“You’re weird,” Jed told Ana.
“You’re weird.” Ana kicked his leg.
“Boys, can you get the rest of the stuff out of the car, please?”
It surprised me that I didn’t have to ask twice. They just got up. Maybe we were all being our best selves for Ana. Cam lowered Portico into the tank, which was on the coffee table for now, and followed his brother out the door.
I set the grocery bags on the counter. “How are you feeling?” I asked her.
“I’m okay,” she said, touching her stomach.
“No pain?”
She traced her collarbones all the way across, from one shoulder to the other. “Life is pain, Nan,” she said.
“That’s what my mother used to say,” I told her.
“What? Life is pain?”
I scolded myself. Why are you talking about your mother, Nancy? You don’t want to be talking about her. So I didn’t tell Ana the rest of my mother’s refrain, which was “Don’t marry losers like I did.” Because every time my mother talked about the pain of life, she was referring to one of her failed relationships.
I changed the subject. “I got you some Red Vines.”
Ana got up off the couch—in a lively way; good—and wrapped one arm around my waist and said, “I love you, Nan.”
Flashback to her telling me she didn’t know what love was. Obviously she’d been wrong about that. Because here she was, saying “I love you” to me, and I knew she meant it.
?
The four of us cooked together. Since Ana knew the recipe best, she became the head chef and told us what to do. Jed chopped the ingredients, Cam sautéed them, I cooked the pasta, and Ana set the table. She dug two candles and two Buddhas out of one of her duffel bags and set them between the plates, and then she put on some nice jazz music.
Jed said, “Ambiance,” and I was proud of him for using a more complex word than cool, or dude, or yeah.
Ana went outside and came back with a dead branch. “Found art!” she exclaimed, and hung it on the nail above the table that I’d abandoned all those months ago. The four of us agreed that we had been skeptical when she’d walked in with the branch but now we could see how it was very clever.
Jed, Cam, and I sat in our usual places, and Ana sat in Chuck’s chair. The steaming pasta looked delicious.
Before we ate, Ana said, “Wait, let’s hold hands for a second.”
Jed shrugged. Cam shrugged. We took each other’s hands.
“Close your eyes.” Ana inhaled and exhaled deeply. “Breathe.”
“What are we doing?” Jed asked.
“Just go along with it for a second,” Ana said gently.
I opened my eyes for just long enough to see Jed close his again.
“What are we doing?” Ana chuckled. “That’s a great question.”
“Yep,” Jed said.
“What we are doing is sitting here,” Ana said, “at the dinner table. The piano music is playing. There are crickets. We smell pasta. We see the candles flickering through our eyelids.”
A long pause. The crescendo of the piano. “In a moment, we will eat this pasta. In this moment, we are grateful for its enticing smell and its beautiful presentation in that decorative bowl. We are grateful to Mom for going to the store. We are grateful we had the energy to cook tonight. We are grateful we feel hungry; an appetite is a sign of health.” Inhale, exhale. Low, calm notes from the piano. “This is it. The moments before this and after this—those are gone. This is it, this is it. This is it. Enjoy this. Be grateful. Eat like you mean it.” Pause. I half expected her to om. She didn’t. “Buon appetito.”
We opened our eyes.
I looked at Ana first. Her eyes were black and glimmering. She was staring straight at me. One candle-lit tear rolled down her cheek.
“Are you crying?” Jed chided, but underneath that he seemed alarmed.
Ana looked at him. “Yes.” She didn’t wipe her tear. “Is that okay with you?”
Before Jed could say more stupid things, I flooded them with information. “Ana has cancer, Jed. Cam. Ana has cancer. Okay? So she’s allowed to cry whenever she wants. She’s dying.”
The boys looked scared.
“Plus,” Ana chuckled, “crying makes you pee less.”
“You’re dying?” Cam’s concerned face.
Ana nodded.
“Shit,” Jed said.
“Shit is right,” Ana said. “But this will not be our dinner topic. No more cancer talk. Agreed?”
She looked at each of us and we nodded.
“Let’s enjoy this food.” She scooped a heap of steaming pasta onto Cam’s plate. She was so selfless. Then she scooped for Jed, and then me and then finally herself.
“Bacon pasta,” Jed said, his mouth full and his eyes bulging. “Dude.”
“It’s divine,” I said because I knew she liked that word.
“Oh, Nan,” Ana said sweetly. Then she pulled a long steaming bunch of spaghetti from the pile with her fingers and lowered it into her mouth.
I laughed. “No fork tonight?”
A line of red sauce ran down her chin. She smiled. “It tastes better with your hands.”
Jed laughed. “I want to try.” He pulled the spaghetti up and waited for it to stop steaming—he was more sensible than she was—before lowering it into his mouth.
We waited for his verdict.
“You’re right, it’s totally better,” he said, going in for more.
Cam and I tried with our hands and decided that no, we preferred our forks.
“You are the fork people,” Ana said, “and we are the animals.”
“Where are you from, Ana?” Cam asked her.
Ana stuck out her tongue, which was red from the sauce. “The armpit of the world.”
“El Cajon?” Jed asked.
Ana sipped her apple juice. “What’s that?”
“It’s a part of San Diego,” I told her.
“Oh, well, I’m sure it’s nicer than New Jersey. That’s where I’m from. When I was nineteen, I moved to Vegas, and then I moved here.” Ana made dots in the air to show us.
Cam twirled his pasta. “Did you go to college in Vegas?”
“No,” Ana said. “I dropped out of college and became a stripper.”
I looked at the boys. They looked at each other as if to say: Whoa. And I felt proud to have this eccentric friend who could teach them something new about the world. Which, clearly, they needed. I couldn’t believe Jed thought that El Cajon was the armpit of the world.
“You weren’t really though, right?” Cam’s wide, earnest eyes.
“Why not?” Ana said. “It’s a real job.”
“What’s the most money you made in a night?” Jed asked, maybe not believing her either.
“Six grand,” Ana said. “An Arabian prince and his entourage.”
“No way,” Jed said.
“Way,” Ana said.
“Mom”—Jed slapped the table—“I’m going to be a stripper.”
“Whatever makes you happy, honey,” I said, which I knew got me some Cool Mom points. Although, of course, I hoped something other than stripping would make him happy.
“College is a better choice,” Ana said. “If I had to do it over again, I would go to college.”
The boys seemed to really get this when Ana said it, and instead of rolling their eyes or rolling their whole heads around in the latent beginnings of a tantrum, they nodded like knowing adults.
“How’s high school going?” Ana asked them.
“Sucks,” Cam said.