“Hi, Luca,” Nola called.
“Hi there. Is it all fixed?” he asked.
“Yes,” I seethed. “Everything, every single thing is fixed. I have the invoice.”
“Great, good,” he said. He sounded distracted. “I need to go.”
“Luca, I’m just calling to say that I will be paying you back for this. I’m—”
“Great,” he said again. “Talk to you later. Call me later.”
And he hung up.
“The presumptuous, overbearing…kisser!” I muttered.
“Can we listen to Brenda Lee?” Nola called. “Will we see Luca today?”
“No, we won’t see Luca,” I said shortly, and angrily started up the music. Then I took a breath. “We saw him this morning, right?” I reminded her in my normal voice. “We probably won’t see him for a while.” Or ever.
“When he was cooking the eggs, he said he likes to swim, like me. We could go with him. He could throw me in the air in the pool, like Sammy’s dad can.”
“Maybe another time.” Luca! My head throbbed and I wanted to pull over and close my eyes. I was equal parts offended that he hadn’t trusted me to take care of my own business and pissed at his high-handed way of organizing my life. And then he had hung up on me? I pushed on the accelerator angrily and the car jumped to life.
Ok, so yes, I had to admit that it was running beautifully. Better than when I had bought it, used, from one of Ty’s uncles. Ty had already zoomed off on his bike and left me, and as I had stopped at the end of the driveway, the muffler had fallen off the car. The uncle had yelled that the sale was as-is and gone back into his house, pulling the curtains closed and refusing to answer the door when I knocked. Ty’s family was great.
“I’m hungry,” Nola announced. “Can we have hamburgers again?”
“No, not tonight.” Traffic ground to a halt as Brenda Lee sang over and over about her boyfriend letting her down easy. I looked in the console and saw that the garage people had neatly stacked and clipped together all the notes that I’d had stuck to my dashboard. I flipped through to remind myself of what I should have been doing.
“***Hem pants?” was never going to get done, so I would just keep rolling the waist of that pair and keep looking a little thick around the middle. “Figure out cable,” yeah, I needed to do that, because they had to be able to give me some kind of break on that bill. We only watched the old movie channel and cartoons—maybe there was some kind of package for that. “Car?? call Lanie’s guy.” Well, now I didn’t have to call the guy that Lanie had sworn was an automotive genius. I crumpled that note and threw it on the floor, then bent and picked it back up because the interior looked so nice, I couldn’t start to mess it up already.
“Call Mom NOW!!!!!” the next post-it yelled at me. Yes, I would definitely do that when I got home.
But the one person I was not going to talk again to was Luca, no matter if my wheel was no longer vibrating, and no matter that I could take corners at a reasonably fast speed, and no matter that it didn’t sound like an injured pig was beneath the chassis when I hit the brakes.
I was not calling Luca. Probably, I wouldn’t ever speak to him again.
Chapter 7
The phone rang, and rang, and rang. Nineteen times, twenty, twenty-one. My parents had neither voicemail or an answering machine, so the only thing to do was to let it go on.
And on. It did, with me counting the rings. Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one…
Nola had gone to sleep a little early tonight after the disruptions in our routine the day before, so I had the apartment to myself. Just me, Gregory Peck on my TV screen, the guy playing the bongos upstairs, and the ringing phone. Forty-three. Forty-four. I was going to hang up.
“Hello? Hello?” My stepdad sounded kind of confused, and a little angry.
“Ron? It’s me, it’s Jolie. Did you have trouble finding the phone?
“Your mother had it in her purse again.”
“Remember how I suggested putting back in your old phone so the handset can’t disappear anymore? Have you tried that?”
“The phone plug doesn’t fit in the wall socket,” he told me gruffly. “Damn near electrocuted myself.”
I held in the sigh. No, a telephone cord wouldn’t fit into a socket for an electric plug. Ron was in his late seventies, or even early eighties, depending on what was his real birth year (he had offered up various possibilities for his age since I had met him when I was a little girl, but I tended to believe the older timeline). He had never gotten very comfortable with technology, even though that particular phone tech dated from the last century. But he was a whiz at rolling a joint and packing a bowl, so he did have his own skill set.
“I’ll send you a letter with pictures showing how to do it,” I suggested. “How is Mom doing?”
“Just fine.”
“And Kayla? She’s going to school, right?” My youngest sister, Kayla, was supposed to be in kindergarten. I had gotten her registered the summer before, but from what I’d gathered on my last visit to them, it didn’t seem like her attendance was a regular thing. Unfortunately, she wasn’t required by California law to go to school until she turned six, which would be first grade for her. That meant that the local board of education up in their county wouldn’t enforce Kayla showing up for kindergarten. I had to try enforce it, from far away, over a phone that no one could find.
“Kayla’s just fine,” Ron told me sharply.
He was not a fount of information. “Is Mom there?”
“Just a moment.”
The phone clunked down. Neither he or my mom had gotten the hang of the idea that they could just carry it to the person I was asking for, since it was cordless.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mom,” I answered.
“Jolie!” I could hear her smile as she said my name. “Hi honey, I was just thinking about you!”
“You were? What were you thinking?” I asked happily. She sounded good. Much better than the last time we had talked.
“I was thinking that it’s about time for our lambs to be born. I know how you love that.”
My heart sank. “It is close to spring, but we don’t have the sheep anymore. I don’t live there anymore either, Mom. Remember? Nola and I live near San Francisco.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, sounding unconvinced.
We talked for a while longer about the garden, which she also didn’t have now, since we hadn’t lived on the farm in twelve years. She told me about Kayla and it did sound like she was attending school, maybe not as regularly as I would have liked, but my mom knew her teachers and that made me glad. Then my mom said something surprising.
“We’re all so happy about Maia’s new job.”
“Maia, my cousin? Your niece? What new job?” I asked dubiously.
“It’s so much more responsibility, but more money, too,” my mom said. “It’s great for her parents.”
I decided that her mind must have switched back to the past, when Maia got her first official job when she turned 14, vacuuming out cars at the dealership. I asked my mom if I could talk to Ron again.
“Just a moment,” she told me. Clunk, the phone went down so she could bring him to it, rather than vice versa.
When he said hello, I led with, “Ron, she sounds really off. What did the doctor say?” He hemmed and hawed for a while, until I interrupted. “You are bringing her to the appointments, right? Follow-up care after a stroke is very important. I know you know that.”
“I get her there when she’ll go,” he said crankily. “Jolie, I’m hanging up. I can’t spend all day blabbing with you on the phone.”
“Ron…ok.” I held in an angry exhalation. “I’ll call again soon. Her next appointment is in a week, so—”
He hung up. Ron had never been the friendliest guy, the most personable, but as the years had gone on, he got touchier and meaner. He had started the family with my mom pretty late in life, with her much younger. He probably never expec
ted to be eighty (maybe) years old and have a daughter in kindergarten and a wife who, after a series of small strokes, wouldn’t ever be the same. Sure, it sucked, but my mom had taken care of him for most of their marriage, making sure he slept in when the rest of us had to get up to feed the animals, making sure his beer was in the fridge when we didn’t have milk. Now it was his turn, but Ron wasn’t taking it. I sat, angry and bitter, on my couch.
That was the mood I was in when Luca called.
“What?” I snapped into the phone.
“Still not happy I had your car fixed, I see,” he commented.
“No. I mean, thank you because it runs great, and it’s probably safer now…”
“It’s definitely safer now. It was not, in any way, before.”
My anger ratcheted up. “Thank you,” I said through clenched teeth. “But I’m in charge, ok? I decide when I get my car repaired. It’s mine and it’s up to me to take care of it, not you. If you had talked to me about what the mechanic had said, if you had told me how bad the brakes were and that I wouldn’t pass my smog test next month, then I would have acted on those things myself.” As I had meant to, as evidenced by the post-it reminder I’d had on my dashboard about Lanie’s car guy. I was going to get around to it, for sure. I got angrier at myself for not getting to it sooner. What had I been doing, driving that deathtrap with Nola in it? “I don’t like you taking over without talking to me!” I exploded at Luca. “What were you thinking to have all that done to my car without even asking me first? Spending all that, without checking with me? And I will pay you back. In installments,” I clarified.
“I’m sorry.”
“Huh?”
“I’m sorry,” he said slowly and clearly. “You’re right. I should have asked you before I gave the go-ahead for the repairs. When they called me from the garage with the list of problems, my first reaction was that I didn’t want you and Nola in that car until it was fixed. You were at school and I didn’t think I could reach you, and I thought it would be easier just to take care of it myself. But you’re right, I should have asked you first. I shouldn’t have acted like…”
“An asshole,” I supplied. “A well-meaning asshole, but an asshole. I really do appreciate how great the car is now,” I stressed. “And I will pay you back.”
“Sure,” he answered briefly. “Then I’ll speak to you later, I guess.”
“No, hold on!” We had another issue to cover also. “Luca, you were like the kissing bandit this morning. It was a mouth-to-mouth hit and run in the Starhurst parking lot! What was that about?”
There was a pause. “I’m sorry about that, too. You piqued my pride a little the night before with what you said, that you kissed me and it was nothing. You felt nothing. And you looked so cute as you walked away from me, in your little skirt with your ass…” His voice dwindled and stopped.
“Um, with it jiggling?” I prompted.
“No, with it so…” he trailed off again. “Your ass is very nice to watch. How your skirt swished back and forth, and your hips, and I got carried away.”
My jaw dropped. Really? He liked my ass? My hips? He had been watching them?
“But I thought about it a lot today, and I’m sorry,” Luca concluded grimly.
“I’m not!” I exploded. “I’m not at all sorry about that kiss. I thought it was awesome. I was awestruck. Awe-inspired. A lot of awe.”
“Really?” he asked, his voice warming. “You’re not mad about that, too?”
“No!” How could I have been mad about it, when it had made my whole day? “Did you think it was as good as I did, or is was it just that good for me because of my lack of experience?”
“What do you mean, ‘lack of experience?’ You have a child. The truth is out,” he said.
“I mean my lack of experience with kissing, dummy! Ty didn’t like me to kiss him. Not on the lips, anyway. He wanted my mouth on other, lower areas—”
“I understand you,” Luca interrupted. “Yes, I thought it was that good, too. I thought about it all day, in fact.” His voice sounded warm and deep. I shivered on my couch.
“Did it change your mind about what I said to you in your kitchen?” I asked him.
“About us? About us, together?”
“Not ‘us, together,’ but us, fooling around. You proved me right today, Luca! You see what I mean now, don’t you?”
He didn’t answer, but I knew I was on point. And I wanted more. Somehow, I had gone from being furious with him about my car right straight to wanting to screw him, immediately, now, at the present moment. Ok, if I was being honest, I had never stopped wanting to screw him, even when I was super mad.
“We can totally do it, and just be friends,” I announced. “I liked kissing you, a lot, but I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to marry anyone, or have another kid, or settle down in any way.”
“I liked kissing you, too, and I don’t want to marry you, either,” he answered.
“See?” I said triumphantly. “Listen, I’m not going to say any more about this to you, and I’m not going to beg or anything, because I do have other options.” Oh, heaps. Tons. Single guys were lining up at my door, spilling down the stairs. “I’m just saying, there’s a thing called chemistry, and it’s a shame to waste it.”
He was silent on the other end of the line. “It is a shame to waste it,” Luca said finally, and my heart went thump, thump, THUMP. “Why don’t we go out this weekend, just us? We can talk more.”
And do other things, I thought happily. “Saturday?”
“Yes. I’ll be in Marin that day, again.” He sighed. “I need to spend more time there. It wasn’t a good day today, with my father.”
“Not good, how? He’s not feeling well?” I asked.
“He’s not feeling well, and he’s acting terrible to my mom. I’ve been staying away, like a coward, but I have to help her out.”
“Like a coward? What do you mean?”
“My father and I don’t get along very well.” He was quiet again.
“Yeah?” I prompted. “I don’t get along great with my stepdad, either. He’s pretty much a dick.”
“My dad is also a dick. He’s mean and controlling to my mom.”
“To you, too?”
“He used to be, and he still tries, even now. I was sitting with him when you called and I didn’t want him to hear us talking, I didn’t want him to hear your name. He’s always been overly interested in what I do. So I hung up on you rather than deal with him.” Big sigh. “I’m sorry about that.”
“That’s ok,” I told him. “I didn’t sit fuming, or call you names like ‘stupid asswipe.’”
And I was very glad to hear him laugh. “Good. And I didn’t have a heart attack and want to kill you when I heard all the things wrong with your car, all the ‘deferred maintenance.’”
“I was getting to it,” I defended myself.
“Hence the word, ‘deferred,’” Luca pointed out.
“I’m trying to save for a new apartment for me and Nola. And I’m trying to save for her for college, too, and beyond. And also put some more away for my mom and my sister, Kayla, because my mom had some strokes, and she’s kind of fading.”
“That’s a lot,” he said quietly.
“Well, anyway, car repairs were on the list, but just not flashing red yet. With a little more distance from the strange guy picking me up at school today and from my incandescent rage when I saw the invoice with how much I owe you, I can really see that your heart was in the right place about my car. So I forgive you.”
He laughed harder. “I’m so relieved. But you know, I take back my apology, because I’m glad I got the car fixed to be safe for you and Nola. What are the rules of take-backs, again?”
And that led to us yakking away, about stupid stuff and funny stuff, and just stuff. I only realized how much time had passed when I saw that the movie was ending with Audrey Hepburn saying Rome was her favorite city, and I looked at the time.
&nb
sp; “I have to go,” I said reluctantly. “I have to get up and deal with seven- and eight-year-olds tomorrow. I have to be in top form, well, as top as I can get it, or they’ll steamroll me.”
“I’ll see you Saturday. But we’ll talk before then. It’s only Tuesday.”
“Jesus, don’t say it like that! Only Tuesday? I’ll never get through the week with that defeatist mindset.”
“How about this: the work week is forty percent complete.” He laughed.
“Much better. Goodnight, Luca.”
“Goodnight, Jolie.”
I went to bed and had very pleasant dreams.
∞
“Did you get a new job like my mom said, or is just her mis-remembering?” I wrote to my cousin on my phone under the table as I waited for the fourth-grader I tutored, Bernard, to slide his math problem over to me. Right now, I was trying to get him up to speed in math; our next focus would be why he hadn’t completed the vocabulary workbook chapter that his teacher told me had been due on Monday, and was now four days late.
Usually Maia was quick to write back, but Bernard and I got through five more division problems and cracked open the vocab before she answered me.
“I got a promotion at the dealership.” And that was all. I called her immediately after I extracted a promise from Bernard that he would finish the synonym/antonym section tonight at home and said goodbye to him.
“Hi, I’m calling about the unicorn you advertised for sale online?” I said when she answered. “I wasn’t clear from the pictures you posted if it has wings or not and wings are really a deal-breaker for me.”
“You’re so weird, Jolie,” Maia responded. “When my phone rings, I always know it’s you, because you’re the only one who still actually uses a phone for calling.”
“I like to hear your voice. Maia, what promotion? Why didn’t you tell me?”
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