What Mateo took from the men in the Escalade was a flash drive no bigger than my thumb, and I found it where a seamstress hides her most precious things: inside a spool of black thread, in my sewing box, under the lid of the old Singer. The man on the phone called himself Mr. Duarte. I said, politely, that I would not hand anything to anyone on the street, and he said he understood, and that he would wait on the curb as long as I liked. I went into the house and locked the screen door, and I watched him through the blinds sip a bottle of water.
Mateo came home at six with a bag of pastelitos from the Cuban bakery on Nebraska Avenue and found me at the kitchen table with the flash drive, the printout from the bank and the photograph from my hallway. He did not even try to lie. He sat down, set the bag between us and told me that for eight months he had worked for a company that sold fake timeshares to old people in Florida and Georgia. The drive held the names and bank logins of nine hundred victims. He had taken it because he wanted out, and because he wanted to give it to the FBI.
“And the cards in my name?” I asked. Mateo looked at his hands. “I owed them twenty two thousand dollars, Abuela. When I tried to quit, they said I had to pay back my training. My credit was gone, so I used yours.” He started to cry. I let him. I made café con leche, which is what Ernesto would have done, and I set the cup in front of him. Then I told him that we were going to do three things before dark: call a lawyer, call the FBI and call Mrs. Figueroa, whose husband was a Tampa police sergeant for thirty years.
A flash drive gave one grandson the length of a Tuesday evening to bring his grandmother back to the truth in Tampa.
I gave my terms to Mr. Duarte and his partner in the middle of my front yard at seven o clock, with Mateo behind me, the sergeant of Mrs. Figueroa on my left and an agent named Rivera from the FBI office on Kennedy Boulevard on my right. I held the spool of thread in my fist. I said that the drive was not for sale, that no one would touch my grandson, and that every victim on that list was about to receive a call from a federal agent. I said I would hand the drive to Rivera and no one else. Mr. Duarte smiled the way a bank smiles.
Mr. Duarte did not shout. He said that his company operated legally, that Mateo was a thief and that I was an old woman who did not understand business. Then Agent Rivera showed him a paper, and his face changed. He said the real owner of the company was a man in Miami of whom he was afraid, that his partner had not been paid since August and that he had followed Mateo hoping to get the drive before the boss did. “Madam,” he said, “I do not want to go to prison and I do not want to go to Miami either.” I said Tampa would suit him better.
The partner, a thin man with a gold chain, saw the spool in my hand, snatched it out of my fingers, meaning to run to the Escalade and drive off before the agent could blink, and he bolted across the lawn with my spool of thread held high. I said, “That is a very good thread,” because I did not know what else to say. Rivera shouted. The sergeant reached for his belt, then remembered he was retired. The thin man jumped the hedge of Mrs. Figueroa in one clean leap and landed on the sidewalk of Florida Avenue.
The sidewalk was full of Ybor City roosters. Our neighborhood has had wild chickens since before I was born, and that evening about thirty of them were crossing toward the dumpster behind the Sedano supermarket. The thin man stepped in the middle of them. Feathers went up. A rooster the size of a cocker spaniel attacked his shoelaces with a fury I have only seen at a church bake sale. The man hopped one way, then the other, and fell into a rosebush. The spool rolled into the gutter and stopped at the shoe of Agent Rivera.
The flash drive led to eleven arrests in Miami and Orlando, and nine hundred victims in three states received money back from a federal fund. Mateo testified before a grand jury. He received probation and a hundred hours of community service at the very bank where Jasmine works, cleaning the front windows on Saturdays. The seven cards were canceled by the lawyer within two weeks. Mateo moved out in the spring, to a small place off Nebraska, and every Sunday he comes for dominoes and does not win a single game. I have never let him. A man has to earn it.
In the name of Ernesto, who passed in 2020, I started the Ernesto Barajas Domino Fund. It pays for credit repair, fraud lawyers and a safe place to go for older people targeted by their own relatives, in Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties. In the first year we helped twenty seven people, and the first was a retired cigar roller of ninety named Mr. Prieto, whose great nephew had taken a reverse mortgage in his name. Jasmine from the bank sends us every case she notices. She keeps a small plastic domino in her drawer and slides it across the counter when someone needs help.
On the porch last Sunday, Mateo set up the table that Ernesto used to play on and shuffled the dominoes in the old slow way. I made the café con leche. We played five games, and I won all five, and when he laid down the last double blank he laughed so hard that Mrs. Figueroa waved from across the street. I took his face in my hands and kissed it. The mango tree had dropped one ripe fruit onto the steps, and the roosters were somewhere nearby, discussing it. It was a very good evening. Ernesto would have told the same three jokes.
