cubicle, she let Rasputin knead the agonizing place in her lower back, letting go enough that she leaned in and rested her forehead against her hands. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right. But we need to—”
“Nothin’ we need that bad today, Jefa. We’ve cut the reservations to a manageable level, and with Hector and Peter, I’ll handle this shift.” He raised his brows. “You’re not going to be any help anyway. You need some rest. Eat some chicken soup.”
She took a breath. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Monday is your day off. You need to take it.”
Elena straightened, and headed out of the walk-in. “No. I have too much to do.”
“You keep up like this, you’ll hit the wall.”
She scowled at him. “You know the rules, Rasputin. A chef is never sick.”
He made a face. “I know a lot of burned-out, drunken cooks, too.”
“Right.”
“I mean it,” he said. “Go sleep and I’m going to send somebody over with my auntie’s chicken soup.”
She nodded. “I’m going.”
Outside in the bright, sparkling day, Elena felt better. Everything hurt still, but just being outdoors eased some of the tight places, and when she thought of the Valentine’s Day special, it gave her a sense of possibility. As she headed toward the car, Alvin tagging behind her, people swished by in nylon ski gear and laughed with vacation fever and tossed brightly colored scarves around their necks. Weekend lunches would be a boon.
But not this minute.
Then, as she climbed into the car, her back screamed and she remembered she didn’t have a home to go to, and she put her head down on the steering wheel in despair. What was this about? Why had the heavens bothered to spare her if she was just going to fail, over and over? If, just as she started to make her dream come true, her broken body betrayed her?
A knock on the window startled her, and she looked up to see Hector’s sister shivering beside the car. In Spanish she said, “I am supposed to tell you to call your mother.”
Alarmed, Elena started to open the door. “What? Did my family call? Is she sick?”
Alma shrugged. “Nobody called,” she said, and patted the hood of Elena’s car, then drifted away, putting her arms into the sleeves of a dark blue sweater. For a long moment, Elena watched her, wearing those odd clothes and the too-tall shoes and swinging her skinny arms, and wondered if she was a ghost, another vision of something Elena had conjured up.
But apparently, everyone else could see her, too. A man slid sideways as she passed, and turned to admire the swish of her tiny bottom beneath the skirts. A girl shook her head at the strange clothes. No, Hector’s sister wasn’t a ghost. She was just an eccentric.
Elena started the car. She would call her mother later. First, she had to get somewhere warm, call the massage person, get some sleep. She thought she would keel over from exhaustion if she didn’t sleep.
She had no choice but to return to Julian’s, but there was no one there when she rang the bell, so she punched in the security code he’d given her and went in through a side door. Alvin found his crocodile and carried it downstairs, looking for Portia, and he didn’t come back up. Elena climbed the stairs, one excruciating stair at a time, focusing not on the pain but on the sound of the water falling from the upper level, on the silver-ribbon beauty of it, and the tremendous effort it took to raise one foot, then the other.
In one part of her brain or heart or soul, she recognized that these issues were getting worse. She’d always had days when cold or overwork or a bout of the flu made everything hurt. Or rather, hurt more, since she pretty much had some pain nearly every day. The walking helped keep her in motion, and she’d had plenty of that here. Aspen proper was not a large place, and both her condo and the restaurant were centrally located, so she walked several miles every day. In the past, that would have been enough.
It wasn’t now.
One step. One more. One more. She leaned on the railing and focused, just as she had long ago when she’d first tried to move around again, nearly eight months after the accident. They had not been entirely sure she would walk. Then they hadn’t thought she would walk without limping. She’d proved them wrong.
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