Fiesta and Fire

The divorce papers came back in March, stamped and final, and I did what I always did. I filed them in a folder. I cleaned the kitchen. I made a list of things I would need to cancel, the joint phone plan, the shared streaming account, the lawn guy who had known us both for fifteen years. I was forty-two years old and my first instinct after nineteen years of marriage ended was to be organized about it.

My sister thought I should be in a support group. My mother thought I should date a nice accountant from her church. My coworkers thought I should take a trip, and I laughed at that one, because I had never traveled alone in my life. I got married at twenty-three. I had never really been an adult by myself. I went straight from my parents' house to a honeymoon suite in Niagara Falls, and then straight into being someone's wife, and then someone's co-worker, and then someone's ex-wife, and somewhere in there I stopped being anyone at all.

So I booked the trip. A train tour through Mexico, two weeks, one suitcase. I told everyone it was about the food. It was mostly about proving I could still do a thing without asking permission first.

The night before I left I sat at my kitchen table with the itinerary and a highlighter, and I planned everything. Which trains, which hotels, which museums. I highlighted the restaurants with good reviews. I made a photocopy of my passport. I packed a first aid kit. That is the kind of person I am, or was. The kind who makes a photocopy of her passport for a vacation. My husband used to call me his sensible girl, and I took it as a compliment for almost two decades, which tells you something about how far sideways a person can drift without noticing.

What I could not plan for was Veracruz.

* * *

The train out of Mexico City was supposed to connect at a junction south of the coast, and the connection died somewhere in the hills, which is a thing they do not put on the brochures. A storm had taken out a stretch of track. We sat in the station for two hours, then four, and then a man in a uniform said words I only half understood, and everyone around me started gathering their bags, and I gathered mine too because that seemed like the move.

Cancelled. The word crossed the language barrier without any trouble at all.

I stood in the station square with my one sensible suitcase and my phone with one bar of battery, and I ran my options like a checklist. The next train was two days out. The hotels nearby were full, because apparently storms strand more people than just me. The taxi driver quoted me a number that made me do math I did not like. And it was hot, the wet kind of hot, the kind where your shirt sticks to you before you finish deciding anything.

So I walked. I did not have a plan. That alone should have been a sign of how far I had already fallen from my highlighted itinerary. I walked past a church, past a market closing up for the evening, past a block of houses with laundry strung between the balconies, and then I smelled something that stopped me in the street. Corn and pork and chiles, the smell of a kitchen working hard at the end of the day.

The restaurant was small, painted yellow, with a hand-lettered sign I could mostly read. Through the window I could see a big steel counter and stacks of what looked like green corn husks hanging from hooks near the ceiling. There was a woman in her sixties back there working with her sleeves rolled up, fast and certain, the way people move when they have done a thing ten thousand times. And there was a younger man hauling a wooden crate through the kitchen door, grunting with the effort of it.

I went in mostly because the alternative was standing in the square until dark making phone calls to hotels that did not answer.

The bell over the door was a bent spoon tied to a string, which is a detail I would remember later and love. The woman looked up from the counter and said something cheerful in Spanish, and I did the pale Ohio tourist thing, the slow apologetic English, and she laughed at me without any meanness in it and waved me toward a table near the back.

The younger man came around the corner wiping his hands on a towel. He was Mexican-American, tall, somewhere in his thirties, with an easy way of standing that I noticed right away and then pretended I had not noticed at all. He looked at me, and then at my suitcase dripping rainwater by the door, and I could see him do the math on my situation faster than I had.

"You're off the train," he said. Not a question.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You're the third one today." He smiled. "Sit. My aunt will feed you whether you want it or not. It's faster to say yes."

I said yes. His aunt, whose name I caught as Lupe, put a bowl of something in front of me that I did not order and did not need to. It was the best thing I had eaten in two weeks of highlighted restaurant reviews, and I told her so in my terrible Spanish, and she patted my arm like I was one of her own.

The younger man brought me coffee without being asked. He sat down across from me for a minute, which I gathered was a thing he did, talking to the stranded strangers, because his aunt's kitchen sat close enough to the station to catch people like tumbleweeds.

"I'm Tom," he said. "The family business is tamales. The family employee is me, at least until next month."

"Dot," I said. "The family business is magazines. The family is down to one."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, and something about it loosened a knot I had been carrying since March. We talked while I ate, about the storm, about the train, about his aunt's total lack of interest in letting anyone leave her kitchen hungry. He was an entertainer on a cruise ship, he explained, home between contracts, doing his aunt the favor of hauling crates of dried chiles around because she refused to hire help.

"That crate," he said, pointing at a big wooden box near the back door with the wrong shipping label still on it, "came from somewhere up north mislabeled as machine parts. We've been making the best machine parts in Veracruz ever since."

I laughed into my coffee. It was the first easy laugh I had had in months, maybe a year, maybe longer if I was honest about the calendar, and I was not planning on being honest about the calendar. Outside the back door I could see a courtyard, and people were already dragging benches toward the middle of it, and somebody had stacked wood in a pile taller than me.

"What's all that about?" I asked.

"Midsummer," Tom said, like that explained everything. "Fire, food, half the neighborhood. You'll see."

He refilled my coffee without asking, the way his aunt did everything. The ship was based in Galveston, he said, and he had been doing it for a few years now. He sang, he ran trivia nights, he hosted the deck parties and did a comedy set that got him more groans than laughs but the groans were apparently part of the act. He was thirty-four, home for a few weeks between contracts, and he talked about it the way people talk about work they like but do not need to brag about.

"Two weeks off," he said. "I'm spending most of them hauling crates and getting bossed around by a woman in her sixties. It's good for me."

"It sounds good for you," I said, and I meant it, because I had spent the last nineteen years being needed by a man who never once hauled anything for anybody out of pure affection.

The divorce was still new enough that I said it out loud to strangers, which I had been doing a lot lately, probably to the point of being tedious. Nineteen years married and no idea what to do with a Tuesday that belonged only to me, and here I was in a tamale kitchen in Veracruz because a storm ate a stretch of track.

Tom listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which I noticed, because it was not a skill my ex had ever bothered to develop. Then he said, "Two days. That is the entire festival. You're lucky."

"Getting stranded is lucky?"

"In this town in this week, yes. You would have paid money for this."

Outside, the courtyard was filling up with activity. Two boys dragged a bench past the window, arguing about which end went where. A man with a wheelbarrow added wood to the pile. Somewhere a radio was playing and losing to the rain, which had eased to a drizzle that made everything shine. Lupe came out of the kitchen at one point, looked at the sky, looked at the woodpile, and made a decision about dinner for forty without breaking stride. Tom translated for me: "She says you're staying for the fire. That was not a question either."

I spent the afternoon in that kitchen, which was not the plan, since I had no plan, since my plan had dissolved somewhere around the moment the conductor said the word cancelled. Lupe put me to work mostly as a joke, spreading masa onto corn husks with a spoon while she corrected my technique every fourth one. Tom stood at the big steel counter doing the real work, folding and stacking, fast and certain like his aunt, and telling me about the ship between folds.

The thing about cruise ship entertainers, he told me, is that everyone assumes their life is one long party. Mostly it was sound checks and buffet lines and remembering the names of sixty crew members. He had done a fling or two over the years, he said, in the vague way people mention such things, but nothing serious since he was twenty-two, and he did not elaborate and I did not ask. There was something nice about a man who did not fill silence with his own résumé.

It was while I was spreading masa that I really looked at the crates by the back door. There were two of them, and the one Tom had been hauling earlier still had its wrong label facing the room. But the second one was the better joke. It was stamped on the side, in big black letters, DRIED TOMATOES, and when I leaned over and looked inside, it was packed full of dried chiles, dark red ones, wrinkled and smoky-looking, filling the crate to the top.

"Your tomatoes," I said, "are lying."

Tom came over, looked in the crate, and laughed so hard he had to put down his towel. "Oh, that one. That's my cousin's work. Raúl packed that whole shipment the night before he drove it down. He cannot read an English label and he refuses to ask anyone. So we get tomatoes." He picked up one of the chiles and held it out to me like evidence. "Best dried tomatoes in the state of Veracruz."

"They look spicy."

"They're chipotles. Smoked jalapeños. Raúl does it right, I'll give him that. He just cannot do it labeled." He tossed it back in with the rest. "Every year somebody buys a crate thinking they're getting tomatoes and ends up cooking the hottest stew in the neighborhood. Every year Raúl swears he'll fix the labels. Every year