I give my wife a quick swat across her butt as she walks past me in the kitchen. Her head spins around to catch a glimpse at me as she bites her bottom lip but doesn’t say anything else. Then she skips off in the other direction, shaking her ass to entice me even more than I already am…and I’m constantly at my limit when it comes to her.
“Is that all you got,” she hollers back as she turns the corner out into the shop.
“Watch yourself there, neighbor!” I joke. It’s a running joke we’ve had since moving to Portugal that we’re still neighbors. She serves customers in our little cafe and I prepare the pastel de nata, Portugal’s most famous dessert, and orange juice that go like wildfire throughout the day.
Thanks to our investment in property and a business here in Lisbon we were able to get residence visas…with the Portuguese change to our last names to Desilva, which went nicely with, ironically, our very Portuguese first names. I guess we were meant for this place, and there is no guessing if you ask me if we were meant for each other.
An alert pops up on my phone and I take a quick break after our morning rush, taking a look at the Google Alert I set up. More women have come out against the man I killed that night in the window. I don’t feel bad about it, as if I need the justification to have done what I did. Just the fact that he impersonated a police officer and harassed my own wife was enough. And about a week after the event, when she was able to recount things more clearly, she recalled he said something about how he was going to kill me too. When you add in premeditated attempt to commit murder, well that was all the icing on the cake I needed.
“We need one with whipped cream,” Diana says, sticking her head back in the area where I’m cooking.
“Coming right up,” I say, scooping a generous helping of vanilla bean onto a pastel de nata and handing it to her, but before she goes I pull her in for a kiss.
“Hey, I’m gonna spill it.”
“We’ll make them another one. We came here for us anyway, not anybody else.”
“Well, us is about to take on a new meaning.”
The ice cream tub slips from my hands before I can slide it back in the freezer.
“What does that mean?”
She swallows hard, her eyes opening big as the saucers we serve our pastries on. “Remember this morning how I had to go out and get some supplies for the day?”
“Yeaaaah?”
“Well, I got all our normal supplies, but I picked up a…pregnancy test too. I was feeling like something was off.”
“I knew it!” I yell out, jumping up and down. “That first time was a charm. The way our bodies fit together so perfectly. I knew we conceived, knew we bred like the filthy animals we are in the sack.”
“Daniel!” she says, but it’s no use. “The customers are gonna here.”
“I’ll give them something to listen to, to talk abo
ut.”
I scoop my wife up in my arms and carry her out into the area where our customers sit.
“Senhoras e senhores,” I begin, my Portuguese language skills still very much lacking. “Everything is on the house. We’re expecting!”
“O que?” an older fellow says, and I remember that although Portugal has a very high rate of English speakers, not everyone understands my mother tongue.
“Bebê,” I say, taking my hand and placing it below Diana’s chest and extending it outward in a half circle until I reach her belt.
“Bebê? Excelente!” the man says, and the old codger comes and gives me a high-five, American style!
“He learned that watching your American football,” his lovely wife says. The pair must be pushing eighty years old each, and still look incredible. I guess that’s what a life by the ocean, good friends and good family, and a whole lotta days of sunshine will do for you. “But I still don’t understand why they call it football, when they almost never use their feet?” she ponders.
“Me too, ma’am. One of life’s great mysteries, right up there with the chicken and the egg.”
We all laugh and I carry my wife back into the prep room, grabbing a new whipped cream bucket from the fridge and putting a dollop on everyone’s dessert.
“We did it,” I say, giving her a big kiss to the cheers of the crowd. “We left the old behind and we made a life together, starting anew as one.”
“And we love it here just as much as these people love us.”
“Hardly any crime, none to speak of really…a city where we can push a baby in a stroller at midnight down just about any street if we want, so we can smell the fresh ocean breeze, and…”