“Come here, Nancy.” Ana pressed me in close. Her coconut oil smell, how tightly she held me. How safe I felt.
And then I told her more. I told her more and more and more. I told her everything. Well, almost everything. About how I had raised my brother. How I’d found an older boyfriend to take us in. How I’d kept my grades up so I could get into USD, how fixated I was on that the whole time because I knew it would get me out. Because the older boyfriend turned out to be abusive—of course he did, that’s how the cycle went. How all I wanted to do was stop the cycle and re-create myself and how now, a million years later, I was trying to figure out who the hell I was under this June Cleaver costume I wore like a straitjacket.
When I said that, Ana said, “We all wear costumes, Nancy,” and the bangs of her wig were covering half her eyes, and I had to laugh.
The sun had lowered behind the palm trees at Longs, and the fronds were casting moving shadows on us. I looked at the clock. “Speaking of costumes,” I said, “I should get home and put my Mom costume on.”
We had four sandwiches left so we ate one apiece and left the others on the curb and drove back to her place.
The last thing Ana said to me that afternoon—she said it in her usual soft and confident voice, but it had turned into a long, emotional day and maybe her guard was down, because just underneath her confidence I could hear her regret.
“It’s interesting, you and me…” Her whole body was completely still. She looked at me. She didn’t blink. “I wonder why you turned out the way you did and I turned out the way I did.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I hugged her. That was my answer. Our bodies, I thought, fit together in a way that seemed just right. We hugged for a long time. We stood there in the driveway under the neon-pink sky, holding on to each other’s shapes.
?
The boys came home with wet hair and chlorine-red eyes and picked at the plate of mangoes I’d set out for them. I told them their dad was taking me out tonight, which meant they’d get a Costco pizza for dinner, which somehow still had the power to excite them.
“I’m going to call Dad and ask him to get Hawaiian,” Jed said. “?’Kay, Cam?”
“Yeah,” Cam said, and opened his binder.
Jed put his phone to his ear and walked out to the lanai.
It was when I reached for a mango slice that I noticed the burn mark on Cam’s arm. It looked like a small bursting comet. “Is that from the fireworks?”
He covered the spot with his hand. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
I hadn’t thought about that night in a while. Two policemen at 1:00 a.m. and the boys looking at their shoes. “We found them lighting fireworks down at the Shores, with about a gram of marijuana in their possession. Can’t have that.” Chuck, who’d followed me to the door, had repeated this line: “Can’t have that, Officer, absolutely not.” The boys swore the pot wasn’t theirs—“I swear!” they each had said, too passionately; I didn’t believe them—and then they swore never to light a firework again. The cops let them off with a warning. Chuck wanted to ground them for a month. I voted for two weeks. We settled on three.
The boys had done nothing illegal since, but I was always worried.
“You boys didn’t bring any fireworks here, did you?” I put my arms around Cam’s shoulders, looked down at the equations he’d written out. “I don’t want you to hurt yourselves.”
“No, Mom,” he said. “I swear.”
I didn’t want to ask, but I thought it was my job to ask. “And you’re not smoking pot, are you?”
“No,” Cam said, annoyed.
Jed reappeared. “Mom, Dad will be home in twenty minutes,” he said. “He’s getting Hawaiian. Boo yeah!”
“Crap, I have to get ready,” I said.
“Craaaaap,” Jed said. When he thought I was out of earshot, he said to Cam, “Can I copy that, dude?”
“Boys!” I called, “No copying!”
“Okay, Mom!” they called back.
But I knew they would do it anyway. It was impossible to separate twins.
?
“Hi, honey, I’m home!” Chuck said in his Ricky Ricardo voice. Which was so stupid, but which made me smile every time. Chuck’s Ricky Ricardo was funny because he really committed to character. He’d always been good at accents.
I continued washing the sticky mango juice off the plates at the sink as Chuck took off his shoes by the door. I felt good. I didn’t feel annoyed by him this evening. I wondered why. Maybe because I felt like my life was expanding.
I’d thrown on a purple dress I hadn’t worn in a long time. It was a dress I used to wear when I felt confident, and it was a little constricting, but only slightly uncomfortable.
I set the dish on the rack, started washing the next one. The smell of pizza wafted toward me. Ham. Pineapple. Cheese. I was hungry.
I dried my hands, turned around. There was Chuck, groomed and handsome, with a gorgeous purple Costco orchid in his hands. His blue eyes in the dusky light. That crazy, unreal dish detergent blue. He’d chosen his “really good shirt” for our date, the gray one from when Costco had had that Tommy Bahama sale. He held the flower in outstretched hands. An offering. “It’s better than the San Diego ones, isn’t it?” he asked.
I touched his arm. “Much better,” I said.
And then Chuck kissed me on the cheek without hesitation, which was the first time he had done that since the affair. Finally, he was taking control.
?
We went to a restaurant at the harbor called Bite Me because Brad had said their poke was the best. On the walls were big plastic fish and pictures of men holding up dead versions of these same kinds of fish. This place didn’t seem fancy enough to me. Not that I was a restaurant snob—it just wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I knew Chuck was thinking the same thing because he said, “Is this okay? Do you want to go somewhere else?”
“No,” I said, touching his arm for the second time that evening. “This place is funny. It kind of reminds me of that place we went to…”
“In Mexico?”
“Exactly.”
“That was a good trip.”
“It was,” I said, remembering our green stucco hotel on the beach and the well-made straw hat I’d bought for a dollar.
All the tables at Bite Me were made of wood that looked sticky. We chose one by the window. Chuck scooted my chair in for me, which was a hilariously too-formal thing to do at this restaurant. The waitresses wore cutoff shorts that looked more like underwear, and tight red shirts that said BITE ME, and when I set my hand on the table, it was even stickier than I’d thought.
We ordered the poke, which arrived two minutes later on a cheap dish with no garnish. But Brad was right. It was the best poke we’d ever had.
Chuck told me he was liking this Costco, maybe even better than the old one. There was a real fraternal spirit, he said. Some of the guys had even started a pool team. They played a few nights a week at a bar in town and they were called the Tide Poolers.
“That’s fun,” I said. “Why don’t you join?”