I replied yes without even stopping to think if I should.
Now Bo stands in the kitchen next to my mom, who’s still sipping on her coffee. She makes a show of turning her back to him and wiggling her eyebrows at me.
“I’m going to Bo’s to study, Mom.”
Her cheeks are so red she could be drunk. “You two behave.”
Bo slides the door open and waits for me to walk out first.
“Don’t you forget to get that quote from your dad, sweetie!” she yells to Bo in a singsong voice.
We round the corner into the driveway. “What was that about?” I ask.
“Uh, yeah.” He motions to my house. “We were talking about that front door. My dad, he’s a locksmith. But he fixes doors a lot, too.”
We drive in silence for a while before I say, “My mom’s a total nut. I’m sorry.”
“You guys look alike.”
I try to swallow, but my mouth is dry as can be. No one’s ever said that about me and my mom. It was always Lucy. You look just like your aunt. I’m not ashamed of that, but I like the idea of looking like my mother’s daughter.
“In a good way,” he says.
Based on what Bo told me about him being on scholarship, I figured he didn’t live in a new neighborhood, but I wasn’t quite expecting this. His house—with its well-maintained lawn—sits on a street of sagging roofs, chipping paint, and overgrown yards.
Bo pulls into the crumbling driveway. “This is my place.”
I follow him up the walkway to the front door, which has a hand-painted sign hanging from it that says: Unless you’re selling cookies, no soliciting, please.
Bo’s house is warm, but not uncomfortably so. It’s one story, and considerably smaller than mine. The furniture is at least two decades old, but it all matches. I wonder what it must be like for his stepmom to live in the house his mom made.
The place smells distinctly of incense, which doesn’t at all match everything else. I wonder if maybe my house smelled anything like me to Bo.
I don’t know where I expected Bo to live, but it was not here.
“Let me introduce you to my stepmom.”
I follow him the short distance from the front door to where the incense is burning in the kitchen. Bo’s stepmom is cursing at the ice machine in the freezer. A small puddle of water with stray cubes of melting ice floats at her feet. She’s not as polished as she was when I saw her at the mall, but she’s still pretty in a way that my mom isn’t. In an unprepared way. Without the manicures and the makeup and the hair spray.
“Loraine,” says Bo, “this is Willowdean.”
She whips around with a big steak knife in her hand. “Oh!” She laughs and drops her arm to her side. “The girl with two names. I remember you.” She turns to Bo. “The one from work?”
Bo nods.
She smiles and hugs me with one arm. Not the knife-carrying arm.
He coughs. “Everything okay with the ice maker?”
She holds the knife up again, like she’s about to stab something. “Oh, just all frozen inside. Trying to break some of it up so your dad doesn’t have to deal with it. He got called out on a job during breakfast.”
“We’re going to study in my room,” says Bo.
Loraine’s eyes bounce back and forth between us. I’m waiting for her to say something like, Maybe you should study out here or Leave the door open. Instead she says, “Let me know if you need anything.”
His room isn’t dirty, but lived in. There are traces of him at every age. Posters for bands I’m surprised he’s even heard of, a basketball on his desk with a few signatures, a bowl of red lollipops of all kinds, one of those corner ceiling hammocks filled with stuffed animals, and a framed San Antonio Spurs jersey.