She ignores me. She’s right to do it. We get out of the car and it’s the type of afternoon that reminds me why old people move down here from Connecticut and why mothers come up here from Puerto Rico. We’re at St. Armands Circle with all the snowbirds and tourists. The water is a block away. The Estate is around the corner. I could turn and run and go there. But would the doors open for me right now? Would the secret painting be ready for me? Something says it’s not time to go at all. It’s time to buy Abuela a very special pillow.
St. Armands is where we go when our tíos and their families visit, where everyone gets ice cream and Tía Elena always buys a gauzy bathing suit cover-up. This is the home of “nice” souvenirs, many of them with Florida-themed puns on them. Angela walks along in steady silence, but she’s so happy to be here. She stops to pet a dog, and then to listen to a guitarist playing at one of the outdoor restaurants.
“Oh my God, every time I’ve ever walked by here, that guy’s playing ‘Brown-Eyed Girl,’” I say, because it’s true.
“Shut up, please.” Angela sways to the music. When the song ends, she pulls a dollar from her pocket, steps toward the guitarist on his stool, scribbles a song request on a piece of paper, and drops it in the guitarist’s straw hat.
“What about the pillow?” I ask.
“I want to wait and see if he plays my song,” Angela says.
“He plays every song the same way,” I say. “He’s not very good.”
“Who are you to say what’s good?” Angela says this loudly enough that the guitarist, who’s now playing “Stairway to Heaven,” which I only know because of Tall Jon, and which I don’t think was Angela’s song request, looks over at us.
Angela looks horrified to be singled out like that, so I don’t expect her to go on.
But she does.
“Seriously, Mercy, you act like there’s no way I could know what’s good or not.” Her voice is lower, but some of the people who noticed her before are still paying attention. She’s drama. She’s confession. “Maybe you’re avoiding me at home because you’re jealous. You never expected me to be good at something, especially something artistic. And now, you know what? I am. I don’t know how I did it, but it’s real. It has to be.”
“I know,” I say out of the side of my mouth. “I know you’re good. And I probably was jealous.”
I stop myself before I can say more, about why I’m not jealous anymore. About how I have my own place where I can go to be good at something. I catch the attention of a man and woman eating fries and having drinks out of coconut-shaped cups. It looks like the greatest and easiest thing in the world.
The guitarist stops “Stairway to Heaven” before the big climax. I think he sees that Angela is still red-faced and fuming at me. He starts in on a new song.
It’s Angela’s. It must be. Of course she would pick this one.
It’s “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás,” made famous in the US by Doris Day, and in my life by Celia Cruz, and also by Abuela. She loves it.
Abuela with her purple fingernails in her hospital bed with its sad lack of decorative pillows. Abuela who needs to wake up. Abuela, who had a stroke in her kitchen and who fell and hit the floor, and whose dogs yapped for long enough that the neighbors busted in and found her and called an ambulance. I hope that wasn’t luck and luck alone—I hope there was a strain of her fighting her luck, or fighting for it. And I hope if it was her luck, that her supply of it hasn’t run out.
Every note of the song hits like a firework in my chest. I turn and run to the center of the circle, where the statues of Greek gods preside over flowers and crosswalks and trash cans and benches, and where I sit and stare at the Red Mangrove Estate while Angela listens to the song. Bits of it trail over here, and I exhale in the music’s direction.
She will wake up.
Angela crosses the street and sits next to me on the bench. I don’t meet her eyes, concentrating instead on the statue of Aphrodite on my left. It seems like it must be a rough life for a statue here, but besides a wad of chewing gum stuck to her, Aphrodite looks pretty good.
“I was worried about you last night,” she says. “I was trying to get to sleep, and of course I made up this whole scenario in my head where you weren’t going to come home at all. I decided that you were tired of Florida and everything here and you were driving to Ohio to live with Dad.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“I almost called him. I really was convinced that’s what you were doing. I was going to be like, Dad, when Mercy gets there, can you send her back home, please?”
“I wouldn’t have made it. I would have gotten as far as the Georgia state line and wondered what the hell I was thinking.”
Angela tugs at her hair. “He doesn’t know we’re here by ourselves, does he?”
“Nope.” Across the street, the song—Abuela’s song—has ended. Some polite applause. “Mom said she was going to tell him, but she never did. If she told him, he totally would have called.”
“‘Hellooo, girls, what’s the story in old Floridy?’” For a fourteen-year-old girl, Angela actually does an excellent impression of a forty-six-year-old guy, born in Ohio to European parents, who thinks he’s secretly descended from a Spanish prince.
“That’s perfect.” Now that we’re safe from the song, I start wandering back toward the shops. “And I’m not planning to say a word to him about all this, even if he does call. Can we agree on that?”
“Sure, I guess.” Angela walks a step behind me. “You know I wanted to live with him at first?”
I stop in front of the Ben & Jerry’s, in its sharp and sugary-scented cloud. “What? You never told me that.”
“It’s true.” She looks in the windows at a big family eating ice cream cones. She looks a little too long, to the point where one of the kids glares at her and sticks out his tongue. “You remember how much Mom and Dad used to talk about starting over? Well, I felt like, if they could choose to start over, then I could too. And I thought living with Dad would be my chance to do that.”
“But they didn’t let you.”
“Nope.” She starts walking again, and this time I’m the one who’s a few steps behind. “Okay, your turn.”
“My turn for what?”
“To tell me something.”
“Ah.” I keep thinking about Angela starting over, and what that would look like for her. And for me. “Okay. I remember a drawing I did a couple years ago. It was the last one Mom ever put on the fridge. It was of sea turtles—you know, how they hatch and then race to the water. That was the first time I ever drew something that was, like, symbolic of me and you.”
“A turtle drawing is your secret,” Angela says. “Well, great.” She blows her bangs out of her eyes. “Let’s go get a pillow.”
Here is the pillow. It is thick and purple. It has SEA LIFE’S BEAUTY in big, swoopy script in the middle, and Sarasota, Florida in small letters at the bottom.
Angela settles herself at the piano as soon as we get home. I consider staying in my bedroom for the rest of the evening, but something doesn’t feel right about that.
“Hey.” I flop into the recliner, grip its armrests. “Do you know any Beethoven?”
“What? Do you know any Beethoven? I think that’s the real question here,” Angela says without looking at me.
“I just thought . . . it might be something you can play.”