“You mind if I go to Windsor for a couple days to help Carlos out, Mr. Snow?” Jimmy said as the two men collected their tools. “Drywall for this last house ain’t coming in until Friday, and Carlos got a restaurant heating job.”

“Help Carlos out,” I said.

The two men unplugged and boxed up the three personal assistant units they had installed in the house. Then Jimmy scrubbed any memory of Ginger from my router before both men left, one of them five dollars richer.

I was in the middle of steam cleaning my face by hovering over a pan of chicken, shrimp and oyster paella (no mussels—too much work for too little return) when my phone rang.

“Octavio!” Elena said. “Do you have a moment?”

“For you,” I said to my beloved godmother, “always.” I sprinkled a bit more cayenne pepper into the aromatic mix.

“You think perhaps you could come with me tomorrow morning to Authentico Foods to meet with Mr. Ochoa?”

“Old man Ochoa?” I said. “What’s going on?”

“He has some sort of business proposition for you,” Elena said. “Plus, Jackie will be there. You remember Jackie.”

I did; she was my unrequited middle- and high-school crush and a teen-in-heat top of the list at Saturday confession.

“I’m sure you’d like to see her.”

“I’d love to see Jackie,” I said, slowly stirring my concoction. “But to be honest with you, Elena, I’m not much on expanding the Snow business empire, or investing in someone else’s.”

“He’s dying, August,” Elena said with sincere gravitas. “Por favor.”

“I’ll drive,” I said.

“No, querido,” Elena said. “I’ll drive.”

2

2

When I was a kid, the only reason I liked Mr. Ochoa was that my mother liked him.

Or rather, she “understood” him.

While my cop father patrolled the potholed streets of Detroit, my mother—during my school hours—had worked as a batch mixer at Mr. Ochoa’s corn and flour tortilla business in Mexicantown. Between my second and eighth grades, Mr. Ochoa’s business grew from a cramped Mexicantown storefront mom-and-pop to a major Midwestern-restaurant supplier of tortillas, restaurant-branded salsas and specialty blended tomato-and-queso white sauces—all organic because Mr. Ochoa didn’t know any other way.

My mother, having worked for Mr. Ochoa and his wife, Esme, since the beginning, was promoted to a quality assurance position, watching over a small team of bakers and packagers, ingredient inventories, cooking equipment and Ochoa family recipes, which she both protected and executed like a culinary guardian angel.

“He’s from the old days,” my mother used to say to my father, who had little regard for Mr. Ochoa. “Not as enlightened as one would hope. Not as bad as one might think.”