"How was it?" Rosalba said, without turning around from the plancha. She was flipping tortillas with her bare fingers, the way she did, which Tavo had never once been able to do without burning himself.
"Okay."
"Okay how."
"Okay good."
She turned around then and looked at him. Rosalba was forty-four and short and fierce, with forearms like a baker's and a burn scar on the back of her left hand in the shape of Baja California. She had taken him in when he was twelve, when his mother had gone up to Medford with a man named Beto who had promised her a job at a pear-packing plant and a house with a yard, and who had turned out to have neither, and when his mother had called after the first month and said, crying, that maybe Tavo should stay in Merrimon a little longer, just until things were settled. Things had not settled. His mother called on Sundays. She sent birthday cards with twenty-dollar bills in them that Tavo did not spend. She was all right now, as far as he could tell, working at a Fred Meyer, still with Beto, who had gotten quieter. She had asked him twice to come up and live with them. Both times he had said he would think about it, and both times he had thought about it, and both times he had stayed.
"Okay good," Rosalba repeated, and wiped her hands on her apron, and came over, and looked at his face very closely, the way she did when she suspected him of lying. Whatever she saw there seemed to satisfy her. She grabbed him by both ears, which she had done since he was twelve and which he was now too old for and allowed anyway, and kissed him hard on the forehead. "Okay good. Okay good! Ximo, you hear? Okay good."
"I hear," Ximo said, wrapping a burrito.
"Eat something. Then take over the window. Ximo, you go on break. Tavo, eat."
He ate standing up, two tacos de lengua and a cup of jamaica, and then he took over the window and took orders for an hour and a half, and he did not tell her about the shot, or about the coach, or about the nineteen stitches. He was not sure why. Maybe because it was too strange to tell in the window of a food truck between orders. Maybe because if he told her she would want to know who Wyn was, and he had never really told her about Wyn either, beyond "a guy at the park who helps me sometimes," and Rosalba had looked at him narrowly and said, "What guy? How old? Does he ask you for anything?" and Tavo had said, "No, Tía, he just watches me kick, he's like twenty, he works at Sorensen," and she had gone down to Corrado Park herself one morning at six-twenty without telling him, and stood behind the backstop with her arms crossed for fifteen minutes, and come home and said only, "He's too skinny. Bring him a burrito sometime," and never mentioned it again.
He had brought Wyn a burrito sometimes. Wyn always ate it in about four bites, standing up, and said, "Tell your aunt thank you," and once, "Tell your aunt it's the best thing I've eaten this year," and Tavo had told her, and she had pretended not to care, and then the next time had put extra cheese in it.
At two the lunch line thinned out and Rosalba started cleaning the plancha with a brick of pumice and a squeeze bottle of water that hissed and smoked against the hot steel. Tavo counted the drawer. Business had been good. It usually was in August.
"The coach say anything to you?" Rosalba asked, scraping.
"She said get new shoes."
Rosalba stopped scraping. "Ha," she said. "You see? I say it, nothing. The coach says it."