“I figured out where to get you a ring,” Bernardo says a few days later. We’re at Reggio, which I’ve taught him to love so that I can come here with him when everyone else in my family isn’t talking. I need to teach him everything Arizona and my dad do, so that as it keeps falling apart, I’ll still have the best parts.
“I found Janie,” I say to Bernardo while I’m shaking way too much sugar into my latte. “I want to see her. I know it went badly with Tess. I need to do it anyway.” I put her ring back in the drawer as soon as I saw it was hers. It made my finger numb. It was a little too small. And a little too beautiful. And a little too reminiscent of the things I used to think I’d have.
She now works at a rooftop restaurant in Williamsburg.
Finding people is so easy it’s a little scary. They’re close, even though I haven’t seen them in years.
“Perfect,” Bernardo says. “Williamsburg works for the ring too.”
“Janie first,” I say. I need to get her out of my system before anything else. My very first stepmom, whose changes were the most extreme. Her mother visited us once, a little over a year into their marriage, and she didn’t recognize her own daughter waiting for her at Penn Station.
It was awful. Janie waving maniacally while her mother looked everywhere for her skinny, big-nosed, brunette daughter. A pretty mole near her right eye was gone. Her squinting, happy eyes were opened wide and intense. She looked like an alien.
It’s been years since I’ve seen her, so I’m half expecting her to be entirely plastic now. More mannequin than person.
“I think I need to do it alone,” I say. I lost sleep practicing that sentence last night. It’s hard to tell Bernardo I need something other than the thing he wants to give.
“I messed up last time,” he says.
“No, no. You were great. I needed you. And I need your support with this too. But I want Janie to see me. Only me. I want it to be about her and me and things we were and who we are now and . . . I don’t know. Maybe there’s something about the first woman you see in a wedding gown. Maybe it’s that simple.”
“I want to see you in a wedding gown,” Bernardo says, which means it’s okay and I can stop apologizing.
We go to Brooklyn together, and Bernardo finds a bookstore to wander around in while I see Janie. He heads right for the mysteries section, and I think there are so many things I don’t know about him at all. As I’m leaving, he sings along with the Beatles playing over the loudspeaker. He doesn’t hum. It is not quiet.
I add it to the List of Things to Be Grateful For.
I ask the hostess to seat me in Janie’s section.
The menus are huge, and I could still choose to hide behind mine and never actually talk to her.
I decide on a lobster roll with bacon on it, because it’s impossible to think of any greater combination. And for the most difficult moments, it’s always a good idea to have bacon.
Arizona would agree. And I know—with as much certainty as I know that lobster and bacon is a perfect combination—that I should have told Arizona to come with me.
I recognize Janie when she comes over, but only barely. Everything about her is bigger except for her nose and her waist, which are both terrifyingly smaller. Her forehead is a flat, motionless desert. Her hair has grown to three times its size. Her nose looks strange and smushed. Her lips are rosebud red and so inflated I’m sure they could be popped with a needle, like balloons.
She doesn’t recognize me. I order the lobster roll and watch the expression on her face, which doesn’t change except for the light in her eyes, which goes dimmer and dimmer with every passing moment.
“Janie,” I say, when she’s turning away to put my order in.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m Montana,” I say.
“I’m Janie,” she says. But before she’s even done saying her name, she startles herself into remembering who I am. “Montana! Montana? Like, little Montana?”
“Stepdaughter Montana,” I say, like giving myself that title will somehow make her be something special to me. I’m increasingly ashamed by myself and how pathetic I’m turning out to be.
“Are you here on purpose?” Janie says. She looks around like maybe my father is here or maybe a hidden camera is trained on her surprised expression.
“I should totally not be here, right?” I have some kind of PTSD from what happened with Tess. I’m filled with the most humiliating type of regret, and I’m getting out of my seat.
“What do you want?” Janie says. “Did your dad send you? Are you in AA or something? Are you, like, getting closure?” She’s deeply nervous, but not pissed like Tess was. I am trying to remember everything about her and her kids. Little boys, Frank and Andy. They fought over toy trucks and grew from little to not-so-little in the time our parents were married. I feel a deep need to know how they ended up.
“How’s Frank?” I ask. I’m gripping the bottom of my chair and trying to calculate how old he’d be now. Two years younger than me, I guess, so fifteen. He’s a teenager.