Tamale Surprise

The dry spell had hit three months. I stopped counting because counting made it worse.

It wasn't that Nia and I didn't love each other. We'd been married five years, we were both thirty-something and busy, and somewhere in there sex had turned into something we did on Sunday mornings like yard work. Same position, same sequence, same polite finish. She was a yoga instructor, so she was flexible and patient, and I was a bail bondsman, so I was patient too. Two patient people can go a long time without saying anything.

That Thursday I walked into the Red Hatch Tamale Kitchen to pick up a catering order for my cousin's retirement party. Thirty dozen tamales. It was one o'clock and the place was packed, all clatter and steam and somebody's kid dropping a cup in the back.

The woman behind the counter turned around and I stopped walking.

"Hans?" she said. "Hans from Spin and Fire?"

I blinked at her for a second. Nisha. Two years ago Nia and I had taken a pottery class together, one of those date-night things, and there'd been a couple in the class who were fun to sit next to. Nisha and her husband. We'd all gotten along, and then the six weeks ended and it was over.

"Nisha," I said. "Wow. Okay!"

"You look exactly the same." She came out from behind the counter and hugged me, quick, and she smelled like cumin and corn husks. "Two years? Was it two years?"

"About two, yeah."

"How's Nia? The quiet one who made that terrible bowl."

"The terrible bowl is still in our cabinet. We use it for keys."

She laughed and pointed at the order slip in my hand. "Thirty dozen? That yours? Big party?"

"Cousin retiring. Forty-one years at the power company."

"That's a retirement that deserves tamales." She flipped a clipboard around. "Sit, it'll be ten minutes. Tucker's boxing them up."

I sat on a stool at the end of the counter and watched her work the register, calling orders back to the kitchen, joking with the customers, hands fast. She was thirty-three now and looked good, better than good, and I caught myself watching too long and made myself look at the salsa menu instead.

Here's what I'll admit. In that pottery class, before it ended, there'd been a moment. She was at the wheel next to me, and we both leaned in to fix her collapsing cylinder at the same time, and her shoulder was against mine and she looked over at me and we both just kind of grinned. Nothing happened. Both of us married. But it lived in the back of my head for two years like a song I couldn't place.

She came back over with a paper bag and set it on the counter, and then she reached into her apron pocket and pulled something out.

"I kept this," she said. "You left it on your shelf at the studio and I asked if I could have it."

It was a little snow globe, one of the paint-your-own ones the studio sold, with a tiny unpainted ceramic couple holding hands inside. The dome had a crack running across it and most of the water had leaked out.

"You kept a broken snow globe for two years?"

"Kept a broken snow globe," she said, "that you dropped on week three and blamed the wheel for." She held it out. "It sat on the shelf in our kitchen the whole time. Tucker used to ask about it. I told him it was from a class."

I took it. My hand was steadier than I expected it to be.

"Nisha," I said, "I'm married. You're married."

"I know what I am," she said, smiling. "I'm not asking you to elope. I'm saying hello after two years."

"Okay. Hello."

"Hello." She leaned on the counter. "Is it good? The marriage?"

I thought about the Sunday morning sequence. "It's good. It's fine."

"Fine," she said. "Yeah. I know that word."

Before I could answer that, a big guy came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a towel, thirty-eight maybe, chef's coat, grey coming in at the temples. He put the bag down next to the snow globe and looked at the snow globe, then at me, then at Nisha.

"So this is the wheel guy," he said.

"This is Hans," Nisha said. "Hans, Tucker."

Tucker stuck his hand out and I shook it. His grip was friendly.

"He's told me about you," Tucker said. "Well. About the class. Mostly about the bowl."

"The terrible bowl," I said.

"The famous terrible bowl." He untied the bag and checked inside like he didn't trust himself, then retied it. "Listen. I'm going to say a thing, and you can tell me to mind my business."

"Okay," I said.

"You two have a thing when you talk. I've watched it from the kitchen window for two minutes now. It's like watching people pick up where they left off, except what they left off was never finished."

"Tucker," Nisha said.

"I'm just saying. Am I wrong?"

He wasn't wrong, and I didn't want to say so out loud, so I picked up the tamale bag instead. It was heavy and warm and I held it like it gave me something to do.

"Here's the offer," Tucker said. "We close at eight. Next Friday, you and Nia come by after hours. I cook for real, not counter food. We drink some wine, we talk. Four adults, dinner, that's it."

"That's it?" I said.

"That's the start of it," he said. "After that, whatever everybody wants and nobody doesn't want. Nisha and I have been doing this a while. We're careful about it. Everybody says yes to everything, every step, or it doesn't happen."

I stood there with thirty dozen tamales going warm against my chest and my heart doing something I didn't have a name for.

"Nia," I said. "I'd have to ask Nia."

"Of course you would," Nisha said. "That's the only way any of this works. Ask her. Tell her the truth, whatever your truth is."

"And if she says no," Tucker said, "you take your tamales home and have a nice party and nothing changes between any of us. I mean that. No hard feelings, free dessert for the party."

I laughed at that, which broke something loose. "Free dessert, huh."

"Flan," he said. "The good kind. The kind with the dark caramel."

Nisha wrote their address on the back of a receipt and slid it across the counter. "Friday. Eight thirty. Think about it, and talk to her honestly. Not the polished version."

"Is there a polished version?" I asked.

"There's always a polished version," she said. "Couples bring it everywhere. Leave it home."

I picked up the snow globe and put it in my jacket pocket. It rattled against my keys on the walk to the truck, this little broken thing she'd kept for two years, and I sat in the driver's seat for a good five minutes before I started the engine.

Then I called Nia.

"Hey," she said. "Did you get the tamales?"

"I got the tamales. And something else."

"What else?"

"You know that pottery class? Two years ago?"

There was a pause. "The one with the couple you mentioned once? The fun ones?"

"Yeah. The wife runs the tamale kitchen in the warehouse district. I just ran into her."

"And?"

"And they invited us to dinner Friday night. After hours. At the restaurant."

Another pause, longer. "Hans. When you say they, do you mean dinner dinner, or do you mean the kind of dinner where I should wear the dress you like?"

"I don't know yet," I said. "That's sort of what I need to talk to you about. Can I come home and talk to you about it?"

"Bring the tamales," she said, "and bring the whole story. Not the polished version."

So I drove home with a warm bag on the seat next to me and a cracked snow globe in my pocket, and I practiced sentences in my head the whole way, and none of them sounded like anything a sane man would actually say out loud.

The house smelled like chili powder from the morning when I walked in. Nia was on the couch in her yoga clothes with her feet up on the coffee table, grading nothing, just sitting with her phone. She looked up when I came through the door.

"Well?" she said. "Where's my flan?"

"Nobody said anything about flan for you."

"Rude. Tucker promised you flan if I said no. That's a very specific bribe. It implies I'm the holdout."

She'd gotten the whole shape of it off one phone call, which is Nia all over. I set the tamale bag on the counter and came back to the living room and sat down across from her, which felt too much like an interview, so I moved to the couch and she made room for me without asking what I was doing.

"Before the talk," I said, and dug the snow globe out of my pocket. "She kept this."

Nia took it and turned it over. The crack runs through the whole dome and the glitter inside has dried into a lump at one end. It's an ugly little thing. She held it up to the window light.

"This is the one you broke at the studio," she said. "The one you were bummed about for a week."

"Two years she kept it. On her kitchen shelf. She says it made her laugh every time she saw it."

Nia shook it. Nothing moved in there but the little rock of dried glitter. "That's kind of sweet," she said. "That's weird and kind of sweet." She set it on the windowsill over the sink, which I noticed she did without asking me, like it already belonged to us again.

Then she looked at me the way she looks at me when she wants the real thing. "Okay. Dinner. What is it actually?"

So I told her. All of it. The two minutes at the counter, Tucker watching from the kitchen window, the thing Nisha and I had apparently never finished in a pottery class two years ago when we were both married to other people. I told her what Tucker said about yes meaning yes to everything, every step, and I told her I didn't know what I wanted except that my chest had been doing something strange since 1:15 in the afternoon.

She listened without interrupting, which she does better than anyone I know. When I ran out she was quiet for a bit.

"Three months," she said finally.

"Three or four, yeah."

"Hans. We've been married five years and we've turned into a Sunday morning routine. I'm not mad about it. I just. I've been waiting for one of us to say something and neither of us ever does." She pulled her legs up under her. "A woman I teach with talks about this stuff. Parties. Couples. I always thought it sounded like a story people tell, not a thing that actually happens on a Friday."

"It might be that," I said. "It might be a story."

"Or it might be dinner and some wine and we go home and laugh about it."

"Or that."

"Or." She didn't finish it. We sat there and I could hear the fridge humming and I thought about Nisha's hands on the clay wheel, which I hadn't let myself think about in two years, and I wondered what Nia was thinking about and decided it was rude to ask.

"What do you want to happen?" I asked her.

"That's the question, isn't it." She looked at the snow globe on the sill. "I want to find out what's still in there. In us. I want to see you want something again. Is that terrible?"

"It's not terrible."

"Because if we go and it's awful, we leave. You'll say some bail bondsman thing and we'll leave."

"I don't have bail bondsman things."

"You absolutely do. You have a whole voice." She laughed then, first time since I'd walked in. "Okay. Friday. I'll wear the dress."

"The dress you like or the dress I like?"

"The one you like. Obviously."

---

Friday came slow the way Fridays do when you're waiting on one. I checked on my guys in the morning, posted one guy who jumped his court date and one guy who didn't, regular Friday business, and at 7:40 Nia came down the stairs in the green dress and I said something dumb and she said something dumber and Nia slipped the snow globe into her purse, "for luck," and we drove over laughing, which felt like a good omen or at least better than arguing in the truck.

The Red Hatch at night is a different animal. The lunch crowd is paper hats and steamed windows. At 8:30 the lights were down to maybe half, one table set for four in the middle of the dining room with actual cloth napkins, and the kitchen doors were propped open so you could see Tucker working a stove with two pans going.

Nisha came around the counter to meet us. She'd changed out of the apron into a black dress and her hair was down instead of tied back. "You came," she said, like there'd been doubt, and maybe there had.

"We came," Nia said, and stuck her hand out, and Nisha took it and held it a second longer than a handshake needs.

"Two years I've heard about you. Hans never shut up about his wife in that class. Do you know he threw a bowl at you? For you? It was terrible."

"He's told me it was terrible."