Hello (From Here)

by Chandler Baker

  “Where are we going?”

  “To do some sleuthing, my dear Watson. Watch and learn.”

  Thank you for shopping with Shop4U. I’ve begun your order and will be sending through messages on preference, changes, and substitutions.

  Maxine M.: How ripe do you like your avocados? They have a decent selection.

  I stare at the message, beaming . . . and concerned. This is kind of creepy. Okay. Very creepy. Olivia is disturbingly good at stalking people. The actual Vons shopping service didn’t turn up anything, so she then googled all the third-party services offered in the area and checked their Instagram pages for followers named Max, or as I described her, the prettiest girl I’ve ever met, which was probably not helpful.

  Sure enough, she found a Max Mauro following a local company called Shop4U, and even though Max’s profile was private, that tiny little smiling circle was more than enough for me to shout: “Holy shit, you are an evil genius!”

  But she wasn’t done. Olivia downloaded the Shop4U app, ordered and canceled until MAXINE M. popped up, and then strutted out of my room, spouting some sort of Victorian adage and a few additions to my otherwise well-curated shopping list.

  Now I have a message.

  And more importantly, a chance to redeem myself.

  Max doesn’t know it’s me yet, since we had to use Dad’s AMEX and have his first name on the profile, but she will certainly figure it out when she gets here and sees me doing . . . Push-ups? Reading Anna Karenina? Somehow pretending my sister didn’t just stalk her and Oh hi Max I was just pruning these marigolds look at me I’m all aflutter! Oh god.

  I look at the blinking cursor on my phone.

  Okay, let’s review. Don’t use the word merger ever again. Don’t banter about toilet paper. Definitely don’t admit your sister just tracked her down . . . I chew my nail feverishly, trying to think.

  I always suck at this, but I suck even more lately because my last relationship ended not well in a very public, humiliating setting involving a preposterously muscular ass. Moving on.

  I try to focus. Okay. Just say the first clever thing that comes into your head.

  Customer: The softer the better! I am making a guacamole, or ahuacamolli, which was loosely the Aztec word for “avocado soup.”

  Okay, it’s pretentious. And I admit I googled avocado fun facts. But it was either that or how they have more potassium than a banana, which is good to know, but . . .

  I stare at my phone. No response. The seconds tick by.

  Shit. I should have gone with the potassium—

  Maxine M.: I will keep that in mind for my next hipster Instagram post. Ahuacamolli toast.

  All the pent-up air in my lungs whooshes out again. My stomach is no longer a churning mass of regret and day-old brie rinds—Kate ate most of the actual cheese. She really is evil.

  Kate is my stepmother, by the way, and an estate planning attorney. I call her the Wicked Witch of the Wills. Or, I would, if I weren’t deathly afraid of her. She takes Muay Thai three times a week and apparently her instructor told her to “ease up” because she broke some dude’s nose.

  Usually I can rely on my dad to temper the evil, but he’s in Madrid for some major corporate acquisition or something . . . and hopefully catching a plane back soon. Really soon.

  The one-two punch of Kate and Olivia is draining my soul.

  I flop onto my bed and message Max back. The fact that she would reply like that to an anonymous customer just reaffirms what I already suspected: Max Mauro is kind of a badass.

  Customer: Exactly. “Just living my best life with my ahuacamolli.”

  Maxine M.: Educational flex. And yes, I got the waxing strips.

  I sigh inwardly. The order had been well-curated until Olivia got her hairy mitts on it.

  Customer: Those are for my sister.

  Maxine M.: Don’t ask, don’t tell. I should go. Your order will arrive soon.

  I put down the phone, grinning. I don’t support Olivia’s tactics . . . but Max is coming! And also holy shitballs, Max is coming like . . . soon. Now what? I want to run out and talk to her in person, but the app said very clearly that all deliveries were now to be left outside the door with a notification, and that it was better for everyone if clients stayed inside their homes and only retrieved the groceries after the driver had left.

  But how am I going to say hi from inside? I turn to the window, pondering.

  * * *

  • • •

  Oh. That could work.

  I pace around my bedroom, through its lounge area and the attached bathroom and back around again. And again. And again. It smells like mint and gardenia . . . Kate filled our entire house with potters, so I basically live in a conservatory.

  My bedroom also doubles as a shrine to all things cinema: a continuous loop of classics on my TV, alphabetized stacks of Blu-rays because I’m a traditionalist, walls plastered with posters of my favorites: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Greed and Glory . . . basically a bunch of cowboys deadpanning me while I have anxiety attacks. I’m a massive Westerns fan, which is ironic, because I’m terrified of horses. I got bit once on a field trip. Long story. Actually, the horse just bit me on the shoulder for no reason.

  Many of the posters have tears and crinkles. These are the movies I watched with Mom, and I tore them all down in the weeks after everything in a hail of hardened Sticky Tack and peeling greige paint. They went into the bottom of my closet with the photos and keepsakes and that amazing Death Star stress ball she bought me that brought back painful memories with every futile squeeze.

  But I slowly put them back, over the last year or so. Baby steps, maybe, like the ones Dr. Syme is always talking about. That, or I’m just a masochist who craves grizzled disdain.

  I sit down at my desk, trying to distract myself with some always productive YouTube rabbit-holing, but my eyes go instead to the navy blue folder sitting beside my laptop: the official welcome package to Esprit Brillants.

  It’s been displayed there for months like a nerdy trophy. I won the uber-competitive competition for the summer semester abroad in Paris, which made sense, since I prepped for that interview for a solid year. I needed to win.

  Esprit Brillants was supposed to be the turning point. Now the sight of the folder makes my stomach roil. What if things don’t clear up? What if I can’t travel? What if things never go back to normal? The thoughts wrap their invisible fingers around my throat.

  I check my phone again.

  It’s been twenty-four minutes since I got the last notification: Shopping complete. I’m getting a little too antsy and I know it. I inhale slowly. Deep in. Hold. Deep out. The little nagging questions try a more urgent angle of attack: Does my breathing feel different today? Did I already catch the coronavirus? What if I give it to Olivia? What if she dies and it’s my fault again and—

  I hear a bass rumble from the street and run to the window just as a car pulls up to the curb. Car might be a stretch, since that thing is rapidly devolving back into steel and rubber. The bright red beater looks very out of place against our pristine front yard and sculpted hedges, matching white Benzes in the driveway, and a truly repulsive cherub fountain that Kate picked out last year to spit recycled love and water to some gigantic Koi fish at the base.

  The muffler spews smoke and sparks(?!) as it comes to a stop. Is that legal?

  The door swings open, and Max Mauro walks around the hood, hair the color of chocolate tied back in a messy bun. A few loose strands blow over her face. White tank top and one-strap-on overalls. She’s freaking singing. I press my face against the windowpane.

  She comes to the porch, and I belatedly notice she has AirPods in. I pat my hair down—needlessly, since it sits flat by default—and knock on the window. She keeps walking. The AirPods . . . she c
an’t hear anything. I knock again, louder this time, but Max disappears below my line of sight. My plans. My message. My chance at redemption—they’re all strolling away with her. I open the window, lean out, and shout at the top of my lungs:

  “Max! Max! It’s me! Ahuacamolli!”

  I see a surprised old man with a Yorkie jump on the sidewalk, squint, and look up at me. Mr. Finney. He hates joy. Max seems to notice the scowling Mr. Finney and turns back to me as well. We meet eyes. I don’t know what the hell to say. My brain is broken. I just . . . stare. I think my mouth moves, but nothing comes out. Speak! Please! Something!

  Max smiles, waves, and then gets into her ramshackle old Civic and drives away, sending up a trail of smoke and fading sparks. I watch her go, sighing and retreating inside.

  On the window is my sign, carefully written on the glass with a blue permanent marker:

  HELLO (FROM HERE)

  chapter three

  MAX

  “Did you wash your hands?” my mom asks by way of greeting. She has her cell phone to her ear and is pacing in the kitchen of our second-floor apartment. On a normal day, the drive from Fountain Valley back to Huntington Beach is twenty minutes, but today, it took exactly one hundred and fifty-two thousand times that. It’s like all of California simultaneously thought, But this might be my last chance to eat In-N-Out Burger and hightailed it to the freeway. Like, You know what might be fun? To give purgatory a test-drive.

  “I literally just walked in the door, Mom.”

  “Shhhh!” She draws pinched fingers across her lips. A beat. Then—“Sing two happy birthdays while you scrub. Don’t stop.” She gives me The Look.

  “You’re talking to me now?” I run the faucet and pump soap into my palm.

  “Uh-huh. Yessir. I can arrange for them to be available—I can’t hear you.” Mom snaps her fingers and points at the faucet. She’s back on me apparently.

  It’s amazing. My mother can be having two legit conversations at once and it’s up to me to know when it’s my turn. She calls it her Single Mom Superpower. She has lots of them—like finding the best thrift store furniture and tuning out any questions with the word dad or father in them.

  “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you . . .” I have a bad singing voice. The kind that would get me singled out as a national laughingstock if I ever auditioned for a reality TV singing competition. I glance at my mom. We both have the kind of pasty white skin that doesn’t tan, just burns. Her long dark brown hair—same as mine—is pulled up into a ponytail. She’s still wearing her Mauro’s Dry Cleaning polo with Rae embroidered above the logo—a clothes hanger bent into the shape of a crown. Barefoot, the hem of her old Dickie’s tucks underneath her heels.

  “Did you take off your shoes?” My mother sets her phone down on the peeling laminate countertop and ticks through the mail pile.

  We’ve been in this apartment through four consecutive lease renewals, the longest I’ve lived anywhere, and even though it’s not the nicest place we’ve called home, I like that we’ve hung around long enough to paint the walls a buttery yellow and for it to smell like my mother when I walk through the door.

  We share a bathroom, our toothbrushes side by side in the medicine cabinet next to the sink, and I swear the fact that not all of our apartments have come with washer-dryer hookups is the main reason why Mom started a dry-cleaning business.

  I try not to think of that kid Jonah’s house, of the massive lawn, of the scaling walls, of the working fountain in the front, because it seems wild that he lives there and I live here and we both call these places “home” like they belong in the same category. For the record, I’m not in the habit of comparing my life to those of rich Fountain Valley kids. I mean, what’s the point and who cares? I’m proud of how far Mom and I have come and the best part is, we have nobody to thank for it but ourselves. It’s just that when the whole world is supposed to “shelter at home,” it’s hard not to clock the differences in what that word can mean.

  I dry my hands on a dish towel and then wiggle my pink-socked toes to demonstrate my shoeless feet. “Who was that?”

  “Just one of the two dozen clients who wants to know how the heck they’re going to get their clothes now that everyone’s supposed to stay put.” She pushes bangs off her forehead and collapses into the kitchen chair that our cat, Sir Scratchmo, uses to sharpen his claws. Mom worked at Ricky’s Cleaners for eighteen months before Ricky announced he was going to retire and planned to close the place. We had six months to scrape together savings and bank loans and google how to run a cleaning business, but Mom said we wouldn’t get an opportunity like this again to have something that’s ours. I don’t think stains are exactly a passion of my mother’s, but people will always need their clothes cleaned, and we Mauros are practical like that. “You know they say that we should be stocking up on cash in all of this too,” she says.

  “Who is ‘they’?”

  She takes a long sip from a glass of water. “I saw an article on Facebook.”

  “Mom, what have we talked about when it comes to Facebook articles?”

  She waves me away. “Mm. Was it wild out there?”

  “You know Walking Dead? Well, like the entire first season of that, but with better hygiene.” I do the bored stare into the open fridge, letting the artificial air cool my cheeks. “What’s for dinner?’

  “Sorry, M ’n’ M, you’ll have to fend for yourself. I’ve got more calls to make.”

  Coincidentally, Fend for Yourself would also be the title of the sitcom version of my life. Sometimes I think the majority of my childhood was one long afternoon sitting way too close to the TV and eating boxed mac ’n’ cheese. Not that I’m complaining. Rae Mauro works harder than anyone I know, and for as long as I can remember it’s been just the two of us, which means often it’s just me.

  I dump two pepperoni Hot Pockets on a plate and shove them in the microwave. Three minutes later, dinner is served, and I tiptoe past Mom, who’s deep into strategizing her customers’ wardrobe deliveries using our coffee table like it’s a Risk board. Honestly, I don’t even understand why anyone needs their dry-cleaned clothes during a lockdown except that I guess cashmere is pretty soft, if you can swing it.

  I tuck myself beneath a mound of blankets and balance the plate on my lap before searching the covers on my bed for the remote control. Sir Scratchmo judges me from his perch on top of my dresser, flicking his scruffy tail. Sometimes Scratchmo watches me with such disdain that I think he sticks around only on the off chance I might choke on a pizza roll and he’ll get to feast on my carcass.

  I check my delivery app—sixty-two dollars in tips today. Not too shabby. I mentally tally the Berkeley fund. I think even my mother’s starting to believe it might happen. A four-year business degree from one of the best colleges in California. Two years ago, I would’ve said I’m destined to be a community college kid, at least for the first two years, because universities are crazy expensive—like, fifteen thousand dollars a year expensive. But think what kind of boss business ladies Mom and I could be with a school like that on my résumé.

  Exactly.

  If you work hard, if you make sacrifices, if you stick to the plan, you’ll get ahead. Mom and I are like two horses in the Kentucky Derby. For most of the race, we’ve just been out here trying not to get trampled in the pack, but then slowly, slowly, inch by inch, we pushed up, and we pressed and pressed even when we were bone-tired, even until just recently, and we nosed ahead enough to get our photo finish. And as my mom likes to say, the finish line is really just the beginning.

  The cheese from the Hot Pocket still manages to burn the roof of my mouth, so I have to use my hand as a fan while my jaw hangs wide open, like no wonder I’m single. I watch one episode of Hannibal and then half of another, take my plate to the sink and wash it while my mom is still talking with great passion about camel hair and mothproof
ing on the phone. Outside is the usual racket of the dumpster lid opening and closing and cars locking, the guy next door playing his bass too loud, and footsteps from the apartment above ours.

  * * *

  • • •

  I belly flop back onto my bed and stare at my Mickey Mouse alarm clock—eight thirty. For the record, lots of things sound like a good idea when you’re really, really bored, and almost none of them can be considered your fault. Like eating an entire package of Oreos or starting a blog or attempting to dye your hair blond. Or in this case, unlocking your phone and finding that you forgot to click “delivered” on your last order of the day and so you still have access to a certain pre-pre-pre-law-slash-L.L.Bean-model-wannabe’s phone number.

  Maxine M.: So you could have told me that you were the customer I was shopping for earlier.

  CUSTOMER: And RUIN the element of surprise?

  Maxine M.: Wait, this *is* the guy from the grocery store, right?

  CUSTOMER: Jonah Stephens, the one and only.

  Maxine M.: . . .

  Maxine M.: Yeah ran a quick fact check on that and I just found like 13 of you on Facebook alone so . . .

  CUSTOMER: Did you friend me?

  Maxine M.: No

  CUSTOMER: Why not? You were right there!

  Maxine M.: Because . . . we’re not friends?

  CUSTOMER: Details

  Maxine M.: Yeah you’re not big on those I seem to recall

  CUSTOMER: OK OK not friends got it.

  CUSTOMER: Do you think that’s permanent?

  Maxine M.: Nothing is permanent Jonah. Time is ephemeral. The ice caps are melting and Criminal Minds is canceled and Prince Harry moved to America so hey anything is possible DREAM BIG

  CUSTOMER: says the girl to the boy with a predisposition for existential crises