“I know.” Luca studied the road. “I like cooking, and I don’t mind driving you.” He waited a tick. “I’m putting off going to my parents’ house. I don’t really want to.”
I swiveled in the seat so I could look at him, but not enough that I got car sick again. “I thought you moved back here to be near them. So you could be back with your father while he’s ill.”
“Yes,” he answered. The word came out like a sigh. “It’s a long story. This is the school, right?” He turned in quickly at the driveway.
“Slow down! There are preschoolers everywhere.” As I said it, one darted out from between two parked cars and her mother had to grab her braid to stop her. Luca slammed on the brakes. “They’re cagey yet unpredictable,” I explained. “Like feral cats, but way worse.” He carefully and slowly pulled into a parking space and Nola and I hopped out. “I’ll be right back, after I talk to the teachers,” I told him.
“Take as long as you’d like,” he said. “No hurry.”
Nola was busy calling hellos to her friends as we walked in, but I was focused on thinking of normal, non-crazy parent things to say to her two teachers. Certainly, “If that Horatio touches my little girl again, I’ll end him,” would not be appropriate, and would probably lead to police involvement.
And I managed to keep it short and sweet when we explained what had happened on the monkey bars, and how the beast-boy Horatio had threatened Nola not to tell on him. Both her teachers were appropriately horrified, which I found gratifying, but they did vaguely mention that there had been other incidents with him in the past.
“Since no one can watch him all the time, maybe this school isn’t the best place for him,” I suggested. I felt that San Quentin, the maximum-security prison just a few miles away, might be better.
The teachers clammed right up, just as I would have done if a parent suggested to me that a kid in my class be expelled, or as we called it at Starhurst, “excluded from campus.” Like the kicked-out kids just weren’t allowed to go to our Native Plants Garden or something like that. I sighed. “Ok, well, I would appreciate you keeping a closer eye on him, because Nola could have been seriously injured. As it is, she was bruised and scared. And we would have had a real problem if she had been really hurt,” I finished, my voice going up a little, and they recoiled. Yes, I had lost it some on the last part. I kissed her goodbye and went out to the parking lot with Luca.
He was looking at his phone, but there were several moms and dads of Nola’s classmates looking into the car’s window at him. I waved to them and got into the front seat, and Luca started to back out, still inching like a snail as if another kid was going to try to leap under the wheels. “Well, of course they’re not going to do anything to that little fucker Horatio,” I announced, too mad to be worried about our lip-touching incident from the night before.
“What did they say?” he demanded. He stopped at the red light at the end of the school’s driveway.
“That they’ll watch him. They’re sorry that it happened. I’m going to email the director and both of the teachers to document all this. Schools are all about the documentation of problems. They like to cover their asses if something goes sideways. Oh, look! There’s Horatio’s mom turning in.” Both Luca and I glared at her, his blue eyes shooting absolute poison at the other car.
“Why are you suddenly smiling at me?” he asked as the light changed.
“Because you don’t like that shit Horatio, either.”
“Why would I like him, a little boy who hurt Nola?” Luca asked.
I just shrugged and enjoyed it. He was on my side about Horatio. Maybe, if it ended up that I had to go to the kid’s house to tell him and his parents how things were, Luca could drive the getaway car. I wouldn’t want him involved in the actual assault. I meant, conversation.
“You’re going to be right on time,” he said, and pulled into the Starhurst drop-off area. I saw one or two other teachers straggling up from the employee parking lot, but there were no students around yet. He stopped the car, but waited for a moment. “Jolie, about what you said last night.”
“I was drunk,” I said quickly. “Drunk, and emotional. Drunk, emotional, and tired. And hungry, too. And I had a headache.”
“Lots of reasons.”
“Yes, and I took it back, remember? A take-back means that it’s like it never even happened.”
Luca looked like he was trying not to laugh. “I can’t argue with the rules of the take-back.”
“No, you can’t,” I told him loftily, then looked out of the window. I absolutely did not want to talk about this anymore. Ever.
“Did you take back kissing me, too?” he asked, sounding very innocent. “I can’t seem to remember. Maybe that’s what you were saying when I found you mumbling in my garage after you left the kitchen.”
“I don’t happen to remember if I took it back then, but I do now. That…the…you know what I’m talking about, it never happened either.” I continued to look out through the glass as if I had never seen anything more interesting than the concrete bench with some student’s forgotten sweatshirt on it. “Thank you very much for driving me. Can you send me the name of the mechanic in the city, so I can—”
“What time are you done here?” Luca interrupted me.
“About four. Then I have to get Nola, then we’ll—”
“I’ll be here,” he cut me off again. “I’ll wait for you in the parking lot. I’m spending the day at my parents’ house and working from there. I’ll pick you up and we’ll go back to San Francisco to get your car.”
“There’s no need for you to do that,” I told the window and the bench. “Thank you, I mean, but I can figure this out. If you can just send me the name of the garage. Thank you, Luca.” I made myself turn to look at him. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate everything you’ve done for me and Nola.”
He was frowning, I could now see. “You’re welcome,” he told me stiffly.
I hesitated for another moment. “Bye.” I grabbed my big school bag and got out of the car, closed the door behind me, and walked purposefully up the path to lower school.
“Jolie!”
I turned and Luca was jogging towards me.
“Did I forget—” I started to ask.
He bent and kissed me. His arms went around me, holding me to his chest. At first, I was a little stunned, then I dropped my bag and my arms twined around his neck. It was gentle and sweet…until I relaxed against him and I felt his tongue flick against my lips. Then it turned hot and hard, his tongue now dancing in my mouth, his lips pressing and nibbling mine, his arms tightening and lifting me off the ground so that our bodies melded together.
“Jolie?”
The kiss was over and I fluttered open my eyes. My legs wobbled under me as he set me back down because my knees seemed to have gotten looser. My heart was beating out of my ribcage and my powers of speech had tapped out. I just stared at him. I had never been kissed like that. The ground was a little tilted under my feet; the sun looked brighter.
“Nothing,” Luca announced. “No emotion, barely any feeling at all.”
My spinning brain recognized my words from the night before, what I had said after I had kissed him in his kitchen. “Uh…”
He laughed. “I’ll see you after school. I’ll be here at four.”
I stood on the sidewalk watching him drive off, then thank Jesus for that bench, because my legs just weren’t up to holding me vertically.
∞
I walked back down to the same bench that afternoon, much more under control. Totally back to normal, mostly, in general. Sure, I had been a little off that day, like I forgot to take my class down to the gym for PE until the coach had called me on my classroom phone asking where the second grade was, and I hadn’t ever taken attendance, and in social studies when we were putting landmarks on our maps, I may have placed our nation’s capital in Maine. But other than that, I had pulled it together from the wobbly-kneed, shaking-ha
nded, incoherent person who had sat on the bench staring after Luca until my friend Lanie walked up from her car in the parking lot and asked me why I was planted there with my mouth open.
“Are you sure you’re ok?” she had asked me again at lunch, concerned. “Do you have another headache?”
Surprisingly, I didn’t. “I feel great,” I had answered honestly. I toyed with the old bag of Nola’s crackers I had found in my purse that were serving as my meal. I needed to dissect the events of the last 24 hours, because my head was spinning. But I realized that didn’t feel like talking to Lanie about kissing Luca, or the arrangement I had suggested to him. Lanie hadn’t said it straight out, but I knew that she hadn’t approved of my behavior in the bar with Stoney. I didn’t want to lower her opinion of me, or of Luca, either. “What’s happening with your roommate?” I asked her instead, and she gave me the lowdown on Brooks. He was still seeing the other woman, sailing with her on some boat her parents had, going to some fancy benefit in the city.
“He just looks so cute in a tux,” Lanie said miserably. She sighed. “Tell me about Nola. I need a distraction.”
I explained the Horatio situation and Lanie was angry too, but she had such a soft heart, she immediately also tried to come up with reasons that Horatio might have acted that way.
“What are his parents like?” she’d asked me. “If there are problems at home, he may be taking them out at school, right?”
“Or maybe he’s just the devil incarnate.”
“No child is really bad, Jolie!”
She didn’t know my youngest brother. And it had been much more satisfying when Luca had given Horatio’s car the evil eye. “Whatever. I’m going to let the teachers handle it, like the parents of our students do here.” We both burst out laughing. Starhurst parents weren’t known for their, um, lack of involvement. If they could have come in and directed the classes each day, some of them would have jumped at the chance. We complained about parents until lunch was over.
So I hadn’t talked to Lanie about Luca, and I hadn’t told her anything about meeting up with Ty the day before. I hadn’t been sure the dinner would actually come off, which it hadn’t, so good idea by me. Also, I felt, well, ashamed about him. I was embarrassed that Ty, a total idiot, had been my choice of partner. Talking to Lanie about Ty today would have meant saying that he had basically stood us up, me and his sweet daughter, and it would probably have led to me discussing his funding request. And I had always felt sort of strange around Lanie regarding money stuff, because she had it and I surely didn’t.
Lanie was well-to-do, as in, a major trust fund baby. Major. She never made a big deal talking about her family with the other teachers, or drove a fancy car to school, or wore giant diamonds or anything. In other words, she never flaunted, and she was always super-generous with gifts for Nola, wanting to take us to dinner, things like that.
But it was more that she just didn’t understand at all where I was coming from on some issues. Like, before Christmas, when I was lamenting that I was really over the weather and how the rain was getting me down, she suggested that I go somewhere hot for a vacation. I had been trying to figure out if I was going to be able to afford the gas and the price of a super-cheap motel so Nola and I could visit my mom and step-dad; a Mexico vacation wasn’t on my horizon probably until Nola finished college. “Maybe,” I had said weakly, and she mentioned something about where her mom was going in Bali. It wasn’t mean, just a little clueless.
And on top of that, I was embarrassed of myself. I had caved and given Ty money. Again. I was such a dummy with him! No need to broadcast it around the world and rehash it endlessly. But, man, I really, really needed some girlfriend advice about Luca. What the hell, anyway? After he said that he didn’t want to do the physical stuff as the garnish to our friendship, then he had gone ahead and kissed me dizzy. Kissed me so that, whenever I thought about it, I got a little lightheaded again and my arms covered in goosebumps. Goosebumps! I had no idea the mere meeting of mouths could produce that kind of physical reaction, even hours later.
As I sat looking for his black car at the end of the school day, I thought about how we had stood just a few feet away and he had made the Earth tilt on its axis for me. I did another full-body shake, a head to toe quiver. Get a grip, Jolie! Luca was going to come soon and I needed to pull my shit together before he did, so it wouldn’t seem like he had knocked me sideways. Which he had. I closed my eyes for a second, remembering again.
“Ms. Fraser? Julie Fraser?”
A guy in a uniform was standing on the curb in front of a town car, holding up a little sign with my name spelled on it wrong, and looking at me inquiringly.
“Yes?”
“I’m here to pick you up and take you to,” he checked his phone, “Marin Hillside Nursery School, and then to Rueda’s Garage in San Francisco. I have your child seat installed, if you want to check it.”
“What?” I stared at him. “Where’s Luca?”
“What?” He stared back. “Is he the guy in Belvedere who gave me the car seat?”
“Hang on a sec, please.” I rummaged in my purse for my phone. “Why is there a car here to drive me around? What’s happening?” I texted.
Luca answered almost immediately. “I need to stay at my parents’ house. Go with the guy, I’ll talk to you later.”
“I don’t need this. I can get a rideshare,” I wrote. Or, Nola and I could take a bus, a ferry, a bus, probably another bus, and then walk to wherever this garage was.
“It’s already paid for. Why not use it?” he answered me.
I looked at the phone, biting my lip. “Go,” he wrote. “Nola is waiting for you.”
Jesus. “Thank you. This is unnecessary. Thank you,” I typed. He didn’t say anything back to me this time.
“Are you ready to go?” the driver asked, and I nodded, and let him open the door for me and drive to the preschool.
Nola was, to put it mildly, surprised to find out that we were going in yet another car. And that we were going back to San Francisco. “Are we going to Luca’s house again? Will he make more breakfast?” she asked me.
“No, we just have to get our car. Then we’ll drive home,” I explained. “But I can make eggs, if you want.”
She made a face. She, unfortunately, had already tasted my eggs and apparently, they had made an impression. “No, I don’t want those.”
“You mean, ‘No, thank you.’”
“No, thank you, I don’t want those eggs ever,” she amended. I didn’t think they were that bad.
The driver brought us to the garage and helped me untangle Nola’s seat from his car. My little ride was parked out in front in the driveway, looking a lot shinier and cleaner than I remembered it. Great, had they detailed it or something? I started to sweat, thinking of how much it was going to cost. “Let’s go pay the piper, Noles,” I told my daughter, and took her little hand for comfort.
The guy at the counter started typing when I pointed to the car and said I was here to pick it up. “Yeah, your tire was a wreck,” he said.
My heart sank further. “You couldn’t fix it?”
“Naw, not with five nails in it! Did you drive through a construction site?”
“No,” I answered slowly. Five nails? If the tire had that much damage, that was why the car had been driving so strangely on our way into the city for dinner with Ty. We were lucky to have made it.
But then the guy said, “Your roters were out of round, too. And your suspension…” He kept talking for a moment, but I interrupted once I realized what he was saying to me.
“Wait a sec. You’re talking in the past tense. What do you mean, they ‘were’ out of round? You didn’t fix my brakes, did you?”
“Sure, we put in new roters and pads, front and back. Four new tires, of course, because your other three were well-past due for it.” He read his screen. “The control arm assemblies, the thermostat, the…” He kept going again, and I clutched the counter.
/> “Stop, please,” I said. I couldn’t take any more of this. I was never going to afford it. I was going to have to leave my car at this garage.
He looked at me. “It was all in the estimate we sent over to your husband.”
“My husband?” I asked weakly.
The mechanic looked at his computer screen. “Luca Visconti. Am I saying that name right, Mrs. Visconti?” He grabbed a paper off the printer and put it in front of me. “If you can just sign here, you’re all set to go.”
“What about paying you?” I managed.
“Naw, your husband called in his card.”
“My husband,” I repeated.
The guy just stared at me. “Uh, did you want to look at the car before you sign?”
Yes, I did, because I wanted to see these repairs, and even though my brain was still moving sluggishly, I did think of one more thing. “Can you print out a detailed invoice for me and my husband?” I choked on the last word a little so that it came out funny. I did not have one of those, and I did not want one. He printed it out and slid it across to me, and I almost fell over backwards at the total cost printed in bold at the bottom.
They had fixed everything, every single thing wrong with my bucket of bolts transportation. “You were definitely going to fail your next smog test,” the mechanic said confidently.
“Oh,” I said, still transfixed by the numbers. Nola pulled on my leg and said something about the pile of dirty toys in the corner of the office. “Just a sec, Noles,” I said automatically.
“You’re all good for the emissions test now that we’ve replaced your spark plugs, air filter, and gas cap,” he assured me. We walked outside, me following him blankly. “Does this car have sentimental value, or something like that?”
“Yes, I’m quite sentimental about it,” I answered, staring at the clean, vacuumed interior. Sentimental because without it, I couldn’t get my ass around.
“Just sign here and you’re all set,” he urged me. My hand shook as I put my name on the paper.
“I have to call Luca,” I told Nola once I had installed the car seat and we were ready to go. The only way to legally talk on the phone and drive was on speakerphone, so I would have to keep it clean with the little ears in the back. “Yes, hello,” I spat out when he answered. “We just got my car.” I grasped the wheel to pull out, my fingers twitching in anger.
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