Did it seem passive and wrong? “Maybe.”
She turned her head so she was looking up at me. She touched my necklace with one hand and her necklace with the other hand, and I felt so close to her and it was closer than I felt to my family or any friend I’d ever had, and when she said, “I need you,” my first thought was, I need you more. Slowly I placed my hand on Ana’s scary bald head. And when I did that, it wasn’t scary anymore. It was warm.
“We have to make things right,” Ana whispered. “We are the Karma Factory.”
Flashback to us making sandwiches. “The factory of two.”
“Goddesses.” She smiled. Her inviting eyes. “We are goddesses.”
I’m not sure why, but it felt necessary to repeat her. “We are goddesses.”
21
I woke up in a perfect nest of white sheets. Rays of yellow sun spilled through Ana’s window. The smell of the ocean came before the sound. The waves were big today. They crashed and crashed against the rock wall, crashing sometimes with a slap, and they were so close that it could have been frightening, but it wasn’t. The waves would not rise over the wall. The birds would never stop singing. The peace in this nest of sheets was real. We were safe and we were calm.
?
We ate mangoes for breakfast and got in the car. The sun, the sky, the ocean. Snow-capped Mauna Kea and tourists spelling out their names with white coral in the lava. I looked for our MURPHY, but it was gone. Our letters had been taken by new families to make new letters. The wind was loud and rushing. We sipped our Vitamin Waters and didn’t listen to music.
Gregory lived in Hawi. Yes, he was the guy Ana had lived with for two years. The two longest years of her life, she said, and they’d even adopted a Siamese fighting fish together and named it Paco. “Because he said if we were going to adopt a real kid, we should prepare with a pet.”
“You wanted children?” I asked. “I didn’t know that.”
And she said, “Oh yeah, of course I did,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Like all men, Gregory was great until he wasn’t. He owned an Italian restaurant, which was fun in the beginning—free wine, really good pesto—but then he started to work more, and more and more and more and then he was at this restaurant twenty hours a day. He was neurotic and very type A, which was what had attracted Ana to him at first—she thought he had his shit together. So she assumed he was at the restaurant obsessing over details, like the size of the ramekins and the little tear in one of the chair cushions and the salmon—should it come out with two almond slivers or three almond slivers? Those were the types of things that Gregory cared about. Their home together was spotless. Anyway, fast-forward, it turned out his real obsession was with the anorexic chef. Whom he impregnated. And during the breakup, when Ana had called the chef anorexic, Gregory had called Ana “fatty.”
“If yoga hadn’t reformed me,” she said, “I would have chopped his balls off right there.”
Ana was wearing the black wig with the pink streak that framed her face. “This is my least conspicuous one,” she’d said when she put it on that morning, “even though it’s still pretty conspicuous.”
I felt bad for thinking I preferred her in a wig. Seeing her bald was uncomfortable. It made her look so weak.
I checked my phone again. The night before, I’d called Chuck to let him know I wasn’t coming home. He hadn’t responded. This was unlike him. It meant things were bad in a new way now, worse than they’d been before. The boys were fine. I’d texted each of them to explain. Not coming home tonight. My friend needs me. Cam had responded with emojis I’d never seen before, and Jed had responded, Whatever.
?
The restaurant was called, simply, Pasta, and the letters on the sign were written in a loopy font that looked like linguine. “I don’t see his car,” Ana said, pulling into a spot behind the bank like she had done this many times before. She turned the engine off. The prickling sensation in my armpits told me I was nervous.
“Has the plan come to you yet?”
“No,” she said, not worried. She tugged at her bangs, puckered her lips in the rearview mirror. “Ugh, these lips are like flat tires,” she said. “I want to look hot in case he’s in there.” She pushed her breasts closer together for more cleavage. “Isn’t that sad?”
“You look great,” I assured her.
“Thanks, Nan. You’re the most supportive person I know. You are my cement-poured foundation.”
Before I could tell Ana that she was my attic, or my chimney, or my roof deck (I was still working it out), she set her hand on mine. “Let’s take pause, okay?”
We sat there for two minutes. Or five minutes; it was hard to tell. The sound of cars. Of footsteps walking up the stairs to the bank, of the ATM beeping, of footsteps going back down the stairs. There was the constant chirping of birds, birds, birds, and Hawaii really was the most magical place on earth, and I should be grateful, grateful, grateful but Chuck was such an asshole and I was angry, angry, angry and I would focus my angry energy on Gregory now, who was the same type of asshole, or worse.
Ana marked the end of our pause with an om and I joined her. Then she said, “Okay, let’s go. I still don’t have a solid plan. We’ll eat lunch at the restaurant and figure it out from there.”
It was three in the afternoon and the restaurant was nearly empty. Only two tables were occupied. A pretty waitress with unfortunate cystic acne on her neck scurried past us in a frenzied state, and then a hostess popped up from behind her podium to say, “Ciao.”
Ana elbowed me. “G makes them say that,” she whispered.
Okay, so we were calling him G now.
“Two?” The hostess took two menus off the stand.
“Yes,” we said at the same time.
“Follow me.”
Everything was spotless, but it wasn’t the sleek, modern look I had expected. It was a lot tackier than that. On the walls was a random mix of pasta art. A highly detailed pencil drawing of a single piece of penne (some cursive words underneath—maybe its Latin name?) hung next to an almost indistinguishable face made from actual pieces of dry penne. The furniture looked old and it didn’t match. Even two chairs at the same table weren’t the same chairs. But it was set up in an orderly way, with the silverware very straight on each napkin and a vase of flowers perfectly centered on each table.
The hostess was taking us to the window when Ana gasped. “No,” she said, her hand going to her throat. Her eyes were on the fish tank, where a red fish with fins like tattered rags was completely still in the water. “We want to sit there.” Ana pointed to the table under the tank.
“No problem,” said the hostess, who tilted herself comically in the new direction like she was steering an imaginary car.
Ana chose the chair that looked like a throne, which left me with the little wicker chair.
“Your waitress will be right with you,” the hostess said.