Finally, Seth and I manage to stop messing around and it’s a good thing, too, because just moments later his parents come through the door carrying white plastic bags full of takeout from the House of Beijing, the one Chinese place in the entire East Rockport area. Delicious smells float in with them, and my stomach growls just a little.
“Vivvy?” a female voice asks, and I stand up from the couch and see Seth’s mom. Long graying hair in a tight ponytail. Beautiful face with a slash of red lipstick in the middle of it. Black jeans and a black T-shirt with a silver scribble running down the middle. Silver and turquoise bangles line both wrists. She walks right up to me and hugs me without warning. She smells of baby powder.
“I’ve so been looking forward to meeting you, honey!”
“Hi,” I say, anxious about getting this woman to like me and wondering what the right thing is to say. It turns out I don’t need to say anything. Seth’s mom introduces herself (“Please call me Zoe. And please call Seth’s dad Alejandro, okay?”) and then she doesn’t stop talking. Like, at all. Not as she takes out the bright green Fiestaware from the cabinets to set the table. Not as she slides out her phone and taps at it for a moment or two. Not as she slips an arm around Alejandro and kisses him on the cheek in a way that feels a little more intimate than I’d expect from people who’ve been married for a hundred years.
She talks about Austin and East Rockport and art and politics and the weather and the lack of good ethnic food in the area and soul music and manicures and how she likes my boots. She talks about how she just found and ordered a vintage Italian parasol online that she really loves, and she talks about how she thinks she’s just had a breakthrough on her recent commissioned piece. (“I just need to keep listening to it sing to me, you know?”) Her voice is knowing and lilting and sure of itself, and by the time all of us sit down at the groovy modern all-white kitchen table and chairs, I’m not sure if I should be smiling or nodding or laughing at everything Zoe Acosta says. But I’m pretty sure I’m exhausted.
That’s when Alejandro offers me some wine.
“Red or white, Viv?” he asks, a bottle in each hand. He’s younger than Zoe. Handsome like Seth. A tattoo of a snake slides down his left arm and wraps itself around his wrist.
I thought my mom was cool, but honestly next to Seth’s mom and dad, she looks like the president of the PTO.
“Oh,” I say. I glance at Seth, who’s sitting across from me, calmly scooping moo goo gai pan onto his bright green plate.
“You don’t have to have any, sweetie, but we’re okay with Seth having a little bit of wine with his dinner,” Zoe says.
“I don’t want any,” Seth says, not looking up. He seems tense, somehow, but I’m not sure if I’m imagining it.
“I’m … okay, too,” I say. My mom has let me have a sip of her wine in the past when I was curious (“Don’t tell Meemaw, okay?”) and I’ve had my fair share of crappy semi-cold cans of beer at stupid parties when people’s parents were out of town, but I’ve never been offered alcohol by an adult in a way that felt so casual.
Alejandro doesn’t offer me wine again, and he and Zoe spend the rest of the meal chatting among themselves, with Zoe inserting a simple question or two directed at me every so often, like was I born in East Rockport and what do I think I want to study in college and so on. I manage simple, to-the-point answers and then sit back and listen as Zoe picks up from where she left off before she asked me anything, sliding back into conversation about her favorite topic: herself.
As Alejandro starts clearing the table and Zoe begins to brew coffee, Seth shoots me a look that clearly reads desperate. His eyebrows arched, he carefully mouths, “Let’s go.” I shrug, scared of appearing rude. But Seth just stands up, clears his dishes and mine, and says, “Well, look, I think I’ve got to be getting Vivian home.”
“But you just got here!” Zoe shouts, turning and walking toward me, clutching my hands in hers like I’m about to journey into the woods with no plan to ever return.
“She and her mom have a thing,” he answers, outright lying.
Zoe performs an exaggerated pout, her mouth sliding down into a severe upside-down U.
“Well, we’ll let you go only if you and your mom come by one night for dinner, all right, preciosa?” Her Spanish accent is awful. She puts her hands on her hips and Alejandro comes over from the kitchen sink and scoots his arms around her waist and kisses her on the neck.
“You and your mom should definitely join us one night,” Seth’s dad says, lifting his gaze and smiling at me. I notice he has tiny diamond earrings—one in each ear.
“You ready, Vivian?” Seth says, pocketing his keys off the counter.
“Sure,” I say, standing up and offering Zoe and Alejandro my most polite smile. “It was so nice to meet you. Thanks for a delicious dinner.”
“Thank you for being the cutest thing ever,” Zoe says, slipping out of Alejandro’s grip and swallowing me up in one last suffocating hug.
Outside in Seth’s car, he slides his key in the ignition, but instead of starting the engine, he just looks at me and slumps against the driver’s seat.
“And those were my parents,” he says, sounding like a sideshow barker who’s been introducing the same carnival act for years.
I smile and try to think of what I want to say.
“They were … nice. Really.”
“They drive me nuts,” Seth says, starting up the car. “Wanna go to the beach? It’s not too cold.”
“Yeah, sure.” I pick out a song by this all-girl band from Louisiana that I just found out about and Seth nods approvingly, but I can tell he’s still feeling off about the dinner. “Your parents really are nice, they’re just…” I search for the word. “They’re intense.”
“I mean, they’re fine,” Seth says. “It’s not like I’ve got any reason to complain. They bought me a car. They kind of let me do what I want. They’re not assholes or anything. I mean, I think they’re fundamentally, like, decent people. It’s just that they’re really, really into being themselves. Especially my mom.”
I nod, peering out the window of Seth’s car, watching East Rockport at night zip past. I think about my mom moving back to her hometown after my dad died. Working hard to put herself through school. Raising me as a single parent and always letting me know in big and small ways how much I matter. She always put me first, to the point where I think maybe she forgot to have her own life.
“I wonder if my mom hasn’t been into herself enough,” I say.
“Yeah? What do you mean?”
I’m still working it out in my head, so I speak slowly. “Well, she basically hated living here when she was a teenager and she had this whole plan to leave East Rockport, and she did it. Then because of me she had to come back and live next door to her mom and dad. She works long hours to make ends meet and does it all on her own. This guy John that she’s dating, he’s only the second boyfriend she’s had in my whole life.”
Seth pulls the car into the public beach parking lot. I can see a few other cars here, parked down the row. It’s prime make-out territory tonight.
“Wanna get out and walk for a while?” he asks.