Wait for It

I do not usually have the patience for six-hundred-page romances. My position has always been that a slow burn is an excuse writers give themselves for padding, and that most of the tension in the genre can be built in three hundred pages and one good kitchen scene. A friend who knows my position exactly pushed this book at me anyway, with the argument that Zapata is the one who does it right. I finished it at two in the morning, which I would like on the record.

The book was self published in December 2016 and runs about 672 pages, which is the length of two normal novels and, as it turned out, the reason it works. There is no way to tell this story fast. Diana Casillas is a twenty-nine-year-old hairstylist in Austin who has been raising her two nephews for two years, after her brother Rodrigo died and their world fell apart, and the whole book is the sound of a woman who has been keeping six plates spinning suddenly meeting a seventh. You cannot rush that. You can only make the reader live in it.

If you know Zapata's other books, the texture will be familiar. If you do not, the important thing is this: the romance is not the plot. The plot is a family holding itself together, and the romance grows in the gaps like grass through sidewalk cracks.

The bat and the stranger

The book starts with a woman and a baseball bat, which is as good an opening as the genre has produced. It is night. Louie, the five-year-old, wakes Diana to say there are men fighting outside. Diana, who has been the adult in this house for two years and has the reflexes to prove it, grabs the closest weapon, which happens to be a child's baseball bat, and charges out the front door in her pajamas to break it up.

What she finds is three men beating up a fourth, which she breaks up with the bat and a very loud voice. The victim turns out to be Jackson Walker, brother of Dallas, the new neighbor across the street. As Diana walks him home to make sure he gets there, the door opens and there is Dallas Walker in his boxers, a big, tired, handsome man with a face that is not friendly about the commotion.

Diana notices the wedding ring immediately. That detail is the axle of the whole book's first act. She writes him off on the spot, mostly because she has a policy about married men, and partly because she has a broken internal compass about men in general, from an old relationship the book doles out slowly and carefully.

The first meeting goes badly in exactly the right way. Dallas misreads her friendliness as flirting and shuts it down, which stings. Diana, who does not flirt, is indignant. When he comes over to apologize the next day, the two of them get the misreading sorted out and establish the terms that will govern the next five hundred pages: he is separated, the divorce is in progress, and he will not so much as date anyone until the papers are signed, because he takes the marriage he is ending seriously. Which means, for now, they can be friends.

I appreciated how unromantic their friendship agreement was. It is not a meet-cute disguised as a truce. Diana genuinely writes him off and starts treating him like the harmless neighbor he claims to be, and Dallas genuinely does not pursue her, which is why the slow burn can be slow without being stupid.

Baseball, and the boys

The connection that changes everything is, of all things, baseball. Dallas, it turns out, is the cousin of Ginny, Diana's friend and the owner of the salon where she works, and he coaches a competitive travel baseball team in his spare time. He sees Josh, the older nephew, hit at the local park, sees the force in it and maybe the anger too, and invites him to try out. Josh makes the team. Which means that Dallas Walker, a former Navy man now working as a contractor, drops into the center of the Casillas household's weekly rhythm and does not leave.

The boys are the best thing in the book. Josh is eleven, guarded, sharp-tongued, still raw from losing his father, and he considers Dallas's interest in him the way a dog considers a friendly hand held out: approaches, retreats, checks again. Louie is five, openly affectionate and open in his grief in the way only small children are, and he attaches to Dallas almost immediately, with the blunt loyalty of a kid who has decided something and will not be discussing alternatives.

Diana watches all of this with her heart in her mouth. Her parenting has been a two-year emergency, organized around money and scheduling and keeping the wheels on. Now a man who is good at being stable is standing in her kitchen making her kid laugh, and her son, the closed one, the one who would not talk about feelings, is following him around. She is not jealous. She is scared, in several directions at once, and the book lets her sit in the fear without rushing her through it.

Diana's ledger

A word about what Diana is carrying, because the book is honest about it and that honesty is why the 672 pages do not feel padded. The house is new and the mortgage is real. The salon pays hourly. The boys need shoes and food and school forms and Josh needs to be driven to practice, and every one of those facts is a line item in a mental ledger she runs in the shower. Her parents are loving and loud and critical, especially her mother, whose one reliable move is to suggest that Diana is doing it wrong. Her brother's absence is a hole in every family gathering, and the book never lets you forget that grief is not a phase; it is a roommate.

She is also, in the good tradition of this author's heroines, very funny. Zapata writes her as a woman who swears in her head and bakes when she is anxious and will fight anyone, at any size, in defense of her kids, including a coach who wants too many practices. The humor is dry and constant and it does most of the work of making the length comfortable.

And she does not trust easily, for reasons that arrive in pieces. There was a man before all this who organized her world so thoroughly that when he was gone she had to re-learn her own opinions. That history is why the ring mattered so much on the first night, and why even after Dallas has explained himself, she keeps one hand near the exit for a very long time.

The night with the migraine

If you read one chapter of this book to decide whether to commit, read the migraine night. Diana gets a full-body migraine, the kind that ends the day, and Dallas, who was coming over for something ordinary, takes one look at her, sends the kids to help him in the kitchen, and cooks dinner for the entire household without being asked and without making it weird.

Then, later, after the boys are down, Diana sits on her porch and falls apart about Rodrigo, because grief does that, it waits for an empty evening. Dallas does not fix it. He tells her about his own father, who died after an illness, and he tells her, plainly, that she is doing a good job with the boys. That is the whole scene. It is not a kiss; it is not even flirting. It is the moment the book stops being about a handsome neighbor and starts being about two tired people choosing each other's burdens, and everything after it is downhill in the best way.

Readers who say the romance in Zapata books is sexless have not paid attention to scenes like this. The physical part of the relationship arrives late, and the book warns you it will. What arrives early, in pounds, is care: chicken soup, rides to practice, an extra plate at dinner, an offer to pick up a shift.

The slow burn, in its natural habitat

The middle of the book is months of ordinary life, and I want to be fair here: this is where some readers bounce. The characters text. Dallas helps with yard work. Diana cuts hair at the salon, including free cuts for Miss Pearl, the elderly neighbor. Josh has a birthday party that fills the yard with relatives and food and a rented bouncy castle of some kind, and the book spends pages on it, because it is the kind of afternoon Diana will remember when she is old. Louie says something devastating and hilarious every forty pages or so, and the household absorbs Dallas so gradually that the neighbors stop asking.

Two mid-book beats deserve the space they get. The first is a fire at Miss Pearl's house, where Louie, of all people, is the one who keeps his head and calls for help, and Diana runs into a burning building for a ninety-year-old woman without appearing to consider an alternative. It is not a plot point, exactly. It is a character X-ray. The second involves Jackson, Dallas's brother, who is drifting badly, tangled up with the wrong people, and whose crises keep testing Dallas's belief that you do not abandon family. Dallas says one line about his brother that I have thought about for weeks: that he is the only one Jackson has left. The book treats Jackson's mess not as a subplot to resolve but as a weather system the family lives under.

That is about as much plot as the middle has, and your experience of it will tell you whether this book is for you. I found it absorbing. The best chapters have the texture of a really good television series about a household, where the tension is not whether anyone will be caught, but whether everyone will be okay.

The divorce comes through

The turn, when it comes, is not a grand gesture. The divorce becomes final, which means the only barrier Dallas ever claimed exists is gone, and the two of them have to decide whether the friendship was a waiting room or the destination. The book lets the question breathe. Dallas, when he finally says his piece, says that his feelings grew out of being her friend, that he watched how she treated her kids and her neighbors and Miss Pearl, and that he wants to sign up for the whole thing, not just the pretty parts.

The intimacy, when it finally happens, is late and earned and warm, and afterwards the story keeps going, which I liked. The last stretch pays off the boys. Josh, who spent the book testing Dallas to see if he would leave, decides something different, and Louie, in the most emotionally direct scene in a six-hundred-page novel full of indirect people, asks Dallas to adopt him. If you do not tear up there, check whether you have a pulse. The epilogue is a forward-looking one, with another baby on the way and the household I spent 672 pages worrying about visibly safe.

What works pairing with what drags

The standard criticism of this book is the standard criticism of Zapata: it is long, and the marriage plot arrives at the very end, which leaves a romance reader who wants tension and heat at 60 percent holding 672 pages of dinner plates. All About Romance gave it a B-plus, calling her the queen of the slow burn, and noting that the payoff requires the waiting and will not be everyone's cup of tea. Complaints about the length are legitimate. There are domestic scenes I would defend to the death and two or three I would cut.

But the book's central argument holds: that the interesting part of romance is not the falling, it is the trust, and trust is built out of chicken soup and borrowed trucks and showing up to things. Also worth saying: this one functions as a standalone, but regular readers will catch cameos from her earlier books, particularly The Wall of Winnipeg and Me. Diana's best friend, in fact, is Van, from that novel, and their friendship is one of the small pleasures for returning readers. The 2017 date floating around is the audiobook, narrated by Callie Dalton, not the publication year. The novel, published in 2016 by Zapata herself, is the one to own. Buy it, clear a weekend, and let it be slow. That is the entire proposition, and it delivers.