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“Think you made enough?”
Pepa settles into the seat across from him and rolls her eyes, directs a swat at him with the dish towel in her hand.
“It’s better to have too many tamales than not enough,” she says. “You should know that by now.”
There’s two giant steamer pots of them going in the kitchen, enough to run through the entire mountain of masa that they started the day with. He has no idea who’s going to eat them all, but he has a feeling he’ll end up with a freezer full. Buck too, if Pepa gets her way.
If Buck even wants them.
He’s not sure what’s going on with him lately.
Well, he knows. Of course. All of it.
But it feels like there's more to it than that, and Eddie can't quite get his head around it. Buck won't let him, is keeping him at arm's length and seems to think Eddie hasn't noticed.
He has. He wants Buck to know that. He has noticed.
It's impossible not to notice, when Buck is usually here, is usually the one in the kitchen letting Pepa boss him around and correct his technique. But he's in the middle of moving this weekend, and there's some sort of squirrel emergency happening in his new attic, and he promised Maddie he'd take the kids for a day. Something. Whatever he said in the too-long over-explanatory apology text that he'd sent Eddie at 3AM as a way to back out of coming.
“Feels different this year,” he says, glancing around the living room. The ofrenda by the window, photo frames hanging on the walls. “With Bobby. It's like when we lost Shannon.”
Pepa lets out a quiet noise, lets her eyes drop to where her fingers are smoothing the dish towel over her lap, folding it into a neat square.
“It’s hardest when the loss is so fresh, I think,” she says. She offers him a small smile, a little sad. “Not that it gets easier, exactly, but less… sharp, maybe. That’s something you should know by now too.”
Eddie raises his eyebrows. “Should I?”
It doesn’t feel easier. Or less sharp, or anything like that. It fades into the background sometimes, but whenever he thinks of it: Shannon, gone nearly a decade now. It doesn’t feel any softer.
“Both of us should,” she says. “With what we’ve lost, it’s easy to hold on too tight. But life is too short to hold onto the past like that.”
Eddie takes a breath, slow and careful. He can feel his throat going tight, just a little.
“I don’t think I know how to do that.”
She hums, nods again. “It’s not an easy thing.”
“I can’t just forget about her,” he says. “Leave her behind.”
“No one’s asking you to,” she says. She tilts her head, waits for him to come to her, to meet her eye. After a beat of silence, he does. “But you can’t keep living your life waiting for the past to come back. You loved her, and you lost her, and now you look at what’s ahead of you. What’s in front of you.”
Which is fine. But he’s read the grief books, done the therapy. He’s been to church. He took Buck’s stupid grief assessment thing a few months ago. He even tried listening to some podcast about unexpected loss, but there’s nothing in any of it, nothing that anyone's been able to say to him that’s made it feel like it’s possible to actually do it. To look ahead.
“What if there isn’t anything in front of me?” he asks. It comes out sounding frustrated, almost angry because of how afraid he is of it. How much he’s thought about it and how true it might be. “What if that was my one shot, and I screwed it up?”
Pepa makes a tsking noise and shakes her head. She reaches out for his hand, squeezes it tight in her own.
“And what if you get hit by a bus tomorrow?” she asks. “What if another plane falls out of the sky? What if, what if?”
Eddie sniffs, blinks the sting out of his eyes. Lets out a little laugh in spite of himself. “You know what I mean.”
“I do,” she says. “And I asked myself the same thing for about as long as you’ve been holding onto this. And you know what I realized eventually?”
Eddie takes a breath. “What?”
“Maybe,” she says. Eddie frowns. “Maybe you had your one shot. But maybe life has some surprises still in store for you.” She squeezes his hand again. “It did for me. Your tío.”
Eddie’s eyes drop down to their joined hands, lets himself picture it. Not specifics, not any one woman in particular, but it, the idea of it. The possibility. Moving on, finding someone new. Building a whole life together with decades ahead of them. Someone he could love, someone who Chris could love too, someone to be part of the family, part of the assembly line.
They’d be happy, he thinks. They’d be a family of their own: him and Chris and someone new.
Maybe.
“You just have to open your eyes,” she says. Squeezes his hand again then lets him go. “Let yourself see what’s right in front of you instead of focusing on what's behind.”