by Lauren Karcz
“You’ll survive it,” Callie said, already beginning to move toward the kitchen and away from me. “You’ll come out on the other side a little more cynical, maybe with some awkwardness in your friendship, and a new understanding of heartbreak.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” I said.
“It’s inevitable.” A smile hit both ends of Callie’s wide mouth but never made it to the middle. “Have fun.”
Tall Jon pats me on the shoulder after beating me in two games. “Well, Moreno, you’re a worthy opponent. Consider your strategy for the next time we meet in the alley of battle.” We walk together across the parking lot, to where the Ford is parked next to Tall Jon’s Mazda coupe.
“That sounds like a good-bye. Do you have time for a smoke?”
He takes off his hat—a bowling hat, apparently—and tosses it into his car. “I’m supposed to text this girl and maybe meet up with her? Angelina. She works at the station with me.”
“Angelina ballerina,” I say, just to fill the space between our cars. “One smoke and one band won’t kill you. Come on, I’m symbolically orphaned right now.”
So we sit in Tall Jon’s car with all the windows rolled down and start filling the ashtray while Tall Jon sorts through some music he’s gotten in at the station. I don’t think I want to go to the University of South Florida, and I know I’d be a terrible college radio DJ, but Tall Jon sure runs across some mind-blowing music. I mean, some of it is mind-blowingly awful, but it fuels our running commentary all the same. Like this band he’s got playing right now, known as There’s Only Three People in This Town. They’re a wall of guitar noise, and not in the melodramatic, bombastic way I can sometimes get into. No, this sounds like these guys wanted to play in a band together, but nobody wanted to be the one who didn’t play the guitar.
My cigarette dies, as does my ability to come up with a fitting description for these dudes. “They sound like . . . a badger being hit by a sack of badgers.”
“Badgers?” Tall Jon snickers. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“Do you have a better animal-inspired metaphor?”
“Hmm. I would say they sound like a couple of musk oxes getting it on.”
“Wow. Okay. The plural is oxen, and they resent your judgment on their sex life.”
Tall Jon shakes his head at me. “Moreno, you weird butt.” He lights another cigarette for me, which is convenient because I was just about to ask him why he’s yet another person in my life who’s almost leaving. Talk about fucking metaphors: Tall Jon in the car, with the keys in, ready to go were it not for me occupying the passenger seat. In animal-inspired metaphors, he’d be an Arctic tern getting ready to migrate. Or a wildebeest traveling to a new grazing pasture. Angela and I used to watch a lot of Animal Planet before Mom shut off the cable.
“One more band,” I say.
“Fine. Ten minutes.” He’s texting, then cueing up the next song. “Tell me what you think of this one. They’re a new band from Alabama. They sound kind of rough, but I think they’re on their way. They’re called Firing Squad.”
It begins. It’s one of those slow-burn songs that starts with a single guitar chord and then calls the rest of the instruments to join in. And they do: drums, a saxophone, a bass, and something that sounds kind of like Angela’s upright piano. Each one brings its own hum, and then they join hands. The music throws itself at me through Tall Jon’s speakers. It wants to be loved, in the best of ways. It wants to be everything to me, and maybe I will let it. The piano bursts in like a mid-July rain shower. The guitar jumps and sways. Controlled chaos, as Tall Jon would say. This guitarist guy—I imagine him to be a tall, skinny white guy like my music criticism and smoking companion here, but with brighter and wilder hair—has obviously found the one thing on this planet that he can do with absolute transcendence.
I tell Tall Jon this.
“Anytime you start spouting off about transcendence, Moreno, I know it’s time for you to go.” He stops the music. He promises to send me the Firing Squad tracks. And he tosses the rest of his pack of cigarettes at me.
“Enabler,” I say.
Along the shore are the condo buildings and hotels that stand uneasily in that space between the street and the water. My favorite one, an old stucco high-rise with iron balconies clinging to each floor, is lit up tonight like I’ve never seen. It’s brilliant, almost blinding, as though all of Sarasota’s sun from the day has been bottled inside and finally allowed out. There’s no one behind my car, so I slow to a crawl. The light doesn’t create a reflection on the water, or even make it down to the empty parking lot. I’ve always thought that building was abandoned—maybe it’s getting a new life.
Whenever I pass these buildings, I imagine no one but women Abuela’s age who live there, passing their time teetering above the Gulf. The light on the top floor shines from two bedside lamps for a woman who sleeps in the center of her bed. Two floors below, a woman prepares her daily injection in her bright kitchen. She steadies her arm. When do these women remember their grandmothers? Their mothers? How long have they kept a secret? Do they worry that death has no color at all? Do they feel heavier at high tide? Are they sleepless like regret?
This is the long way home.
Angela has fallen asleep on the couch. She looks uncomfortable—her arms are stuffed under her belly, and she’s open-mouth frowning. I sit on the floor and nudge her shoulder.
“Mercedes,” she grumbles. “Ugh, Mercy, you smell awful.”
“It’s the stench of bowling alley.”
“Grrrhm.” Which means, roughly, It is not, and don’t be silly by acting like I don’t understand. I was born three summers before she was, and sometimes I forget to do the math. Fourteen. She’s fourteen. She’s damn smart, but she needs me.
“How did the piano go?”
“I suck, and you know it.” She sits up. “Why is everything terrible right now? Abuela in the hospital, and Mom being gone, and me not being able to do anything, and you leaving for hours to smoke in a bowling alley?”
“To be fair, they don’t allow smoking in the bowling alley.”
“Oh God, you know what I mean.” Angela fumbles to her feet and straightens out this poor faded pair of Tweety Bird pajama pants she’s had since she was about eleven. She’s gotten plenty of other pajamas since then, but she persists in keeping Tweety alive.
“I’ll be around this weekend.”
She looks at me as though I’ve claimed I’m not going to drive the Ford Focus anymore.
“Really. And Victoria’s coming over. We can watch movies or something.”
Angela goes to bed. And so do I. But something feels wrong about this place. Yes . . . I have stumbled into our mother’s room by mistake. I have curled up in her unmade bed, pulled her covers over me, and settled this pillow that smells like her perfume and hair spray under my head. And it feels wrong because it is supposed to, because everything has gone crooked. I need to find a way to stay close to her, though, so that nothing I do makes Abuela’s breathing stop. So this is it—I will sleep in my mother’s messy bed until she comes home.
four
REX HAS LEFT us a note on the door: I FOUND A RENTER! It’s signed with a bearded smiley face wearing a party hat. Rex totally knows how to celebrate a Friday afternoon. At the bottom of the note, in tiny letters, he’s written, M—you’ll like her. She’s a painter!
Out the front window, everything looks the same. Unless any of our neighbors witnessed Mom running out to the airport shuttle last week, or Tuesday’s moment of piano relocation, they’d have no idea that anything has changed at the Moreno-McBride residence. And so far, there’s no sign next door that someone else is moving in. An artist, a painter. Maybe she’ll be a portrait artist with an abstraction habit on the side. A VW Bug driver with an all-black wardrobe and a Frida Kahlo brow. Maybe she’ll also discover that the back porch is simultaneously the coziest and most difficult place to paint in the house, and she’ll adopt it as her stu
dio, too.
I lay the note on top of Angela’s piano, but she doesn’t seem to notice it, or me. She has the lid thing hiding the keys, and she runs her hands down it like she’s petting a dog.
“Do you know what I want tonight? More than anything?” I say, flinging her out of her concentration.
“What?”
“Abuela’s mofongo.”
Angela takes a breath through her nose, as though she might be able to smell it if she pulls in deep enough. “Yes. Yes, absolutely. Why did you say that? There’s no way we can make it like she does.”
“We don’t even have the freaking recipe.”
“I wish we could call her.”
“Even if she was at home, she wouldn’t pick up.”
Angela gets up from the piano and heads toward the kitchen. “Yeah, she’d call back like four hours later, and she’d say, ‘Bueno, I’ve got that recipe for you!’”
“I wouldn’t care.” I follow her. The kitchen still smells like Thursday’s grilled cheese sandwiches. “I’d go out and buy a crate of plantains from the store. I’d make it at midnight. I’d make it at one a.m.”
“I want to do a Green Eggs and Ham–style rhyme for you, but I can’t think of anything that rhymes with mofongo.” Angela opens the dishwasher, probably because it seems more likely to be a successful mission than opening the fridge, but we roll out the racks to find dirty dishes and the sour smell of old ketchup.
“The Dishwasher Lemur,” I tell my sister.
It takes her a minute. “Oh man! He’s back. He followed us from Naples, and he’s been lurking, waiting for us to be alone.”
“Sinister and wily, he is.” We shut the dishwasher together and look at each other, like we’re embarrassed to be remembering that old story. But embarrassed for who? We are so very alone here.
Okay, so maybe our mother’s absence has shown that the better housekeepers in this residence are the ones currently occupying it. However, in the Who goes to the grocery store most often? challenge, the absent resident is definitely the winner.
“She’s made some sort of pasta with peanut sauce before,” Angela says. “I’m positive it used peanut butter.”
We’re seriously about ready to pull the trigger on this. Noodles, peanut butter, and whatever else we can find to put into the sauce. And we are considering serving this to Victoria. Mom, for all her quirks, would find a way to pull this one off—she’d look hopeless, but she’d magically find a way to whip up a dinner that would serve at least ten, and it’d be delicious. I check my phone, thinking I might text Mom and ask for her recipe. But her most recent text to me was asking if I’ve heard anything about my college applications, and I don’t feel like answering that.
There are three loud, ironically ominous knocks at the door. Rex.
“I’ve got it.” I leave Angela to the mess with the pasta.
Rex takes up our whole doorway. When he says he’s got someone to introduce, I figure he’s going to lead me to his side of the house. But no—he moves aside and there she is, staring out the little circular windows of the foyer between the two halves of the duplex, as though the flat Florida houses lined up on both sides of the street are the most interesting landscape she’s ever seen.
“This is my new renter!” Rex announces. “Lilia Solis. And this is my old renter, Mercedes Moreno.”
She turns to me. I think she’s Latina, too. She has long black hair and brown eyes and her brows are distinct and therefore very non-Kahlo. Her bright pink, gauzy floral dress looks like something she bought at one of the beachwear stores haunted mainly by tourists.
Also, this Lilia Solis is just a year or two older than I am. And she’s an artist? Like, a legit, professional one? I want to know, but I don’t want to hit her with questions, especially since she doesn’t seem to be much of a talker.
“It’s great to meet you,” I prompt her. “Welcome to the McBride-slash-Moreno Palacio.”
She looks dazed, like she really was expecting a palace, but got this duplex with beige walls and no ceiling lights (that was Mom’s chief complaint when we moved in: “I just got divorced, and now I have to buy lamps?”).
But her eyes lock on mine, and her face brightens. “Thanks. It’s nice to meet you, too.”
Angela pops in with peanut butter all over her hands and introduces herself.
And Rex says he has plenty of casserole for tonight’s dinner.
There is something about being inside Rex’s place that makes me feel like I’m on vacation. Like, on one of the vacations I dream about taking every summer, where I hop in my grumpy old Pontiac and point it north until I get out of Florida, and then take another highway and see where it leads. How do people end up on those trips where they meet all sorts of interesting strangers along the way—people who always have a spare room furnished with telling details about their past? People who have the right amount of good stories: enough to have mastered telling them, but not to have worn them out.
I’m not sure if Rex is all those things, but his half of the house feels that way. All along the wall in the living room are framed photos and letters from his extended family of burly redheaded folk. And the intended dining room is so packed full of boxes of stuff that there’s no space in there for a table. So that’s why we’re all sitting on the floor around the living room coffee table. It’s easy to enjoy a visit to Rex’s place, but I can’t imagine why someone would pay good money to live in a tiny bedroom on the McBride side of the duplex. And yet, Lilia Solis seems quietly excited to be here, looking around at everything on the walls while finishing her helping of casserole. I should have something artsy in mind to say if she catches me watching her. Or I should make some sort of benign conversation about my day at school, but with the words “art class” emphasized and nudged toward Lilia.
“I love this casserole,” says Angela, who has scrubbed most of the peanut butter off her hands.
Rex smiles. “I call it Sunday Slop. And I’m well aware that it’s Friday. It’s how I use my leftovers from the week.”
It’s almost seven—Victoria will be here soon. I should find a way to join in the discussion, such as it is, but I keep looking out the front window for Mrs. Caballini’s car. Angela is right to love the casserole, but I can barely eat. My chest tightens with every breath. Why am I like this tonight? Why does it seem like something out of the ordinary is going to happen, even though I have planted my flag firmly in the “not telling Victoria” camp? What’s going to happen beyond the usual Victoria-hangs-out activities of saying we’re going to watch a movie but then spending an hour looking at cat videos on her phone, and me sneaking glances at her while she reads and I sketch, and also talking about things that are not how much I want to give her a kiss (messy at first, but turning soft)? And for all the ways that this doesn’t sound like a pleasant evening, it is. It really, really is.
“So, Rex, that’s a fascinating painting over there.” It’s Lilia, pointing to a canvas hanging over Rex’s couch. I know it well.
“The orange-and-blue one?” Rex says. “Well, you can compliment the artist. You’re sitting right next to her.”
For the first time since the foyer, we’re looking at each other at the same time. “Ah, okay,” Lilia says, and then glances away. I thought I heard it before, but I’m sure of it now—she has a Puerto Rican accent.
Lilia goes on, “There’s something unexpected about it. The way you mix the colors. At first, they seem like they go together, but when you look at it again, they’re definitely angry with each other.”
“It’s a mood piece,” I tell her. I guess maybe it could be. “It’s just how the sky looked one night last summer.”
“A mood piece? What do you mean by that?”
She wants me to explain it, to set it cozily in the context of my life, to tell her that it was the seminal piece of my Orange Period or whatever. But really, it was a painting I did sort of absentmindedly right after junior year ended. It was a distraction from thinking about V
ictoria and knowing I was going to break up with Bill.
“I saw Mercedes finishing it on her porch,” Rex cuts in. “I asked her if I could buy it, and you should have seen the look on her face!”
“It wasn’t actually finished,” I say. “It’s still not finished. I gave Rex a bargain.”
“That look, right? That’s the look,” Angela says.
Rex grins. “That’s it. It’s the ‘please don’t everybody talk about my art’ look.”
“Okay.” Lilia has more of her Sunday Slop, and her gaze shifts back to the painting. My painting. “Well, I was just wondering.”
Rex and Angela exchange silence, and since I don’t say anything either, they think I’m a part of their conversation. I dig for a sausage-heavy bite of the casserole to take at the same time as Lilia, so we can chew in unison and I can buy some time to find the perfect gateway to the artsy chat that maybe we’re meant to be having. Where do you get your art supplies? Do you love the smell of a brand-new canvas? What’s your favorite way to get paint out of your hair? Do you paint from real life or memory or a different place entirely?
“You’re a painter, too?” I finally say.
Lilia’s long hair is in her face. “On and off,” she tells me, brushing her hair away. She looks at me for a minute, and I’m not sure if she’s trying to decide whether to trust me, or if she’s already made up her mind that she doesn’t. I wish I was better at making friends, artist friends especially.
I glance out the window, at the spot where we found the piano.
And a car pulls up.
When Victoria Caballini gets out of her mom’s car, or does pretty much anything, she has a nice follow-through, as though every action needs an equal reaction, and the first part of that reaction needs to be made by her. That’s the effect of being in dance classes and troupes for over half her life—she has control over her every movement, so much that it slides into directing how people see her and feel about her. But not everything about them.
