Page 15 of Every Step She Takes
“I’m sorry I caused you so much additional stress,” Sadie quickly apologizes, working herself into another spectacular bluster.
“I promise I will handle this all better once I’ve had a good night of sleep.
” She adjusts her heavy pack and almost falls over again.
“Do you mind just pointing us in the direction of the elevator?”
I turn to Inez. I’m not going to be the one to tell her.
“How is there no elevator?” Sadie cries as we face the steep, narrow staircase up to our room.
“A lot of budget hotels in Europe don’t have elevators.”
“That’s fucking ableist.”
“Do you want me to carry your bag for you?”
“I don’t.” She grabs onto the straps and tries to stand up tall.
And then she starts falling backward as soon as she takes a step.
After a few false starts, she finally gets enough momentum to make it up the first flight of stairs.
I should leave her there on the landing up to the second floor, but I don’t.
We arrive at the rickety wooden door with the crooked number 42 nailed to the front ten minutes later.
I slide the key into the lock and push open the door to reveal a standard one-star European hotel room.
It’s a clean but cramped space with two twin beds, a tiny bathroom visible through a pocket door, and not much else.
Sadie freezes in the doorway and stares at the semi-depressing, one-hundred square feet. And she finally, fully, breaks down.
Heavy, full-body sobs tremor through her as she remains immobilized in the doorway. I set my backpack down on one of the beds and hover beside it, unsure what to do. There is a part of me that wants to go to her, to hold her hand the way I did on the plane. I want to sit with her, listen to her.
But I also know myself. I know that comforting is my romantic gateway drug, and if I hold Sadie now while she cries, it will only be a matter of time before I want to hold her in other ways too.
I can’t let myself go down that road with her, and not just because I’m swearing off Romeo-antics. Sadie is a fragile baby gay, a gosling who’s only now learning how to walk, and I don’t want to be the asshole hawk that swoops in and traumatizes her.
I’m great at falling in love and horrible at staying in it, and in the end, someone always ends up hurt. I wouldn’t want that person to be Sadie.
So, I don’t comfort her. Instead, I say, “I’m going to give you some space,” as I’m already halfway out the door.
“What are you doing here?” Inez asks me, switching seamlessly into Portuguese an hour later.
I gesture at her across the table with my Super Bock beer. “Enjoying a beer with an old friend,” I answer back, though my Portuguese is hardly seamless these days.
Inez casts a glance around the mostly empty lobby of the hostel. “I don’t mean here . Why are you on this tour?”
“I told you. I got dumped.”
Inez narrows her eyes, like she’s trying to read my aura to uncover the truth behind my usual bullshit. “I was sorry to hear about your dad,” she finally says.
“I wasn’t.” There’s a bottle of Vinho Verde in front of Inez, the label printed with my last name and the logo of Portugal’s coastline. That logo, the wine within that bottle, and the company it represents… those were the only things Valentim Costa cared about.
When I came out to him, he told me, in no uncertain terms, that I couldn’t be both gay and his daughter, and I took him at his word.
I’ve spent the twenty years since that rejection embracing my queerness and disavowing the part of me that was him.
I rejected all the Costas—my paternal grandparents, my aunts, my cousins.
I rejected any ambition, any sense of familial duty, any love I might have had for Portugal or wine or him.
I used my trust fund to travel the world and fall in love with as many women as possible, because I knew that would really piss him off.
And I always fall out of love with those women before there is any possibility of being rejected again.
“Yet you came home after all these years,” Inez says now.
“This isn’t home. And I came to do the Camino,” I correct her. I snatch up the wine bottle and begin to pick at the label. “The Camino helped me once. I’m hoping it can help me again.”
“Did it help? It seems like it only taught you how to run.”
“You walk the Camino,” I joke.
Inez watches me peel off the wine label in tiny, sticky pieces that litter our table, and I wait for her to call out my bullshit, to push me to be honest with her, the way Michelle would.
But she never does. Inez is not Michelle, and I’ve trained her to never expect genuine vulnerability from me. Like most people in my life, Inez accepts what I’m willing to show her. That’s how I want my friendships. Usually.
Tonight, though, I’m thinking about the woman on the plane who confessed all her most precious secrets to a stranger. I’m thinking about the statues of grieving women. I’m thinking about all the things I haven’t let myself feel.
“He left it to me,” I hear myself say.
“Who left what to you?”
“My father. Valentim.” Bits of the label stick to the pads of my fingers, and I try to wipe them on my clothes under the table. “He left me Quinta Costa. The entire business, his entire fortune. A dozen vineyards, the majority shares, just… all of it.”
Inez stares at me blankly at first, as if we’re not speaking English or Portuguese, but some third Martian language that resembles neither. “You said he disowned you. Why… why would he do that?”
“That’s the question that’s been haunting me since I got the news.”
It’s not like my dad completely cut me out of his life after I came out to him.
He sent birthday cards with extravagant gifts each year; he called me to complain about the family of finches living in his fireplace at the vineyard in Vigo; he emailed me random articles about things I’d loved when I was ten years old.
For all intents and purposes, he acted like the fight never happened, even if the unspoken chasm between us was evidence that it had.
We never talked about anything real, we rarely saw each other, and we never mentioned the fact that I’d spent the first eighteen years of my life preparing to take over the family business, then spent the next eighteen years drifting aimlessly from job to job, from country to country, from woman to woman.
I hated him for it—for rejecting me and acting like he hadn’t—but I kept picking up the phone when he called, unable to fully sever that fragile connection.
He never told me he was sick. Up until the bitter end, he was leaving me voicemails about a Cabrera vole that kept sneaking into his vegetable garden.
And then he was gone, and I was getting a phone call from a stepmom I’d never met, telling me what happened, telling me about his trust. None of it was going to her. All of it was coming to me.
Even in death, Valentim Costa saddled me with his emotional baggage.
“Does this mean you’re now CEO of Quinta Costa?” Inez asks. “Should I start addressing you as ‘sir’? Or ‘Your Majesty’? What is the appropriate form of address for a capitalistic overlord?”
“The board named Valentim’s fifth wife as interim CEO while I figure out what I want to do with the company.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
I shrug and aim for flippancy. “Sell it? Run it into the ground? Burn each vineyard that he loved more than me, one by one?” I suggest, not flippant at all.
“Sounds like you’re in a healthy place with all of it.” Inez nods her head up and down like an infinitely wise bobblehead. “Now the spontaneous Camino is starting to make sense. You’re searching for someone to take your mind off”—she waves her hand in circles in front of my face—“all of that .”
“Not someone. The Camino.”
“Uh-huh.” She clucks in disbelief. “You forget that I’ve met you before.”
“I’m changing my ways.”
She clucks again. “Just promise me that when you do your typical Mal thing, you’ll choose someone other than Sadie to fall in love with. I don’t need that kind of mess on my tour.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t think I didn’t notice the looks the two of you were exchanging at dinner.”
“There were no looks. Like you said, Sadie is straight.”
“She’s definitely gay for you.” Inez rolls her eyes. “And who isn’t? You’re sapphic catnip. You have Kristen Stewart’s face, first-season Shane’s hair, and Tig Notaro’s body.”
“Tig Notaro’s personality too,” I add.
She scoffs. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
“I’m sorry, but did you not just imply that I can turn straight girls with my mullet and dad bod?”
“Your outsides are inarguably fabulous, but the insides could use some work.”
I throw the wadded-up label scraps at her and pretend those words don’t hurt.
Ruth loved to teasingly call me her himbo , a hot body and an empty head.
She was joking—she always said she was joking—but after a while, it became clear that she was only interested in my body and my bank account, that in her eyes, I had nothing else to offer her.
I was both the sugar daddy and the arm candy, and neither felt great.
“Promise, Mal. Fall in love with someone else. Her sister’s blog has a huge following, and the publicity could really change things for me and Beatrix. I need Sadie to have a good time and write nice things about this tour. As the company’s sole investor, you should care about this going well.”
“I’m not an investor.”
Inez empties the label-less bottle into her wineglass. “What do you call it when you write a check to cover all the start-up costs for a new company?”
“Spending Daddy’s money,” I answer, and ha . There it is. Perfect flippancy. “I wasn’t really the only investor, was I?”
“You think banks were lining up to give a small-business loan to a dirt-poor, Afro-Brazilian trans woman looking to open a tour company for queer women?”
“You should know that I only wrote that check for the tax break.”
“There’s no tax break for loaning money to a friend.”
“There’s always a tax break if you’re rich enough.” I reach for my pint glass only to discover it’s empty. “And I told you ten years ago, it’s not a loan. You never have to pay it back. You don’t owe me anything, Inez. Not even a spot on your tours.”
“I owe you everything .” She tugs at her shirt with the Beatrix Tours logo. “None of this would exist without you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Mal, you—”
“No, seriously,” I cut her off. “Please don’t mention it ever again. It makes me weirdly uncomfortable.”
Inez lifts her glass toward me. “You want people to think you have a heart of stone, but you have a heart of pure gold, my friend.”
“I recently inherited a lot of gold,” I say, and Inez snorts a laugh. This is where I want to stay: in the shallows where I make jokes and Inez laughs.
“Not Sadie, okay?” she repeats, her tone sober.
I wish I had another beer, another label to rip up, another distraction to keep the thoughts from slipping in through the cracks.
“Not Sadie,” I agree. “I was thinking about Rebecca, actually…”
“Don’t.”
“What? She keeps it tight . That’s a GILF if I’ve ever seen one.”
“Please stop.”
“Or maybe Ro. We could make love while their corgis watch, then snuggle up for a Ken Burns documentary after.”
“Why are you like this?” Inez covers her face to hide her laughter.
I laugh too, and then I order another beer.
At the end of the night we hug, and Inez slips a healing crystal into the pocket of my fleece.
“What is this? Were you carrying this around all day?”
She ignores my teasing. “It’s amethyst. For willpower.”
THE CAMINO CREW
Inez Oliveira
Boa noite, beautiful pilgrims!
I hope you get the rest you need to face our first full day tomorrow! 9:54 p.m.
Inez Oliveira
Tomorrow we will also have our first sharing circle! Part of this tour is guided self-reflection as we make our journey. Each day, I will ask the group a question to prompt self-reflection, and I will invite you to share. 9:57 p.m.
Ro Hashmi
DO WE HAVE TO SHARE? 9:58 p.m.
Inez Oliveira
I know it can be scary to be vulnerable, but connection is one of the greatest gifts the Camino offers us. 10:03 p.m.
Ro Hashmi
BUT DO WE HAVE TO SHARE??? 10:05 p.m.
Rebecca Hartley
Dear Camino Friends,
It was lovely to chat with y’all at dinner. Thank you for being so accepting. I can’t wait to share with you more tomorrow.
Love,
Rebecca 10:12 p.m.
Ro Hashmi
BECAUSE I DID NOT SIGN UP FOR GROUP THERAPY 10:13 p.m.
Ari Ocampo
ro you dont have to write in all caps… it makes it look like youre screaming at us 10:15 p.m.
Rebecca Hartley
Dear Ari,
They are screaming, dear. They are screaming at their phone as they send their messages. It’s quite alarming.
Love,
Rebecca 10:21 p.m.
Ari Ocampo
and rebecca youre not writing a letter to a lost love away at war… we know who you are 10:22 p.m.
Vera Lopez
I have extra Compeed if anyone needs it for their blisters 10:27 p.m.
Stefano Demurtas
10:29 p.m.
Ari Ocampo
stefano why the hell did you just send a 12 minute voice memo?? 10:31 p.m.
Stefano Demurtas
Going for a little run 10:32 p.m.
Stefano Demurtas
Can’t text 10:32 p.m.
Ari Ocampo
i cannot with all of you 10:33 p.m.
Stefano Demurtas
Hkrncofgarlg 10:33 p.m.
Ro Hashmi
BUT DO WE HAVE TO SHARE?????? 10:41 p.m.
Mal Goncalves
I’m sorry, but your nonsense has driven Inez to take solace in a bottle of disgusting wine. She will address all further inquiries in the morning. Get some sleep, weirdos. 10:57 p.m.