Sam smiled. It gave him a better view anyway.
“You know what I love about you?” she asked.
“My enormous muscles and my sun-kissed glow?”
“Yes,” she said. “The second thing I like about you”—Sam noticed that she’d switched “love” to “like”—“is that your brain goes as fast as mine,” she said.
“So you like that I remind you of you basically,” he said.
They both laughed.
“Exactly.”
“Cool.”
“No,” she tried again. “Most people don’t ever know what I’m talking about. Not ever. I don’t necessarily know why.”
“Well, you start your stories from the epilogue. Plus, none of your questions have anything to do with what’s being discussed.”
“Neither do yours.”
Sam smiled.
“But you know what I’m talking about,” she said. “You’ve known from the day we met. Even on text, where there are no inflections or nuance or tone for non sequiturs. You’ve always spoken fluent me.”
She slugged him on the arm. A meaty little thwock. Sam didn’t know what to read into it.
“I’m glad you didn’t talk about yourself in the third person just then, like ‘speaking fluent Penny,’ ” he said. “That would have been so gnar. What if all I did was—”
Before he could continue, Penny kissed him square on the mouth.
He didn’t have time to close his eyes, so he knew that she hadn’t closed hers.
Sam stared at her for a moment. Then he went for it.
PENNY.
Kissing Sam was nothing like kissing Bobby or Mark. Not even close. Kissing them was pressing your face up against your own forearm compared to this. Oh man. This. ThisThisThis. When she kissed Sam, it was closing your eyes and opening them to find yourself in outer space. Kissing Sam was the universe. It was the Internet. It was a miracle. The part that was most astounding was that her brain switched off to pure white noise, and as she leaned in, she didn’t obsess about the mechanics of her tongue or where the rest of her body was in relation to his.
Penny felt the contour of his jaw under her hand and couldn’t believe she’d gone this long without touching it. Sam rolled over her, propping himself up so he wouldn’t squish her body with his. He hung for a bit and—Oh God—he was so pretty that it was unfathomable that he could even see her. It was inconceivable to Penny that his eyes served any function other than to be admired. He kissed her back with urgency. Her hands traveled around his waist. Sam was startlingly skinny. The slightness was new. His skin was warm and there was a refinement in the economy of his build. Sam’s stomach was smooth. Penny wanted to run her fingers up and down her own sides to check what she felt like. She suspected her love handles were too fleshy or lumpy in contrast, but when his hands migrated to her middle, Penny shivered. It felt so good to be this close. Sam fell onto his side, wrapped his leg around hers, and drew her in deeper. It made no difference where he started and she ended. Until it did. When his hands moved under her shirt, she stiffened. Penny didn’t have a bra on.
Responding to her hesitation, Sam changed course. He kissed her lightly and moved his hands from her front toward her back. It reminded Penny of when people tripped slightly and started running to pretend they hadn’t.
Penny pulled away to get some air. Sam’s hair had fallen in his face and his lips were swollen.
“Whoa,” he breathed, and rolled onto his back.
Penny wondered what would happen next.
He reached for her hand under the cover.
“So . . . ,” he said.
Penny rolled onto her stomach and faced him, admiring his profile. He had an elegant nose. She wished she could explore his body and inspect him. Learn him and memorize him. That way she’d know what to miss when he was gone. Sam was heartbreakingly, hauntingly beautiful. It made her heart hurt. This couldn’t end well.
“I think I should go,” she said. She didn’t know why she said it. Penny wanted to take it back, but that’s the thing about certain words. They broke spells. She searched Sam’s face for meaning, yet felt too self-conscious to keep staring. Penny wished he would text her about what was going on in his mind, tell her in some way that this made sense.
He sat up, frowned, and then nodded.
• • •
“Are you kidding me?” When Penny got home, Jude leapt out of bed and rushed to her. She grabbed Penny by the shoulders.
“Where the hell were you?” Jude shrieked.
Penny stared at her. She was mystified that somehow her roommate’s rage had built in her absence.
“I thought you were dead. I texted and called.” Her blond hair was tied up in a lopsided ponytail, and she was still wearing yesterday’s mascara.
Penny grabbed her phone from her back pocket and held it up feebly. “It died,” she said.
She examined Jude’s face for clues. She looked unglued but not necessarily angry.
“I thought you hated me,” Penny reasoned.
“You’re an idiot,” said Jude, scowling. “Of course I hate you. I’m furious at you. I figured you’d gone to your mom’s, but your laptop was here and your charger.”
Jude walked over to Penny’s desk and pointed. “Then I realized your pouches were here with your backpack, and that’s when I started to get hysterical.”
She turned to grab her phone off her pillow. “See,” she said, showing Penny her outgoing calls. “Six times I called you.”
Penny sat on her bed, dazed. “Jude, did you sleep at all?”
“No, asshole,” she said.
“Mallory had some guy over, so I got home at one and you weren’t here, which is fine. Except then I texted at one thirty and again at three, and when you were still gone, I couldn’t sleep. Jesus Christ, Penny, what the F?”
Penny went over to Jude and hugged her fiercely.
“You scared me,” said Jude quietly. Penny held her tighter. People scared Penny all the time. Like her mom and even Sam. It meant she loved them.
• • •
“The dumbest thing happened,” said Penny. They were lying on Jude’s bed. “My mom OD’d.”
Jude turned to Penny, horrified. “Holy shit. What?”
“No, no, no,” Penny corrected. “She’s fine. It is the stupidest thing. She overdosed on weed brownies at her birthday dinner, lost her mind, and had to go to the hospital.”
Jude fell silent and then erupted into laughter, which made Penny laugh.
“I only got back,” she said, skipping over the detail of spending the night at Sam’s house and making out with him in the morning and bolting like a dork.
“How is she?” Jude asked. “Poor Celeste.”
“She’s fine,” she said. “I met her shit-kicker boyfriend. Who’s handsome, younger than her, and was wearing these insane Lucchese cowboy boots.”
Jude smiled. “That’s so Texas,” she said. “How’d she seem?”
“I didn’t see her.”
“Penny.”
Jude nudged her. “Can you do me a favor? Can you tell me this story the opposite of the way you’d tell it normally? Start at the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”
“No, that was everything,” she said. “Her boyfriend called, said she was in the hospital. I figured you were too pissed to come with me, so . . .” She took a deep breath. “I called Sam and he drove me.”
“Okay, Sam we’ll get back to,” Jude told her. “You should’ve called me anyway, you know. Possible dead mother calls for a cease-fire. Even you have to know that.”
Penny continued. “Anyway, I get down there to discover that in true Celeste form, she was totally fine. She was in the hospital for no reason on her fortieth birthday other than that she’s a needy, messy monster.”
“Come on,” said Jude. “I’m sure she wasn’t stoked to be there.”
“I don’t care!” said Penny. “I’ve had it. As soon as I heard she wasn’t dead, I turned aro
und and came back home.”
Jude’s mouth hung open.
“You didn’t talk to her? After you drove all the way down there?”
Penny shook her head.
“But, Pen, you’re the one who ditched her on her birthday.”
“I’m over it,” said Penny, throwing her hands up. “I’m done worrying about her. She’s the mom. I’m sick to death of looking out for her and being paranoid she’s going to do something dumb.”
If anything, Celeste was lucky she hadn’t gone in to visit her. Penny would’ve strangled her.
“Okay,” said Jude. “Well, thank God nothing truly bad happened. We all make mistakes, which, by the way, you might know something about.” Jude shot her a meaningful look. “It wouldn’t kill you to give your mom a break.”
Except that maybe it would.
SAM.
Sam measured out the flour. He hadn’t made hamantaschen in a while. Brandi Rose loved the prune ones best, so he was making those. It was time to go see his mother.
As he threw the mixer on low speed, his mind wandered to Penny. Dark eyes. Hands pulling him closer by the belt loops of his jeans. Her breath hot against his throat.
Jeez. What was that?
Sam recalled the impossible softness of her skin. The way her hair fanned out on his pillows as if she were floating on top of water.
But then she took off.
Sam didn’t know where to go with her and how far. Maybe Penny changed her mind. Maybe she’d tried it out and realized—to her horror—that she’d made a mistake and decided that they were better off as friends.
It would make sense if she were skittish, given the events of her life. But she’d been the one to kiss him first. Sam’s mind flashed back to the way her lips yielded to his and the sigh that escaped when his mouth brushed her shoulder.
When the cookies had cooled, Sam drove over to his mother’s. He took the left into Forest Park, through a cluster of mobile homes that had been built before the highway in 1964. He wiped his sweating hands onto his jeans.
Sam knew she’d be home. Brandi Rose stayed home most afternoons, ever since she sought early retirement and workman’s comp for fibromyalgia—a mysterious rambling pain that assaulted her extremities. Autry, her current boyfriend, took care of her most days.
Sure, Austin had a few kitschy trailer parks, cutesy chrome Airstreams that were rejiggered as Airbnbs or else food trucks and cozy bars where the cocktails cost as much as Sam’s pants. Sam’s mom’s place was nothing like that. The rooms were drafty and the neighbors rowdy, and they only got rowdier when they drank. Which was often.
Sam could see her car in the driveway and rang the bell.
Autry answered. “Sam!” he said, and slapped him on the back. “Honey, it’s Sam.” Autry was a sometime auto mechanic who was wearing his usual outfit of an undershirt, cargo shorts, and beer in his hand. He was tanned and slender through the limbs with a bowling ball of a booze gut. Autry was a simple happy guy. Though if he put up with Brandi Rose, something had to be going on with him.
Sam followed him into the living room to see that his mother hadn’t stirred from her usual spot right in front of the TV. Brandi Rose was angry. Her absorption in her TV watching and the abject lack of effort to glance over betrayed her sentiments. It took real work to ignore someone in such close quarters.
She was smoking a cigarette and drinking a tall glass of bourbon with an iced tea floater. He remembered when he was younger, how Brandi Rose had made the effort to hide the handles of Ten High whiskey. That was, until he’d partially melted a plastic bottle heating up a pizza. Brandi kept them stashed in different places in the house, and one hiding place was the roomy metal drawer under the oven. It had ruined the frozen pizza he’d paid for with the last of his sofa change. Sam left the gnarled, blackened bottle in the sink for her to see. He’d wanted her to be embarrassed. Brandi Rose had started drinking in the open after that.
The screen door opened and clanged shut, signaling another of Autry’s walks. That man loved his constitutionals. Talk on the block was that he never wandered far, since he frequently entertained Mrs. Packer, whose husband went to get TP one morning and never returned.
“Hey, Mom,” he said. She kept her eyes glued to the demonstration on induction ovens. You could cook a whole chicken—a frozen one—in under fifteen minutes.
The antique, cordless phone was in the pocket of her beige dressing gown. It was eerie. It was as if someone dumped amber over her head like the slime on children’s TV shows and preserved her whole. Nothing had changed since he’d left. Kicking her son out of her life hadn’t made a lick of difference.
Sam felt sweat sting at his armpits. He tried to look at something that wasn’t depressing. Like the dark brown stain on the carpet that resembled the head of fat Elvis in profile. Or the piles of catalogs that lay collapsed at her feet. Sam slowed his breathing. What he was tempted to do was make a movie about his mom. It would cover depression, addiction, and the poison it becomes when you don’t get a handle on any of it.
Sam felt strangely calmer thinking about filming her. Sad yet calm. Distant.
“I made you something.” He placed the Christmas tin of fresh cookies in her lap. The tin with gold and white reindeer was hers from when she was a kid. It used to be Sam’s stash box, and he’d had to wash it twice to scrub out the stink of burnt weed. “Prune, your favorite.”
“You know I almost had to sell the house,” Brandi Rose said, finally diverting her attention from the screen. When Sam was very young he remembered how her mouth would move along to the parts of the ads she knew by heart. “Me and Autry were almost homeless after the stunt you pulled.”
The stunt he pulled was that he called fraud protection on the credit cards she’d opened in his name.
Sam remembered the bills. His mother had spent four hundred dollars on anti-aging face peels that had literal diamonds in it. Not figurative. Literal diamonds.
Finally, Brandi Rose looked at her son.
Her eyes were dead. Sunken. Her hair had been dark once, but as she got older she’d dyed it a brassy, orangey-red. He realized it was exactly the same color as her bronzed skin. The way her cheeks had collapsed into jowls gave her chin and mouth the hinged appearance of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s. Brandi Rose’s thin lips puckered in disgust at him, as if she’d swallowed a bug.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Sam said. There was no sense in trying to explain to her that his credit was ruined. That as it stood it was near impossible for him to sign a lease or get loans for school.
“Selfish,” she said, turning back to the TV. “What good are cookies when it’s cold outside and I don’t have a house?”
Sam considered telling her that a residence you could put wheels on didn’t quite qualify as a house, and that as far as winters went she could do a lot worse than Texas.
“Share them with Autry,” Sam said. “Autry knows his way around a cookie.”
His mother didn’t say anything else. Sam turned his attention to the magical oven that was cool to the touch and made fruit leather for the kids and if you ordered now you could get a second for your RV half off. Sam was desperate to reach out and place a hand lightly on her shoulder. He knew exactly how the fuzziness of the robe would feel on his palm, the warmth and familiarity. Yet he also knew that if she flinched or pulled away he’d be devastated.
“All right,” he said brightly, kissing his mother on the head. “It’s nice to see you, Mama. Happy holidays.”
Sam couldn’t believe Thanksgiving was a week out.
There were dirty dishes in the sink, as usual. Sam thought about washing them and tidying up, maybe cooking something nutritious for her to eat. But it wouldn’t make a dent in the guilt he felt or in her resentment. There was a time when he’d thought he could pull them out of this. That he would man up and rescue her and move them someplace nice. But even if he freed her from the trailer, there was nothing he could do about the raging inside-person’s
headache you get when you watch TV for too many hours in a row and her compulsion to do only that.
“I love you,” he whispered to the dishes, and let himself out.
• • •
When Sam got back to House, Jude was waiting for him on the porch swing.
“Hey!” he said brightly.
“Hey,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he responded.
“I can see that.” Jude extended her long legs forward to see how far the porch swing pitched back. “You look like hell.”
“I went to see my mom,” he said, taking a seat next to her. “Which is why the next order of business is to smoke this.” He held up a cigarette.
“Jeez, that good, huh?”
Sam sighed.
“Did you tell her Fraser’s granddaughter says hi?” Jude nudged him in the ribs.
“Who the hell is Fraser?” Sam laughed dryly and lit his smoke when he realized. “You know I only ever knew him as Mr. Lange?”
“Wow,” breathed Jude. “That’s twisted. Okay, so I’ve come to a conclusion,” she told him.
“Sounds fascinating.”
“Promise not to get mad?” Jude cast a sidelong glance at him.
“Nope.”
She laughed. “Are you in love with Penny?”
“How is that a conclusion? That’s a question.”
Jude rolled her eyes. “She says she’s in love with you.”
“She did not.”
“Fine, she didn’t say those exact words, but it’s the only explanation. She’s in love with you.”
“Stop,” he said. “You know she’s inscrutable. You ever notice how she seems furious when she’s super excited?”
Jude laughed. “Or when she’s actually furious and starts bawling? That’s a classic,” she responded.
Sam thought about the last time he’d seen her cry. How he’d wanted to place her in a bubble and firebomb everything around her.
“So it was you on her phone.”
Sam nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Sam sighed. He glanced down at the tattoo of a horse head partially covered by cloth on his forearm. It was how they used to train wild horses way back when, throwing fabric over their eyes so they wouldn’t get spooked by their surroundings. They’d have to submit to the rider’s commands. Surrender.
Emergency Contact Page 25
