“I just got a promotion at the dealership,” she repeated. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s important enough that my mom knew about it and remembered it. What’s the story? Tell me, immediately.”
She explained it, vaguely, and it sounded like a big deal to me. “Are you a manager there now?” I demanded. “Seriously, as a senior in high school, you got a job like that? Maia! That’s awesome!”
“It’s just the parts department, where I’ve been for the past two years,” she said. “I’m not doing much more stuff, just the title is different.”
“And the money.”
“And the money is different,” Maia agreed. “Better.”
“Wow. I’m so impressed. Think of what you’ll be able to save for college!” I thought of what I had learned at the admissions seminar in San Francisco. “You should tell the schools you applied to about this promotion, Mai.”
She didn’t answer and I thought we got cut off until I heard a honk in the background. She was at work right now.
“Well, I don’t want to keep you from your new, high-powered job, Ms. Manager. I’ll talk to you soon, ok?”
“Yeah, unless you want to text me, like a normal person,” she said.
“I’m going to call and leave you a thousand voice mails, one word at a time so you have to listen to each one to get the very important message from me. That will be fun. Love you, Maia.”
“I love you too, Jolie.”
I stuck the phone in my bag and hurried to my car, my smoothly-running, safe car. It had been a weird week. Usually, I sort of trudged through the days, and by the end of the week, I was practically sleep-walking. But time seemed to have flown. I could hardly believe that it was already Friday, and tomorrow Luca and I would go out. I had been thinking about it, a little.
Yes, fine, a lot. And we had been talking, too, on the phone like Maia enjoyed mocking. Luca had called to say that he had found my cardigan in his guest bedroom where Nola had slept cuddling it. Then he had called again because he wanted to know if Horatio had pulled any more stunts at the preschool. Then he had sent me an article about the nutritional value of pickles, ha ha. Which had led to a lot of writing back and forth, and more talking on the phone. And tomorrow, I would see him. Cue the shivers and goose bumps.
My shivery excitement-mood was broken up when I got Nola. She was angry that she had to leave school when some of her friends were going to stay later and she was equally angry that other friends had gotten picked up sooner. “Their mommies come right away and I have to wait!” she accused me.
“You just finished telling me that you didn’t want to go,” I reasoned, my heart clenching at her words, and then she burst into tears.
“She’s had a tough day,” her teacher told me, patting Nola’s back as I picked my crying child off the floor.
“Horatio?” I mouthed, but Mrs. Lopez shook her head.
“Just having a hard time,” she said complacently. I was sure she had seen a lot of crying kids in her years of teaching, and I had too, but it was way, way different when it was your own little one bawling on your shoulder.
I kissed and cuddled Nola on the way to the car, carrying her and her bag draped across my body. She had dialed down to sniffles by the time I did the last buckle of her seat. “Noles, did all the kids get along today?” I asked vaguely, trying not to plant ideas in her quick little brain.
“Yes, except David and Rogelio, they were mad at each other at snack.” Sniff, sniff. “I’m hungry!”
Maybe that was her issue. I dug out some dried fruit from the depths of my bag, glad I hadn’t found it before to eat for lunch. I put on the soothing sounds of Brenda Lee and drove us home.
“No.” Nola sat at the bottom of the stairs when we got there.
“Nola Jane…”
“No!”
We had been having this argument for five minutes and I was starting to turn red in the face.
“I can’t carry you up because my ankle hurts a lot today,” I explained, again, keeping my voice nice and level. “I’ll hold your hand and—”
“No! I’m too tired to walk.” She burst into noisy tears. It wasn’t like her, not at all—she usually was a sunny-side up kid. And I didn’t just say that because I was her mom, either.
I sat down on the step, suddenly very, very tired too. “Well, I guess we could just stay here. I won’t be able to start dinner until we go up, though, and you said you were hungry, so…”
It was a mistake. She was past the point of reason and hints. Her mouth opened into a perfect circle and a wail loud enough to wake the dead came out of it. The door to the apartment next to the stairs also flew open, and an angry face appeared.
“Sorry,” I apologized to my neighbor. I half-dragged, half-carried Nola to Mrs. Santamaría’s apartment. “Sorry,” I said to her too, when she opened the door to my knocking. Ok, pounding.
Her eyes widened. “Come in!” she urged us, and I got us past the threshold. Nola collapsed against me, sobbing.
“I think she’s just hungry,” I tried to explain over the crying, “but I can’t get her up the stairs…”
“It’s so fortunate that my dinner is ready and I have more than enough to share,” Mrs. Santamaría said loudly. “Is anyone else hungry? I wonder, Jolie, if you and Nola would like to sit at the table and hold a doll while I set out plates of pasta for you.”
“D-d-d-doll?” Nola said, her voice stutter-sobbing on the word.
“Doll and dinner,” Mrs. Santamaría promised her. “Let’s go have a seat.”
The woman was a miracle worker. My daughter was at the table with a glass of milk, a small dish of carrots, and a plate of lasagna almost before we realized what was happening. The giant doll sat beside her in its own chair as Nola dug into a food she usually turned up her nose at (she didn’t believe in mixing cheese, pasta, and sauce. It was usually a two out of three situation). I ate too, with gusto.
“Thank you. Thank you so much. I was at my wit’s end,” I told Mrs. Santamaría. “I thought we would have to live at the bottom of the stairs.”
“Kids are so funny,” she said, beaming at Nola.
“Funny” was not the word I would have used to describe this episode. Funny, no; draining and rotten, yes. “Funny,” I repeated. I looked at Nola. “Hey, now that you’re feeling better, can you tell me why you were so upset when I got you at school?”
She shrugged. Her face was bathed in tomato sauce. “My shoe hurt,” she informed me.
Well, there. It was so obvious.
After dinner, and after doll-playing and fun, Mrs. Santamaría made the trek up to our apartment with us. It took her a while, because she did have a bad back, but Nola really wanted her to come and she insisted that she was fine. I was wishing I had picked up the place a little. There was a bit of a mess, like the PJs that Nola had discarded by the door as we ran out that morning and she changed as we went; the coffee cup, knife with jam, and the new loaf of low-sugar/low-sodium bread (as recommended by Luca) on the counter; the sturdy and entirely unsexy bra that I had gratefully removed the night before and that I had left draped over the back of the couch. I quickly stuffed it behind the cushion.
All Mrs. Santamaría said was, “Your apartment seems so much bigger than mine! That’s because you’re a sane woman, not a collector like I am.” She made a face. “This inspires me to do some clean up.”
Me, too. I put away the bread and swept crumbs off the counter into my hand. “Nola, pajamas, please.”
“I want to stay with Mrs. Santa!”
“You’ll see her tomorrow night, too, remember?” She was babysitting because I was going out with Luca. I was going out with Luca…
“Let me come with you to brush your teeth,” Mrs. Santamaría told my daughter. “I’d like to see how you do it.”
“You have to get every one,” Nola started to explain, and led her to the bathroom.
By the time they were done reading books together, which Nola had love
d, I had the apartment back in pretty good working order. We both kissed Nola goodnight and turned out the lights, but I could hear the sounds of Brenda Lee through our bedroom door as she sang to herself.
“Come sit and hang out,” I urged Mrs. Santamaría. “Can I get you anything…” I didn’t have a lot. Grocery shopping was tomorrow. “How about coffee?”
“So late at night?” she asked dubiously.
Well, it was only 7:30, and caffeine was my friend at any hour of the day. “How about water?”
“Tell me what you’re doing tomorrow evening when I have Nola,” she said, settling down with the glass I gave her.
“Um…I’m going out with a friend. But he may be more than a friend.”
Her eyes lit up. “A love connection? That’s so exciting!”
“Um…” I said again. “More like a physical connection, maybe?”
“This is a booty call?” she asked me calmly.
My mouth dropped. “Mrs. Santamaría!”
“I think you should call me Eva,” she told me. “I’m old, but I’ve been around. We didn’t used to call them that, though the basic concept is the same.”
“This isn’t what you just said, anyway,” I informed her. “Luca and I are getting to be friends. I think we already are. We have so much fun talking to each other, and I really like being with him.”
“So, it is a love connection?” She seemed puzzled.
“No, because neither of us wants love. Or a boyfriend or a girlfriend, or any kind of commitment. We just want to be friends, have fun, and…enjoy our bodies.” I got very red.
Eva cracked up, laughing her head off. “I’m sorry, Jolie, but you sounded exactly like a movie that I used to have to show to my Human Development class. I think that line about ‘enjoying our bodies’ was in it. That, and they talked vaguely about ‘self-love,’ which the kids never understood. They thought it was something to do with confidence and dressing well,” she explained.
“I don’t know how else to say what I’m trying to say!”
“You and this man are using each other for sex,” Eva said calmly.
“No, there’s no using! We’re enjoying each other for sex. I should say, we may enjoy each other. All we’ve done so far is kiss, but, wow, he knocked my socks off.” Shiver, goosebumps. “Luca is really something, and I don’t mean just the kissing part. And not just that he’s so devastatingly handsome that I drool a little when I see him. He’s just awesome. As a person, I think he’s awesome.”
“You like him,” she said, eyebrows up.
“Yes. As a friend. I don’t need another complication, and I don’t want to mess up Nola’s life trying to have some boyfriend. It won’t be just me getting hurt and I can’t have that for her.”
It seemed like Eva was itching to say something, but all she did was nod.
“Anyway, he’s not interested either. He broke up with someone, a really serious relationship, and she followed him around the world to try to get back together with him. Not that I blame her, really,” I conceded. “If I had a guy like that, I would probably follow him around like a puppy, too. Bad enough what I did with Ty.”
“Ty?”
“My stupid ex-boyfriend. We started dating in high school but we broke up when I got pregnant. I was so, so dumb about him. I don’t I regret having Nola, of course, but I really regret the circumstances.” I shook my head. I had been an idiot. “When he left me, I tried for months to get him back. I called him non-stop, texted him at all hours. I begged. I wrote him letters, made him cookies. I showed up at his friends’ houses and asked them to help me.” I burned with humiliation just saying it.
“It makes sense that you would want the father of your child involved in your lives,” Eva told me.
I shook my head again. “No, I acted like a crazy person. A pathetic, spineless, needy, crazy person. I didn’t wise up and see the reality of the situation until the day after I gave birth to Nola.” I remembered it so clearly. “It was the morning after, and I was so tired I felt like I could have slept for the rest of my life. Nola was in the little plastic bassinet next to my bed, beautiful and sweet and perfect, and I looked at her and realized that we were really alone. Just me and Nola. I mean, I have a few people that I can turn to if things go really bad, but at that moment it suddenly became crystal clear to me that Ty and I were through. He didn’t love me, he didn’t love his baby, he wasn’t even a decent enough person to respond to a text that I’d had her. All the years I had spent with him meant nothing. But I got Nola out of it.” I smiled a little. I was the luckiest woman alive to have her.
“And you swore off love?”
I laughed. “Nothing so dramatic! It was more that I saw that I had to change my ways. I was a mother and I had bigger fish to fry than trying to hang on to some guy or get myself another one. That part of my life is over. Never again.”
Eva nodded. “Jolie, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my long life, it’s to never say never.”
That statement gave me a very, very odd feeling, and I thought about it for the rest of the night.
Chapter 8
I heard the voice in calling to me in my dream: “Mama.” I was back on the farm among the marijuana plants but there were bugs all over them, brown beetles eating the leaves. I brushed and brushed at them and was running to get Ron and my mom, when I saw the bugs all over me, crawling on my legs and arms, going in my shirt, tickling my face. And then Nola was there, saying, “Mama, Mama,” and she was covered, too. I couldn’t get them off her. I lost her in the plants.
“Mama!”
I blinked open my eyes, confused and disturbed by my nightmare. Nola had her forehead close to mine and was brushing my cheek with her fingertips, tickling me like the bugs in my dream. I jerked away. “Are you awake?” she whispered loudly, and I groaned a little.
“Now I am.” Despite really wanting to get as much beauty sleep as possible before seeing Luca, I hadn’t been able to drift off last night. I had been thinking, which led to some worrying, which led to not sleeping and then weird dreams like the bugs on the pot plants just before I woke up. Correction: before I was woken up. I knew it was early; there wasn’t enough light in the room. “Nola, do you need to go to the potty? Is that why you got me up?”
No, she just wanted to chat. She had some ideas to discuss that seemed to come from her own dreams, like a vacuum that she could sit on and ride (“and it’s pink!”), but then she moved to recommending that we go to the park ASAP and bring her bike because she hadn’t ridden that in a very long time and it would be as fun as the pink vacuum. She also reminded me that she’d like to go for a swim that day, and she requested that I make her an egg sandwich for breakfast. “Just exactly like Luca’s, not like the kind of eggs you make. Except they can be from in our refrigerator. But you have to wake up,” she informed me, and patted my cheek, a little too briskly.
“Ok. Ok! Don’t do that so hard. I’m up.” Nola leapt from the bed and I heard her clattering around in the drawer under the oven where I kept some pots and pans. Jesus. I rested my head in my hands. It kind of sucked to wake up with a headache already going. I made my legs carry me into the living room and kitchen to ensure that Nola hadn’t moved on to getting the eggs herself.
“No, I don’t think so!” she was saying excitedly. “Yes, that’s my favorite!” She was so funny, how she made up friends. I’d never had to, with my house always full of relatives, real and fake. I looked over at her, smiling. Wait a minute…
“Nola, are you talking on my phone? Who are you talking to? Give that to me!” I held out my hand. “Hello?”
“I was going to leave you a message since it’s so early, but Nola answered,” Luca said, just as my daughter simultaneously explained that she had thought it might be Mrs. Santa calling. She couldn’t read the screen yet.
“Nola, do not touch the stove or the eggs. Nothing else in here except your own kitchen,” I told her, and directed her toward her plastic fruits and veget
ables in the battered bowl in the corner. “Luca?”
“Still me. I’m calling because I have to change our plans.”
“Oh.” Of course. He was nice and all, but Luca was still a guy, and this was what they did, right?
“My father took a bad turn yesterday. My mother was planning to go to the opera in the city tonight with a friend but she says she needs to cancel to stay with him. I would really like her to get away from here for a while, but it would mean me staying with my dad to put her mind at ease. Which would mean that we can’t go out.”
“Oh. Well, I understand.” And I did. It wasn’t like he was ditching me to go off and get stoned with his friends, like Ty had done, or screw another woman, also like Ty had done. “I hope he feels better. We can make plans for another time.”
“Nola and I were discussing seeing each other today instead of tonight,” Luca said. “You two could come my parents’ house. They have an indoor pool.”
“You want us to come there, seriously? And seriously, an indoor pool?”
“Seriously. My dad loved being in the water, but he never understood why pools were always outside in northern California. He put ours in the house. In a wing of the house,” he clarified.
Oh, of course. In the pool wing.
Nola was pulling on my pajama pants, nearly yanking them off. “I want to go! There will be eggs there! I want to swim!”
“There’s a park near here, a really nice trail to it where we could walk or bike,” Luca was saying. “It’s a beautiful day.”
“You don’t need to stay with him? With your father?”
He paused. “I need to be in the house and check on him from time to time but it’s not so bad that we can’t go to the playground for a little while. There is a nurse here twenty-four hours a day and I’ll be a phone call away.” His voice rose a little. “My mother is overly cautious with him. I don’t need to be at his damn beck and call!”
“Ok, ok, I get it. No beck and call, sure. Nola and I will be pleased to—hang on,” I said, and then addressed my daughter. “We’re going, ok, Noles? Please stop pulling down my pants.”
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