Free Heart of the World by Linda Barnes Page B

her, for chrissake?”
    â€œHey, you watch what you say!”
    â€œAny trouble?” The bartender barely raised his voice. A couple of men at the bar gave me the evil eye.
    â€œIt's okay,” she said, tossing him a forced smile. Then she refocused on me, lowering her voice. “Don’t go getting me in trouble here. I lose my job, I’ll kill you.”
    â€œCome on, Marta, talk to me.”
    â€œWhat's the big deal? I don’t know nothing about where she is. All I know is he writes me a letter, maybe eight, nine months ago, says how he's sorry for not taking care of me better. Is nice, no? After fifteen years, he remembers he gave me a little something to remember him by.” She made a bitter sound, half laugh, half grunt.
    â€œYou have the letter?”
    â€œWhy would I keep it? I don’t still have the money he sent, either.” No? I thought. Not even a little bit, in a sugar bowl? “How much?” I asked.
    â€œYou think I’m folding napkins in a bar and I’m a millionaire? He send a couple hundred, a couple hundred when he's got millions stashed away, maybe billions.”
    There’d been three hundred in the sugar bowl, but the real question was why send Marta a dime? When I’d last spoken to Roldan, he’d said he never wanted to deal with her again. They told different tales concerning their brief time together. Knowing Marta, I’d been willing to take his word for it. Now I reminded myself that just because one side is lying doesn’t mean the other is telling the truth.
    â€œMarta, this can come out in dribs and drabs, take all night, and cost you your job. Why not start at the beginning, tell me what you know, and I’ll leave you alone?”
    She pressed her lips together and considered how to spin the story so she’d come out looking good. A skinny man got up from his barstool and fed fifty cents into the jukebox. Marta, the good hostess, beamed at him to keep in practice, and the speakers blared the opening bars of an oldie named “Sweet Caroline.” I’d never heard it sung by anybody but drunken baseball fans at Fenway Park. I preferred it that way.
    She leaned back in her chair and regarded me coolly. “I get a letter, like I say, signed Carlito. I used to call him that. There's a couple bills tucked inside, and he asks can he send a few things to his girl. Paolina, he means. After that, the letters are only for her. Personal and private.”
    I didn’t believe for a minute that Marta hadn’t read them.
    She held the little birdman up to the dim light. “If he sent her this, I never saw it. You know, the mail, it gets to the house so late I’m already on the way to work. Most girls, you know, they get a present, they show it to their mother, but she likes to keep secrets. She's a sly one. Always, she's like that, even when she's a baby.”
    I knew her before you did. I know her better than you do.Sooner or later every conversation we’ve ever had comes down to that.
    â€œDo you know what it is?” I held out my hand to reclaim the figure.
    â€œIt's pretty,” she said, placing it reluctantly in my palm. “Just some little thing. I don’t know what you call it.”
    â€œSo you’re telling me you got one letter, a couple hundred bucks, and that's it? You weren’t curious. You didn’t want more? You didn’t write back—”
    â€œYou think there's a return address or something?” she said angrily. “There's nothing. Roldan calls the shots, like always.”
    â€œThere was a postmark.”
    â€œMiami. Yeah, big deal.”
    â€œYou didn’t tell anybody you’d heard from him?”
    â€œWho's to tell?”
    â€œHow many times did he write to Paolina? How often?”
    â€œYou mean she didn’t run and tell you all about it?”
    I moistened my lips. The bar was too quiet, the jukebox silent now, the clientele too