by Ava Dellaira
“You know,” she told him finally on the phone, heart thudding, “only two percent of high school relationships end in marriage. So, I mean, maybe it’s for the best if we’re just friends. Maybe—”
“Fuck that,” Sam interrupted. “Fuck your meaningless numbers. I told you I love you. If you don’t feel the same way, at least have the balls to admit it.”
“Sam, I—it’s not that—I just, I don’t think I’m ready for love.”
“Okay, Angie,” he said. “Guess this is it, then.”
“I guess.”
“Thanks for the past year and a half.” He hung up.
* * *
She didn’t know how to miss her dad, but the ache of missing Sam, which stayed with her when she went to bed at night, became almost like an anchor. On her early-morning runs, she’d sometimes find herself at the park where they first met, bent over, out of breath, staring at apartment 3D, trying not to imagine Sam asleep inside, the rise and fall of his chest. She’d painted and repainted the memory of him so many times she could no longer see what was really there. Only thick layers of feeling on top of each other, indecipherable color.
She got through her junior year. She kept her grades up. She avoided her mom’s questions about college. She took refuge with Mia, Lana, and Lana’s new girlfriend, Abby. They spent Saturdays at Mia’s house, giving each other avocado masks, baking brownies, skinny-dipping in Mia’s pool, watching old movies—10 Things I Hate About You, Almost Famous, Romeo + Juliet. Angie laughed with them; she joined in on dance parties; she played along. But she avoided saying much about her and Sam’s breakup: We just kind of outgrew each other, I guess. And she never did talk to them about her father, or the photographs she’d abandoned back in Marilyn’s drawer.
She felt, often, that her ghost dad was standing beside her, just out of reach, obscured by the light, one with the air. She wondered after the rest of her ghosts, but try as she might, Angie couldn’t visualize their faces—those invisible ancestors remained blurry, uncertain, haunting her with stories she did not know.
Her English class was assigned a project on immigration after reading Call It Sleep, in which they were meant to interview a member of their family about how their ancestors came to America, and write a fictional re-creation of the journey. Angie’s first thought was that one could hardly call being kidnapped and sold into slavery “immigration,” as her father’s ancestors likely were. She wished she could talk to her ghost dad about it, but of course she could not.
She didn’t really want to interview her mom, either, since Marilyn always tensed up at the mention of her own parents. Marilyn’s dad had died when Marilyn was a little kid, and Angie had never met Marilyn’s mom, who was a Jehovah’s Witness. She lived with her husband in a complex in the Dominican Republic as part of their “Bethel Family,” having dedicated herself to supporting God’s will (and missionary work). Ever since she could remember, Angie had gotten a birthday card from Grandma Sylvie with a five-dollar bill inside, and every so often her mom would get a piece of mail addressed in loopy script. Marilyn would set it aside by carefully pinching the envelope between two fingers as if it could burn her. Once Angie had walked in on her mom reading one of those letters; the look on her face was one that Angie had never seen before: something like an abandoned child.
Angie decided to try doing some research for the assignment, even going so far as to join Ancestry.com. She knew that her dad was James Bell, that his mother was named Angela and that she’d died when Angie’s dad was a kid, but it wasn’t enough info to turn up anything on the website. She asked Marilyn for her dad’s father’s name, but Marilyn didn’t know. His grandparents, Marilyn said, had been Rose and Alan Jones.
“Where are they now?” Angie ventured.
“I have no idea, honey.” Though for once her mother didn’t resort to tears, Angie could hear the strain in her voice, could see her grip tighten on the knife she was using to chop cilantro from the garden. “I’m not sure they’re even alive. We didn’t keep in touch.”
As Marilyn turned, the bowl of almost-finished ceviche she was holding slipped from her hands and shattered on the floor.
Angie helped her clean it up, then retreated to her bedroom while Marilyn ordered a pizza to replace the ruined dinner. When Angie typed Rose’s name into the online family tree, the website said only, There aren’t any hints available for Rose Jones yet. To get hints, try adding details to her profile. Same for Alan. Her mom’s side of the chart practically filled itself in, however. She entered Marilyn’s name, Sylvie’s, and Marilyn’s dad Patrick’s, along with their birthplaces and years. The website found Patrick’s death records and suggested matches for his parents, who were also born in Amarillo, Texas, and then his parents’ parents—father from Georgia and mother from Mississippi. The generations of white southerners kept hopping backward, until she got to her great-great-great-great-grandfather, William Isaac Cheney, who’d been a general in the Seventy-Fourth Regiment of the Georgia Militia during the Civil War. Angie felt dizzy. So she had ancestors who were more than likely slaves, and others who fought against their freedom in the Confederate army? She shut the computer screen and tucked her head down to her knees.
Eventually she read a couple Wikipedia articles about the arrival of the Puritan pilgrims and wrote some bullshit about the Mayflower. A generally good student, she got a C, with a note from her white teacher: Dig deeper. Angie balled up the paper and threw it in the trash.
She ran. She loved running. She loved how it allowed her to become a blur. She won track meets, but they didn’t matter. What mattered was the way it felt to put on headphones and sneakers and loud music—“Backseat Freestyle,” “Black Skinhead,” “16 Shots”—the pounding rhythms taking over her body until she was hardly herself anymore. She understood the anger deep inside of her muscles, of her lungs, but she never allowed herself to feel it outside of the confines of the songs that pushed her to go harder, go faster, her feet hitting pavement.
And, when she arrived at the end of the school year, seventeen years old, with only one more year left until she’d graduate, the ground was tipping beneath her.
Angie sees the sign on the highway: WINSLOW 23 MILES.
“Look,” she says to Sam, trying to maintain their tentative truce. She begins an off-key rendition of “Take It Easy.”
He cracks a small smile in spite of himself.
“Should we stop?” Angie asks.
He shrugs.
“Come on!”
“Alright, alright.”
So when they arrive at the exit, Sam pulls off the freeway and drives through the streets of the small town, until they see a brick building, WINSLOW, ARIZONA painted on the side. By the stop sign is metal sculpture of a man, leaning against a pole holding a sign that reads STANDING ON A CORNER.
“Think that’s your spot,” Sam says, and parks at the curb.
Angie gets out of the car, drapes herself over the man, and throws up a peace sign.
“Hold the pose.” Sam snaps a picture on his phone.
“Now you!” Angie insists.
Sam shakes his head no.
“One together at least?” she asks.
Sam rolls his eyes, but comes to stand beside Angie. She takes his phone and captures a shot of the two of them on either side of the metal man.
They wander into the trading post across the street. As they wait in line Angie glances over Sam’s shoulder and catches him studying their photo. He buys a bottle of water, and Angie buys a postcard—GREETINGS FROM WINSLOW—thinking she’ll send it to her mom.
Her mom. Angie’s stomach tightens at the thought of her. Marilyn will be getting home from work around now, discovering she’s gone. Angie reaches into her bag, pulls out her phone, and looks down at the black screen. She’d shut it off this morning, not wanting to hear from her mother, not wanting to be found.
She thinks about turning it on, dialing “Mom.” But she can’t. She knows she can’t. She can’t hear
the way her mom’s voice would break, the way she’d say, “Angie, where are you?” The way she’d say, “Stay right there. I’m coming.” Angie knows (without even thinking it), that if she hears her mom like that, she won’t be able to carry on.
She’s managed to suspend the reality of her decision to leave, to suspend the reality of her separation from her mom and the pain it will cause her. She’s allowed herself to think only of the version of her mother in the photo, the version of her mother she’s fallen in love with, the version of her mother she’s gone to look for—the version of her mother that, deep down, Angie imagines she can bring back to life.
On her first day of summer vacation, Marilyn took Angie out to dinner to celebrate the end of her junior year.
“Let’s go to the diner,” Angie had said.
“You don’t wanna go somewhere nicer?”
“You said anywhere I want! You knew I’d pick that.” Anytime there was a cause to celebrate that allowed Angie to select a restaurant—including birthdays, track trophies, and good report cards—Angie chose the 66 Diner, with its infamous slogan: Get your kicks on Route 66. Mostly because she wanted to see Manny Martinez, the manager, and to make sure her mom did too.
As they stepped through the doors they were welcomed by a blast of cool air-conditioned air, the smell of hamburgers and fries, and by Manny, hovering over the hostess stand.
“If it isn’t my girls!” he said, a reference to their old song—“My Girl.”
Angie smiled at him. “Hi, Manny.”
“You look older every time I see you. You guys don’t come to visit me enough.”
Marilyn offered a conciliatory smile, her head bobbing back and forth in a girlish way like it did when she was nervous. Angie thought how young she looked in that moment, and for a second, she thought she saw a glimpse of the girl she’d once been, the girl in the picture with her dad.
“Not much’s changed around here, as you can see,” Manny said. “Just got a little more of this”—he patted his small belly—“and a little less of this,” he said, referring to his barely receding hairline. It was the same joke he’d made on and off for the past several years. But he still had the same handsome face, kind brown eyes, and easy smile, and whatever the indefinable quality was that had made Angie, as a kid, wish her mom would fall in love with him.
* * *
Marilyn had worked at the diner until Angie was nine. When Angie used to walk over after school from Montezuma Elementary, Marilyn would set her up in a corner booth where she’d get to order a red cream soda and grilled cheese on sourdough while she did her homework. Angie had felt special, part of something. She hadn’t just been in a restaurant. She’d been the waitress’s daughter.
Manny used to make a fuss over Angie, sneaking her tastes of milk shakes when there’d be extra in the bottom of the frosty silver cups, asking her about her books, pretending to find a quarter behind her ear, which he’d give Angie to put in the old ’50s jukebox. She’d loved “Dancing in the Street” and “Baby Love” and especially “My Girl.” If it was slow, when the song came on her mom would pull her up from the booth and lift her into the air, singing along—Talkin’ ’bout my girl … Angie was her girl, and in those moments she was so proud to be. As they’d bounce around the dining room, she could sense Manny’s eyes on them, how he watched her mother with what she now knows looked like longing.
Every so often, when they were closing, he’d pop open beers and put on the radio the cooks kept in the kitchen, and get Marilyn to salsa dance with him. He moved like magic, Angie thought, twirling and dipping and making her mom laugh with her head thrown back.
* * *
A week after Marilyn left the diner for her new job at Chase, she’d told Angie in a cautious voice, “Now that I’m not working with him anymore, Manny wants to be friends. He’s going to take us out to dinner on Saturday.”
When Angie and her mom would stay up late having slumber parties, eating popcorn, and watching movies, Angie used to imagine the actors as possible suitors for her mom. She’d wanted Marilyn to have someone to swoop in and give her a happy ending, and she hoped Manny might be him. Though Marilyn was careful to say it wasn’t a date, Angie had never seen her mom act that way before—nervous and fluttering, like the hummingbirds she loved to watch through the kitchen window, flitting back and forth uncertainly before they’d finally land on the feeder and drink from the red plastic flower.
Angie watched her mom dig out things she’d never worn before—a maroon dress with long sleeves that she said was too tight now, a faded one with flower print ending at her knees, and Angie’s favorite, a black velvet one with a swingy skirt. But when Marilyn stared at herself in the mirror in the black dress, she seemed to see something beyond her own reflection, and Angie worried she’d go through the looking glass like Alice. Finally she took it off and put on her jeans and the soft blue button-up blouse she wore to parent-teacher conferences. She brushed mascara on the lashes over her ocean-blue eyes and painted on lipstick from her tube with the perpetually pointy tip. Then she started acting busy, folding the laundry, tidying the kitchen.
Angie put on her favorite dress—a purple Mexican one that her mom had bought her at the flea market, which she saved only for birthday parties and other special occasions—and sat in front of the window of their apartment building, waiting.
She watched as Manny pulled up in a baby-blue ’80s convertible Cadillac (or the Caddy, as he called it) and walked across the lot toward their apartment, smoothing his hair with the inside of his palm. Angie was used to seeing him on his motorcycle, but he also kept the older car, which had been his dad’s. By the time the bell rang, Angie was already poised to open the door. He lifted her up, told her how pretty she looked. When Marilyn appeared a moment later, he said the same to her, but in a whisper-voice. He was wearing a button-up shirt and a tie. Angie thought he’d dressed up like the men in the movies on purpose, to show her mom that the story didn’t end just as friends; maybe Manny was the star of their own romantic comedy.
* * *
They went to a restaurant called the Town House. The dim lighting and dark red vinyl booths made it seem impossibly fancy to Angie. She ordered a Shirley Temple with extra cherries, and to her delight the glass was chock-full of them. She sat on the same side of the booth as her mom, and together they looked across the table at Manny, as he lifted his martini glass.
“I can’t believe I’ve taken for granted every day I’ve gotten to spend with you,” he said as he met Marilyn’s eyes. “You blow me away. Here’s to the next chapter in your life.”
Marilyn blushed, her cheeks turning red under their rouge, as she lifted her own glass to meet his.
“And here’s to Angie,” Manny said, smiling at her, “the coolest girl I know.”
After dinner, when they arrived back at the apartment, Manny walked them up to the door. Angie said good night and slipped inside, hoping he and her mom would kiss. In the movies, people always kissed on the porch. She rushed to the window to watch, just in time to see their lips meet, just for a moment.
* * *
Manny now led them to the best table in the 66 Diner, next to the window, asking Marilyn if work was going well, asking Angie about school.
“Are you thinking about colleges already?”
Angie only nodded.
“Where do you want to go?”
“I’m not sure,” Angie said. “I’m applying to a bunch of places.”
At the beginning of junior year, Marilyn had given her a package wrapped in purple paper and tied with matching ribbon. Angie opened it to discover a Fiske Guide to Colleges.
“This is such an exciting time in your life, Angie. The whole world ahead of you,” Marilyn said as she reached out and pushed the curls from Angie’s face. “I’m so proud of you.”
Her mom was always telling Angie this—I’m proud of you—for things that Angie didn’t believe merited pride. It was her mom, not Angie, who spent hours poring o
ver the Fiske Guide, adding flags to pages, highlighting passages she’d read aloud. Marilyn got Angie a tutor they couldn’t afford for the SATs, which Angie took twice this past year; Marilyn insisted they spend hours watching virtual tours of various schools on YOUniversityTV; she made too many appointments with the college counselor at school, who could never remember their names. Still, for all of Marilyn’s excitement, Angie didn’t miss the sadness in her mom’s eyes when she would talk about Angie going away, and she worried about leaving her alone.
Angie’s grades were good, though she wasn’t an overachiever with APs and all that. She should have been able to do well on the SAT, she thought, what with all the extra tutoring, but while her score did go up a few points between tests, it wasn’t in “Ivy League range.” Still, when her mom suggested she consider Columbia, Angie thought of the worn brochure tucked into the manila envelope, and she agreed to apply.
“Are you sure?” Marilyn asked. “I—when I was your age, you know, my mom put a lot of pressure on me, and I never want to do that to you. I want you to feel free to make your own choices. As long as you’re happy, Angie—that’s what I want for you.”
Angie fought her frustration—she’d just agreed to her mom’s suggestion! Part of her wished that Marilyn just wanted her to be a doctor or lawyer or something like that—at least then the path would be obvious.
“I am happy, Mom,” she’d said, and forced a smile.
* * *
Angie now looked up at Manny, hovering over their booth.
“Do you girls want your usual?” he asked.
They did. For Angie, it was the same grilled cheese meal she’d had since she was a kid, and for Marilyn it was a green chile cheeseburger and a glass of white wine.
A moment later, “My Girl” came on the jukebox, and Angie looked up to see Manny smiling at them from across the restaurant. The early-evening sunlight spilled onto the checkered linoleum floor. In the next booth over, a little girl shared a sundae with her father.
