by Swan Huntley
Chuck’s keychain was on the table. He pulled out the blade of his Swiss army knife.
“What are you doing?”
“Remember when we carved our names into the rocks in Point Loma?” With one stroke he scratched half a heart into the table.
“I remember,” I said.
Then he scratched the other half. Inside the heart, he wrote it simply: N + C. The C was the hardest part. It came out looking jagged. “There,” he said.
After lunch we looped around the walking path, which was surrounded by a community garden. Sections were divided according to the community groups that had planted them, and were marked with placards. There were succulents and plumeria trees and a tree with strange green orbs floating from its branches. Mongeese dashed across the path in front of us as we walked, always right in front of us like that, as if they’d been waiting to create a brush with disaster—adrenaline junkies. A few roosters had somehow made it up to the limbs of a high tree. Beneath them, feral cats rolled over in the shade. A group of old Japanese men sat in a circle, eating tangerines. Runners ran by. Women in sports bras and sweaty shirtless men. Two ladies power-walking reminded me that I should call Marcy.
One plot—not marked with a placard—had a sculpture on the ground of a dog swimming in a pool. Even with its glossy sheen of paint, meant to invoke life, the dog looked helpless, like it was drowning in cement. Its one big black eye was screaming out for help. But maybe—yes, okay, its paw was very close to the edge of the pool. It was poised for escape. This dog was definitely going to make it.
•
We got back into Sharkie and just sat there for a little while with the seats reclined. This was another thing we used to do in the beginning—just sit in cars for hours like time wasn’t a real thing. I thought of Ana, of sitting in her Jeep in the parking lot, of everything I had told her. I still couldn’t believe how much I had revealed.
“I’m glad you got this car,” Chuck said. He sounded relaxed, sleepy. He took off his hat and put it over his face. He reached for my hand without looking and found it. “And the name Sharkie is funny. Did Ana make that up or did you?”
“On-a,” I corrected.
“Right, On-a.”
“We both made it up,” I said. Was that true? I couldn’t remember now who had said Sharkie first.
Palm fronds rocking back and forth in the wind. The sound of waves, of birds.
Chuck yawned. “Jed’s game has improved at least ten percent.”
I tapped his hand. “I don’t like that Liko kid.”
“Oh? I thought he was nice.”
I almost told Chuck he was a terrible judge of character, but whenever I said this, he reminded me that I was his wife so how bad could his judgment be?
“What did you think of Tom?” I asked.
Chuck contemplated. “He’s very tall?”
The thought of asking him felt more comfortable in this position—with us lying back, not looking at each other, the center console between us. Maybe this was why I had revealed so much to Ana. There was something about the solidly front-facing nature of sitting in a car that made honesty easier.
“Chuck?”
“Nancy?”
“Do you think Cam is gay?”
Chuck sighed heavily, which bothered me. “I don’t know,” he said, “but no, not really. He’s sensitive, that’s all. But that doesn’t mean he is.” I could tell Chuck had gone over this in his head just like I had. “Do you think he is?”
“Gay?” I said. “Are you uncomfortable saying that word?”
“No.”
“Seems like you might be.” I tapped his hand again, coaxing him.
“Well,” Chuck shifted in the seat, “okay, maybe a little.”
“Would you be upset if your son turned out to be gay?” I was still annoyed by his sigh, but I managed to say this lovingly, with curiosity. Come at your life with curiosity instead of anger. Pema Chödrön had written something like that.
“Honestly?” he asked. “Maybe a tiny bit.”
“That’s…” I wanted to say: That’s horrible. But, no, curiosity, not anger. Curiosity, not anger. I settled for: “That’s a little upsetting.”
“I’ll still love him. I just worry it’s an obstacle.” Chuck un-reclined his chair so he was sitting up again. “Don’t you think it might make his life harder?”
I un-reclined my chair. Would it make his life harder? I hated that I thought it might. “Maybe,” I said. “But we could never tell him that.”
Chuck nodded slowly. “Okay.”
“Okay,” I said firmly.
He looked at me sideways. “Are we fighting?” His face was adorably worried.
I shook my head in a way that said: Oh, Chuck, I love you. “No,” I said, “we’re not fighting.”
“Good.” He put his hand on my knee. “Because I don’t want to fight. It’s…” Chuck squinted at the sky. “It’s almost too nice to fight here, isn’t it? It’s so sunny.”
Without thinking, I said exactly what Ana had said to me. I used her intonation and her slightly deeper voice. And for the brief moment it took to say the words, I felt like I was Ana, or like I was becoming Ana, or like Ana had already become an essential part of me.
“Every day is sunny here, Chuck.”
12
“Target!”
It was an old man at the intersection. Short white beard, long heavy jacket, bright white shoes. His sign said VETERAN HUNRGY BROKE.
“I’ve never seen this one before,” Ana said, and pulled over.
The car behind us honked. “Sor-ry.” Ana waved and hit the emergency lights.
I held out the sandwich for the veteran. “Here you go, sir.”
His eyes were bloodshot. Trembling hands. He took the sandwich tentatively. Asked in a shaky voice, “What’s in it?”
“Skippy!” Ana exclaimed, leaning over me so her Wynonna hair spilled onto my arm.
“Darnit,” he said. The sandwich was shaking in his hand. I thought he might drop it. “I’m allergic to peanuts.”
“Oh no.” I held out my hand in case he wanted to give it back.
“I’ll eat the bread around,” he said, looking at the sandwich from a new angle, planning his surgery.
Ana had opened the tub of Red Vines. Sensing what she wanted, I took a few and held them out for him.
The veteran took the Red Vines and smiled. Barely any teeth. A greenish film in his mouth. “I like these.”
I was relieved. “Oh good.”
“Enjoy!” Ana said, and we drove on.
The basket weaver with the long fingers of a possible former piano player told us his name was Daniel. “And if you don’t see me sitting on the wall, I’m probably taking a nap right behind. You can throw it over, yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said, “no problem.”
Mana at the bus stop, who apparently never took the bus, greeted us before we greeted him. “Sandwich Sistahs!” He raised his brown paper bag in cheers. My throw was better this time. “Mana thanks you!”
At the banyan tree, the boy wearing the backpack glanced both ways like he was about to buy drugs. “Can I get five?” He pointed behind him. “For my friends.”
“Absolutely.” I counted them out.
“You know who we are?” Ana asked him.
“Some chicks in a Jeep?”
Ana laughed. “Yeah, that, too. But no.”
“We’re the Sandwich Sisters,” I said.
“Sandwich Sistahs, actually,” Ana corrected.
“Chill,” he said, and zipped up his backpack.
The girl who’d been lying on the sidewalk before—with the sign that simply said HELP—was gone today. Maybe she’d gotten some help.
Marigold and Petunia were fast asleep in the dumpster’s shade, their arms looped through the straps of the backpack between them, which they were also using as a pillow. “They crashed,” Ana said. I got out of the car and quietly left four sandwiches at their feet.
The parking lots were bustling with targets. Some we recognized, some we didn’t. Ana said, “From the Sandwich Sistahs!” to every person. When we ran out of sandwiches, I asked, “What should we do now?”
Ana’s answer was to pull into a parking space at Longs. “Let’s take pause. We need to sit and be present for a minute.” She turned off the engine, looked up at the sky, put her feet on the window ledge. I looked at myself in the little side mirror. Remembered I’d put a plumeria flower behind my ear. Thought: Nancy, you look happy today. And your shoulders look defined.
After our pause, which was brief, we just sat there and talked. Our conversation was endless and flowing and random and marked by long stretches of silence, and the silence was marked by the revving of cars in the parking lot and the country music station playing low on the radio.
•
“It’s really nice,” I said, “getting to know these people. The locals.”
“I just adore our new name.” Ana stretched her arms up, which moved her shirt and exposed her stomach. Then she put her head on the center console so her face was looking up at me. Half her legs were dangling out of the car. She affectionately pinched my chin. “Nan,” she said.
“Ana,” I replied. I took a Red Vine, handed her one. “You know Red Vines are fat-free,” I told her, pointing to the FAT FREE on the label.
Ana contemplated her Red Vine. “Whoever invented Red Vines is a genius.” She took a bite. “Did you like my quote in class this morning?”
“I did. The Helen Keller one. What was it?”
“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light,” she said, annunciating each word like she had in class. “Honestly, it made me think of you. I don’t know what I’d be doing without you, Nan.”
“I know,” I said, because what would I be doing without Ana? Power-walking with Marcy? Power-walking on my hamster wheel. “I’m so glad we met.”
“You’re like the stable married mommy version of me,” Ana said.
“And you’re like the free spirit version of me,” I said.
“I want to be more like you.” Ana sighed. “Stable.” She chuckled. “A homeowner.”
“I want to be more like you,” I said. “You can go anywhere. You can do anything you want without running it by your husband first. You’re not tied to anything.”
“What’s that poem? Two roads diverged at a yellow tree?”
“I think it was a yellow wood,” I said.
“Nan, you scholar.” Ana kissed her Red Vine and tapped my leg—“Boop!”—like it was a wand.
•
Ana moved to an upright position. She’d made her Red Vine into a flute. A motorcycle roared through the parking lot. When it was gone, I asked, “What was your stripper name?”
“Malificent.”
“Wow.”
“Does it bother you that I was a stripper?”
“No.”
“It does a little though.”
“No, it really doesn’t,” I said. “Because now I know you and like you, so…”
“So I could tell you anything and you’d be fine with it?”
“Probably.”
•
I slipped off my flip-flops and rested my feet on the dash. Ana braided her hair. Two French braids. It took a while. Then she put her head on the console again. I crossed and uncrossed my legs. We kept changing positions as the sun blazed down. Every thirty minutes Ana reapplied her sunscreen and handed me the bottle when she was done. “You don’t want to get haole rot,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“A skin fungus white people get because they can’t handle the sun here.”
“Ew.” I squeezed more sunscreen into my palm. I would do two layers from now on.
•
We watched people go in and out of Longs. Sometimes we guessed things about them. “I bet that lady has a French bulldog at home,” Ana said about a woman who looked exactly like a French bulldog. “I bet he’s a mechanic,” I said about a scruffy guy with black-oiled hands. Ana said, “I have meaner things to say, but I won’t say them. Because the degree to which we judge others is the degree to which we judge ourselves.”
“Wow,” I said. I hated that I thought of Marcy then.
•
Ana rolled out the muscles in her neck and when her gaze fell on my feet, she said, “Your second toe is longer than your first. That means you’re intelligent.” She lifted her foot. Her purple sparkly polish was chipping. “So am I.”
•
“I wish I had my cards in here,” Ana said in a lazy voice.
“Cards?”
“Tarot. Have you never had your cards read?”
“No.”
“What? Why? Don’t you want to know what your future holds?”
“No. What if I learn something awful?”
“Well exactly,” she said. “You’d want to be ready for it.”
•
“Have you ever been married?” I asked her.
“Only four times.” She laughed. “So you can see why I have trust issues.”
“Do you ever get lonely?”
“I learned a long time ago to own my solitude. If you can own your solitude, it makes you stronger.”
Like so many other things Ana said, this just sounded right.
“How’s your husband doing?” she asked me.
“He’s better. Things are better. I planted a garden.”
“Did the garden make things better?”
“Yes,” I said, “or no, it was before that. I had—well, it was an epiphany, I guess.”
“Tell me. I love epiphanies.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It will probably sound stupid.”
“Tell me, Nan. You know you want to.”
That was true. I did want to. So I told her. “And, okay, maybe you had to be there, but I just felt like: Get back on this hamster wheel or change, you know?”
“Oh, girl, I have been there.”
“You have?”
“Please. We’re all fighting hamster-hood.”
•
Ana went into Longs to get us Vitamin Waters. When she came back, I said, “Can I tell you something else?”
“What?”
“I think my son might be gay.”
“Cool.” She chugged her Dragonfruit. “My first husband was gay.”
“He was?”
She went on to tell me that yes, she’d married gay Dave in a blackout at a twenty-four-hour chapel in Vegas. It wasn’t love. They were drug buddies. She broke out into hysterical laughter when she explained how they’d tried to sleep together that night—well, later that night, it was technically dawn—and he couldn’t get it up. “But,” she said, “that experience was what showed him the truth about himself. He was finally able to work through his internalized homophobic Mormon bullshit and face his true self.” She touched my arm. “But, Nan, it’s easier to be gay these days. What’s your son’s name?”
“Cam.”
“Cam will be fine.”
I was almost moved to tears by this obvious and simple reaction: he will be fine. I squeezed her shoulder. “Thank you for saying that. Really.”
•
When the volcano update came on the radio, she turned it up.
“This is a civil defense message. This morning’s assessment continues to show no advancement of any of the downslope flow areas. All current activity does not pose an immediate threat to area communities.”
“Oh good,” I said, “maybe that town will be okay.”
“Pahoa?” Ana said. “I don’t think so. Pele will get it eventually.”
“Pele?”
“The goddess of the volcano.” Ana turned to me. Seriously, she said, “This is her island, you know. She made this rock. And she can destroy it whenever she wants.” She chuckled. “Epic, right?”
I chuckled because she had. But I wasn’t sure I agreed with Ana. Because of course the lava could stop flowing. Or it coul
d take a less destructive path. Pahoa might be fine.
•
“If I showed you a picture,” Ana said, “just a picture of a landscape with light in the sky, do you think you’d be able to tell whether it was dawn or dusk?”
I thought about that. “Yes,” I said. “The light is different.”
“Is it?”
“And the feeling is different.”
“But it’s a picture, so you couldn’t feel the feeling.”
“But you can. I think you can.” Our elbows touched on the center console. “Why are you asking me this?”
“I don’t know.” She stroked my hand. Then she rested her head there. Her hair was like doll hair. “I’m scared, Nan.”
That surprised me. Because Ana seemed so strong. Of the two of us, I had assumed that she was the strong one and I was the one who was trying to be strong like her. “You seem pretty fearless to me.”
“I’m not ready to die.” She rolled the end of her braid between her fingers. “Even though, honestly, a part of me thinks I deserve to be dead already.”
“No one deserves to be dead already.” I placed my hand on hers.
She sighed. “If you knew everything about me…” She stroked my fingers one by one, and then enough time passed that I realized she wasn’t going to finish this sentence.
“What?”
“You wouldn’t like me.”
I planned to say, No no, I would like you, but I only managed to get out one no before Ana bolted back to her upright position and turned the key. “We need to do more good stuff today,” she said. “It’s urgent.”
“But we’re out of sandwiches.”
“I know.” She drove fast out of the parking lot and started up the street.
I tried to stay curious. “Where are we going?”
And then a hitchhiker. She pulled over. This was what she’d been hoping to find. “We’ll give him a ride,” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back. The guy looked like a friendly hippie—dreadlocks, a thick hemp necklace, a hat that said I LOVE YOU. But still, you never knew with people.
“Two against one,” she murmured out the side of her mouth, and then the guy was throwing his sack into the backseat and hoisting himself in, saying, “Up to Magics?” and Ana was saying, “No problem,” and I locked my eyes on the little mirror so I could watch his every move. For now he seemed to be enjoying the wind on his face.
