Along the shore are the condo buildings and hotels that stand uneasily in that space between the street and the water. My favorite one, an old stucco high-rise with iron balconies clinging to each floor, is lit up tonight like I’ve never seen. It’s brilliant, almost blinding, as though all of Sarasota’s sun from the day has been bottled inside and finally allowed out. There’s no one behind my car, so I slow to a crawl. The light doesn’t create a reflection on the water, or even make it down to the empty parking lot. I’ve always thought that building was abandoned—maybe it’s getting a new life.
Whenever I pass these buildings, I imagine no one but women Abuela’s age who live there, passing their time teetering above the Gulf. The light on the top floor shines from two bedside lamps for a woman who sleeps in the center of her bed. Two floors below, a woman prepares her daily injection in her bright kitchen. She steadies her arm. When do these women remember their grandmothers? Their mothers? How long have they kept a secret? Do they worry that death has no color at all? Do they feel heavier at high tide? Are they sleepless like regret?
This is the long way home.
Angela has fallen asleep on the couch. She looks uncomfortable—her arms are stuffed under her belly, and she’s open-mouth frowning. I sit on the floor and nudge her shoulder.
“Mercedes,” she grumbles. “Ugh, Mercy, you smell awful.”
“It’s the stench of bowling alley.”
“Grrrhm.” Which means, roughly, It is not, and don’t be silly by acting like I don’t understand. I was born three summers before she was, and sometimes I forget to do the math. Fourteen. She’s fourteen. She’s damn smart, but she needs me.
“How did the piano go?”
“I suck, and you know it.” She sits up. “Why is everything terrible right now? Abuela in the hospital, and Mom being gone, and me not being able to do anything, and you leaving for hours to smoke in a bowling alley?”
“To be fair, they don’t allow smoking in the bowling alley.”
“Oh God, you know what I mean.” Angela fumbles to her feet and straightens out this poor faded pair of Tweety Bird pajama pants she’s had since she was about eleven. She’s gotten plenty of other pajamas since then, but she persists in keeping Tweety alive.
“I’ll be around this weekend.”
She looks at me as though I’ve claimed I’m not going to drive the Ford Focus anymore.
“Really. And Victoria’s coming over. We can watch movies or something.”
Angela goes to bed. And so do I. But something feels wrong about this place. Yes . . . I have stumbled into our mother’s room by mistake. I have curled up in her unmade bed, pulled her covers over me, and settled this pillow that smells like her perfume and hair spray under my head. And it feels wrong because it is supposed to, because everything has gone crooked. I need to find a way to stay close to her, though, so that nothing I do makes Abuela’s breathing stop. So this is it—I will sleep in my mother’s messy bed until she comes home.
four
REX HAS LEFT us a note on the door: I FOUND A RENTER! It’s signed with a bearded smiley face wearing a party hat. Rex totally knows how to celebrate a Friday afternoon. At the bottom of the note, in tiny letters, he’s written, M—you’ll like her. She’s a painter!
Out the front window, everything looks the same. Unless any of our neighbors witnessed Mom running out to the airport shuttle last week, or Tuesday’s moment of piano relocation, they’d have no idea that anything has changed at the Moreno-McBride residence. And so far, there’s no sign next door that someone else is moving in. An artist, a painter. Maybe she’ll be a portrait artist with an abstraction habit on the side. A VW Bug driver with an all-black wardrobe and a Frida Kahlo brow. Maybe she’ll also discover that the back porch is simultaneously the coziest and most difficult place to paint in the house, and she’ll adopt it as her studio, too.
I lay the note on top of Angela’s piano, but she doesn’t seem to notice it, or me. She has the lid thing hiding the keys, and she runs her hands down it like she’s petting a dog.
“Do you know what I want tonight? More than anything?” I say, flinging her out of her concentration.
“What?”
“Abuela’s mofongo.”
Angela takes a breath through her nose, as though she might be able to smell it if she pulls in deep enough. “Yes. Yes, absolutely. Why did you say that? There’s no way we can make it like she does.”
“We don’t even have the freaking recipe.”
“I wish we could call her.”
“Even if she was at home, she wouldn’t pick up.”
Angela gets up from the piano and heads toward the kitchen. “Yeah, she’d call back like four hours later, and she’d say, ‘Bueno, I’ve got that recipe for you!’”
“I wouldn’t care.” I follow her. The kitchen still smells like Thursday’s grilled cheese sandwiches. “I’d go out and buy a crate of plantains from the store. I’d make it at midnight. I’d make it at one a.m.”
“I want to do a Green Eggs and Ham–style rhyme for you, but I can’t think of anything that rhymes with mofongo.” Angela opens the dishwasher, probably because it seems more likely to be a successful mission than opening the fridge, but we roll out the racks to find dirty dishes and the sour smell of old ketchup.
“The Dishwasher Lemur,” I tell my sister.
It takes her a minute. “Oh man! He’s back. He followed us from Naples, and he’s been lurking, waiting for us to be alone.”
“Sinister and wily, he is.” We shut the dishwasher together and look at each other, like we’re embarrassed to be remembering that old story. But embarrassed for who? We are so very alone here.
Okay, so maybe our mother’s absence has shown that the better housekeepers in this residence are the ones currently occupying it. However, in the Who goes to the grocery store most often? challenge, the absent resident is definitely the winner.
“She’s made some sort of pasta with peanut sauce before,” Angela says. “I’m positive it used peanut butter.”
We’re seriously about ready to pull the trigger on this. Noodles, peanut butter, and whatever else we can find to put into the sauce. And we are considering serving this to Victoria. Mom, for all her quirks, would find a way to pull this one off—she’d look hopeless, but she’d magically find a way to whip up a dinner that would serve at least ten, and it’d be delicious. I check my phone, thinking I might text Mom and ask for her recipe. But her most recent text to me was asking if I’ve heard anything about my college applications, and I don’t feel like answering that.
There are three loud, ironically ominous knocks at the door. Rex.
“I’ve got it.” I leave Angela to the mess with the pasta.
Rex takes up our whole doorway. When he says he’s got someone to introduce, I figure he’s going to lead me to his side of the house. But no—he moves aside and there she is, staring out the little circular windows of the foyer between the two halves of the duplex, as though the flat Florida houses lined up on both sides of the street are the most interesting landscape she’s ever seen.
“This is my new renter!” Rex announces. “Lilia Solis. And this is my old renter, Mercedes Moreno.”