Read Online Yours to Keep by Serena Bell - Free Book Online Page A

him. Canned red beans, bell peppers, onions, tomato sauce, garlic, brown rice, a couple of bouillon cubes. She’d premixed the spices in a plastic ziplock. “Estamos” (she pointed to herself, then to him), “cocinando” (she mimed stirring a pot), “habichuelas rojas.” She held up the red beans and looked up to see his reaction.
    His mouth hung open. “You’re kidding. We’re cooking?”
    She grinned. “For the cooking chapter in your textbook. Do you think your dad will mind?”
    He shook his head. “No.”
    “So let’s go.” She led the way downstairs to the kitchen. “En Español,” she warned him, setting the bag down on the floor and unpacking it. “Todo en Español.”
    “Sí,” he agreed.
    She made him wash his hands and put him to work chopping peppers. “Estás cortando los pimientos.” He was obviously nervous with the big knife. “Síi, es un cuchillo de cocina. Tambien necesitas esta tabla de cortar, ¿síi?” She handed him the cutting board.
    He began to awkwardly dismember the peppers, and she watched uneasily, hoping she hadn’t made a mistake. But he gained confidence quickly. She helped him pull out the cores, showing him how to tap the seeds off the flesh. He tossed the stems and cores in the garbage and said in English, “You tutor my friend Leah, too.”
    “Leah Abrams?” Leah’s mom, Mrs. Abrams, was the nicest of the nice, always ready with a bag of hand-me-down designer clothes in good condition. Ana sneaked those bags into the apartment, divvying up the clothes between herself and her sister, hiding their existence from her brother so that he wouldn’t rant about “rich white people’s castoffs.”
    Sometimes she thought that under different circumstances she and Rena Abrams might have been friends. They had the same taste in clothes and, if the piles of books Mrs. Abrams left lying around were any indication, in reading, too.
    “Leah and her mom are kind people,” she said in Spanish.
    “I’m going to ask Leah out,” he whispered, as if there were someone around who might hear.
    “En Español,” she reminded him.
    “No, I’m going to ask her out in English,” he said, laughing. “To the movies. Do youthink she’ll say yes?”
    “I’m sure she will.” He was a cute kid, when he wasn’t causing trouble. She hoped Leah would say yes to him, even though the thought of an open back channel between two of her tutoring households made her faintly ill.
    She’d bet he hadn’t told his father about his plans. She wondered what, exactly, had opened the rift between Ethan and Theo, or whether it was the natural evolution of father and teenage son. Tensions in her household had grown between her brother and his nephews when Marco hit twelve or so, and Ricky wasn’t even his dad.
    Theo chopped the peppers while she set the beans and broth on the stove and went to work on the onions, sans goggles. She’d finished almost all the other prep work by the time Theo put down the knife.
    “Wash the knife and the cutting board,” she told him.
    “You know, this is the coolest Spanish project ever. You should get a job teaching at the high school. You’d be so much better than the Spanish teachers they have there. They really suck. You’d be great at it.”
    He was so earnest and so naïve that she wished she could tell him the truth: She couldn’t get a job there or anywhere else where a Social Security number was required.
    “I like tutoring.” She did, especially at times like this. The broth and beans bubbled on the stove. The chopped veggies lay in neat heaps on the cutting board. As they worked, she’d pointed to appliances, kitchen implements, ingredients, naming and labeling, making him repeat them. He’d tossed the answers back at her, cheerful, compliant.
    And she felt her own bubbling sense of anticipation for the moment Ethan would walk through the door.
    Ethan could smell food cooking as soon as he came through the garage door into the basement. His