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“Are you okay?”
I offer my hand to help her up, but she stands easily on her own. “My ass hurts. And it’s your fault!”
I try not to laugh at this. She was complaining this morning about her ass hurting. I warned her before I took her from behind last night, but she insisted she could handle it.
I open the car door for her and she gets inside without further insult. Rounding the front of the car, I get inside quickly so I can crank up the heater. She pulls off her gloves and tucks them between her legs. When she looks up at me, the anger is gone.
“Do you really think it’s too soon for you to meet my parents?”
“No, it’s not. That was just an automatic response. I’m … sorry. I want to meet your folks.”
“You want to meet them?”
“Okay, maybe not yet, but I’m sure the nerves will subside. But … you should know that parents usually hate me. There’s just something about me.”
I try not to smile as I think of all the dicks I’ve had to deal with over the years: brothers and friends of girls I’ve dated who thought they could talk enough crap about me to change those girls’ minds. You can’t force someone to see that something is bad for them. You just have to sit back and watch people reach for the flame – sometimes repeatedly – until they finally understand that fire hurts.
“Yeah, there is something about you. It’s your asshole-y-ness.”
“His Asshole-y-ness. I suppose I deserve that title.”
She shakes her head as I pull the car out of the parking space. “My parents want to take you to a Salvadoran restaurant.”
“I like burritos.”
“You have so much to learn. Just let me do most of the talking. We’re not there to tell them about the baby. They just want to meet you before we go to Vegas. They still don’t know we’re living together.”
I pull onto the highway to head toward her parents’ neighborhood and I begin to feel an itch in the pit of my stomach, a restlessness that makes me want to turn the car around and forget all of it.
Suddenly, I’m reminded of the first time I met Ashley’s adoptive parents. They had taken her in as a foster child shortly after her appearances at Elaine’s house. She was completely broken and she even turned to drugs for a while, but they cleaned her up, adopted her, put her in a different school to get her away from her old friends, and she was able to pretend to be okay – until we ended up in the same art class.
Chris had quit school the summer before our junior year, so it was just Jake and I left at Athens Drive High School. Jake was a senior, so the only classes we ever shared at ADHS were elective classes. We didn’t get placed in any of the same electives during my junior year. But I recognized Ashley the moment I saw her sitting in the back of the class with her brown hair looking a bit disheveled and hardly any make-up, unlike the last time I saw her in that back bedroom with her black mascara streaming down her cheeks.
“You missed the exit,” Senia says. “Are you okay?”
“Just thinking about Molly.”
I want to tell her everything. I do. But the shame and disgust I feel for the things I did to Ashley nine years ago couldn’t be erased by years of perspective or thirteen months of her trying to prove that she did forgive me. I knew when she cheated on me that she did it to make it easier for her to go to college and leave me behind – to leave everything that happened between us behind. But you can’t leave behind the kind of demons that cling to your back, leaving you weighed down and misshapen.
Ashley’s friend, Beatrice, left me a voicemail message last year to tell me that Ashley had just come back from a fashion internship in Paris. For a few days, I considered returning her call, just to know why Ashley wanted me to know this. Then it dawned on me that she wanted me to know that she’s doing well. She had to get away from me to be okay.
“I think Molly should move in with us,” Senia says as I take the next exit.
“She doesn’t want to change schools. She doesn’t want to lose her friends.” And I don’t blame her.
After Chris dropped out and Jake and Ashley graduated, that’s where the endless stream of meaningless sex and relationships began for me. I don’t want Molly to go looking for something to fill the void once her grandmother and her friends are taken from her.
“But Chapel Hill is just forty minutes from her school. I’ve been driving forty minutes to get to school every day,” Senia continues. “And I’m sure Jackie would let her use her address so it looks like she still resides within the district lines.”
I’m positive Chris’s mom, Jackie, would allow Molly to use her address, but that’s not what I’m most worried about.
“What about Grandma? I can’t leave her alone in that house.”
“She could come too,” she replies without hesitation. “She could have our bedroom and we’ll sleep on a sofa bed or something. It will be … comfortable.”
“You have a warped idea of what constitutes comfortable living conditions.”
She shrugs as I turn onto the main road. “Whatever. I just think it would be good for Molly.”
And that itchy restlessness in the pit of my stomach is gone. I reach for her hand and she smiles as I give it a gentle squeeze. Maybe Senia understands more than I give her credit for.
The day our wires crossed,
You were broken, I was lost.
But I found my way to you,
To a place I didn’t know was true.
Now I can’t conceive of living without the sound of us too.
Chapter Twenty-Six
We’re nearly at the restaurant when Senia’s phone rings. It’s her parents informing her that the restaurant reservation has been canceled. Dinner will take place at her parents’ house. I turn the car around – again – and ten minutes later we arrive at a large two-story stucco house in a country-club housing tract in North Raleigh.
I know Senia’s family does well with the family real estate business, but I did sort of fantasize that her family’s house would be a rundown shack I rescued her from. I reach for the door handle to exit the car, but Senia grabs my arm.
“Wait!” She holds my face and kisses me hard – the kind of kiss that melts your insides and makes you want to stay under the covers all day. “Just wanted to get it out of the way since I won’t be able to do that for a while.”
I chuckle as she lets go of my face and hops out of the car. We walk hand-in-hand toward the front door, passing under a bare bougainvillea archway that drips with melting snow. I’m not sure what she’s thinking, but I’m thinking that this feels an awful lot like walking down the aisle. She reaches for the doorknob and, I swear, the next twenty minutes are a slow-motion blur of handshakes and hugs. I can’t really remember much of it, but I do remember someone grabbing my ass and the look on Senia’s father’s face when he sees me.
He’s wearing a gray suit and he’s in good shape for a man his age. His dark hair is cropped short and impeccably styled. I can’t tell if he looks more like a real estate agent or a mobster. His nostrils flare as his gaze takes in my shoulder-length hair, my gray jeans and the black sweater I’m wearing under my army-green twill jacket.
I hold my hand out to him. “Nice to meet you, sir.”
He cocks an eyebrow, exactly the way Senia does when she’s not impressed. “Aren’t you going to remove your jacket?” he says with a slight accent that makes me feel as if I’ve stepped into a scene from the movie Scarface. I begin to take my jacket off and he laughs. “I’m only kidding!” He holds his hand out for me to shake. When I take it, he pulls me into a bone-crushing hug, which gives him the perfect opportunity to whisper in my ear: “Keep it in your pants in Las Vegas, okay?”
I swallow hard as he lets me go and he’s still wearing a huge smile. He nods and I nod just enough for him to notice, then I try not to smile. We’ll only be in Vegas for two nights. I can handle two nights without sex. Good thing is, with Senia being pregnant, I don’t have to.
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nbsp; Dinner actually goes pretty well after that. Senia’s mom serves up some fried fish and something called pupusas, which just look like fat tortillas stuffed with cheese and various meats. Senia rolls her eyes when I tell her I hope this food doesn’t give me explosive pupusa, then her cheeks flush red when I ask her for some ketchup for my fried fish. Just the sight of me pouring the ketchup onto my plate makes her mom, Nancy, cringe. Fried food always tastes better with ketchup. They’ll learn.
Senia’s three older sisters are a whole different story. They ogle me all through dinner and I catch Senia burning them with her laser eyes multiple times. None of them are as hot as Senia, but her sister Maribel, who’s just two years older than Senia, keeps glancing at me as she blathers on about her volunteer work at the local boys and girls club. It starts to make me a little uncomfortable, so I reach up and pretend to wipe something from the corner of Senia’s mouth.
“What is it?” Senia asks as she attempts to wipe her face clean.
“Nothing. Just a piece of pupu … sa. I got it.”
“You think that’s funny?”
“I think you’re smiling.”
I kiss her cheek and she pushes me away gently. “Stop.”
But Senia’s little sister Sophie, who Senia proudly claims to have named, is the most persistent of them all. She sits next to me on the couch as the family watches football and we draw pictures. She draws pictures of all the new friends she’s made in kindergarten and I draw a picture of Molly. She trades drawings with me and asks me to draw something on her picture. I think this is her subtle way of trying to get me to improve her drawing. So I add a sketch of Senia and me on the right side of the page and she makes me squeeze in a picture of her so the three of us are together.
