Still Water East
Copyright© 2026 by Art Samms
Chapter 3
Trevor finds the restaurant by getting lost.
We’re in the rental car, a white sedan that smells like new plastic and somebody else’s air freshener, and he is searching for a marina entrance that his phone insists is “four hundred feet ahead” and has been for the last ten minutes. Lena isn’t with us. She has a video call she’s been scheduling for weeks, one she mentioned only as “a thing with some paperwork,” and she took the laptop out to the balcony with the particular stillness of someone who doesn’t want to be asked about it. So it’s just the two of us, the sedan, and a busy road lined with tire shops and a tropical-fish store, and Trevor muttering at the dashboard.
“It’s right here, ” he says. “The map says right here.”
“The map says a lot of things.”
“The marina’s supposed to be behind that building.”
“That’s a dentist.”
“A dentist with a marina.”
“That’s the most Florida sentence you’ve ever said.”
He swings the car down a side street in frustration, and then, halfway down it, brakes so suddenly that my seat belt locks across my chest.
“What?” I say.
“Smell that.”
I lower the window. Warm air pours in, thick with exhaust and cut grass, and under it, unmistakable, something else: charcoal and citrus, cumin and garlic, grilled meat with a sweetness at the edges. It’s the kind of smell that doesn’t come from a restaurant so much as from someone’s kitchen on a Sunday.
Trevor is already parking.
The place sits at the end of a short strip of stucco storefronts, between a laundromat and a shop that sells phone cases. It’s small, a narrow white building with a green awning faded by the sun and a hand-painted sign above the door. The letters are red and gold, slightly uneven, as though somebody had done them with a steady hand and a lot of patience: CAMILA’S — COCINA PERUANA. Below, in smaller letters, someone has added Ceviche · Lomo · Pollo a la Brasa. The door is propped open with a cinder block. Inside, a ceiling fan turns.
Trevor stands on the sidewalk and looks at it for a long moment, hands on his hips.
“You know,” he says, “we should probably keep going. There’s that place on the Intracoastal with the valet. The one with the raw bar.”
“The one you called a tourist trap.”
“It’s a scenic tourist trap.”
“Trevor. You spent the entire drive complaining that every restaurant on the waterfront charges thirty dollars for a salad.”
“That’s...” He opens his mouth, closes it. “That’s a fair point.”
“You were the one complaining about overpriced food.”
“I’m aware of what I said.”
“And now there’s a place that smells like this, and you want to leave.”
“It doesn’t have a view, Calder.”
“It has a smell,” I say. “I’m going in.”
I’m through the door before he can finish his objection. Behind me, I hear him sigh, and then the soft, defeated scuff of his shoes on the sidewalk.
The dining room is narrow and low-ceilinged, a long rectangle with about a dozen tables arranged in two uneven rows. The walls are painted a warm terracotta, and the framed photographs on them are nothing like the glossy marine art we’ve seen all week: black-and-white shots of a mountain town, a market full of potatoes in more colors than I knew potatoes came in, a woman in a bowler hat and layered skirts laughing at the camera. A shelf above the register holds a row of small clay figures and a hand-lettered card that says Aquí se come como en casa. Here you eat like you’re at home.
A radio plays softly from the kitchen, a trumpet sliding through something that sounds like a love song with an argument inside it. A voice sings along, off-key and unembarrassed.
It’s mid-afternoon, that dead hour between lunch and dinner, and the room is almost empty. Two men in work boots share a plate at the back. A woman with a laptop sits by the window with a half-finished glass of something purple.
“Welcome,” says a voice from behind the counter. “Sit wherever you like.”
I turn.
She’s wiping her hands on a dish towel, and she’s looking at us the way I imagine she looks at everyone who walks in: directly, without hurry, with an attentiveness that doesn’t feel like a test and still somehow makes you want to pass it. She’s mid-thirties, I’d guess. Dark hair pulled back in a loose knot, a few strands escaping. A simple black apron over a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. A small gold chain at her throat. There’s a calm about her that I notice before I notice anything else, the kind of settled confidence that makes people explain themselves more than they meant to.
“Two?” she asks.
“Two,” Trevor says, a little too loudly. “Unless a third shows up. Which she might. Lena. My wife. She’s on a call.”
“Then two, and a chair we can add.” She picks up two menus, thin laminated sheets with a coffee ring on the corner. “Window or back?”
“Window,” I say, and then regret how quickly I said it.
She leads us to a table by the glass, where the afternoon light falls in a long gold bar across the floor. She sets down the menus, then, without fanfare, a small dish of roasted corn kernels, large and pale and salted, and a ramekin of something green.
“Cancha, ” she says, nodding at the corn. “To eat while you decide. And this is ají verde. Careful with it. It looks friendly.”
“It looks like guacamole,” Trevor says.
“It’s not guacamole.”
He dips a kernel anyway. His eyes widen. He chews, swallows, and says, in a reverent whisper, “Okay.”
“I told you.”
“You told me. I didn’t listen.”
“That’s the usual order,” she says, and there’s a small, dry smile at the corner of her mouth that makes me look at the menu very hard.
She doesn’t hover. That’s the first thing I notice. She takes our drink order, an Inca Kola for Trevor because he insists on trying “the yellow one,” and a chicha morada for me because she suggests it without asking whether I want her to, and she steps back to let us read. She returns exactly when we’ve finished and stands with her hands loosely folded, waiting.
“What’s good?” Trevor asks.
“Everything is good. That’s my job.” She tilts her head. “What do you like?”
“Meat.”
“Then the lomo saltado. Beef, onions, tomatoes, a little soy and vinegar. It’s a dish that came from the Chinese immigrants in Lima, and from Peruvian cooks who were clever enough to listen. And you will want the anticuchos first. Grilled skewers. Beef heart.”
Trevor hesitates. “Heart.”
“If you do not like it, I will bring you something else and take it off your bill. But I think you will like it.”
“I’ll try anything once.”
“That is how most of my best customers begin.” She turns to me. “And you?”
“I’ll have the ceviche. And whatever you’d put next to it.”
“Ah.” She nods slowly. “A man who asks the cook to decide. That is brave.”
“It’s laziness.”
“Sometimes the same thing.” She writes nothing down. “I will bring you something small and honest.”
While we wait, Trevor does what Trevor does in any room where someone is being kind to him: he fills the space. He tells her we’ve just arrived from Boston. He says we’re looking at property. Then, because he can’t help it, because eight years of clubhouse conversations have trained him to introduce himself as a résumé, he says, “I used to play ball, actually. Major league. We both did.”
I wince, quietly. I always do.
“Baseball,” she says.
“Right. I was with Boston last. Before that, a few other...”
“Eleven teams,” I say.
“Not eleven. I’m saying a few.”
“It was eleven.”
She looks from one of us to the other, and I wait for the reaction. I know the reaction. It has a shape, I’ve seen it in a thousand restaurants, a flicker of recognition followed by a rising brightness: Wait, I know you, or My husband’s a huge fan, or Can I get a picture for my nephew?
“The Red Sox,” she says. “I know them. A customer of mine, Mr. Delgado, he talks about them every week. He is very sad about them.”
“Everybody’s sad about them,” Trevor says. “It’s a condition.”
“Yes, he says this.” She smiles faintly. “Have you tried the sauce on the table? The orange one. It is made with ají amarillo and a little lime. And the red is rocoto. The red is the dangerous one. Mr. Delgado says baseball is a religion, but he says my rocoto is a miracle, and I think he is confusing the two.”
Trevor blinks. I realize he’s waiting for the follow-up question, What was it like? Did you ever face so-and-so?, and it isn’t coming.
“Do you ... want to hear about the games?” he asks, almost plaintively.
“Of course. But first you should try the sauces.” She taps the table gently. “Everything tastes better when you start with the sauces.”
She walks away. Trevor stares after her with the wounded confusion of a man who has just been outranked by a condiment.
I find that I’m grinning.
“Don’t,” he says.
“I’m not doing anything.”
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