by Jen Larsen
“I’m the one who washes the dishes,” I say, pulling out the stool next to him and hopping up. I reach for a slice of bacon but Mateo slaps my hand away.
“It’s my birthday!” I say.
“Matthew,” my grandmother says. “You are not twelve years old.”
“It’s still my bacon,” he says. Annabelle Lee sighs and collapses against his shoulder, quiet now.
“So share your bacon,” I say.
Lucas grabs the plate from behind Mateo’s other shoulder and walks around to the other side of the island.
“Dick!” Mateo says.
“I want bacon,” I grumble. I can ignore my queasy stomach for bacon.
“Making more right this second,” my father says. He steps back to peer into the oven window. “Almost ready. All of it yours.”
“Is that my birthday gift?” I ask.
“I thought that was just a Tuesday,” Mateo says, and nudges me in the side, his elbow sharp and pointy.
“No, on Tuesday I eat an entire cow,” I say.
“Aw, don’t look like that,” he says. “You know I’m kidding.”
My grandmother sets down her mug and pushes it toward Mateo. “Make yourself useful, Matthew,” she says to my brother. He hops up and gives her a big smacking kiss on the cheek. He grabs her mug and wanders over to the coffee machine, Annabelle Lee still draped over his shoulder.
Lucas pushes the plate across the island to me. “Knock yourself out,” he says.
“Thank you,” I say, and take an extra-crispy piece.
“I’ll just eat the fresh batch,” he says.
“Why are you here?” I ask him. “Do you have to be here?”
“It’s your last birthday at home,” he says, with his hand in his chin. “How do you feel? Do you feel terrified about your future and all the stupid choices you’ve made and all the mistakes you’re about to make?”
“I could come home for my birthday next year,” I say. I take another piece of bacon.
“Once you leave you’re not coming back,” Mateo says, hopping back on his stool and kicking mine in a steady beat.
“Why not? You come back all the time. It’s like you’ve never left. It’s like we’re never going to get rid of you,” I say.
“Yeah, but we’re like ten minutes away.” He leans over and drops Annabelle gently on the floor. She pads off around the island with Toby in fascinated pursuit. Soto is lying at my feet with her chin on her paws, looking off into the distance.
“Like five hours away,” Lucas says.
“Fourteen hours and eight minutes,” Grandmother says. “By car.”
“Who’s counting?” my father says. He was the one who drove on that trip and I think he has blocked it all out, the fights over the radio and my grandmother’s giant paper map and her acid anger about speed limits and roadside diners and me lying in the backseat with my ear buds cranked up so loud even the open windows couldn’t drown out the bass.
“Okay, an hour by plane, though,” Mateo says.
“It’s only eight hours for me,” I say, as my father slides a pancake onto my plate. It is lumpy and pale on one side, black on the other.
“First one for the birthday girl,” he says. “As is tradition.”
“Thank you,” I say. I pick it up and drop it on the floor, as is tradition. Soto snatches it before it lands. “Good girl,” I say.
My father makes a humph noise at me and slides the next one onto my plate.
“Really?” I say. “Did you cook this?” I poke at it, and it oozes. “Are you eating these? You are going to make yourself sick.”
“Really, Charles,” my grandmother says. She slides gracefully off her stool and circles around to the stove. My father backs off as she lifts the handle of the pan and examines the pancake splatter that is currently bubbling. “This could be acceptable,” she says. She sets the pan down and crosses her arms.
“It’ll burn,” my father says.
My grandmother doesn’t answer. She arches her eyebrow at him in the way that I can too and he slinks away to peer into the fridge. Soto hauls herself up and pads over because my father with his head in the fridge is often an unexpected bounty of his impatience.
Mateo bounces up from his stool and heads for the foyer. The dogs all perk up and fling themselves away from the fridge and out of the room, barking. There are voices, and I think I recognize all of them. When Hector is at the kitchen door, still talking to Mateo about whatever, I am unsurprised. He looks around and finds me and his whole face lights up as he throws his arms out.
“Happy birthday!” he says. He’s dragging me off my stool and he is squishing me. “Happy birthday, gorgeous girl!” He gives me a big smacking kiss on the side of my face, halfway between my mouth and my cheek and I can’t help smiling. He drops me to shake hands with my dad. I stumble back and end up tipping my stool.
I catch it and settle it back into place while he’s trading hellos and various physical greetings with all the people in my family. Fist bumps and cheek kisses and handshakes, and I sit myself back on my shaky stool and eat another piece of bacon and then another while Hector and my brothers talk about the various benefits of breakfast as the first meal of the day.
Soto has vacated, because she is nervous around Hector, and Annabelle Lee and Toby have come trampling through the kitchen and out the back patio door, off in the backyard to be small dumb dogs. I think it’s for the best, because Hector has a swooping-and-overwhelming problem. He wants to gather up all the puppies into his arms at once and have quiet moments full of peace and unconditional love. I think sometimes that Hector does not actually understand how love works. There is a tiny piece of my heart that worries someday he might figure it out. And I’m not sure where that will leave me.
My grandmother slides two perfect pancakes onto my plate and smiles at me and my heart hurts.
“They are very beautiful,” I say, because they are. They look like fashion-model pancakes and I suddenly feel hungry. I pull the syrup jar over and pour it in perfect, swooping gold loops across my perfect pancakes until Mateo smacks my hand and messes up the design.
“Don’t hog it, hog,” he says.
“Don’t be an ass, ass,” I say.
I drop the syrup on the table. He snatches it up and starts drowning his stack of pancakes, which are just as perfect as mine.
“Are you ready to go?” Hector is bouncing next to my stool. He looks on the outside the way I feel inside, full of itching powder. My mouth is full and I point at it. “Chew! Chew! Chew!” he says.
“All aboard!” my father says predictably.
I swallow. “Have a pancake,” I say, pointing at the plate with my fork.
“I don’t want a pancake,” he says. “I want to go get your party stuff.”
“Ashley will eat all the pancakes for you,” Mateo says.
“She can eat them later,” Hector says. He looks at me. “What if they’re all sold out?”
“Of what?” I say with my mouth full again.
He shrugs. “I don’t know. Napkins?”
“Unlikely,” I say. I stab another bit of pancake and he watches me anxiously, like the dogs do sometimes. “Okay, fine,” I say. “I’ll go put pants on.”
I pick up my plate and shuffle out of the room with it. I hear my grandmother say, “For god’s sake, Hector, sit down.”
I can feel myself dawdling. I run a brush through my hair and put it in a ponytail and take it back down and change T-shirts three times, even though each one is the same as the last, the University of Seattle ones my brothers bring home to wash and then forget about. At the door, I pause and turn right toward my father’s room instead. It’s a mess, with piles of clothes and books and empty Fanta cans lining the windowsill. I dig through the clean laundry basket for my mother’s Harvard T-shirt, run back to my room with it. It’s tight at the boobs and it looks good on me. I’m the same size as she was, which I realize surprises me. But I’m smiling when I bounce back into the
kitchen and sing, “Ready! Let’s go! Let’s go now!”
My grandmother smiles at me again and holds her arm out. She pats me on the shoulder when I lean over to kiss her soft cheek. “This will be a very good birthday, darling. I can promise you that.”
“Oh,” I say, and then Hector is pulling me by the elbow out the door.
I’m quiet in the car all the way to the next town over. Our town is too small to have its own party store. Hector’s in the passenger seat, singing along to the terrible San Luis Obispo radio station we get, cranking it up another notch every time a new song comes on and shouting, “Oh man, I love this song!” He’s out of the car and sprinting for the party store as soon as I hit the brakes.
“Why are you so excited?” I say as I catch up to him, and he throws an arm over my shoulder.
“I’m always excited,” he says.
“But you’re extra excited. Even for you,” I say, shrugging out from under his arm and pushing through the jingling door. All the associates in the store look up.
“Hello there, can I help you with anything?” the cheerful-looking white man with the long gray braid says.
“No, thank you,” I say as I follow Hector down the aisle, though it looks like he’s disappeared. He’ll be back soon; it is like he is attached to me by an elastic cord.
Hector sneaks back up behind me while I am considering Daisy Duck napkins, which are on sale. He slips a mask over my head. He laughs when I yelp. “You’re Wonder Woman!” he says, spinning me around. I can’t see much through the narrow, crooked eye holes.
I pull off the mask and look at Wonder Woman’s empty eyes. I snap the elastic around my wrist because I don’t want to leave her alone in the store. “Maybe,” I say.
“You okay?” he says to me. He rests his forearms on my shoulder and peers into my face like he’s going to find answers in my eyebrows.
“No,” I say.
“Come on, it’s your birthday,” he says, rocking me side to side. “You love parties! You love cake!”
“Everyone loves cake.”
“You love cake like a fat kid loves cake!” he says, grinning at me.
I yank myself away from him. “I love cake the way a fat kid loves his friends and family.” I turn and stalk down the aisle away from him.
“Sure,” he says, following after me. “But seriously, what’s up?”
“I don’t want a party.”
“You don’t have to have one,” he says.
“My father wants me to have a party,” I say.
My father throws these parties because that is how he shows he loves me. He understands love as noisy and demonstrative, messy and full of streamers. But he is fairly useless when it comes to practical issues. His eyes glaze over when I try to talk to him about fixing the irrigation system in the garden because it is, literally, a hundred years old, or suggest we find out what that knocking sound in the Volvo is. It is faster to do these things on my own, which is why I’m the one buying the napkins and the plates and the food and the cake and the soda. I do love parties. I still don’t want this one.
“It won’t be so bad,” he says soothingly as he ambles next to me. He is almost as unhelpful as my father when it comes to shopping and making practical decisions, even about tiny things like how many packages of forks we need.
“I don’t want Grandmother’s coupon,” I say. I told Hector about the coupons when we first started dating. He had looked puzzled by the idea. He looked at my body as if he was trying to understand the problem. The birthday bribes have always seemed like an abstract thing to him. This will be the first year he’ll be around when I get one.
“The coupon,” he says. “Oh. Well. Maybe you won’t get one this year?”
He leans in to kiss me again. He knows I don’t like it when he does it in public. I dodge him by leaning down to grab a package of Wonder Woman paper plates. Her head is still dangling from my wrist. On the plates she’s punching the air. She looks determined, and she looks focused.
“Superhero theme,” I say. I wave the plates at him and he is distracted.
“Really?” he says, delighted. “Everyone will wear masks!” I am pleased to have made him happy. “And have secret identities! What’s your secret identity?” He pulls out the plain napkins I had given him and starts piling in the superhero-themed ones.
“I don’t need a secret identity. Secret identities are for people with something to hide.”
“You never hide anything,” Hector says.
“Of course not,” I say.
He kisses me on the forehead and brushes my hair back behind my ear. “Let’s get masks anyway.” He darts ahead of me and around the corner.
I pull Wonder Woman streamers off the rack and follow him to the masks. Superheroes and masks will be whimsical. My father is always telling me I need more whimsy in my life. Less taking things so literally and seriously.
Hector piles masks into my arms because there’s no more room left in the basket he’s got. He pulls my ponytail holder off and pushes a tiara into my mess of hair because my arms are full and I can’t nudge him away. He snaps on his own squirrel mask like it’s a hat. It mashes down his curls. I am looking for a cart, and then hear Hector talking to someone behind us.
“Does your sister need a basket?” the girl says. Our age. She doesn’t go to our school, because I don’t recognize her. She is white and pretty and pink-cheeked. She looks like the kind of girl who goes to all her school’s games, both home and away, and has six football boyfriends.
I think that, but how do I know? I shake my head. I’m just as bad as anybody.
“No,” Hector says to the girl. He smiles at her and turns away. He doesn’t know what she was implying? I catch up to him. I am glad to resist the urge to glance back at her when he drapes his arm over my shoulder and rubs his thumb on my bare arm. He is just a little bit taller than me. When I look over at him he’s smiling. Brown eyes almost gold. I press my cheek against his just briefly, a short hug, and he grins at me as if I have just thrown my arms around him and squeezed him until he was breathless.
The first time we had sex was on the beach behind my house, on a blanket from the trunk of the car, and I tried to cover myself because it was cold, because I couldn’t imagine wanting to know what anyone else thought about my body. I just wanted him to touch me and he did, moving his hands across my body and down my sides and touching me everywhere, all of my skin, all of it bare and the moon up in the sky and his face close to mine and that smile on his face and his whisper that he loved me, he loved me, he loved me and I was so beautiful and he loved me, until I buried my face in his neck, not sure I could withstand the force of him anymore.
The force of him is sometimes too much to bear. Even at a party shop. This boy.
“Hector,” I say, and stop. I’m not sure what I want to say to him. I can’t stop myself from glancing behind us this time. The girl is still at the end of the aisle. Her white shorts are very short and her legs are very long. A girl who should run down the beach in slow motion with wind blowing through her hair.
I don’t know what I want. To have the difference acknowledged. To have the difference dismissed. It’s like he doesn’t even know he has these options.
I say, “Thank you for helping me shop for my birthday party.”
Hector smiles at me again. I wonder if he has ever had a moment of doubt.
He says, “It’s your birthday!” He gives me a kiss on my temple with a smacking sound. “Everything is going to be awesome.”
I know he genuinely does not notice those tiny kinds of moments. Nobody seems to notice them as much as I do, I have realized. Hector is talking about superheroes, and the girl in the shorts is gone. I cannot decide if I am relieved or angry. Wonder Woman is dangling from my wrist and she is no help at all.
CHAPTER 7
“Ashley, is this a joke?” Jolene asks. I drape a feather boa around her neck and put a tiara on her head before I even let her off the veranda and
through the front door. She pushes a paper streamer out of her face and it catches on her rhinestones. She is grinning though. The light is low in the foyer and her eyes are shining bright. She says, “Was this Hector’s idea?”
I look at her and say, “Yes. And you are in a dress,” because she is. She never dresses up. She wears tailored khaki shorts and button-down shirts. I can’t remember if I’ve seen her in a dress since that day in fourth grade. This one is red gingham, with a small white collar and a row of shell buttons down the front. She dislikes what Laura calls “excessive displays of egregious status-quo feminine trappings,” but she’s dressing up for my birthday because she knows that symbols are important. She is smiling at me, and then she hugs me and I hug her back. She always seems so small. Sometimes I worry about overwhelming her and breaking her into bits.
I clear my throat when I step back. I never know when to stop hugging. She changes the subject. “Tiara!” she says. She’s pointing at me.
I reach up and find one on top of my head. “I don’t know where that came from,” I say. I start to pull it off but it gets caught in my hair.
“You should wear it,” Jolene says, reaching up to untangle the little sparkly crown. “It looks nice on you.” She holds it out for me to take. “Here. It’s your birthday.”
Everyone keeps saying that. I find myself ducking my head and she is settling the tiara back into my curls.
She pats me on the shoulder. “There,” she says. “That’s perfect.”
“Wait!” I say. I grab a cardboard box full of flimsy plastic Halloween masks from the mantel and shake them up. They’re all twisted together. “It’s whimsical,” I say.
She raises her eyebrows at me. “Hector again.”
“Who else?” I say.
She grins at me and takes the box, digging through it as we head down the hallway and into the kitchen. Paper streamers are everywhere. They brush across my face and hair. Her nose wrinkles. “Is that a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?” She tilts the box to get a better look in the overhead light of the kitchen.
“I don’t know,” I say. “He is a turtle in a mask. He must be ashamed of being a mutant if that is what he is.”