He’s all right. I should go.
But as luck would have it, right at that very moment a family in the restaurant gets up to leave, and Jeffrey glances over, past them, and those bright eyes spot me before I can duck out of the way. His mouth opens, and then Lucy turns to look at me, too, and through the glass I catch the word sister, and the word annoying, and he jumps to his feet.
I take off down the sidewalk toward my car.
“Hey, Clara!” Jeffrey calls before I get there. “What are you doing?”
I spin back around. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. You haven’t called in months.”
He stops a few feet away from me and crosses his arms over his chest like he’s cold.
“I keep telling you, I’m fine.” Something flickers in his eyes: a decision, albeit a reluctant one. “Do you want to come back with me? I can scrounge you up some free pizza.”
“Well, you know I can’t say no to free pizza.”
“My girlfriend’s in there,” he tells me as we walk back to the restaurant together.
“She is? I didn’t notice,” I say with mock innocence.
He rolls his eyes. “Don’t humiliate me, okay? No stories about me as a kid. Promise.”
“All right,” I say, with a little pout. “No stories about how when you were three you pooped on the neighbor’s lawn.”
“Clara!”
“I’ll be good.”
He opens the door for me. Lucy is still sitting where she was, her eyes curious. She smiles as we approach the table.
“Luce, this is my sister, Clara,” Jeffrey mumbles by means of a formal introduction. “Clara, Luce.”
“Hi,” I say, and give her a little wave, which makes Jeffrey give me a warning look like I’m already making him look bad.
“Jeffrey’s told me a lot about you,” Lucy says as I slide into the booth and Jeffrey gets in beside me.
“Good things, I hope.”
She raises a perfectly defined eyebrow at me and her smile becomes something sassier. “For the most part,” she says.
“Hey, I gotta work,” Jeffrey says, and hops up. “Moroccan pizza?” he directs at Lucy.
“You know what I like,” she says.
He smiles, all sheepish, and goes off to the kitchen. Then it’s just me and the new girlfriend.
“Jeffrey told me you go to Stanford,” she says.
“Yep. Guilty as charged.”
“That’s hard-core,” she says. “I never liked school. I was so happy when I graduated.”
“Graduated?” I’m unable to keep the surprise out of my voice. “When did you graduate?”
“Two years ago,” she answers nonchalantly. She shudders. “I was so glad to get out of that hellhole.”
That would make her what, twenty?
“So, do you live around here?” I ask, while I ponder how weird it feels that my brother’s girlfriend is older than me.
“Yes and no,” she says. “My father owns a tattoo parlor on El Camino, and I like to hang out there, and the guys who work there have a pizza thing, so I come by here fairly often.”
“Wait, I thought Jeffrey said that your dad owned a club.”
“That too.” She smiles. “He has his fingers in a lot of pies.”
I’ve never understood that expression. It has always seemed vaguely disgusting to me.
“So there’s a tattoo parlor in Mountain View? I don’t think I remember that from when I lived here,” I say.
“He opened it few years ago,” she says. “Business is good. People are more open now to the idea of ink as a way of expressing themselves.”
I scan her for tattoos. She’s wearing a metallic-silver shirt/dress and black leggings, black boots, dangly silver earrings. No tattoos, though. She does have a very interesting ring, a silver snake with ruby eyes curled around her right index finger. There’s something about her that reminds me vaguely of Angela—maybe the eyeliner or the dark nail polish.
Jeffrey returns to the table and sits by her side, scans both of our faces before he asks, “So what were you talking about?”
“I was telling her about my dad’s tattoo shop,” Lucy says.