MANA: Tastes like Beer.

Technically, this takes place BEFORE the last posting, but there you have it. And I'm not entirely pleased with the quality of my writing here, tying up loose ends so I can get back to the Mana I know and love which involves far more horses. YAY.

The Mana Farms story line frequently contains mature language, topics, and situations. The characters within are fictional beings with weaknesses and faults, and I cannot promise you that you will like them for what they believe, say and do. This particular segment has VERY strong language in the beginning. Just a heads up.

Join the community of MANA readers! Start from the beginning. (New readers, it is strongly recommended you begin this series from the very first story...which can be found here: [link] ) Thanks!


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It was funny...the simple things she thought of on the drive home from LAX. Instead of Laurence’s eyes when she told him it was over, she thought about the laundry that needed to be done and how she would bury her face in her warm clothes when they came out of the dryer. Instead of why she had taken Brett’s hand on the flight home, she wondered if Marianne next door had remembered to feed the neighborhood stray cat and if the case of almond milk in her refrigerator had already gone bad. Instead of the cure Brett had offered, she drove by a redbox and debated picking up a movie. Maybe the one where the muscled man gets revenge on the villainous crime lord who murdered his wife or the romantic comedy about the dog walker. Or maybe that documentary about the science of being happy.

Almost home, Santa stopped at the corner Mexican market several streets down from her neighborhood; the one with the hot flat roof and the kids smoking cigarettes outside the two front doors. She got out and grabbed a shopping cart. Maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t stayed in New York with Laurence. She loved the familiarity of Southern California. The hot dry air with the occasional gust of humid sea. The lights of Interstate 5 pumping down the torso of California like a red hot artery, and the little Mexican markets stocked with local produce and chicken feet and pork rinds in vinegar. The floors smelled of pine sol freshly swabbed down the aisles, and the produce section of ripe thick-skinned oranges and crimson strawberries dripping juice. She picked up a papaya, heavy and bruised, and smiled as she dropped it into her cart. She placed three yellow onions into a bag. She cradled the papery skin of a fat green tomatillo, bought a small glass bottle of grapeseed oil, chatted to the cashier in mutually fluent Spanish, got back into her car, and ten minutes later pulled into her driveway and realized she forgot the almond milk.

Dropping her head into her hands, Santa wondered whether Laurence was doing the same. Was he standing outside the door to his apartment in New York and cursing himself for forgetting the milk? And Brett? What was he doing? Was that skinny shirtless bastard standing there in his kitchen staring at an almost empty refrigerator, save the neglected orange juice now reduced to primitive beer (and coincidentally sitting beside actual beer)? Had Eddie forgotten where his sunglasses were?

Or worse...,she thought, what if they weren’t? What if Laurence was enjoying a glass of almond milk himself, reading a paper and laughing at Jon Stewart on the television. Maybe instead of sitting in his car rereading his receipts to see if he’d bought the milk and just left it behind by accident, he was sitting at his dinner table, sipping at a glass of red wine and relishing a fat juicy steak? What if Brett North had simply walked into his home, pulled off his shirt, taken a shower, and fallen right to sleep without so much as a second thought to Therese, or Meagan, or her?

With an angry snort, she grabbed her groceries from the backseat and climbed out of the car. She stopped in front of her gate, with the little fountain tinkling and the ivy growing up the walls and stared at the house that had belonged to the only man she had ever needed. Or at least, she concluded, that’s what she kept telling herself. She slipped the key into the gate’s keyhole and stopped. There was smoke. It didn’t smell culinary, like someone barbecuing in their backyard or electric like an overworked clothes dryer. It was the spicy sweet smell of a man and his cigarettes. With a curious step through the gate, she carried her groceries inside the courtyard and pressed her nose to the heavy wood of the front door. Cigarettes, yes, but it wasn’t the familiar safe smell of Max and his fancy imports long soaked up by the cedar and brick of the house. This smelled like six years ago, like Colombian weed hidden in the mountains, wet and sweet and criminal. It smelled like Rocco.

“A nose like a hound,” he whispered from the bench beneath the ivy, “but eyes like a mole rat.”

Whatever words might have come out dissolved on her tongue instantly.

“Here, let me help you,” he murmured, flicking the remnants of his smoke into the potted cactus beside him. He padded over to the bags she had dropped and gathered them up into his arms, opening her already unlocked door with a twist of the knob and a gentle kick.

Santa didn’t need to ask him how he’d gotten in. Or why Marianne the neighbor hadn’t called on him. It was Rocco. She stood there and watched numbly as he walked into the home she had shared with Maxwell and made a practiced right turn into the kitchen. Santa’s chest went cold, as if she had accidentally swallowed an ice cube. Not only was he in her home, but he had been here a long while. Possibly since she’d left for New York.

“You’re letting the moths in,” he shouted from the island where he was unloading her bags. She followed him and stared as he placed the papaya on her counter, put the grapeseed oil on the bottom shelf of the pantry next to the vinegars, and opened her fridge with his dexterous toes.

“You seem to know your way around my home.”

“Funny you should say that, no?” he answered with his head in her refrigerator.

Santa did not get the joke and knew she did not want to. She glanced at the phone in her hand and when he popped up from over the refrigerator door he followed her eyes.

“What? You going to call the authorities on me? On your husband? What would the neighbors think, dulce?”

“Rocco.”

“Maria,” he stared at her over the fridge door, “But they do call you Santa now.”

She sat down at the kitchen table, stiff and cold and paralyzed by something other than fear, something only vaguely remembered. Rocco pulled a couple of bottles of beer from the fridge; leftovers from Laurence proudly wearing the badge of Canada on their labels. Rocco popped the lid as quick as an otter with an oyster, without even a hiss, and passed it to her, cold and frothing. His small brown eyes watched her closely as she accepted the beer and drank long and deep because there was nothing else to do. She dropped her cell into her purse and closed her eyes. Yes. This was what it tasted like, this paralysis at her own table in her own home. It tasted like beer, like ten thousand years of acknowledging that life could be cruel.

Rocco cracked her a smile and then he laughed, tilting Laurence’s beer to her, as if in a nod of a approval. “You are still beautiful, I see. That is a good thing to see. I had heard it. I see it on the television too. And now, here you are, in the flesh again and you are still beautiful. Horseracing it is good to you.”

Santa looked at him. Rocco had always had the thick dark hair, prominent cheeks, and long rectangular jaw of the Kuna. He had a beautifully sculpted nose, like something smooth and round from a South Pacific statue, full lips, and skin as rich and dark as cocoa. His mother had been albino, he said, common for a Kuna, and sacred. A protectress of the moon from the dragon that might swallow it up, but a white paladin who nonetheless could not stop another dragon from devouring her own son. “You too,” she whispered.

“You lie, belleza,” he countered with a dangerous smile, and his gold tooth glittered. “You were never good at lying,” he took a long relaxed look around the house, “but you were always a very good thief. And it seems to me, a very patient one.”

“I learned from the best,” Santa replied, “I learned from you.”

“Yes,” he replied, “And we know, yes, how it was you rewarded me.”

Her eyes traveled around the house with him now. Nothing was missing, but all of it had been touched, picked up, examined. Maxwell’s books, the ones she had left just as he had left them, had been moved. His love letters to her, dozens of them, yellow and fading, had been taken from the box by the nightstand, opened and scattered on the coffee table in the living room. Max’s trombone was stretched across the couch like a raped woman, long and brassy and used; the mouthpiece in place. There were fingerprints on his framed photo over the fireplace.

“I see you met Max.”

The phone rang and Santa almost stood to get it, but his hand flew out like a snake, clamped down on her wrist, and in his eyes was a warning. “Don’t bother, mami, the machine will get it.”

She looked over her shoulder and then back at him. The phone rang again.

“Let the machine get it.”

Santa sat back down, slowly.

“Santa.” It was Laurence on the machine. His voice was thick. He had been drinking wine, Santa suspected, but not with a big fat juicy steak. “You should be home now. Your plane. I thought we could talk.”

Rocco raised an eyebrow, he gave a low whistle. “So controlling, no?” he whispered in accusation.

Santa met his eyes.

Rocco grinned, “If I did that, what would you have done?”

“Santa call me. No. I’ll call your cell.”

Rocco shook his head. “I know what you would have done,” he said, strengthening the vice on her wrist, “You would have left me behind.”

Santa’s purse began to buzz on the table beside her. She looked at Rocco and he stared right back.

“Let go of me.”

Her purse buzzed urgently between them.

“Si, you are right, that is what I should do. In fact,” he smiled and let her go. “That is what I came to do.”

Santa froze as he got up slowly and walked to the coffee table, where he grabbed a stack of papers stapled to one another and held them up for her review. The phone in her purse stopped buzzing.

Santa took the papers from his hand and scanned them. A choke of relief ripped through her throat, “What?”

“You want a divorce. I can do. You might say I have made myself acquainted with your assets.”

She glanced up at him. “How....What do you want?”

He smiled thinly, and a ripple of glee passed over his features. “I want the house.”



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