As La Vista Turns

by Kris Ripper

  “I hope everyone I’ve ever had sex with describes me in such glowing terms.”

  “You want to keep talking shit?”

  “No.” I let my hands trail down her back. “Why are you thinking about this right now?”

  “Because. Because he’s suddenly back in my life—or in James’s life—and every time I look at him I think about this dumb fantasy I had for the future, where we were a family, and did everything better than my parents.” She let her forehead fall against my neck. “I know that’s dumb.”

  “It’s not. It’s what most people want, so why do you think it’s dumb?”

  “Because I’m not ‘most people.’ And I didn’t know I wanted that until—” Her eyelashes fluttered against my skin. “And he left. He fucking disappeared. So fine, that sucked, but I dealt, and it’s like the second I got my shit together, oh look, Bri’s back, Bri wants to be a good dad now, but it’s like he’s fake-parenting, you know? Like he’s trying it on to see if it fits. And I don’t have a choice. I’m stuck with him. Hell, I don’t know. I was thinking about how the sex was good and he had a job and he wasn’t stupid, and I’d put all that together like it meant maybe we could build a life. But that’s not how it works.”

  “You must have loved him, though. I kind of think maybe that’s how it works.”

  “Sure. I did love him. And I think he loved me. And none of that mattered. Anyway, then I was thinking about how I’m never having sex again in my life and I can’t even care.”

  Yikes, never having sex again in my life sounded sort of bad, if you were into sex. “I haven’t been laid since before Christmas,” I offered.

  “Oh man.” She fell back some, looking at me from under her eyelashes. “Zane, I haven’t fucked anyone since like two months before James was born. It’s been almost a year. I probably forget how to do it. Also, what the hell do you mean, you got laid before Christmas? I thought this was an exclusive fake relationship! You pig!”

  “Baby, it wasn’t like that!” I made my voice wheedling. “Come on, baby, you know you’re the only one for me. She didn’t mean anything! She was just a body!”

  “Uh-huh. Whose body? Now I gotta know so the next time she comes up on you I can rip her hair out or something.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah right. You’d punch someone before you’d touch their hair.”

  “Ha. True. Like I want my fingers in some bitch’s gnarly weave.”

  “For your information, she doesn’t have a weave. She has a very nice high top. And I don’t think she’d appreciate you messing it up.”

  “Oh damn! You fucked the librarian!”

  “Guilty as charged.” I smugly polished my nails on my shirt. “And yes, she was every inch as hot as she looks.” Mel-the-librarian was thirty-nine, cute as a button, and able to wear the kinds of clothing combinations that normal people shouldn’t be able to wear (like converted prom dresses with jeans, and suit coats with frilly skirts).

  “You like black girls.”

  My mouth dropped open. “I—I do not— Not that I don’t, but it’s not like I do— Because— Oh my—”

  She threw her head back, that smoky sharp laugh making me smile, helplessly, because it sounded so real.

  “Mildred, I do not have a racial preference for black women! Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I don’t, and you’re trying to mess with my head right now, which by the way is not attractive!”

  Dred laid her head back, one leg still between mine. “What if I started falling off the bed? Would you catch me?”

  “I’d point and laugh.”

  She twisted toward the edge. “Really?”

  “Dred—”

  I tried to catch her, but we were too tangled and I ended up almost coming down on top of her, both of us gasping and laughing and rolling to avoid collision.

  “You just tumbled us off the bed, you loon.” This time I knelt over her and pinned one of her arms over her head. “You’re fucking nuts.”

  “You love it, don’t you?”

  I leaned down. I hadn’t had the chance to control a kiss, and this time she let me. This time I tasted her, but not too much, slipping my tongue between her lips so she’d understand I was a supplicant, not a thief.

  Her nonpinned hand came around my head, holding me tightly.

  We broke for air minutes later.

  “I might be all fucked up in the sexy bits,” she murmured, the purple gleam from my hair casting her skin darker than usual.

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  “I’m not worried about it, either. I’m just saying. No one’s seen all that in a long damn time. It might no longer resemble the map.”

  I touched her face, her cheek, her jaw. Maybe she wasn’t worried about it. Maybe she was. I couldn’t decide yet. And it didn’t matter. “The thing you said about the sex itself not being a priority? That’s true for me, too. It’s like . . . this was always my plan. I thought I could do it alone. But I didn’t really prepare for it to take this long, you know? I’ve read all the stats, but I thought it’d happen faster. Now that it hasn’t, now that it might never happen . . . I guess I wish I had someone to hold my hand, even if I never get pregnant, even if I don’t get to check that off my list.”

  She hummed a few bars of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

  “You gonna sing the Beatles to me?”

  “If you want me to? Hell yeah. But we should probably go downstairs and see how it’s going.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “You gonna get off me?”

  I kissed her one more time. “If I must.”

  “We should kiss a lot more often.”

  “Agreed. I’m adding it to my list.”

  “Oh damn. On the list now. No backing out.”

  We walked downstairs together. Emerson looked up at us, narrowed his eyes, and didn’t say anything.

  Dred waved a hand at him. “FYI, Zane and I are allowed to kiss now. So you can shut your trap about it.”

  He grinned. And Emerson, not a grinner, looked about five years younger when he grinned. “Sweet. I’ll text Obie so he knows to shut his trap.”

  “Oh, he won’t. Asshole. Anyway, let’s do dinner and shit. What’s next?”

  We did dinner. And I kissed Dred good-bye before I left. Because now we were allowed to kiss.

  I took the boys to the San Marcos Grill for our “so you wanna be a known donor” intensive. We got all the way to dessert and still had barely cracked Jane’s big folder.

  Carlos eventually pulled the papers out of my hands and shuffled them back into some semblance of order. “We’ll take it home.”

  “But shouldn’t we—shouldn’t we all, like—”

  “We will do it.” He patted my arm. “Why are you so nervous? We did research before we offered. Tom went and got all the tests run, and all of them were clean, which we knew. Nothing we’ve said so far has been different than we read before we talked to you.” He looked up at Tom for confirmation.

  “The only sticking point for us was the hot tub.” Tom grinned at me. “You know how he likes to get me into the hot tub.”

  “But I can hold back for a few days for the good of the little swimmers.” Carlos made a sperm-swimming motion with the fingers on his right hand. “Swim to Mama, little sperm. Make a baby.”

  I laughed out loud. “Oh my god. It’s like Carlos is some kind of sinister magician conjuring a child into existence!”

  “You think I can’t conjure humans? I’m fuckin’ Zeus, children. I will fuck you up with my fecundity!”

  “I’m not sure that follows.” I shot a conspiratorial look at Tom. “Didn’t Zeus only personally birth Athena?”

  “Zeus was everyone’s big daddy!”

  Now we were laughing way too loudly, drawing stares from around the room.

  “Crap,” I mumbled, attempting to muffle myself. “We’re gonna get our asses booted out of here. It’ll be like college all over again.”

  “You’r
e conveniently forgetting that time at Taco Junction when we were in high school.”

  Tom shook his head. “No way you two got kicked out of Taco Junction. Between the frat boys and the linebackers, no one gets kicked out of Taco Junction.”

  “Ah, well.” Carlos relaxed back in his chair. “It was the three of us. Jaq was there too. And technically, dear boy, we were lifetime-banned from Taco Junction.”

  “Which didn’t apply to me and Jaq because we looked like every other average-sized white broad,” I said. “They could never keep track.”

  “But, Carlos, I’ve seen you at Taco Junction.”

  “True. The old owner—a rotten sonofabitch who liked to hire young illegal girls so he could pay them on the basis of ‘whenever the fuck he felt like it’—keeled over one day out in the back. They said he had a massive heart attack, but I like to think of it as his just deserts for a life poorly lived.”

  Tom shook his head, smile playing around his lips. “It’s weird that there are still stories I haven’t heard before.”

  “Look.” I started scraping ice cream out of my bowl. “We only got lifetime-banned from Taco Junction once. That means it barely even happened at all.”

  “And was null and void when new owners took over. Though the food was better under the old regime.”

  “Dude had like thirty little Mexican fourteen-year-olds in the back making tacos. But you’re right, they were pretty fucking delicious.”

  Carlos picked up his wineglass and tipped it toward mine. “We are horrible people. Cheers, Zane.”

  “Cheers.”

  “As for everything else.” He looked at Tom, who shrugged. “Let us take this home and look over it. But darlin’—we didn’t go into this on a whim. We have no idea if this would even work, but Tom and I know what kind of family you’re thinking of having, and we can support that.”

  Tom cleared his throat. “I don’t want kids, Zane. I never did. I think it’ll be cool when you have one, or Jaq if she decides to go that way, but it’s not something I want. You wouldn’t have to worry about that from me.”

  “And even if he thought about it, I’d—”

  “Don’t joke,” Tom murmured.

  Carlos nodded once. “Yeah, you’re right. Well, we don’t want any babies. We’ll leave that to you and Mildred.”

  “What do you know about Mildred?”

  They did a comical Who, us? Carlos glanced at Tom. “I heard Richard’s hosting the reception. Didn’t you hear that?”

  Tom laughed.

  I glared across the table. “You know, if your legs were longer, it’d be a lot easier for me to kick them under the table.”

  “Oh, hating on dwarfs, that’s classy, Suzanne.”

  “Don’t you Suzanne me, Carlos!”

  Tom started looking for a server. “Check, please!” He lowered his voice. “I’m getting us out of here before you two get us ejected.”

  Something about the word ejected was too much. Carlos and I laughed.

  “I can’t take you guys anywhere!”

  Tom’s deep respect for the service industry got us out of the San Marcos Grill without any disciplinary actions against us. I kissed them good-bye and sat for a long moment in my car with my hand over my stomach.

  “Are you in there, Future Kid?” I sent my awareness deep in my body, and for the first time ever during the two-week wait, I didn’t feel a damn thing. Instead of the usual cascade of “might be pregnant” alarms ringing, my body said . . . nothing at all.

  “No, huh?” Maybe that wasn’t all bad. Maybe this thing with Carlos and Tom could be interesting. Maybe it might even work.

  Or maybe not. But if they looked over Jane’s novel-length summary of all the information we should talk about and were cool with it, this could be . . . yeah, interesting. For a cycle. Maybe a few cycles, if it worked out.

  A small, tentative voice in the back of my head whispered, If you need a few cycles.

  Emerson was right. Hope was goddamn dangerous. I started the car and drove home.

  I’d only been to Saturday breakfast without James once before, but that had been Before Aunt Florence. Like so many things BAF, this, too, was irrevocably marked by her presence.

  And not always in obvious ways.

  “Are you going out of your mind yet?” She was washing as Obie and I prepped, talking to Emerson at the stove. “The first week of meditation was the worst for me. The first two weeks. That was true all three times I tried to follow that book before I finally stuck with it.”

  Obie and I raised eyebrows at each other.

  Emerson shifted, not quite looking over. “You tried three times?”

  “Four. I failed the first three.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment. “I feel pretty stupid. I mean, I’m doing it. And I usually stay awake for the whole thing, but it still doesn’t feel like it’s doing anything for me.”

  “This is your seventh day?”

  “Guess so.”

  She nodded. “It might feel that way for a while longer. Or it might start feeling like you’re getting somewhere. I quit where you are the first time, and I quit at the third week twice after that.”

  Dred, lounging on the built-in corner bench, whistled. “I can’t imagine you quitting anything, Auntie.”

  “Oh, I’ve quit a lot of things in my time. This book came to me from a woman I admired greatly, but I thought at the time that it was—” She broke off, hands no longer moving in the soapy water. “Well. Heathenistic, I suppose. With all its talk of finding wholeness in the self, not in God.”

  “Then what happened?” Emerson asked.

  “I quit it the first time, and my mentor smiled and told me that was all right, but I should keep the book just in case. I quit it the second and third times, and didn’t even tell her I’d tried it. And then a very dark period fell upon us—upon all of us. We’d had those terrible plane attacks back east. People embraced vengeance and violence over clarity. The voice of God seemed ever more distant.”

  We didn’t speak. For a moment the kitchen only held sounds of running water and knives on cutting boards.

  “I wouldn’t say I lost my faith, but that’s as close as I ever want to come. My mentor asked me if I still had my tapes, if I still had that book. And I suppose everything seemed so dark that I was numb even to the things that had made me uncomfortable before. I wanted to heal. I wanted to be an instrument of God, to heal others, to help.”

  Obie put his knife aside and looked over at her. “That’s when you went on your first trip. You left a year after September eleventh.”

  “You two were going into your senior year and you didn’t need my supervision. I’d set aside that account so I could send money for the mortgage until you could afford it on your own.” She laughed. “People thought I was crazy, you know. ‘You left two seventeen-year-olds in your house, with access to your bank account!’”

  I didn’t think that was actually legal, when it came down to it, but I wasn’t about to say that. Plus, it was Dred’s and Obie’s parents who should have been looking after them. Not Aunt Florence.

  Dred shook her head sadly. “And all those signed checks. Damn, Obe, we should have cashed them.”

  “I made them out to the bank, if I recall correctly,” Aunt Florence said, voice prim. After a minute, she turned to her niece. “It wouldn’t have mattered. I would have left you cash if I hadn’t thought that would be far more suspicious. You two were more trustworthy at seventeen than most people are at thirty. And you’ve fulfilled every expectation I had of you, so my trust was well-founded.”

  She turned back to the dishes and Dred directed her face toward the window, but not before I saw her blink a few times.

  “What I was going to say, Emerson, was at a certain point, when I finally kept at it long enough, the sensation of wasting my time that I’d felt before eased off. I still couldn’t necessarily hold my focus for an entire sitting meditation without wandering, but I realized that
wasn’t the point.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “You’ll figure it out on your own, I’m sure. The point might be different for you than it is for me. But if you stick with it, you’ll find something.” She flicked water off her hands into the sink and dried them. “I’ve been meaning to look into your workshop, Obadiah, but you have hardly been here. Show me around in the few minutes before breakfast?”

  “Sure, Aunt Florence. I love your pictures on Instagram, by the way.”

  Dred gasped. Like actually gasped. “You are not on Instagram, Auntie!”

  “Of course I’m on Instagram! How do you think I keep up with all of James’s growth? Though I applaud you, Obadiah, for not taking pictures of his face. I really don’t know about some of these people, parading their children all over everything as if they were accessories . . .”

  Their voices faded as they went into the next room, and I began pulling together this week’s omelet fillings. Mushrooms, peppers, two kinds of cheese, ham.

  “Anyway,” Emerson said, as if he’d been talking. “It’s forty-five minutes a day. I guess I can keep doing it if it makes Florence happy.”

  “I can’t even believe all that.” Dred drifted over, lowering her voice. “I had no idea she ever wavered in her faith. That’s crazy.”

  I dumped the mushrooms and peppers on a plate and handed them to her. “I think it’s probably pretty normal. I mean, among people of faith. Doubts and stuff like that.”

  “Hold up.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You aren’t— Do you believe in God?”

  “No. I mean, I used to, when I was a kid. Do you?”

  “I’m totally agnostic. I have no idea, and I don’t really care. I know that I’m not gonna live my life based on what some god judges, or fears, or thinks.”

  I nodded. “Exactly. But I find it hard to believe there’s an actual . . . being. It feels too much like Santa Claus. But for people who do believe, past the Santa Claus stage, I think having doubts makes a lot of sense. And I think it’s brave when they keep trucking with the whole faith thing despite their doubts.”

  “I can see that.” She leaned back against the sink and nudged Emerson. “What about you?”