Ana had opened the tub of Red Vines. Sensing what she wanted, I took a few and held them out for him.
The veteran took the Red Vines and smiled. Barely any teeth. A greenish film in his mouth. “I like these.”
I was relieved. “Oh good.”
“Enjoy!” Ana said, and we drove on.
The basket weaver with the long fingers of a possible former piano player told us his name was Daniel. “And if you don’t see me sitting on the wall, I’m probably taking a nap right behind. You can throw it over, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said, “no problem.”
Mana at the bus stop, who apparently never took the bus, greeted us before we greeted him. “Sandwich Sistahs!” He raised his brown paper bag in cheers. My throw was better this time. “Mana thanks you!”
At the banyan tree, the boy wearing the backpack glanced both ways like he was about to buy drugs. “Can I get five?” He pointed behind him. “For my friends.”
“Absolutely.” I counted them out.
“You know who we are?” Ana asked him.
“Some chicks in a Jeep?”
Ana laughed. “Yeah, that, too. But no.”
“We’re the Sandwich Sisters,” I said.
“Sandwich Sistahs, actually,” Ana corrected.
“Chill,” he said, and zipped up his backpack.
The girl who’d been lying on the sidewalk before—with the sign that simply said HELP—was gone today. Maybe she’d gotten some help.
Marigold and Petunia were fast asleep in the dumpster’s shade, their arms looped through the straps of the backpack between them, which they were also using as a pillow. “They crashed,” Ana said. I got out of the car and quietly left four sandwiches at their feet.
The parking lots were bustling with targets. Some we recognized, some we didn’t. Ana said, “From the Sandwich Sistahs!” to every person. When we ran out of sandwiches, I asked, “What should we do now?”
Ana’s answer was to pull into a parking space at Longs. “Let’s take pause. We need to sit and be present for a minute.” She turned off the engine, looked up at the sky, put her feet on the window ledge. I looked at myself in the little side mirror. Remembered I’d put a plumeria flower behind my ear. Thought: Nancy, you look happy today. And your shoulders look defined.
After our pause, which was brief, we just sat there and talked. Our conversation was endless and flowing and random and marked by long stretches of silence, and the silence was marked by the revving of cars in the parking lot and the country music station playing low on the radio.
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“It’s really nice,” I said, “getting to know these people. The locals.”
“I just adore our new name.” Ana stretched her arms up, which moved her shirt and exposed her stomach. Then she put her head on the center console so her face was looking up at me. Half her legs were dangling out of the car. She affectionately pinched my chin. “Nan,” she said.
“Ana,” I replied. I took a Red Vine, handed her one. “You know Red Vines are fat-free,” I told her, pointing to the FAT FREE on the label.
Ana contemplated her Red Vine. “Whoever invented Red Vines is a genius.” She took a bite. “Did you like my quote in class this morning?”
“I did. The Helen Keller one. What was it?”
“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light,” she said, annunciating each word like she had in class. “Honestly, it made me think of you. I don’t know what I’d be doing without you, Nan.”
“I know,” I said, because what would I be doing without Ana? Power-walking with Marcy? Power-walking on my hamster wheel. “I’m so glad we met.”
“You’re like the stable married mommy version of me,” Ana said.
“And you’re like the free spirit version of me,” I said.
“I want to be more like you.” Ana sighed. “Stable.” She chuckled. “A homeowner.”
“I want to be more like you,” I said. “You can go anywhere. You can do anything you want without running it by your husband first. You’re not tied to anything.”
“What’s that poem? Two roads diverged at a yellow tree?”
“I think it was a yellow wood,” I said.
“Nan, you scholar.” Ana kissed her Red Vine and tapped my leg—“Boop!”—like it was a wand.
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Ana moved to an upright position. She’d made her Red Vine into a flute. A motorcycle roared through the parking lot. When it was gone, I asked, “What was your stripper name?”
“Malificent.”
“Wow.”
“Does it bother you that I was a stripper?”
“No.”
“It does a little though.”
“No, it really doesn’t,” I said. “Because now I know you and like you, so…”
“So I could tell you anything and you’d be fine with it?”
“Probably.”
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I slipped off my flip-flops and rested my feet on the dash. Ana braided her hair. Two French braids. It took a while. Then she put her head on the console again. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. We kept changing positions as the sun blazed down. Every thirty minutes Ana reapplied her sunscreen and handed me the bottle when she was done. “You don’t want to get haole rot,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“A skin fungus white people get because they can’t handle the sun here.”
“Ew.” I squeezed more sunscreen into my palm. I would do two layers from now on.
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We watched people go in and out of Longs. Sometimes we guessed things about them. “I bet that lady has a French bulldog at home,” Ana said about a woman who looked exactly like a French bulldog. “I bet he’s a mechanic,” I said about a scruffy guy with black-oiled hands. Ana said, “I have meaner things to say, but I won’t say them. Because the degree to which we judge others is the degree to which we judge ourselves.”
“Wow,” I said. I hated that I thought of Marcy then.
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Ana rolled out the muscles in her neck and when her gaze fell on my feet, she said, “Your second toe is longer than your first. That means you’re intelligent.” She lifted her foot. Her purple sparkly polish was chipping. “So am I.”
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“I wish I had my cards in here,” Ana said in a lazy voice.
“Cards?”
“Tarot. Have you never had your cards read?”
“No.”
“What? Why? Don’t you want to know what your future holds?”
“No. What if I learn something awful?”
“Well exactly,” she said. “You’d want to be ready for it.”
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“Have you ever been married?” I asked her.
“Only four times.” She laughed. “So you can see why I have trust issues.”
“Do you ever get lonely?”
“I learned a long time ago to own my solitude. If you can own your solitude, it makes you stronger.”
Like so many other things Ana said, this just sounded right.
“How’s your husband doing?” she asked me.
“He’s better. Things are better. I planted a garden.”
“Did the garden make things better?”
“Yes,” I said, “or no, it was before that. I had—well, it was an epiphany, I guess.”
“Tell me. I love epiphanies.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It will probably sound stupid.”
“Tell me, Nan. You know you want to.”
That was true. I did want to. So I told her. “And, okay, maybe you had to be there, but I just felt like: Get back on this hamster wheel or change, you know?”
“Oh, girl, I have been there.”