Buried Beneath by Debbie Baldwin

Author:Debbie Baldwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Three hours later, the adjacent storeroom had turned into party central, music blared and laughter and pot smoke filtered in through the opening. Evan had told Miguel her life story. Well, that had only taken about fifteen minutes. She grew up in California wine country. Her parents had married right out of college and divorced when she was three. Her childhood had been happy but lonely. Had that taken fifteen minutes? Probably closer to fifteen seconds.

Evan wasn’t one to talk about herself. She was shy, at times painfully so. Maybe it was the darkness, maybe it was the fact that this perplexing man seemed receptive, or maybe they simply needed to pass the time. Whatever the reason, Evan had opened like a blossom in their confinement.

She hadn’t learned much about Miguel except that he was secretive. He had grown up on the streets of a village near Bogota and spent most of his life there until he was hired by a man in Suriname to work as a handyman. She assumed it was a handyman; the job description of “fixer” was most likely a translation error.

It was clear he’d led a hard life, different in every way from her idyllic, if isolated, life on the family vineyard. It was also clear he didn’t want to talk about himself. That was fine. She was enjoying just being in his company. Whatever his life outside this cave, in this little cubbyhole, Miguel Ramirez was a kind, attentive, magnetic man. She didn’t want facts to shatter her image of him. So she filled the silence with her own stories.

“My dad was obsessive about the grapes, tending them, protecting them. A bad harvest could ruin us. I’d tag along, and I’d just dig in the dirt. My dad would joke that I looked like a potato he’d just pulled from the ground.”

Evan could see Miguel’s teeth as he smiled, feel his fingers as he brushed her hair from her face.

“And the love for digging stuck,” he surmised.

She held up a finger, indicating that she was getting to the good part. “One day, I was out in the vineyard, and my hand ran across something sharp. I dug it out and showed it to my dad.”

“What was it?” he asked.

“A tooth.”

“That’s it?” She could see Miguel touch his own incisor in the dark.

Evan took his hands in hers and held the palms several inches apart. “A tooth.”

She continued the story. “My dad knew enough to know we should take it to the natural history museum and have someone examine it. Turned out it was the tooth from a Cenozoic-era amphimachairodus.”

Her declaration was met with silence.

“A saber-toothed tiger. Well, not a tiger as we know it, but a saber-toothed cat,” she clarified.

He didn’t speak, but she could see the whites of his eyes.

“I know, right? My dad started researching colleges with the best archaeology programs that afternoon.”

“Your father, he is a good man?” Miguel asked.

“The best,” Evan beamed. “The divorce was hard on him, and we had a very unconventional life, but he’s a great dad.

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