The Day the Gas Stops Coming

The Tappan coughs once, like an old man trying to remember a name, and then it dies.

I am holding a wooden spoon in one hand and a tin of toasted coconut in the other, and the custard on the back burner is at that exact moment — that exact, infuriating, miraculous moment — when it has thickened just enough to coat the spoon but not enough to set. Forty more seconds. That's all I needed. Forty seconds of blue flame and the flan de coco for the families on the second, third, and fourth floors of Edificio Calvario would have been finished, cooling on the counter, waiting for the rope-and-basket to lower them down like little yellow miracles to neighbors who already paid me on Monday.

Forty seconds. The country owes me forty seconds.

"Mira, no me hagas esto," I tell the stove, because this is a thing I do — I talk to objects when I'm scared, the way other men curse. I crouch under the sink. The propane cylinder is the same scratched orange thing I have been nursing for two months now, telling myself each morning that it sounded a little heavier than it did the night before, which is the kind of lie a hungry man tells his own hands. I tap it. It rings like a church bell that nobody believes in anymore. I tip it onto its side. I shake it. I do all the small superstitions a Cuban does with an empty tank — I pray to it, basically — and the stove gives me nothing back but the smell of cooling caramel turning bitter on the burner I had going for the topping.

The caramel. Dios mío, the caramel.

I scrape it off the heat with a towel wrapped around the handle, fast, before the sugar seizes into amber glass. The custard I pour through a sieve into a metal bowl, set into a basin of cool water from the cistern, and stir, and stir, and stir, like a man rocking a baby who has no business still being awake. Pastry chef's reflex. Triage. The custard is still loose. The caramel is still hot. The stove is a corpse. Three families downstairs are waiting on a dessert that, technically, no longer exists.

This, mira, is what they don't teach you at the Escuela de Hotelería in Havana. They teach you tempering and laminating and the seventeen ways a génoise can betray you. They don't teach you what to do when the entire Republic of Cuba decides, on a Tuesday, that your tools are no longer your tools.

Este servidor stands in the middle of his own kitchen and feels, briefly, like a fraud.

"Reinaldo."

My mother is in the kitchen doorway. La vieja is wearing the blue housedress, the one with the small tear at the hem she won't let me sew. Her hair is loose. Her hands are doing that thing — that small, terrible, beautiful thing — where the fingers of her right hand are tracing something invisible on the air in front of her, a curve, a number. A quadratic, I think. She was a math teacher for thirty-one years. She is still teaching, somewhere behind her own eyes, to a classroom only she can see.

"Sí, vieja."

"¿Qué día es hoy?"

"Tuesday, mami. The eleventh."

She nods. She shuffles to the table, sits, runs her fingertip along the oilcloth — across the faded daisies — and traces what is unmistakably the curve of a parabola. My chest does the thing chests do.

"Reinaldo."

"Sí."

"¿Qué día es hoy?"

"Tuesday, vieja. The eleventh. Same as before. Dale, we're good."

I keep stirring. The custard is cooling. It will set, maybe — into something humbler than I wanted, a soft-set flan, a flan that has given up on being a flan and decided to be a pudding instead. The metaphor is not lost on me. I feel overproofed. I feel like a dough that has risen one time too many and is about to collapse on itself with a small dignified sigh.

She asks me four times in fifteen minutes what day it is. Four. I count them, because I am the kind of man who counts things when he doesn't know what else to do with his hands. Each time I answer her the same way, soft, no edge, because the day I put an edge in my voice with her is the day I become a person I don't want to be. Tuesday, vieja. The eleventh. Tuesday. Tuesday. Tuesday.

In between the third Tuesday and the fourth, the phone rings.

It is the borrowed cell — the little Nokia Frasi from downstairs lets me keep here because he says a man without a phone is a man the world has already buried. The number on the screen is Havana. I don't recognize it. I almost don't answer.

"¿Aló?"

"Rei."

Yari. I haven't heard her voice in seven months and I know it in one syllable, the way you know the smell of your own building's stairwell.

"Yari."

She doesn't waste time. She never did. That's the thing I loved about her once and the thing that finished us.

"Aldito is on the Víazul. He left an hour ago. He'll be in Santiago around four in the morning."

I sit down. I don't remember choosing to. The wooden spoon is still in my hand. There is custard on my wrist.

"Yari, espera —"

"Rei, no puedo ahora. Yoandri and him — there were problems. School problems. Other problems. Él no me hace caso a mí, Rei. Tal vez a ti sí."

Maybe he'll listen to you. Maybe. The Spanish carries the maybe like a small wet stone.

"How long?" I ask. It is the only question I know how to ask. The other questions — the real ones, the ones about whether my fifteen-year-old son hates me less than I think he does, about what I'm supposed to do with him in an apartment with no gas and a grandmother who keeps asking what day it is — those questions don't come out. They stay in my throat like undissolved sugar.

"I don't know. A while. Bring his medicine. He has an inhaler. He forgets."

"Yari."

"Rei. Por favor. Just — be there when the bus comes."

She hangs up before I can say the thing I wasn't going to say anyway. The receiver is warm against my ear. My hands are shaking, which is, of all things, the part that offends me — these are pastry chef's hands, these hands have piped buttercream rosettes onto wedding cakes for the daughters of Party officials, these hands do not shake. And yet. Here we are. The Tappan is dead and my hands are shaking and somewhere on the Carretera Central a bus is moving south through the dark with my son on it, and I have understood, suddenly and completely, that today stopped being about the gas about ninety seconds ago.

I look at the half-saved flan. It looks back.

The sun goes down over the Bahía de Santiago like it has somewhere better to be. From the balcony I can see the water turning the color of weak café con leche, the freighters out past the mouth of the bay sitting still as toys. I lower the salvaged desserts — six small cups of soft-set flan, one for each family that paid — down the side of the building in the basket. The rope is frayed in two places. Doña Caridad on the second floor pulls hers off, drops the crumpled pesos into the basket, and yells up that I look thin.

"¡Está usted más flaco, Reinaldo!"

"¡Es el estrés del éxito, doña!" I yell back. The stress of success. She laughs. She always laughs at that one. It is a joke I have been making for eleven years and it has never been less true than it is tonight.

I don't tell her about Aldito. I don't tell anyone. I haul the basket back up empty and stand at the window and watch the lights of Santiago come on the way they do here — one block at a time, like the city is being remembered into existence by someone who is doing their best.

I eat nothing.

La vieja watches a telenovela she has seen three times. I sit beside her on the couch with the springs that bite. Around nine she turns to me with eyes that are, for one clean second, entirely hers — the math teacher's eyes, the eyes that used to grade my arithmetic homework and circle my mistakes in red — and she says, "Mijo, ¿estás bien?"

"Dale, vieja. Todo en orden."

It comes out smooth. It always does. It is the kind of lie that tastes like burnt sugar — a flavor I know because I have, more than once in my life, walked away from a caramel for thirty seconds too long.

She pats my knee. She goes back to the telenovela. Whoever she just was is gone again.

Later, after I get her into bed, I do the inventory the way a man counts his teeth after a fight. Rice: half a sack. Black beans: enough for two days, maybe three if I'm careful. Condensed milk: one can, dented, from the bodega in October. Eggs: four, two of them suspicious. Coffee: a finger's worth in the bottom of the tin. Stove: dead. Charcoal: none. A fork to stir embers with: none. Any idea, este servidor, any single idea how to cook a meal over an open fire?

None.

I think about my father. I think about him every time the apartment gets quiet enough to hear the cistern pump. He died on the kitchen floor sixteen years ago, alone, while I was in a apartment in Vedado drinking Havana Club out of a plastic cup and laughing at something I no longer remember. The apron he wore for Sunday lunches is still on the back of the kitchen door. I have not taken it down. I have not put it on. It hangs there the way certain debts hang — visible, unspoken, accruing interest in a currency I do not know how to pay in.

The couch does not let me sleep. I knew it wouldn't.

At two in the morning I am on the balcony with a cigarette I am not going to smoke, because I quit four years ago and I keep one in my shirt pocket the way other men keep saints. The street six floors down is empty. The streetlight at the corner of Calvario and Trocha is flickering with the night's voltage drop, on-off-on-off, like the city is blinking in Morse code at something only it can see.

I rehearse openings.

*Aldito, mira, I know it's been a year.* Too pastry-shop.

*Hijo, your mother called.* Too late.

*Aldito, I'm sorry.* For what, exactly. Pick one. I have a menu.

Nothing fits. Everything I have ever said in my life has been somebody else's words rearranged, and now, on the only night I need a sentence of my own, the pantry is empty.

At 4:07 a.m. the headlights come around the corner.

The Víazul is white and battered and the air brakes sigh like a tired animal. The door folds open under the streetlight. A tall, narrow boy steps down with a duffel slung across his chest and headphones around his neck. He is taller than he was last December. Of course he is. He doesn't look up at the building. He doesn't look up at the sixth floor. He doesn't look for me.

He just starts walking toward the stairwell, and I hear, in my chest, six floors of footsteps that haven't happened yet.

I stand in the open doorway of 6-C. I have left the hallway light on. I have a hundred opening lines and I have rejected every one of them and now there is no time to choose. The footsteps come up — slow, deliberate, fifteen years old and angry. Third floor. Fourth floor. Fifth.

He reaches the landing.

He does not say hello. He does not lift his eyes. He walks past me into the apartment with the duffel still on his shoulder, drops it on the floor of the living room with a sound like a sack of flour hitting a counter, and turns. He looks at the wall, not at me. His voice, when it comes, is flat as a closed oven.

"¿Dónde duermo?"

And I stand there in the doorway of my own home, a pastry chef with no oven and no son and no sentence ready, and I understand — clean, complete, the way a custard finally sets — that the gas is gone, the boy is here, and in five hours, when the sun comes up over the Bahía de Santiago, I am going to have to feed both of them, and I have no idea how.