Houston, We Have a Problema Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Gwendolyn Zepeda

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: January 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-54363-7

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  About the Author

  for Dorothea Terry

  1

  Dreaming of snakes means someone will die.

  Dreaming of death means someone will get married.

  Jessica Luna was dreaming of a wedding when the ringing phone woke her up.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, chiquitita.”

  She had snatched her cell from the nightstand automatically. Now she rolled and squinted at her glowing alarm clock: 1:17 a.m.

  “Guillermo? What happened?” she whispered.

  “Nothing, chiquitita.”

  Was it still Wednesday? Jessica rolled onto her pillow. Through the window, between the gauzy lavender curtains that looked gray in the dark, the full moon peeked down at her. Her eyes adjusted to the moonlight and ran over the familiar objects in her bedroom — her tall white dresser; the ironing board stacked with clean laundry; the pictures on the wall; her walnut vanity covered with bottles and boxes and lucky cat figurines. She sighed.

  She hated when Guillermo called in the middle of a weeknight. She should hang up on him. She would hang up. “Why are you calling so late?” she said instead.

  “I wanted to hear your voice, corazón.”

  “Okay, well, you’re hearing it. What do you want?” He had never called her corazón before.

  “Are you mad at me, chiquitita? Don’t be. I can’t help the crazy things I do. I’m just a crazy mojado, right? Is that what you think of me?” As always, he sounded completely unhurried. And his accent — that slow, relaxed drawl — wasn’t the nasal singsong of the construction workers that yelled silly things at her on downtown streets. No, Guillermo’s voice came from someplace deeper, down around the mountains and plains west of Monterrey, where he’d been born. He sounded like a stream over smooth rocks. Like syrup on hot pancakes. Like warm fingers down her back.

  “No, I don’t think you’re a crazy mojado.” She laid her head back on the pillow, untangling the phone from her hair and cradling it to her ear. Through the open bedroom door, she heard the refrigerator compressor start its soothing murmur. She felt her heart ease from middle-of-the-night panic down to listening-to-Guillermo calm.

  “Soy loco, chiquitita. Loco para ti. Listen. I’ve been thinking. You and me, chiquitita . . . we should run away to Washington.”

  “To Washington?” she said, like a kindergartner repeating after her teacher.

  “Yes. Have you ever seen Washington in the summer, corazón? It’s beautiful. We should go there to pick cherries. You and me. Leave all those men who are too stupid to appreciate you and go away with me.”

  “Mm . . . I don’t —”

  “We’ll live in a cabin and have all the cherries we can eat. I’ll paint the cherry trees. You can bake a hundred pies. We’ll make love.”

  She let herself imagine it for a moment.

  “We’ll make love and you’ll have my babies. Strong sons to help with the work. Beautiful daughters to help cook the food. They’ll be strong, like you, with big feet.”

  “Hey —”

  “Big, beautiful feet. We’ll name them Jennifer, Heather, Amber, Taylor . . . Madison, Dylan, South Dakota . . .”

  She knew he was just being silly. But it was a nice kind of silly, coming from him. “Have you painted a portrait of me yet?” she asked suddenly, remembering the last conversation they’d had the week before.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “I’m working on it now. It’s a painting of a bottle that is shaped just like you are, on the hips.”

  Before she could protest, he went on. “Something else made me think of you today, chiquitita. A surprise I think you will like. Hunter had kittens.”

  “What? I thought Hunter was a boy.”

  “Yes. You and I both thought the same thing. But Hunter had a secret. Era una mujer,” he said.

  “So are you going to change her name now? To South Dakota, maybe?” she murmured drowsily.

  “No, chiquitita. I could change her name, but it wouldn’t matter. She’s still a Hunter, and she probably has a secret name that we’ll never know.”

  No matter how outrageous his words were, his voice always made her feel the same. She could probably keep warm on the cherry farm with his voice alone. “How many kittens did she have?”

  “Just enough, chiquitita, to eat me out of my house and my home. Come to see them.”

  Sometimes she suspected Guillermo was just pretending that he couldn’t speak or understand English so well. She couldn’t help but think that this was a little game he played so that he’d have one more excuse for not doing what she expected him to do. For instance, he could pretend not to understand when she said, “Call me tomorrow,” or hinted that she would love to go out to a new restaurant for dinner instead of eating tacos at his place, as good as his tacos were. And she was convinced that he didn’t call regularly because he wasn’t ever clear on if and when he should. He simply said, “We’ll talk soon, chiquitita.” She could have made a list of things he said or didn’t say, and what he had “misunderstood,” but then she’d be denying that his accent turned her on.

  She sighed. “Okay. I’ll visit you and the kittens. Whe
n?”

  “Right now,” he said.

  “Guillermo, you know I can’t come right now. I have to work tomorrow.”

  “Come tomorrow, then.”

  Jessica concentrated. The next day was Friday, she figured out.

  The thing was, Guillermo lived out in the boondocks, and there was no such thing as just dropping by for a visit. Once she was there, the minutes would time-warp into hours, and the next thing she knew, she’d be forced to spend the night. Plus, the weekend before, she’d wanted to come over, but he’d been unavailable. His phone had been turned off — whether because he was ignoring her or because he’d forgotten to pay the bill again, she’d never found out. “I don’t know, Guillermo. I’m really busy.” If he really wanted her to come over, she decided, he’d have to try harder.

  “Please, chiquitita. I miss seeing your beautiful face. I’ll cook for you. Stop being mad at me and come over. I promise to make you happy again.”

  Jessica sighed. It was frustrating, the way he expected her to just forgive and forget, over and over again. This time she was mad at him because two weeks before, she’d invited him to accompany her to her friend Marisol’s birthday party. He’d promised to meet her there. Then, as so often happened, he’d failed to show up. A week after that, he’d left her an airy voice-mail apology, with some lame excuse about his truck breaking down. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this sort of thing, either. It was just the last in a long series that she’d put up with it.

  She knew what he had in mind as far as making her happy, if she were to go over to his place. And it wasn’t cherries or kittens.

  “Okay . . . ,” she told him, feeling equal parts resignation, shame, and wicked excitement. “Maybe.”

  2

  Hello, Jessica? Are you awake, girl?”

  “What? I’m sorry, Rochelle. What did you say?” Jessica dropped the pencil she’d been idly twisting through the ends of her hair. It fell onto a pile of papers and big blue files on her desk. She’d spaced out and wasn’t sure if it was a result of a restless night after Guillermo’s call or because her insurance job was far from stimulating. She turned in her rickety orange tweed office chair to give her co-worker full attention.

  “I said it’s almost lunchtime. Are you going out or staying in?” At a faux wood desk exactly matching Jessica’s, Rochelle stretched her purple-polyester-clad legs and idly looked over the instant soup packets in her desk drawer.

  Jessica glanced to the corner of their little room, at Mr. Cochran’s dusty grandfather clock. It had finally hobbled around to noon. “I’m going out. Will y’all be okay without me?”

  “Sure we will, honey.”

  Jessica balanced the last file of the morning on her out-box, then picked up her ancient, blocky phone and dialed the company’s most popular three-digit extension.

  “Tech Support,” said the man at the other end.

  “Hey, sexy,” she whispered. “We still on for lunch?”

  “Of course.”

  “Meet me at the elevator in two minutes.”

  She hung up and reshouldered her bag and violet mockcroc laptop case, leaving her monitor to lapse into its Hello Kitty screen saver. “I’m going to lunch, you guys. See you in an hour.”

  Across the room, Olga looked up from her game of online bingo, a half-eaten SpeedSlim bar at her lips. “Already? Gosh. The morning went by so fast. Who are you going to lunch with today, Jessica?”

  “See y’all! Have fun!” Jessica was out the door.

  At the elevators, Xavier Flores stood waiting in his uniform of blue button-down, slightly clashing striped tie, and black Dockers and wearing his unstylish wire-framed glasses. He stood out among the executives littering the hall, given that he was one of the few men at McCormick who didn’t have gray hair. He was also among the very few people in the company who were under thirty. He would have been really cute if he ever took Jessica’s advice on his clothing, which she offered him all the time for the sake of their friendship. But, as he’d explained more than once, his job wasn’t worth being fashionable for. So she settled for teasing him instead.

  “Nice outfit,” she whispered to her friend. “You look like my old chemistry teacher.”

  “And you,” he whispered back, “look like you busted out of Catholic school.”

  She looked down at her sedate skirt and pastel twin set and laughed. He was wrong, of course. Catholic school students didn’t wear awesome ankle-strap heels like hers.

  The elevator bell rang and they stepped into the tiny mirrored chamber, where one of the younger partner-wannabes was already waiting.

  “Hey, X-Man,” he said. Xavier nodded in return. Jessica saw the freckle-faced broker’s reflection as he looked her up and down from behind and then gave Xavier a sly thumbs-up. Xavier ignored him.

  “We can’t take too long this time,” he told Jessica quietly. “I told Dunson I’d have the new network up and running today.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll eat fast.”

  Once they were safe in Xavier’s Subaru, Jessica brought up the subject that had been on her mind for two days. “Guess who wants to see me tonight.”

  “The salesmen at Macy’s?” he guessed, eyes on the road.

  “No. Well, yeah, probably, but guess who else.”

  “Hopefully not What’s-his-name. The guy you’re supposed to be finished with. What’d he do, show up with a dozen roses?”

  “Well . . . ,” Jessica said. “Not exactly.” Not unless you could count the handful of wildflowers he’d left at her apartment door the week before, while she’d been at work. Sometimes she regretted ever having told Xavier about Guillermo. It was hard to explain her attraction to Guillermo without going into cheesy — or X-rated — details.

  Xavier made a gesture that invited her to come out with the rest of the story.

  “Look, it doesn’t matter how it happened. The point is, he called to ask me out, and I can tell that he’s learned his lesson.”

  “Oh yeah? What lesson is that?” His expression was teasingly skeptical.

  “That I’m the most awesome woman he’s ever met, and that he’d be stupid to let me go.”

  Xavier shrugged. “Oh, okay. Well, there you go, then.”

  Jessica had expected a little more resistance. She’d already had her argument prepared, in fact. No use wasting it.

  “Like you can talk, Xavier. You’ve been trying to get back with Cynthia this whole time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t even. I saw you at her desk last week.”

  Cynthia was Xavier’s ex-girlfriend, who worked on the forty-fourth floor, where they kept the prettiest, most useless assistants for the biggest big shots at McCormick. Jessica had gone upstairs to pick up a file and seen Xavier hovering over her desk like a fly. Although he’d dated her for only two months and had been broken up with her for three, Jessica could tell by Xavier’s perplexed face right now that her suspicions were correct. He wasn’t over Cynthia yet.

  Instead of replying, he got out of his car and walked around to her side to open her door. They were at Taqueria Aztlán, a hole-in-the-wall where they could talk as loud as they wanted about their corporate colleagues and everything else.

  They sat at their usual table and ordered their usual chicken quesadillas. A handful of chips with salsa later, Jessica was ready to pick up where they’d left off. “So tell me. Did you beg Cynthia to take you back?”

  Xavier sighed, but patiently. “Jess, I was at her desk giving her tech support. You know — that thing they pay me to do here?”

  “Is that what the kids are calling it these days? Did you install some hardware?”

  “No. I was checking her system for a virus.”

  “Can’t you do that from downstairs?” Jessica asked, breaking a chip neatly in two.

  “Normally, yes. But she said she had a problem that I had to come see.”

  “I bet she did. And did you see it?”

  “It w
as nothing. She’d unplugged her monitor by accident.”

  Jessica raised her eyebrow. “Xavier, nobody unplugs their monitor by accident. She just wanted you to go up there. What did she say? Do you think she’s trying to get you back?”

  He shook his head as he finished off the last of the red salsa. “Seriously? I think she really is that technologically challenged.”

  Like a genie, the waitress showed up with their chicken quesadillas. Like a devil, Jessica found herself wanting to press further into Xavier’s personal business. She peered at his face over her iced-tea glass. “If Cynthia did want to get back together, would you?”

  “No. I’ve learned my lesson. No more pathetic office romance for me.”

  Jessica remembered when he’d first broken up with Cynthia and spent weeks avoiding her floor altogether. That was when he and Jessica had first started going to lunch on a regular basis, instead of just striking up conversations about coding whenever they met in the break room.

  Jessica knew better than anybody how reluctant Xavier would be to hook up with Cynthia again, or with anyone else at McCormick. However, Cynthia was one of those evil little doll women, with long, long hair and flowery size four dresses. The kind who seemed stupid but were extremely clever when it came to wrapping men around their petite little fingers. Jessica worried about Xavier, because even though he was smart, he was also too nice for his own good. He was always opening doors for women, even if they didn’t appreciate it. He was always incredibly polite and charming with all the secretaries at McCormick, even when they drove him crazy with their ridiculous tech support demands. He was the kind of guy who obviously loved his mother, and therefore he always treated women like gold — even when they didn’t necessarily deserve it. Jessica had the feeling that if Cynthia wanted him back, Xavier might have a hard time saying no.

  Not like she could call his kettle black, though. Not with everything she’d been putting up with from Guillermo. All the times he’d completely flaked on their dates . . . All the times he’d promised to take her somewhere exciting but then failed to follow through.

  Suddenly, as she sat there looking at her sad friend Xavier, the sun streamed through the window and hit her in the head, making her think clearly.

  She wasn’t going to see Guillermo tonight. Deep in her heart, she knew it’d just be more of the same. He’d act as though he cared about her. They’d have sex. She’d go home and he wouldn’t call. Or he’d flake on their next date and give her some lame excuse. It was time to move on. It was time to change the subject, too, Jessica decided.