hacendados had claimed her community’s land just like they’d done Lupe’s grandparents’.
After, Doña Carla had leaned over to inspect Lupe’s work. Her wrinkled fingers probed across the denim. She gave a single satisfied nod. She wished her husband had been able to sew like that, she’d remarked. He’d had strong hands like Lupe’s. It was a shame he’d wasted them.
Her words, her comparisons, the smell of her baking cinnamon—none of it had made Lupe love sewing. It had, however, significantly lowered her desire to throw the whole thing at the wall.
Now, as an adult, she’s careful with her clothes. With her glove and her uniform, too. It surprises some of the others, she knows, the care with which she laces and oils and washes. Cared for things stay with you, though. Lupe has learned that from both sides.
This, sitting in the Peaches’ living room with her second baseman’s skirt in her lap and her shortstop as a witness, feels different than all of it. This is more than a practical responsibility or a childhood chore. She doesn’t have to do it. There’s no expectation for it, kindly or nagging.
There’s just a needle, and thread, and a hot butch watching over her shoulder. The press of Jess’s gaze charges every stitch.
And, well. How else does Lupe spend her time, if not showing off repetitive, perfectionistic hand movements?
She reaches the end of the rip. She glances back up at Jess. “Wanna see a trick?”
Jess narrows her eyes.
Lupe pushes the needle down one last time and, unlike before, doesn’t stop once she’s held tension. This time, she pinches it from the bottom and pulls the string like wire through a drawplate. The seam purses, the stitching folding in. It vanishes into an almost invisible line. “Ta-da.”
Jess’s mouth parts in a grin. “Bravo,” she teases. “Encore, encore.”
Lupe’s lips quirk, not unproud. Jess’s approval always twists low in her belly. Tucking the needle under a near stitch and winding the thread around the end to tie it off, she says, “You tell Esti this is a once in a lifetime showing. One night only. Fuck knows I stitched up too much of my little sisters’ shit to do hers too.”
“Uh-huh.”
Lupe frowns, clipping the end. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Moving the arm that was resting against Lupe’s shoulder, Jess plucks the needle from her fingers. Smirking, she tucks it in her mouth like a toothpick. “Nothin’.”
“What?”
“Nothing. You don’t care at all.”
“I don’t!”
“Heart like a stone.”
Lupe leans her back against the couch. “Yeah, and what if I was stone, huh? What then?”
Jess gives her a sidelong look, then huffs a laugh from the back of her throat. It’s a crisp, pleasant sound. “Yeah, didn’t mean that kind of stone.” She pulls the needle from her mouth with two hooked fingers, like a cigarette. She taps it in Lupe’s direction. “I know better.”
I know better. The words sink through Lupe’s stomach, all the way down.
Lupe feels heat flush her neck, rolls her eyes to hide it. “Nah,” she deflects, “but better tell her you did this. That way she can badger you next time she needs her socks darned or whatever.”
“She didn’t badger you this time.”
“Exactly.” Lupe drops the mended skirt into Jess’s lap.
Jess gives her a long look. She shakes her head, arching her eyebrows in a way that could mean seriously? or, equally, you’re an idiot.
Lupe breaks wryly, looking away, because she has some self-awareness, now. A little bit, at least. “Yeah, I know. Still. Tell her you did it?”
Jess plays her tongue against the needle inside her mouth. Lupe sees the point wheel and dip out of the corner of her eye. “Sure, Lu.”
Lupe nods.
The two of them sit there, for a while, sunbaked and settled on the floor. Lupe leans some of her weight into Jess’s side. Jess brings her right knee, the one not pressed against Lupe’s leg, to her chest. Lupe’s sandwich rests, abandoned, on the coffee table.
In the kitchen, water shushes and ceramic clinks. A radio burbles. Maybelle hums. From the window, they can hear birds chirping. Lupe figures they’re from the nest of barn swallows that’s been camped out under the eaves. (She knows they’re barn swallows because the day they’d built the nest, Jess had stopped dead on the porch steps, nearly sending Lupe crashing into her back, squinted up, and reported “barn swallows” the way someone else might have relayed the weather.)
In the rare calm, Lupe relaxes. She’s even considering closing her eyes for a moment, when a sharp pain lances her inner arm.
“Ow!” Startled, she flinches back. “Jess, what the fuck!”
Jess grins her feral grin that really, really, God help her, shouldn’t do as much for Lupe as it does. She holds up the needle. “Just trying to draw blood from a stone. Did it work?”
“You jabbed me with a fucking needle!” She looks at her arm, her pitching arm, at a tiny spot welling with a perfect bubble of blood. It’s startlingly red, in the sunlight.
“Sure, I did.” Jess leans closer. “Did you like it?”
Lupe chest catches at the drop in Jess’s voice. She meets her eyes too quickly.
Jess grins again, this time like a cat with cream. Deliberately raising her pointer finger, she swipes it along Lupe’s arm and brings it to her lips, holding the eye contact. She sucks on her finger up to the first knuckle.
Fuck, that’s nasty. That is so nasty. Lupe’s witnessing some kind of fucking white-ass raised-by-wolves bullshit and yet–
She watches Jess pull her finger from her mouth.
“There,” Jess says, so fucking smug. “All better.”
Lupe wants to wrestle her down, pin her to the carpet. Teach her to stick her with a sharp and ice it with a suggestive smile and a vampire bat impression and a little sana sana as if that makes anything better, except the type of teaching she has in mind isn’t best done in broad daylight in the middle of their shared living space with their pseudo-little sister’s skirt draped between them like a cloth napkin.
She curls her lip, worked up and stymied and endeared despite everything. “You….”
Jess lifts her eyebrows, her chin dimpled.
Lupe rakes a hand over her hair. “You said Esti’s out with Terri and Ana?”
“All afternoon, she told me.”
Lupe reaches an arm to brace herself on the couch cushion. “Alright. We should, uh, go put this up in our room for her, then. Just so it’s ready.”
“Mm, yeah,” Jess agrees. She pushes herself forward onto her knees. “For Esti.”
Lupe shakes her head, tongue against her teeth. “Yeah, exactly,” she says. “For Esti.”