A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow

by Laura Taylor Namey

“I want to make the right choice. The best one for our family. For our business and everyone.” “What happened to the best choice for you?” Papi asks. For me. My legacy. My heart. My future. But a piercing truth slashes like Tío’s knife into corn stalks. I turn to my mother. “You didn’t send me to England so I would choose it over our family, over Miami and La Paloma.” Not the woman who lost her best friend to the same country. “If you’d known, you wouldn’t have put me on that plane. But you did and now look!” Mami stands and reaches for me, her hands twined with mine and her eyes like arrow points. “Did your heart find peace and some closure and something new to smile about in England?” “Sí, Mami,” I whisper. “So, so much.” Now she cries, a fat tear rolling down her cheek and the smell of her like honeysuckle. “That is exactly why we sent you.”

And a best-friendship doesn’t die. Instead, it runs its own way now, miles over bridges and roads and desert sand. Without us.

“It’s terrible luck for the person who takes the last slice of bread to not kiss the baker.”

“Back in England, I didn’t want to be ‘that guy.’ I couldn’t ask you to leave your family, your business, your country, just for me.” He rubs my shoulder. “So I wanted you to choose a future that’s first and foremost yours alone. Not to belong to me. I want you to belong with me. That’s the part I didn’t say enough.”

“I still don’t know how we can work it out with you here and me there right now, but I’m not giving up.” His voice shakes. “I was wrong, too. Sometimes we have to want more than we’re given. So, this is me, wishing for someone as impossible and otherworldly as you.”