The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (8)

Rey had endured an entire lifetime of that joke. The only reason he used Montoya instead of Restrepo was because it was slightly easier on the English-speaking American tongue. It was remarkable how people treated him differently depending on which last name he used.

Still, he laughed at the joke and swallowed his own pride as he picked up a pen from Leonard’s desk and waved it in the air like a Spanish rapier.

“Exactly. Here is my résumé and I have the last six months to speak for my work.”

“You been working with Paul? I haven’t seen you.”

“We split the floor, sir.”

“Graduated Adelphi in two years? Impressive.” He pressed a button on his phone. “Hey, Jasmine, get Mr. Montoya here set up. We’re about to get fucked by the IRS and need all hands on deck. And Paul’s late with my coffee.”

The new Paul the Intern started later that day, and Rey was assigned a tiny desk at the far end of the office.

Now, Rey leaned back in his chair and looked into Paul the Intern’s face. “What’s your name, kid?”

“Krishan Patel,” he said.

“Do you really want to do this?”

“I just want a college credit.” He scratched the side of his face and broke a pimple along his jaw.

“Then go home. If you come back tomorrow, figure out how to make people learn your name.”

Krishan nodded, but Rey could tell he wasn’t listening, not really. Instead, he picked up a stack of packages from the cart and dropped them off on the desk beside Rey’s. As the kid started to leave, he jolted to a stop and turned around.

“Oh, almost forgot one.”

He handed Rey an envelope that looked like it had traveled from the late nineteenth century, wax seal and all. Then, Krishan was gone.

Rey didn’t have time for mail that didn’t come in manila envelopes from the firm’s clients, so he put it aside and got down to work, punching the numbers on his calculator like the world’s least satisfying game of whack-a-mole.

Rey hated numbers, but he was good at them. He could make sense of them, at least. Always could. He wasn’t sure where he got that talent from, and sometimes he wished he’d gotten Marimar’s photographic memory, or the twins’ musical talent, or even Tatinelly’s ability to charm unsuspecting suckers into pyramid schemes. His mother had dropped out of high school to chase after a soldier whose motorcycle had gotten a flat on their road. His father, the soldier, had been an army grunt who’d been killed in combat when Rey was eight. He’d been a good man, as far as Rey remembered. When he started to forget, all he had to do was rummage through his father’s old things he could never get rid of. There was a folded flag that hung at an awkward angle on their living room wall. The three crates of vinyl covering an entire history of rock, from Ray Charles to Metallica. His mother had also kept his collection of terrible Hawaiian print shirts that he liked to barbecue in when he was home. And even worse, sterling silver jewelry of flames and skulls from his teenage days as a metalhead in Queens. It was, all together, an altar to toxic masculinity, despite the fact that his father had been the first person to realize Rey was gay. He’d also been the first person to tell Rey there was nothing wrong with him, and he’d hold onto that through his adolescence and current attempt at adulthood.

Rey had thought that he could get through anything as long as he remembered that he’d been loved by two parents who had burned hard and bright, and quickly, like matchsticks.

Jordan Restrepo took every moment to be with his Parcha and his Reymundo when he wasn’t deployed. One time, Rey and his dad were playing baseball in the park, even though Rey hated baseball. It was his dad’s excuse to talk to his son. At some point, Reymundo regaled him in painful detail about what the second grade was like. All the boys were bigger. All the boys were grosser. Rey didn’t know how to be like them, soft and quiet like a drop of dulce de leche as he was. The kind his mom scooped up out of half coconut shells from the bodega. There was this class play and Reymundo wanted to be in the role that sang and danced with a boy named Timothy who had hazel eyes, and Reymundo wanted to marry him. Rey didn’t know what “marry” meant, but his mother liked to yell at her sister over the phone that way. “If you love that summabitch so much, marry him.” “If you love misery so much, marry it.” And so on. All he knew was that marriage was for love and he loved Timothy.

“Easy buddy,” Jordan had said. He held little Reymundo’s round face for so long, and Rey was never sure what his old man had been thinking. But the memory was sharper than the rest from his earliest years. He could always recall the tears in his dad’s eyes. Not because he was upset, but because he was worried. “You have to wait until you’re my age to get married, okay?”

“Fine,” Reymundo had said, in that way bored little boys had.

Sometimes, when he was unsure of himself, Reymundo thought back to that moment. To the certainty that he’d never been more himself than with his dad, hating baseball, talking about a boy he wouldn’t kiss for another ten years. Sometimes, on Rey’s worst days, he pictured his Army hero father—with his chunky boots, gap between his teeth, scars crisscrossing his white skin—and told himself, If my dad could cry, then so can I.

Rey would never marry Timothy, but they kissed in the halls of their high school at sixteen, and then one last time in Timothy’s room. Before Tim’s dad came home and had a fit. He asked, “What would your father say if he were alive?”