Because I Said So Read online

  “It isn’t a bother, lola. Coming home and finding you on the floor again—that would be a bother.”

  “I will call tomorrow.”

  “Promise me.” Cami put her hands over the draw stack of tiles, preventing Auntie Ivy from moving on.

  The old lady said something in a burst of Filipino that made Marisol smother a smile, and then said, “Oh, all right.”

  Marisol nodded gravely. “That’s very accommodating of you, Ivy. Would you like some fruit now?”

  The word Auntie Ivy said in response sent Cami into a fit of laughter before explaining to Kesa, “If bee-yotch had a Filipino equivalent, that’s what she said.”

  “I’m shocked, I tell you.” Kesa drew a seven-dot and discarded it. “Teach me sometime.”

  Auntie Ivy picked up Kesa’s seven-dot and laid it out with the rest of her hand. “Mahjong, bitches!”

  Chapter Four

  “So Josie and I were thinking…”

  Shannon spooned another helping of spaghetti onto her plate and hoped her face didn’t reflect her sinking heart at Paz’s words. She got up from the dining room table to fetch the Parmesan cheese. So much for the hope that a week would change their minds. In terms of their relationship length, another week was a long time. “Yes?”

  “Her sister kind of flipped out. Seriously. So we were thinking what if we all got together and talked?” His voice took on a touch of rehearsed script. “You have reason to be concerned for our future and welfare, and it’s a good idea to talk about things before they fester.”

  She could hardly disagree. “That seems…Like a good idea. I would like to meet Josie’s family.”

  “There’s just her sister. I think you’ll get along with her.” Amusement flickered over his face, then he was serious again. “Josie doesn’t know of any other family. Their folks died twelve, thirteen years ago. She was just a kid.” He speared a meatball and popped it into his mouth whole.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” The older sister had probably been in loco parentis ever since—she must be a lot older, then. She peeled back more foil to expose another slice of the warm sourdough bread Paz had buttered and seasoned while she’d boiled the noodles and doctored their favorite bottled marinara with hot sauce and more basil. “When do you want to do this?”

  “There’s a coffee shop near school, and they have really good desserts. Josie loves the lemon tarts, and the peanut butter fudge cake puts me in a coma.”

  He was talking her language with the cake, and he knew it, the little shit. “That sounds like good neutral ground.”

  “Friday night? Seven thirty?”

  “Sure.” She tapped the name of the coffee shop into her phone and set the calendar to remind her Friday morning. It would no doubt be a mature and measured discussion—if she could silence the voice still wailing inside that he was too young, that it put him at risk, and he had too much he wanted to do to invest in marriage.

  She nearly took a picture of their full plates covered in red. The two of them could put away a lot of spaghetti. She ignored the pang that said the number of times they’d feast like this might be limited. “So, how much does Josie know about you?”

  He hesitated, then admitted, “Everything.”

  He’d only known her a month. He cut off her reaction by adding, “I told her last week when I proposed. She already knew I was a foster kid. But she should know my real name. And everything that happened.”

  “She was okay about it all?”

  He blinked. “She was not ‘okay.’”

  “I’m sorry. That was a bad word choice. How did she handle it?”

  He shrugged. “She’s never—nothing like that has ever happened to her. At first she thought I was pulling her leg.”

  “In spite of television, not many people see the kind of thing you did.”

  “She really wants to meet you. At first she was pissed at what you did—”

  It was Shannon’s turn to blink. “For getting you into witness protection?”

  “I told it to her wrong. I mean, I didn’t want to get graphic about…” After she nodded, he went on, “So she thought you overreacted, like some white savior for the poor brown kid. But after I explained more, she got it. She promised not to tell her sister either.”

  His nightmares had eased after their first year in Portland. She’d never stopped checking the streets when they left for school in the morning, even after a Los Angeles-based colleague had sent word that the suspect was now in federal lockup on drug trafficking charges under what turned out to be his real name. She’d kept tabs on his incarceration and now knew the perp wasn’t ever getting out. Until she’d seen the picture and custody order with her own eyes, she’d worried every day that a guy capable of slaughtering his wife with a hunting knife would come looking for a witness, a helpless kid. She didn’t regret for even a minute her pressure on the system to get Paz into WITSEC and fast.

  Fortunately, he’d always gone by Paz, and that hadn’t changed. It had made adapting to a new name easier. Juan Feliz Pulido, witness to a domestic violence murder, had become Phoenix William Lopez, of interest to no one except the UCLA School of Engineering. And a girl named Josie. “I was the nice white lady next door. With serious law enforcement connections.”

  “Lucky for me.”

  “It shouldn’t be about luck.”

  “I know.” They’d talked about it before. “Luck or the grace of God, whatever. Josie agrees…” His voice slowed with shyness. “I should pay it forward. Somehow. If I hadn’t known you, that guy probably would have found me before anybody thought I was worth protecting. I couldn’t have picked him out again. I didn’t look at him. I wasn’t even sure which house it was—they all look alike in that neighborhood. But he didn’t know that. And there’s the whole fact that he was a maniac.”

  Picking up pocket money by tucking flyers into doors for a local Chinese restaurant had landed Paz in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’d heard a noise, glanced through open curtains and seen blood, a figure on the floor, someone standing over it. She’d told him over and over that running had been the absolute right thing to do. And he had run, nearly two miles, right to her back door. She’d helped him call it in, rode along in the back of the police car while he narrowed down the houses it might have been, and then insisted he be taken away before the officers began their sweep. He had seen nothing but blood, and he didn’t need to see it again.

  LAPD had found the right house and the wife’s body. No sign of the husband, but a car was missing. A suspect at large had meant risk to Paz, and she’d ruthlessly used her credentials and her connections to push jurisdictional boundaries. Fortunately, the suspect fled into Nevada, and crossing state lines meant it became a matter for the Marshals Service. So why not also protection of the witness who could testify about time, day, location? WITSEC had developed his new identity and moved him to Portland.

  She’d quickly followed. Though memories of her aunt’s Boyle Heights home were not bad, per se, she hadn’t regretted selling the house and leaving the weight of Aunt Ryanne’s negativity and bleak predictions of doom and gloom behind. It had been time for her to get some distance from LA anyway—and her own failings.

  Plus, she knew that WITSEC payments wouldn’t be enough to keep Paz college bound, and protection would end the moment the USMS deemed him no longer at risk. He’d be in a new city, with a new name and not yet twenty when the money that barely covered rent stopped arriving. It was every kind of wrong to her that his being a witness would cost him his goals and forever set him back in life.

  She wanted to ask if talking about it to his girlfriend had brought back the nightmares, but she worried that if she did he’d have a nightmare. Three years was not that long ago. He’d been shaking so hard she could hardly keep hold of him, and it had gotten worse as he’d struggled to put what he’d seen into words. He’d desperately needed someone to make it safe for him to breathe. To promise him that a blood-covered bogeyman wouldn’t fi
nd him in his sleep. A promise he believed when it came from Shannon.

  Gia Pagan, who ran the group home next door, had had six boys under her roof, and she kept them fed and focused on school. Shannon had found herself with maternal feelings she had never suspected were inside her and had enjoyed helping Paz plan out community college with a hope of transferring to a four-year program. Over the years of casual basketball games on the weekend, day trips to the beach, and Lakers tickets for his birthday he’d gone from elbow height to being able to look her in the eye.

  All his hopes and dreams—and hers for him—disappeared in the time it took to glance through a window.

  Dreams resumed in Portland. Painful pasts and her regrets became distant. He’d thrived in college classes and she had learned not to borrow trouble in every situation. Aunt Ryanne’s obsessive caution lingered, but she was getting much better at not anticipating worst-outcomes-possible during simple trips to the grocery store.

  He looked unhappy and stressed now, and she worried it was because he’d had to recall that bloody night. A change of subject was due. “Did you get any notification yet about them accepting your birth certificate?”

  His grin was quick as his shoulders relaxed. “Yes, finally. Form letter. Nobody acknowledged that they already had a copy. Copies.”

  Well, that was a relief, though the whole thing was upsetting. There were realities she couldn’t change about Paz’s world, and him being asked to prove he was a citizen, over and over, was a depressingly real part of it. Even though they would, of course, always pass muster, it made her anxious any time his official papers—courtesy of USMS witness protection—were examined. “The whole thing was annoying.”

  “Yes, but friends at other schools say it happens to them, especially when they’re in programs that get grant money or federal money. Friends with last names like Morales and Isfahani.”

  “That doesn’t make it any more acceptable. I can’t believe it’s entirely a bureaucratic mix-up, not since this is the third time a program has wanted confirmation.” She rubbed her overfull stomach as if that would ease her distress. Spaghetti—she had no willpower over it. “And I know what bureaucracies are capable of. I spent two hours today on the phone confirming to four different people that two records should be combined to create one identity with aliases. I was thinking I’d need an act of Congress when I had all the supporting material.”

  Paz forked up the last of his spaghetti. The bite was too large and he ended up with sauce on his chin. How could she possibly think him grown-up enough to get married?

  As he mopped at the mess, Paz said, “I’d rather live in a world with flawed people than perfect machines.”

  She couldn’t disagree with that. Later, as she stared at the textured ceiling and wished for too elusive sleep, she acknowledged that Paz was so much more mature and self-aware than she’d ever felt at his age.

  But he was not ready for marriage and she had no idea how to slow him down.

  His nightmares had stopped. Hers had not. They weren’t nightmares so much as waking with a start to wonder if that was a window breaking or merely the wind and immediately getting up to make sure Paz was sleeping and safe. When they’d first settled in Portland she had found herself using her lunch breaks to drive by the college to know he was safe. That there was no active shooter. No gang presence. No anything that would hurt him. He was a brown kid in a hostile world and her aunt had raised Shannon to be pessimistic. She had told herself it was impossible to protect him, but that didn’t stop her from trying.

  How could she tell him about her fear? That the skill of seeing connections and possibilities was great for work but had meant anxious nights all her life. She could picture so many ways for the worst imaginable tragedies to happen.

  She closed her eyes, snuggled her feet to a slightly warmer place in the bed and tried to quiet her mind by counting backward from one thousand. No thinking about work. 999. No thinking about politics. 998. Or Paz getting married… Damn.

  1000. Yes, it would be good to meet Josie’s older sister. 999. Allies were always useful. 998…

  Chapter Five

  Josie’s crossed arms meant both sharp elbows were pointed at Kesa, which left her feeling in the line of fire. “So you’ll come?”

  “Yes. I’m free on Friday night. What else is new?”

  “Thanks for the reminder of how hard you work.”

  “That remark was for me, not you.” She held back a sigh Josie would no doubt take the wrong way too.

  “If you dated, maybe you’d get what I’m feeling.”

  “Don’t go down that road,” Kesa said sharply. “How I feel about you getting married isn’t about my love life.”

  Josie coughed “bullshit” into her hand and dodged the wadded napkin Kesa threw at her. “Paz’s guardian isn’t happy about it, just so you know. You two have a lot in common. Paz says she’s also qu…” She took a deep breath as if looking for the right word. “Quite the hard worker. We think talking about it will convince you both that we’re serious. That we’ve thought about the challenges.”

  “Why does he have a guardian? He’s an adult, right?”

  “Yes,” Josie snapped. “He’s an orphan. She’s not like his official guardian or anything. She’s always watched out for him. Through…stuff.”

  An orphan. No family. No support, nobody to help them get by when life inevitably turned hard. It always turned hard. “What kind of stuff?”

  “He’s a Latinx kid, living in foster care and group homes most of his life. There was stuff, and none of it was his fault.”

  “Criminal stuff?”

  “He didn’t do anything.”

  Kesa wanted to point out that all criminals said nothing was their fault. That would put the fight that was simmering into full boil. Great, just great. Josie had always loved lost causes. This boy sounded like another one, and Josie didn’t want to see that it could steal away her entire future. “Is this rush to get married because…”

  “I told you already, I’m not pregnant!” Josie scrambled to her feet, picked up her dinner plate, and carried it to the kitchen. “It’s only been a month—besides, we’re very careful. We want to get married. We want to have kids, but not now. See? If you were listening, you’d have heard me say all that.”

  “I am listening. I’m trying.”

  “Maybe you are. But you don’t hear me.”

  Kesa blinked fast and hard to hold back tears. “I feel exactly the same way about your listening skills, so we agree on something.”

  Josie didn’t answer as Kesa headed to her bedroom to resume cutting cloth for her second suit-kini order. Her breathing steadied as she worked. Josie wasn’t old enough to get married, and that was a fact. It had nothing to do with Kesa’s dating or their parents or anything else. She was simply too young. Too immature.

  “Love at first sight. Love conquers all,” she muttered. “Next she’ll be saying ‘He completes me’ and I’ll need a barf bag.”

  She comforted herself by hoping that Paz’s guardian was sensible. If they presented a united front, maybe the lovebirds would agree to a long engagement. Trial cohabitation. Save the legal documents and “I do” pledges until they were more certain it would last.

  The workshop lease paperwork was finished and the deposit check was written. Her plans would go into motion the moment she dropped off the thick envelope. She’d been hesitating all week, pleased that her financial history finally had not factored into the rates being offered and yet terrified of signing a lease. The thought of having to meet that payment every month even though her current cash flow and savings met all her targets gave her the shakes. She could tell herself it was okay, but she didn’t feel it. Her caution had gotten her and Josie through the past twelve years. She’d only screwed it up once, and that had just been her stupid heart, which wasn’t ever going to run her life again.

  She idly rubbed the permanent scissor notch in the fleshy part of her thumb and studied her neat
ly cut pieces. Going after the upscale market had been a change from alterations and a good one. It had taken belief in herself, networking with strangers, and so much practice.

  She rolled up the pieces and collapsed the table, making enough space to reach her tiny closet. Her favorite sweater, a patchwork of crimson cashmere and white wool, would keep the night air away.

  “Errands to run,” she told Josie, who had settled with her books in front of the TV. “Back in a while.”

  L.A. after sunset always soothed her. The lights from any high ground became magical. The whimsy of street art or the happenstance of turning a corner to find a dance party spilling out onto the sidewalk reminded her there was life without work.

  I can do this.

  By the time she reached the leasing office her heart was hammering in her ears so loud she almost couldn’t hear Santana streaming from the car radio. The parking lot was deserted and there didn’t seem to be anyone around, so she pulled up close to the doors. She left the engine running as she carried the flat envelope of papers to the door. As she’d hoped, there was a mail drop.

  She couldn’t make her fingers let go.

  This is ridiculous, she scolded herself.

  You’re wasting gas standing here.

  Just do it.

  Don’t do it.

  You can’t.

  You can.

  Everything you have and your entire future is at risk.

  You’re not a bankrupt, jumped-up, uneducated, unproven nobody anymore.

  Make up your mind.

  With a long shaky breath she let it go. The envelope containing all her hopes dropped out of sight, not making a sound.

  Chapter Six

  With a never-seen-before shy pride, Paz said, “This is Josie.”

  Shannon shook hands with the young woman. “I’m Shannon. Paz has told me a lot about you, but not nearly enough.”

  “Same here.” Josie broke off as the coffee shop host waved at them to follow him to a table.