Page 20 of That Last Summer

“Got it!”

* * *

An hour later, Jaime and I are at Manuela’s Bakery, the town’s bakehouse—it’s been an establishment here for a hundred years now. We’re on two stools at the bar, trying fifteen different slices of cake at once.

“They all taste the same to me,” Jaime tells me on the seventh piece.

“Yeah. I guess that’s because we’ve been eating cake for half an hour now.”

“We’re going to be sick, mark my words.”

“I think the problem here is that they’re kind of dry. We need Manuela to wet them with something, maybe with—”

“Alcohol?” Jaime suggests.

“We can’t wet the cake with alcohol, there will be kids at the wedding, and elderly people—grandpas, Jaime. Ninety-year-old grandpas. You don’t want them drunk, do you?”

“Ninety years old?”

“We’re a long-lived family.”

“Right, but I didn’t mean to wet the cake, I meant us. We need to get this down our throats, but it looks like there’s not a single drop of alcohol in here,” he says regretfully as he takes a look around, studying every corner of the establishment.

“What time is it?” I ask him; I don’t wear a watch.

“It’s past one in the afternoon.”

“Well, I guess that’s vermouth time, then,” I say with conviction.

“I agree, but this Manuela lady only has a thousand different flavors of artisan ice cream and tiger nut milk.”

“Wait for it.”

I get off the stool, move to the bakery’s open door and call out to the bar across the street—I know the bartender by name, we’ve known each other since forever. He waves at me with a nod of recognition and a smile.

“Two martinis, please!”

“On it!” he answers from over the way.

Jaime is completely stunned when, a few minutes later, a waiter brings us our martinis on a tray.

“Damn, I love this town.”

I turn to Manuela. “Come on, we’re ready now. Give us more cakes.”

We finish all of them in an hour and, when Manuela can’t hear us, we choose the winner by playing eeny, meeny, miney, mo because the honest truth is we don’t remember any of the flavors.

We say goodbye to good old Manuela, happy for having achieved our mission, and walk to the bar across the street to drop our empty glasses. Since we’re already there, we order a couple more martinis.

“Hey, Pris,” Jaime says once we’re sitting comfortably at one of the tables on the terrace.

“Yes?”

“This thing we’ve just done... isn’t it something the bride and groom should do? Isn’t it too personal?”

“Choosing the cake?” Jaime nods. “Well, I guess so, but you heard Alicia, she was busy and couldn’t do it. And it’s also true that Marcos is ducking out.”

“Men ducking out, so typical. And speaking of men, I saw your husband earlier,” he blurts out.