“Dad. Seriously. We’re not coming,” I say. “Don’t make us come.”
“It would mean a lot to me,” he says. “I need my girls there. We’re a team. The three of us.” It breaks us both, when he says my girls. And need. And team. When someone leaves a family, the ones left behind pull together and form a thing—a strong, necessary, desperate thing—and even in the worst moments, it exists. Because no moment is worse than the moment when we were all left behind.
The worst thing that happened to us keeps us together in this overwhelming way.
“Please, Dad. Don’t say that,” Arizona says. She’s still laughing, but it’s the terrible kind that comes from her ribs and the pit of her stomach.
“You’re my girls,” Dad says. He has tiny tears in the corners of his eyes. They probably won’t ever come out, but they sparkle there, much smaller than any ring my father would ever buy for anyone, and make it impossible for us to say no.
“Wanna come to my place tonight?” Arizona says. Dad’s left us on the sidewalk so that he can go and meet up with Karissa at some swanky bar that is probably the opposite of Dirty Versailles.
There’s need written all over her face. We would usually spend all night together after Dad’s done something messed up. We like to make lists of women who would be more appropriate than whoever he’s picked. Mary Poppins. Hillary Clinton. The mom from the Berenstain Bears. That therapist he made us go to when Mom left. My sixth-grade teacher. We can do it all night long. It’s one of our rituals.
But Bernardo is texting back and asking me to meet up at this fondue place he knows, where we can dip pretzels in chocolate and bread in melted cheese and we can play footsie under the table and make out by the bathrooms. Or, he says, we can go to his friend’s place and play video games and drink beer and be a Couple in that capital C kind of way. Or we can make out in my basement.
“Oh, I think maybe not tonight?” I say. I know she knows I’m probably going to see Bernardo, but she doesn’t ask about it.
“Right. Got it,” Arizona says. She swallows, and I watch the nothing that she swallowed travel down her throat.
“Tomorrow maybe?” I say.
“Yeah, I don’t know, probably not. I have plans, I think.” Arizona starts applying lip gloss and looking at the archway across the park.
The funny thing is, I’d love to spend the night with Arizona being Arizona and Montana, doing the things we used to do. But doing something new is less painful than trying to do something old and familiar and having it feel all wrong and foreign.
Bernardo doesn’t remind me of all the things I miss or wish I had.
“This is messed up, right?” I say, trying to do a compressed kind of rehashing of the night, like we’d usually do. We aren’t so far from what we used to be that I can’t see it anymore, but far enough that I don’t know quite how to get back there. Like sometimes walking around Manhattan I can see the Empire State Building, and I know it’s north of where I am, but I can’t be sure if it’s four blocks away or fifteen. I’ll try walking there from where I am and end up unable to find the actual entrance. It’s tricky.
“I mean, whatever. I give up,” Arizona says. “You’ve obviously checked out of this whole thing.”
She keeps shrugging and rolling her eyes. It reminds me of Arizona at eleven, when she was really into passive aggression.
“I don’t know what that means,” I say. “You chose not to be around this summer. You chose . . . all the things you chose. I’m following your lead. And whatever. It’s not like I want Dad to marry my friend. I’m not exactly psyched here.”
“But you have Bernardo. So.”
“You’ll meet someone.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. I know it immediately, even though I can’t put my finger on why.
“You’re so much like him,” Arizona says. She sounds sad more than angry, but she walks away without hugging me, and I don’t call after her.
Later that night Bernardo and I dip things in chocolate over a white-tableclothed table, and I feel like I’m in some idea of a romance that I should hate but it feels so, so good. I even forget about the diner and the way Arizona looked at the archway instead of at me and that more and more things are shifting, making this summer a kind of earthquake instead of a vacation.
It doesn’t matter as much, when I’m so busy falling in love with him.
Besides, Arizona left me first.
nineteen