It’s a promise they made to us when we started high school—as long as our college plans are set for the autumn after our graduation, they’ll send us on a European trip for a month with one of our friends. I want it for Lionel. He needs that trip next year. Something to look forward to.
Saul is quiet. Too quiet, and I think he’s doing that thing where he pretends to be preoccupied with traffic when he doesn’t know what to say. But then he sighs. “That’s on hold for now, Suzette.”
“On hold? But it’s a year from now. You don’t think—”
Saul’s cell phone rings then, sitting in the console, and his relief at not having to continue the conversation is palpable. Which I hate. He said he’d be honest with me about Lionel, but he still doesn’t want to answer my questions.
He asks me to look at the screen for him.
“Ora?” I say, squinting at the last name.
“I’d better get that. The guys just delivered to her this morning.” I pick up the call and put it on speaker while Saul gets his client voice ready. “Ora! How’s that table working out? Beautiful, right? Looks perfect in the space?”
The woman who called sounds as if she’s wringing her hands. Like so many people in L.A., she has a slight accent, a lyrical way of saying certain words that makes me think she grew up speaking Spanish, too. Saul pulls over to the side of the road, across from the lake, as he listens to her describe a strange patch on the table he made. We aren’t anywhere close to LACMA and I don’t think we will be anytime soon, which is confirmed when Saul offers to swing by and take a look.
“Sorry,” he says once Ora has hung up the phone. “Slight detour. You into flower shops?”
“I’m not not into them.” But people who are into flower shops seem like the people who would buy or receive flowers often, and I fall into neither category. Flowers seem inherently romantic, and I’m still a novice in that area. “Flowers are just so… temporary.”
“Ah, you are your mother’s daughter,” he says as he does a clean U-turn to reroute us. “The first time I bought her roses she said she hoped they weren’t a metaphor for our relationship because they’d be dead in a week.”
“Ouch.”
“She’s a tough sell, kiddo,” he says with a shrug.
The flower shop is a couple of miles away, in Silver Lake, near Emil’s house. Like most of the shops in that area of Sunset Boulevard, it’s part of a strip mall, linked to an upscale coffee shop on one side and a denim boutique on the other. The sign on the storefront is white with green script, advertising CASTILLO FLOWERS. A flash of orange in the front window catches my eye and I look over to see a fat ginger cat sunning himself, his stomach stretched out in all its fluffy glory.
A bell rings over the glass door as we walk in, and the first thing I notice is how cramped the shop is. Nearly every surface is bursting with rows of flowering bushes and potted plants and tropical flowers. The air is perfumed with a variety of scents that should conflict with each other but blend seamlessly into a fresh, clean fragrance.
What I notice next is the girl sitting behind the counter. I recognize the curves of ink that wind around her arm, and the black curls that fall just below her shoulders. And, of course, her purple lips. Rafaela. My stomach flips.
She hops off her stool when we walk in, but her expression is neutral, no recognition present. Her eyes only briefly sweep over my face before she looks at Saul and smiles. “You’re here about the table, right?”
“Indeed.”
He’s barely gotten the word out of his mouth before a woman comes bounding through the swinging wooden door that separates the shop from the back room. She’s wearing an apron over denim overalls, and her black hair is pulled into a messy, silver-streaked bun. She comes right over to Saul with arms outstretched and squeezes his forearms in a detached sort of hug.
“Thank you for coming. I realized I never said I love the table—I do love it, but it’s just that patch…”
“Ora, I’m glad to take a look at it.” Saul pats her shoulder when she lets go of him. “The shop was on our way, right, Suzette?”
Both Ora’s and Rafaela’s eyes shift toward me. I nod.
“This is your daughter?” I wait for Ora to ask all sorts of personal questions or make an inappropriate comment about how our skin colors don’t match, but she simply beams. Does that weird non-hug thing to me, too, and says, “Well, he never told me you were so beautiful.”
I smile back at her and try not to glance over at Rafaela.
Ora looks at her. “Help Suzette pick out something—anything she wants.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I start to protest. “I mean, that’s very nice, but I—”
“Beautiful girls should have beautiful flowers,” she says as if that’s the end.
And it is. She leads Saul to the back of the shop, babbling about the table as they disappear behind the swinging door.
“Beautiful girls should have beautiful flowers,” Rafaela mutters from her post. I don’t know if she’s mocking Ora or the fact that she said it about me, but then Rafaela catches my eye and smiles.
I hope she can’t see how embarrassed I am. “She’s just being nice because of my… Saul.”
“Your Saul?”
“He’s with my mom but they’re not married, so he’s not really my stepdad,” I say in one breath. It’s easier to have some answers prepared.
“Oh. Well, my aunt Ora doesn’t just tell people things they want to hear.” She strides over to the cat lying in the window, and I remember how she said she dated Grace, and I wonder, with an intensity that only makes my face hotter, if she endorses her aunt’s statement. “So, you just disappeared at that party, huh?”
She does remember me. I move to the display of tropical flowers and examine their vibrant petals. “I… Sorry. It was my first night seeing everyone, and I got dragged away…”
The truth is that I practically ran into Tommy Ng’s arms when he wandered by us. I couldn’t tell if Rafaela was flirting with me or if it was going to go there eventually, and I’m not used to doing that—liking a girl in public. Everything with Iris was behind our dorm room door, or in town when we were sure none of the girls from our hall would see us. And even then, we weren’t careful enough.
“Well, you heard about the drama?” Rafaela picks up the cat, who meows with his eyes closed and doesn’t complain when she holds him like a baby, rubbing her cheek against his fur. “This dude I dated for, like, two seconds showed up wasted, acting like a complete asshole.”
“That was about you?” We’d all had a few drinks by then and that part of the night was a little hazy, but I vaguely remember DeeDee proudly stating she’d kicked out some randoms. And I guess I’m surprised to know that Rafaela used to date guys, too.
“Yeah, some jerk from the Palisades. I thought we were just having fun, nothing serious… but he’s taking this thing to stalker levels.” Rafaela shakes her head.