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“I am. But now that I think about it, Tess does always wear a swimsuit under all her clothes during summer.”
I laughed. “Yeah, we were total water babies. We’d go swimming pretty much every day. Walk forty-five minutes to Hollywood Beach and then take the bus back because we were too tired to walk. The bus driver started bringing snacks in case he saw us. Plantain chips sometimes, but Dunkaroos mostly. That was the shit.”
“Lukas Hendricks eating Dunkaroos. I can hardly imagine it.”
I grinned. “Well, imagine it. I loved that shit. Dunkaroos, Gushers, Capri Suns. Whole bunch of stuff I can’t find anymore.”
“Well maybe you’re not looking hard enough. I can find you Capri Suns easy.”
“Yeah?” I turned to catch the sass on Lia’s face. Only she could make smug look so good. “Well, do it then. We can make a day of it. We’ll drink Capri Sun, have Lunchables for dinner and watch Jumanji and Space Jam.”
“And Matilda.”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t know Matilda? Wow. I feel sorry for you.”
I snorted. “Jesus Christ, take it easy. We’ll watch Matilda.”
“Good. Though I have a hard time believing Tess never watched Matilda growing up. Every nineties girl was obsessed with both the book and the movie.”
“Well, she had the misfortune of having me as a big brother, and I basically dictated all our TV viewing.”
“Rude. Didn’t your parents intervene?”
“They were never home.”
Lia paused. “Oh. Were they… workaholics?” she asked hopefully.
“Alcoholics.”
She hung her head. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright. Tess didn’t even know anything was wrong growing up. It was just our normal,” I said as we got onto the I-95.
“Tess didn’t know but you knew?”
“I was four years older, so yeah. I knew my friends weren’t waiting up till four, five in the morning for their parents to come home. My best friends parents’ slept in beds at night. I woke up to find mine passed out on the couch with their shoes on.”
Even from my peripherals, I could see the sadness on Lia’s face as she studied me. “They just went straight from work to bars or something?”
“Yep. They both worked at the same country club. My mom was a server and my dad was in the kitchen. Both their shifts started at two-thirty in the afternoon so as far as I knew, they woke up around two, got to work, went out with friends after their shift and kept the party going wherever it went for the night.”
“They were always like that? From the beginning?”
I nodded but then frowned. “Well, for as long as I can remember, my dad was always red-faced and bleary-eyed and smelling like booze. I was close to my mom for awhile, maybe till kindergarten. But she was too in love with my dad to be left out of his life and his life was all drinking and partying. So it was almost like she picked up the addiction to stay close to him.”
“Jesus,” Lia breathed out, frowning into her lap. “That’s horrible.”
“It was alright. Tess and I were pretty used to our routine. We liked going straight to the beach from school and seeing our bus driver on the way home.”
“‘Our’ bus driver,” Lia teased, making me chuckle.
“Yeah. He was our bus driver. We actually got possessive if other people on the bus tried to talk to him. He was ours.”
Lia tipped her head back and laughed. “That’s so cute. I like to imagine that he was an old man who looked like Santa.”
I squinted as I pictured his face again. “He was too skinny to be Santa but he was definitely old. Referred to himself as grandpa and abuelo and treated us like grandkids with all the presents he showered on us. In that sense, he was definitely our own personal Santa.”
