Double Pop

by Jamie Bennett

  I waved at him and drove out of the school gates, going as fast as I could to get Nola. At stop lights and when I got stuck in some unfortunate traffic, I reviewed the reminders I had posted up on my dashboard: MILK!, Call Mom, Gym? and other notations of things that came to me while I was stuck in the car. They were all over my desk at work, too, and my fridge. I grabbed the one that prompted me to call my mom and put it on my purse so I would do it that night.

  Nola was involved in writing something when I came into her school, the thick pencil clutched between her little fingers and the point of her tongue in her teeth as she concentrated. She wanted to finish it before she went home. “It’s my story,” she explained, gesturing to the long strings of letters on the page.

  “She’s been working on it for quite a while,” her teacher told me. “We’ve been helping her to sound out the words.”

  I swelled with maternal pride. My daughter was, in fact, a genius. I would have real things to say on those college tours. More importantly, she would be a shoo-in to the Starhurst Academy pre-kindergarten program for the upcoming year and I had been practically promised when I took the job at Starhurst that they would cover the steep private school tuition with scholarships. It would be amazing to have her on the same campus with me, ideal, really. “Let’s go, Nola. Come give me a hug.” She carefully folded her paper, telling me I could read it later, and let me get my arms around her. I had been wanting to, all day.

  We chatted on the way home about what she had done at school.

  “Look,” she told me, holding up her hands. “They won’t hold the monkey bars!”

  “It’s frustrating,” I commiserated. “Can Miss Kelley help you across?”

  “I want it to be me,” she explained. “Farida wanted my baby doll. It was mine first but I had to give her a turn.” She sighed deeply.

  “Sound like a rough day.”

  “Not as bad as Sammy’s! He got a splinter in his finger. The size of…of…” She thought and I waited. “It was the size of my foot!” Nola held up her little sneaker to demonstrate.

  “That must have been exciting. And painful,” I said.

  “It sure was,” my little bloodthirsty daughter said happily. We had dinner at home, a mixture of the seven or eight foods that she would eat, including pasta and peanut butter. I tried to introduce new things—hey! Have you heard of broccoli?—but I was often stuck gnawing on a pile of stuff that I didn’t care for too much myself.

  “Nola, look at this. Yum!” I took a bite of the yam I had baked for us and tried to smile as I chewed. “Try some.”

  I put a little bit on my fork and held it out but she turned her head away disdainfully. I had to say, I couldn’t blame her. My own childhood had been fueled by boxes of mac and cheese and the vending machines at school, and that was what still tasted good to me. The yam, not so much.

  After dinner, and playing, and her bath, and stories, Nola fell asleep clutching her pink bear and I was alone, kind of. For the first time in a few hours, I checked my messages. My mom wasn’t a big communicator, but she had been having some health issues, and we had been playing phone tag. She had left me another voicemail: “Jolie? Are you there? Pick up.” She had never quite gotten the hang of cellphones. I called her back, but the phone just rang and rang. I had given them a cordless for Christmas, which had been a huge technological advance in their lives, and also a real mistake. My mom kept leaving the handset in various places, like the kitchen cupboard, the shower, and the glovebox of their car, and then she and my stepdad had no way to make or answer calls until they found it. Next time I was up there, I would plug back in the old rotary dial unit that no one could misplace.

  I looked again at the text message I had gotten earlier, from the number I didn’t recognize: “JoJo. I need to talk to you now.” That was it, but I knew who had sent it, because there was only one person in the world who called me “JoJo.” He had since we had met when I was a freshman and he was a sophomore in high school, when he had leaned over during a test. “Slide your paper closer so I can see,” he had whispered. I had done it, let him copy all my answers—me, the girl who tried to return loose change I found on the sidewalk. Something came over me and I had acted totally out of character.

  After class he had waited for me, not to say thank you, but to tell me to write bigger on the next test because it was tough to read my handwriting. Then he had introduced himself. “I’m Ty.”

  “Jo-Jolie,” I had stammered back, totally thrown that a boy, an older boy who smelled like weed already at nine in the morning, had condescended to talk to me.

  “Nice to meet you, JoJo,” he had said, with a smile that had made me shiver. I had let him cheat off me for the rest of the year, and I had let him get away with anything else he wanted, too. That was the beginning of my relationship with Ty, Nola’s father.

  I pressed my hand to my forehead. We had made plans to meet up for him to see Nola over the holidays when I had driven north to see my family, but he hadn’t shown. That type of behavior was far from unusual, as was what happened afterwards, when he had ignored my messages asking where the hell he had been. I was sure that he still wasn’t interested in his daughter, so this request to talk to me now was probably regarding one of his usual issues. For a while after we had split, he had called me when he wanted a place to crash, but I wouldn’t let him stay the night now that Nola had grown up and become more aware of what was up in the world. A few times in the past, he had gotten me to write fake letters of recommendation, or to pretend be a reference person for a job he had applied for, but that didn’t happen too often. Ty didn’t like to work.

  No, I knew what he probably wanted: money. No matter what, there was never enough of that in his wallet. But I wasn’t going to give him any, not anymore. Not when I was trying to save up for a nicer, bigger place for Nola and me, and trying to start putting money away for her college. Maybe I would save money for a car for her, or so she could travel—I wanted to be able to give her things that my mom never could for me or my brothers and sisters. No matter what he said, no matter how he sweet-talked, I wasn’t going to give Ty a thin dime.

  I realized that my heart was beating pretty hard, and I tried to put it off as anger. I should have been pretty pissed at my ex, for a whole lot of things, things dating back to when we were teenagers. So maybe it was anger.

  But secretly, I was afraid that it was excitement, that my heart was working overtime to pump the fluid through my veins because oh man, Ty! Ty was absolutely bad news for me, and I knew it very clearly, but he just had that something…that something that pushed all my buttons, and he always had. Starting back when he had smiled at me after math class, all he’d had to do was give me one certain look and I would just about pass out. I had cut school, skipped out from my job, done his homework, shoplifted beer, and handed over my virginity on the cold, wet grass next to the football stadium when he was drunk, because he made me feel like I was high, almost, just when he looked at me. I could think back now in wonder and disgust at the silly girl I had been then, how terrible I had acted.

  But I wasn’t in high school anymore. I was a grown-ass woman with a child and a job and a whole mountain of responsibilities. So, be still my beating heart, and calm the hell down, Jolie, I told myself. I also told myself that it wasn’t excitement I was feeling, it was anger. For sure. I sighed and pulled out a pile of spelling tests, my purple grading pen, and my stickers. Focus on work was a much better idea.

  I was still hard at it, grading some, planning some, trying to organize the pile of general crap in my school bag, when my phone rang. And it wasn’t Ty, or my mom, who had finally found the lost cordless phone. It was Luca—the guy who had driven me and the reprobate Stoney over to the hospital. The one I had texted by accident over the weekend, and maybe he was returning the favor with a butt dial or something. “Hello?” I answered, not expecting a response.

  “Jolie? This is Luca, Luca Visconti.”

  “Oh. Hi,” I told
him. “What’s up? I was sure you were calling me by mistake.”

  “No, I wanted to talk to you,” Luca said. “I was thinking about you.”

  “Really?” The old ticker sped up again. That was nice to hear, that a super-cute, totally-a-catch guy was thinking about me. Hm. I preened a little.

  “I was talking to a friend of mine whose wife does private college admissions counseling. She’s having an information session this weekend about boosting applicants’ chances, and I thought you might like to go.”

  “Wow, I would.” I meant, I wouldn’t, because who would, really? But I thought it would be a good idea for me to help my cousin Maia. “Thank you!”

  “I’ll give her your name to put you on the list. I’m sending the information to you now.”

  I looked down at the phone, at the address on Russian Hill in San Francisco and the time on Sunday, and wondered how Nola would do at an event like this. Probably not well, and the under-four crowd was probably not welcome.

  “Let me know when you’re in the city,” Luca said. “I’ll be around.”

  “Oh. Um, ok.” He told me we’d talk soon, and said goodbye. I hung up and looked at the phone in my hand.

  Ok, so, what did that mean, that he wanted me to let him know when I was there, that he’d be around? I had been out of the man-loop for a while, but it sounded like he wanted to see me.

  I shook my head, because I had to be misinterpreting his meaning. And it was after nine, which I had set as my responsible parent bedtime, and it was certainly irresponsible to sit on my couch thinking about Luca, with his blue eyes. I plugged in my phone and went to bed, but even though I told myself to go to sleep, I lay there thinking for a long time before I finally drifted off.

  As usual, it was much, much later than when the responsible parents had done it.

  Chapter 3

  Step one for getting myself to San Francisco: find a babysitter.

  And, no. “Are you sure? No time at all?” I asked the next name on my sitter list. “Maybe you could just squeeze us in?” This was what happened when you waited until the last minute to look for childcare for the weekend. I listened as my fifth-choice said no, that she was busy, too, all day on Sunday. Finding someone who could stay with Nola while I went to the city the next day was looking pretty impossible, a Homeric epic kind of task. And the harder it got to find someone, the more I wanted to go to the talk on college admissions. Maybe it would be really helpful for Maia, although she hadn’t sounded too enthused when I texted her about it. But I knew that she was busy, and it was hard to convey excitement when you were speaking in acronyms:

  Me: Do you want me to go to a college admissions seminar? I might get some info that would be good for you.

  Maia: IDK. GTG.

  I could find out good stuff for Nola, too, even though it would be a few years until she needed college advice. When I myself had started to think about college, I hadn’t had anyone to give me any kind of tips, except for the one counselor who advised about 500 other kids at my high school also. She had helpfully handed me a list of websites. Some of the addresses had worked, but most resulted in 404 error messages. I needed to be well-informed to help both my cousin and my daughter, so I wanted to attend this seminar.

  And also…there was Luca. What the hell did that mean when he said, “Let me know when you’re in the city, I’ll be around?” Now, after spending a few days considering, I really wanted to know. A lot. I had been thinking about what he had said, those few little words, way too frequently.

  My phone beeped an alarm, indicating that our laundry would be ready to come out of the washer soon. And if I didn’t hurry down, the mean guy who lived in 3F would dump the clean, wet clothes out onto the dirty laundry room floor—it seemed like he hung around down there, just to get the chance to do it. I had never caught him red-handed, but I had seen him running up the stairs once, and he had left behind him a muddy footprint from the ever-present puddle in the laundry room. “Nola, let’s go!” I called. “We have to get the clothes.”

  “I don’t want to!” She was standing naked in our bedroom, having removed her clothes to put on an old bikini top of mine.

  “I know, but we have to, anyway.” We did, if either of us wanted to wear clean underwear, which I was aware meant more to me than it did to her. “I’ll help you put your clothes back on and you can have a piggyback ride.” It took a little while to convince her, and time ticked past.

  Begrudgingly, she removed the bikini top from her head, put her own clothes back on, and finally hopped on my back so we could make our way to the stairs. I let out an ugly grunt as I took the first step down on the ankle which still didn’t feel completely better. I grabbed the handrail to steady us so we didn’t take a header down to the first floor.

  “God darn it straight to Hades!” I tried not to swear in front of Nola, but on this occasion, it was hard not to go right to the F word. Our clean clothes had been thrown out of the washing machine in a sodden ball, sitting in the middle of the usual muddy puddle on the laundry room floor. We hadn’t been fast enough.

  I glared at the other occupant of the room, an older lady taking stuff out of one of the dryers. Angrily, I removed my daughter from my back and threw open the washing machine. He hadn’t even put his own clothes in, he had just thrown ours out! “That’s why we have to hurry when we do laundry,” I told Nola. “Because there’s a spiteful, vengeful man with nothing but time on his hands who likes to take out his own misery on innocent people.” She nodded like she understood, and I hoped that asswipe was close enough to have heard me say it.

  “I know who did it,” the other woman told me. “From 3-F.” She bent and started to help me pick up the clothes out of the puddle. She was a tiny little thing, and she made a face when she bent, like it hurt her somehow. “Everyone thinks it’s him, but no one’s ever caught him. There’s something wrong here.” She tapped her temple to demonstrate.

  I started up the machine for round two. “Thanks,” I said, sorry I had shot her the look. “I’ve had my suspicions of him, too. I’m Jolie. 2-B. This is my daughter, Nola.”

  “Eva Santamaría,” she introduced herself, and kind of bowed. She was so cute, with her white hair and huge, dark eyes. She looked like a little elf. “1-C.”

  Nola was pulling on my jeans and I leaned down to her. “Yes?”

  She started pointing at Mrs. Santamaría and whispering in my ear, “Wisha wisha wisha.” I managed to discern the word “Christmas” among the whooshing noises.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized to my neighbor. “I think she heard the word Santa and she’s talking about the holidays. It’s a long way off,” I told my daughter, “and her last name is Santamaría. It’s different from Santa Claus.”

  “I understand the excitement,” Mrs. Santamaría said. “I love Christmas.” She smiled at Nola, who peeked around my leg and smiled back.

  I set the alarm on my phone again, making it go off even earlier so that this time around, we would get there before the dickweed threw our clothes on the floor. “It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Santamaría. Maybe we’ll run into you again on our way back down,” I told our neighbor.

  “Why don’t you come for a visit in my apartment?” she suggested. “If you’re there, I’ll leave the front door open. We can see him coming down the stairs and then you can stop him from getting at your clothes.”

  And I could give him a large piece of my mind. “Maybe we could stop by for a minute, if you don’t mind. I just need to grab our other load out of the dryer.”

  She nodded and smiled at Nola. “Come visit. I made cookies.”

  Nola took off behind her at the mention of the word, ignoring me as I told her to stay while I got our stuff. By the time I made it to 1C, she was sitting on the couch, a giant, gooey, chocolate cookie in her one hand. The other hand was clutched around a doll that was almost Nola-sized. I came in, leaving the door open so we could spy on the stairs.

  “Mama, look! Mrs. Santa has c
ookies and dolls!” she told me.

  “Would you care for a cookie, Jolie?” Mrs. Santamaría asked me. “Or coffee?”

  I was always up for caffeine. “Coffee would be wonderful. Thank you.” She gave me a mug and she and Nola talked dolls for quite a while. I had never been a doll person, but Mrs. Santamaría’s daughter really had been, and she had a lot of them.

  “Heidi, my daughter, moved away so many years ago, now, but I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of all of them,” she explained. “Heidi is a nurse. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya.”

  “What is that?” Nola asked her, so Mrs. Santamaría went to the other room and brought out a map, pointing to where we lived in Marin County, California, and all the way across the ocean to Africa.

  “I don’t get to see her very often,” she said, her voice a little sad. She nodded at the map. “And this is where I was born, which is also very far away.” She showed Nola the country of Honduras.

  “It’s pink,” Nola said. “That’s my favorite color.”

  “Do you have other family nearby?” I asked. I had seen Mrs. Santamaría around the building in the two years we had lived here, but she was always alone.

  “No, no family here. I moved to California when I got married, but my husband passed when we were quite young, and we had only Heidi. I spent many, many years teaching, and my students were like my children.”