“That is so sweet of you, Nan, thank you, but I need to do this one on my own.” She looked around. “Have you seen my keys?”
I put the pot down. Because the pot was dry. It didn’t need me to keep drying it. “They’re on the key rack by the door.”
“A key rack. You would have a key rack, Nan.” She went over and took them off what I had mentally designated as her hook. “Okay, I’ll be back later. Don’t get too lonely without me.” She blew me a kiss and then she was gone.
?
I spent the day waiting for her to come back. Hours passed. Should I be worried? But no, Ana was an adult and Ana could take care of herself, and I would not be worried and I would not call her and I would stop checking my phone to see if she had called me. She would come back. She would have to. She lived here now.
I googled “pancreatic cancer symptoms” and they were brutal, and I felt helpless. Suddenly cleaning the house seemed very urgent. I put on the same jazz music we had listened to at dinner, and swept and scrubbed and it felt good. Her words echoed in my head: “Neat people fear death more than messy people. It’s about control.” And when I had dropped the gecko tail: “You’re scared of death, man!” I knew she had meant to say Nan.
I organized the bedroom for a person who would be convalescing here. Or I tried. I stood at the end of the bed and imagined her dying in it. I imagined her withered to skin and bone by anorexia-cachexia, which affected 80 percent of PC victims. She would probably want to sleep most of the time. So I fluffed the pillows. I put a box of tissues on the nightstand. I sprayed some Febreze. And then I ran off to mop the floors before the feeling of helplessness immobilized me.
At 3:32 she called. I picked up on the first ring. “OhmyGod I’vebeensoworried. Are you okay?”
“Nan.” The way she said my name told me this was serious.
“What?” Was she in the hospital? Could I hear the drip of her IV in the background? But no, a car honked in the background.
“You need to come down here right now. Patricio’s. I’m parked in front. Do not go inside. Meet me at the car.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You’re going to want to see for yourself. Trust me. And hurry. Seriously. Chop chop!”
?
The sight of the purple Jeep in a parking lot made me sad for the old days. I pulled in next to her and got out of my car and into hers quickly because whatever we were doing had a time limit.
“Ana, what is going oooooh—”
What was wrong with Ana’s lips? She’d either gotten them stuck in a pool drain or she’d been stung by eight hundred bees. They were puffy and white-pink and filmed in a shiny layer of Vaseline.
She pressed her buggy sunglasses up her nose. When she spoke, her voice was there, but her lips didn’t move. “I know,” her voice said, “I got my lips done. They look bad today, but tomorrow they’ll look fabulous.”
“So that was your doctor’s appointment today,” I said slowly, figuring it out on the way.
“Nan, whatever makes me happy right now is a good thing, right? Restylane makes me happy right now. Don’t judge.” Some words were obviously harder for her to pronounce. Like “Restylane.” She grabbed my wrist. “But that’s not why we’re here. Look inside Patricio’s.”
I squinted. We were pretty far away. All I could see was the Patricio’s decal, and behind that the shadowy shapes of tables and bodies.
“Here,” she said, handing me a pair of binoculars from her lap. I hadn’t noticed them there because I hadn’t noticed anything after her lips. Since when did Ana keep binoculars in her car?
I laughed, taking them. “Why do you have these?”
“Bird-watching. Whatever. Will you look inside freaking Patricio’s please?”
I pressed the binoculars to my eyes. It was hard to hold them steady. There were people’s feet, and people eating, and a salsa bar with lots of bins that looked empty except for the orange one piled high with pickled carrots because those were gross and no one liked them.
“What am I looking for?”
“To the left. Look to the left.”
To the left, there was a family and a policeman and someone I recognized from somewhere, but I couldn’t place it right now, and there was a blond woman at a table sipping a fountain soda and—“No.”
“You see him?”
“This can’t be happening.”
“It’s happening.”
“No.”
“Chuck,” Ana said, like his name was something dirty.
I couldn’t believe it. Chuck with a woman, and of course she was a fucking blonde. Chuck at a bad Mexican restaurant with a fucking blond woman at 4:00 p.m.? I kept looking, trying to make it go away. But no, there he was. My Chuck, nodding along as the blond woman spoke. She was animated. She used her hands to accentuate her point. And Chuck was smiling that particular smile he used when he wanted to impress people, the one where he stuck his chin forward extra far. He was making that extra effort for her. And his body language, how attentive he was. His whole being was trying to impress her. And he was wearing his Hawaiian Walmart shirt, not his work shirt. Which meant that he had changed his clothes for this date. I felt dizzy and frozen and hot in the sun, and I wanted it to stop but I couldn’t look away. Things were bad between us, but now they were irreparably bad. Cheating on me again? This could not be repaired. This was the last straw, this was the avalanche, this was divorce court.
The chips at the center of the table. Chuck and the blond woman reached for them at the same time. Did their hands touch? It was too fast to see. Chuck ate his chip with his mouth closed, which was so deferential. And then they were standing up and walking to the door. Chuck opened the door for her. How rarely he did that for me. Smiling as he held it open, gesturing for her to go. Smiling so incessantly that it must have been hurting his face. They emerged and took a few steps down the corridor of the strip mall and—no! They disappeared behind a big white van.
“Fuck. I can’t see.”
“Fuck that van,” Ana said.
They were probably kissing good-bye behind that van. I had to go see for myself. I reached for the door handle.
“Don’t do it, Nan,” Ana said. “Think about this.”
“I’m going to fucking kill him.” I opened the door.
“Nan, no.” Ana grabbed my wrist.
I shook her off me. I was ready to break something.
“Nan,” Ana said. “Screaming at Chuck in a parking lot isn’t going to accomplish anything.”
My eyes were still fixed on the spot where they’d gone missing.