The Ruined Torta

*I wanted to write a revenge story where the weapon is genuine surprise, not cruelty. If you laughed at the tlayuda bit, I did my job. Thank you for reading.*

I came to that coastal town in Oaxaca because my sister said it would be good for me. Sixty-three years old, eight months a widow, and apparently in need of "healing." What I actually needed was a month where nobody asked how I was holding up.

So there I was, third morning in, sweating up the hill toward the mercado with a hat that made me look like a fool and a grudge I'd packed in my carry-on. My husband, Raymond, spent forty years passing off my work as his. Edited my translations, put his name above mine on two papers, once introduced my own research back to me at a dinner party. He died in February and I have not yet managed to feel a single thing about it except fury. The therapist says that's a stage. I say it's a lifestyle.

The mercado was the best part of the town. Tin roofs, old women selling string cheese the length of my arm, a whole aisle of nothing but chiles. I was standing at a big clay comal watching a lady toast the biggest tortilla I have ever seen, kid-you-not the size of a truck hubcap, when the tour group found me.

I hadn't signed up for the tour. I'd made a point of not signing up. But there they were anyway, fifteen gringos trailing a young man in a linen shirt like he was carrying the ark. This was Landon Delgado, twenty-eight, local tour guide, and if you believe his own brochures, a man who had never once been wrong about anything. He was handsome in the way that costs money eventually. Good teeth. Very tan. A voice he'd clearly practiced.

"And here," he announced to his flock, "is the famous tlayuda. Sometimes called the Oaxacan pizza."

The tourists made the sounds tourists make. I, without thinking, because I am a retired linguistics professor and it is an illness, said to the woman next to me, "Tla-YOO-da. Three syllables. The tl stays together, it's from Nahuatl."

Except I said it loud enough for Landon to hear, and Landon heard.

"Actually," he said, turning to me with a smile like a parking ticket, "it's tuh-LAY-oo-da. Most folks get it wrong." And then he winked at his group, and his group laughed. All of them. A bald man laughed so hard he coughed.

I want you to understand something. I have corrected the pronunciation of native speakers. I have made graduate students cry over the vowel shift in 15th century Castilian. And this child, this linen-shirted child, was correcting me, wrongly, with a wink.

"Of course," I said sweetly. "My mistake."

The comal lady, who understood more English than she let on, gave me a look of pure sympathy and handed me a piece of the tlayuda with beans on it. It was excellent. I ate it standing there, plotting.

* * *

The tour group and I kept intersecting, since the town has about four streets. The fawning one was Cyndi Clifton, fifty-nine, from Scottsdale, wearing jewelry that could signal aircraft. She had decided Landon was her project and possibly her destiny.

"Landon, you simply have to tell me where you get your coffee," she said at the juice stand, touching his forearm like she was checking it for a pulse. "I bet you know everything about this town."

"Well, I try," he said, modest in the way only shameless men can be.

"He's being modest," Cyndi told the group, as if reporting a medical miracle.

I drifted toward the one other person not worshipping. This was Steve Gunn, sixty-seven, retired chef, who had attached himself to the tour purely for the food and stood apart from it making small noises of professional disapproval.

"Cochinita pibil's not even from here," he muttered, nodding at a stand. "That's Yucatecan. Guy's serving a whole menu of borrowed states."

"Careful," I said. "He'll correct you."

"Already did. Told me the best mole in town. It's the mole in his cousin's restaurant, in case you were wondering."

I looked at Landon over there letting Cyndi laugh at something that was not funny, and something in my chest, which had been dead weight since February, turned over and woke up.

"You know what that man needs?" I said. "Taking down a peg."

Steve snorted into his coffee. "Good luck. Women like Cyndi build the pegs."

"I don't mean Cyndi. I mean him."

Steve looked at me the way you look at a dog that has started talking. "You've known him four hours."

"Four hours is plenty," I said. And the terrible thing is, some engine in me had already started. I hadn't felt ambitious about anything since Raymond died. Turns out all I needed was a villain.

* * *

That afternoon the tour climbed to the mirador, the cliff overlook, where the whole town goes gold and blue below you and the pelicans do their lazy figure eights. It's honestly beautiful, and I hate that it was beautiful, because Landon had everyone arranged for photos and Cyndi had her hand planted on his shoulder like a flag.

"The sunsets here," Landon told the group, "are the best in Mexico. Better than Puerto Escondido. Ask anyone."

"Better than Puerto Escondido," Cyndi repeated, in the tone of someone agreeing with scripture.

He worked the crowd, told his stories, and never once looked at me. I'd been edited out. Forty years of being edited out of my own life by Raymond, and here was this boy doing it for free.

Because here's what I decided on that cliff, watching the pelicans: I was going to ruin him. Not with a bad review. Anybody can leave a bad review. I was going to do it properly. He flattered women old enough to be his mother, took their tips, took their adoration, and probably took a few of them to bed for the sport of it. Well. I was going to add myself to the collection, and then I was going to stand in the plaza the next morning and tell the whole group, in a professorial voice, exactly how the great Landon Delgado had performed. Every fumble. Every mispronounced thing he whispered in the dark. His business depended on the widows. The widows would hear it from me.

I am not saying it was a good plan. I am saying it was a plan, and it was the first thing in eight months that made me want to get up in the morning.

* * *

The boutique hotel where I was staying had a terrace bar, and it turned out Landon drank there on slow nights. I learned this from Steve, who learned it from the bartender, because Steve is the kind of man who knows everything in a town in one week.

"He'll be there around nine," Steve said, not looking up from his ceviche. "You want a wingman?"

"I want a witness," I said, "for later."

I put on the dress I'd brought for exactly zero occasions so far. Black, decent arms for sixty-three, if I say so myself, and I do. I sat at the bar at nine-fifteen with a mezcal I did not want and waited for him to notice me, which took eleven minutes, because he made a point of being slow about it.

"Ms. Greer." He took the stool one over from mine. "Enjoying the market this morning?"

"Immensely. Tell me, do you give the tour in Spanish too?"

"Of course."

"Then you'd know the word for the big tortilla. Strange, since you don't."

He had the grace to blink. "That's not really how the tl works on the coast," he started, and I raised one eyebrow at him, an expression I learned from twenty years of doctoral committees, and he stopped.

"You know," I said, "it's a funny thing. A man who doesn't know the language, teaching the culture. Serving