“You’ve never done a rash thing in your life.” This time I do touch her hand. “What if you totally love it?”
Jasmine climbs into the chair beside her mother and leans on her arm. “I’m going to miss you,” she says. “It’s so far away.”
“Aw. My girl.” Stephanie lifts her arm so Jasmine can lean into her shoulder, and kisses her head. “You can call me anytime, okay? Anytime. I will pick up.”
“What if you’re asleep?”
“Call back.”
“Can we have a cat when we get there?”
Steph chuckles. “Maybe.”
Jasmine smiles and lifts her face for a kiss, which Steph drops on her nose. In this, she is not like my mother at all. Sylvia was not affectionate. She wasn’t hostile, but she didn’t like to cuddle and I did. Luckily, my father and grandmother made up for it.
The doorbell rings, and Maui leaps to his feet, barking.
“Come in!” I call.
Stephanie says, “It’s so weird that you live like that, never locking your door.”
Suze peeks around the door. “Am I interrupting?”
“Auntie Suze!” Jasmine cries, and flies across the room. “You’re home! Are you staying? Are you just visiting?”
“I’m staying for a little while.” Suze scoops her up into a hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you, beautiful girl!”
“Want some coffee?” I ask.
“Sure.” Tangled in Jasmine, she walks with the bouncing girl into the kitchen. “Hi, Steph,” she says, and drops a kiss on her head. “You look fantastic, as ever.”
“Thank you. So do you.”
“Auntie Suze!” Jasmine says, leaning on the counter. “I saw you on TikTok!”
“What were you doing on TikTok?” Stephanie says. “I told you not to go there.”
“It was at Ashley’s house. Just for a minute, and we were practicing the TikTok dance, and then I saw Auntie Suze, and then I had to watch.” She plants her palms on the counter and lifts herself up until her feet dangle. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” Suze tangles her hand in Jasmine’s long, curly ponytail, touches her nape. “Thanks for worrying about me, but I’m good.”
“And they said somebody beat you up—”
“Jasmine,” Stephanie says, sharply.
In an echo of her mother, Jasmine sucks her top lip into her mouth. “Sorry.”
Stephanie says, “Go get your iPad and bring it to me.”
“It wasn’t on my iPad! It was on Ashley’s.”
“Now.”
She huffs. “Fine.”
Stephanie waits until Jasmine is upstairs. “I am so sorry, Suze. She doesn’t get it, but I’m sorry you—”
“It’s really fine.” Suze shakes her head.
Stephanie is blushing slightly. She’s dazzled by Suze’s celebrity even when she knows it’s silly, that she’s known her all her life. But she wants to do things right even more when Suze is around than she usually does, and that’s a pretty tall order.
And it’s not like it isn’t easy to be dazzled by my old friend, even now, when she’s wearing jeans and a long-sleeved Henley T-shirt and no makeup whatsoever. In the even northern light of the window, she’s illuminated, the elegant swoop of cheekbones and jaw, those aqua eyes, her still-lush mouth. We’re the same age, so I know she must have done a few things—eyelids, maybe, and her jaw, something to erase the lines on her décolletage. She’s stunningly, staggeringly beautiful, as she always has been. There have been many times over the years that I envied the power that beauty commanded, but it never lingers. I’ve also seen the torture it has conjured in her life. People want to own beauty, make it their own, ruin it if they can’t possess it.
In such simple clothing, her gauntness is accentuated. Her collarbones look ready to set sail. She’s always been a person who lost weight under trying circumstances, something I try not to envy.
Instead, it triggers my wish to take care of her. “You’re staying for dinner, right?” Maybe Stephanie will stay if she knows Suze will be here.
“Oh, yes, please. I haven’t had a home-cooked meal in ages.”
“I made chicken tortilla soup.” Stephanie shakes her head, and I add, “I saved some of the base before I added chicken so Jasmine won’t starve.” The girl has gone vegetarian the past year, part of her transformation into an eco-warrior. “Sure you can’t have a bowl of soup?”
She looks at her watch, then at the window, which is showing plenty of light. “I can have some.”
Suze almost winks at me, and I’m grateful, at least in this moment, for her presence.
Jasmine absolutely loves setting the table—she loves eating at the dinner table, as a family, more than almost anything. We devour soup and freshly fried tortilla strips, Suze and I carefully skirting anything important. Stephanie asks what Suze knows about London, and she offers a few pointers along with her phone number.
Halfway through dinner, Jasmine says, “Did you know this is a tsunami zone? Where would we go if we heard the warning?”
“She’s been deep into tsunamis the past few weeks,” Steph says. “They had a section on them in school. Emergency preparedness week.”
“Tsunamis wouldn’t make it to Portland,” I say. “There are mountains in between.”
“Yes,” Jasmine says, “that’s correct. But it is a tsunami zone here. Where would we go?”
I crumble tortilla strips into my soup. “Where do you think we should go?”
“Straight out the front and up the hill.”
“Very good.”
“But it’s really steep. How would we climb? Especially if, like, it’s raining or something?”
“That’s a good question,” I say. “We can do a trial run if you want.”
“Maybe I do,” she says. “Did you know that a tsunami from Japan reached Oregon after the earthquake in 2011?”
“I didn’t know that!” Suze exclaims. I suspect she does know, but this is why Jasmine loves her. Like my grandmother, and very unlike me, Suze has a gift for loving people as they are. “Did it do any damage?”
Jasmine is only too happy to fill her in, and then Suze brings out her jewel. “You know,” she says, “I was in Sri Lanka when that really big tsunami hit.”
“What? You were? Did you get hurt?”
“No, I was really lucky. I was filming a movie and we were high in the jungle when it happened. Our hotel was completely wiped out.”
“I remember that!” I cry, and an echo of the painful worry I felt when the whole place went off the grid runs down my spine.
Steph scowls. “Maybe—uh—careful?”
“No!” Jasmine protests. “I’m not a baby, Mom.”
“We can talk about it another time,” Suze says, and she’s instantly apologetic. There’s something deferential in the angle of her head, and the way she crumbles a tortilla strip between two fingers. I haven’t seen this in years, and it makes me furious with her brutal father, with the people who attacked her, the media who’ve made her life a misery at times.
“It’s fine, Suze,” I say, frowning a little at my daughter. “I’m sure Jasmine heard all about it at school.”
“I did! Can I go get my notebook? I have all the details in there.”
Her mother nods, wearily. “Sure.” When Jasmine has bolted upstairs again, she says, “She’s so full of everything right now. She carries this notebook with her everywhere—school, swimming lessons, the grocery store, everywhere.”
“It’s exhausting to be a working single parent,” I say, but see immediately that it’s exactly the wrong comment. She can be so prickly and defensive. I don’t know where it came from. Then again, maybe that’s me, too. Not that I like admitting it.
“Oh, yeah, Mom, as I was always very aware.”
“Steph. That’s not what—”
“Whatever. I really do need to go.” She pushes back from the table.
Suze covers Steph’s hand. “Finish your soup, darling girl. Your mom didn’t mean anything.”
Steph settles. Gives me an apologetic look. “Sorry, I’m just . . . freaked.”
“I know.”
Jasmine sails from the foot of the stairs to the table, notebook in hand. “Okay! This is about the tsunami in Japan.” She regales us with a dozen bullet-point details.
“That’s amazing,” I say. “It reached all the way to Oregon!”