fuonlyknew

My eyes kept returning to the bride and groom. Bony elbows linked, they raised champagne flutes, gazing at each other starry-eyed.

“This whole holiday is kind of sad,” I muttered, my gaze fixed on the skeletal couple. If they’d found true love, they discovered it too late. A familiar anxiety prickled through my chest. Nearly three months ago, my best friend Cass and I raised margarita glasses to celebrate my divorce from Manny Martin, Santa Fe’s busiest philandering cop. I was the one to ask for the divorce, and I’m certain I did the right thing. Since then, however, I haven’t worked out a new me to celebrate. I am once again Rita Lafitte. I am once again single. I am also forty-one, living on a café cook’s income, and sharing a 700-square-foot cottage with a teenage daughter wrestling with her own emotions. It’s not exactly the inspiring stuff of women’s magazines.

Flori smiled up at me. “People will know you’re not a local if you talk like that, cariño. Dia de los Muertos is a holiday for the dead, but it’s made for the living. It’s a time of joy, a reminder that death comes to us all and we must enjoy our time in this world.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “And I would be enjoying too, if Gloria wasn’t such a sneaky cheat.”

My eighty-year-old friend had re-launched her rant: her nemesis, Gloria Hendrix, and her alleged cheating at Santa Fe’s Day of the Dead baking contest.

I tried to assure her, but I knew I might be fibbing. “You’ll win this year,” I said, shifting my box of skulls to the opposite hip. “Your pan de muerto is the best.”

That part was true. Flori’s pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, is utterly delicious, and I should know. I’ve eaten loads of it over the last several weeks, readily ditching dieting aspirations for the sake of taste testing. Imagine a French brioche, soft and golden with sinful amounts of butter and eggs. Then imagine that same pillowy bread scented with orange zest and anise seeds and shaped in the form of a toothy skull. That’s Flori’s pan de muerto. Our customers at Tres Amigas Café beg for it, and Flori has taken home blue ribbons in baking contests from Taos to Albuquerque.

The last two years, however, Flori has lost to Gloria Hendrix. That’s where my fib came in. I feared that Flori might be defeated again, and I didn’t like it any more than she did. I wasn’t upset because Gloria was a relative newcomer like me. I didn’t mind that she was from Texas, a state that native New Mexicans like Flori love to loathe. I didn’t even care that she was a flashy socialite who threw around her money and influence. What bugged me was Gloria’s boasting, her bragging about a bread which—if the rumors were true—she didn’t make herself. Word in my culinary circles was that Gloria’s housekeeper, Armida, baked the victorious loaves. So far, I hadn’t sifted out the truth. However, Armida flees across the street whenever she sees me or Flori coming. This, in my mind, is evidence enough of Armida’s co-conspirator guilt.

Flori wasn’t fooled by my words. “I might not win, Rita, and I wouldn’t mind being beaten by Armida if she entered in her own name. She’s comes from a cooking family. Her mother did a fry bread that could make grown Navajos weep.”

She picked up her bag and took off down the street. I had to jog to avoid being bested by a petite octogenarian with bad knees. Flori, however, wasn’t carrying around a dozen extra heads at 7000 feet above sea level.

“It’s the principle,” I agreed, siphoning air through my teeth to hide my panting. “Gloria shouldn’t be bragging about something she hasn’t done.”

“Exactly.” Flori’s mica eyes had a dangerous sparkle. She slowed and looked furtively over her shoulder, as if checking for Gloria and her spies. “I have a plan,” she whispered. “A way for us to catch Gloria and Armida in the act.”

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