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Amelia shared as well, telling Cory how she dropped out of college her sophomore year to help her parents care for her younger brother who got sick with leukemia (he was fine now but the path back to college was hard!). How she lost her serving job because she reported a coworker who was stealing food, not realizing the coworker was her manager’s girlfriend.
It astonished me how easily the stories came. They arrived, fully formed, and all I had to do was retell them. I can’t believe how effortless it is to talk to you, I typed now. Most guys on here ask three superficial questions and then go straight for the hookup.
I liked being Amelia. To be able to shed my problems and become a different person was liberating. Amelia had options where I had none, and with a few keystrokes, she could have even more. Today she might be out of work, but tomorrow she could find an even better job, simply because I said so.
“What are you doing?” Johnny’s voice, just over my shoulder, made me jump. I toggled away from the dating site, but he’d already seen it. “No personal business on the computer. If I catch you again, I’ll have to write you up.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again.” I hated myself for groveling, but I needed this job.
I closed the tab and resumed staring out the window, and when Johnny dumped a new batch of freshly laundered towels on the counter in front of me, I offered him a bright smile and started folding.
***
After work, I drove to the public library in Santa Monica, not wanting to splurge on another session at an internet café. If I wanted to eat this weekend, I needed to set up at least one date. I entered the large space with its oversize book return bins and the circulation desk that spanned an entire wall, and let my memory travel backward. Libraries had always been my refuge. My mother used to take me every weekend, and we’d spend hours reading in a corner, insulated from the outside world. She’d fill her biggest purse with snacks—granola bars, small bags of chips and cookies—and we’d settle in as soon as the library opened, staking out the best chairs on the second floor that overlooked the street below. We’d take turns looking for books, surreptitiously eating and reading the day away, only leaving when the lights flashed and the closing announcement was made.
I approached the librarian working the information desk and showed her my library card. She pointed to the bank of computers and said, “Take your pick.”
There were only two other people online—an older man who may or may not have been homeless, and a teenager who should have been in school. I picked a machine near the end of the row and logged in to Amelia’s account.
There were no new messages from Cory, and I was surprised by the flash of disappointment that passed through me. How quickly I’d become addicted to the thrill of a new message from him.
Then I logged in to my account. There were three guys I was messaging with, each of them a slightly different version of the same person. Jason, the venture capitalist who seemed to start every sentence with the word I. Sean, a mortgage broker in Manhattan Beach. And Dylan, the party promoter.
Up until now, my criteria had been pretty simple: they had to have a job, they had to ask me at least three questions about myself, and they couldn’t look like the Unabomber. I always made sure I met them in a public place, and I never went home with anyone who felt unsafe. But sometimes, I couldn’t tell until it was too late. Fingers running through my hair that tugged too hard. Hands that gripped too tight. Bruises in places easily hidden. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, I’d learned how to compartmentalize. To turn off my thoughts and go somewhere else in my mind until it was over.
I stared at Jason’s last message, an invitation to a restaurant that just opened in Venice, imagining an interminable evening stroking his ego, before closing it without responding.
Then I toggled over to the community college website, just so I could tell Cal that I looked. Accounting. Art History. Business Administration. The words began to blur until my eyes snagged on Digital Art Certificate. This six-month course will take you through the basics of HTML code, web design, and Adobe Photoshop. Students will gain skills valuable to any existing business, or allow them to work for themselves as a freelancer. I studied the sample images that went alongside the Photoshop course. A picture of a family portrait taken at a park with several people in the background. The second image was the same photo, this time with everyone behind them edited out, as if no one had ever been there.
I clicked on the tuition button and blew out hard. Including registration fees, it would be nearly $200 to complete the coursework and get the certificate. More, if the class had any required materials to buy. And then there was the equipment I’d need once I’d finished—a computer. Software. For someone who made less than $150 a week after taxes—most of it already spent the moment it hit my account—$200 might as well have been $2 million. I closed the window, feeling the pinch of regret I always felt whenever a door closed.
I logged out and gave the librarian a wave. I had about four more hours of daylight to find a place to park for the night.
***
Instead, I made a detour through Brentwood, the streets as familiar to me as an old friend. The Brentwood Country Mart where my mom used to buy me ice cream and, if I was lucky, a book from the bookstore there. The corner where I fell off my bike and skinned my knee. The large stump of a tree that came down in a storm when I was seven, cutting off traffic on San Vicente for an entire day.
I turned left onto Canyon Drive and navigated as if on autopilot. The houses there were on large lots, set far back from the street, some behind tall gates you could barely see through. I wound my way slowly, as if pulled by some magnetic force, back to the place where it all started.
I parked just south of the house, a spot that gave me the best vantage point from which to study it. To follow the familiar contours of the dark wood and white stucco. The round tower that housed the circular staircase that led to a tiny third-floor study. The large windows of the living room, where my mother said her grandfather would spend his days, smoking a pipe and worrying about his son—her father—who spent more time in rehab than out of it.
“The front door is made of oak, milled from a forest in Virginia,” I recited into the silent car. “A tree that probably greeted the colonists of Jamestown before arriving here to keep us safe.” The start of my mother’s monologue, the one she’d use to help me sleep at night. Like a bedtime story, she’d walk us through the home we both yearned to return to. Always, I’d picture it behind my eyes. The plastered walls that still held the tray marks of the artisans who smoothed them. The wide, wooden beams that spanned the width of the ceiling in the great room. The fourth stair that always creaked if you stepped on it near the banister. The closet with the trapdoor that led to the attic, and the wall that measured not only my mother’s height, but a few months of my own heights as well.
My mother, Rosie, had been born right before her parents had graduated high school. Her mother had disappeared early on, and her father had descended into drugs and alcohol use, leaving Rosie in the care of her grandparents—my great-grandparents—whom we both called Nana and Pop, the only stable influences she ever had.
It was Nana and Pop who went to her school open houses. Who taught her how to ride a bike. Who waited up for her when she went on dates in high school, raising her as if she were their own.
My mother fell in love only twice in her life. The first time was with a college hockey player who’d gone to Europe and never returned. That relationship had given her me and the set of rules that dictated my entire childhood:
Convenience and comfort aren’t worth settling for. We can earn what we need; we don’t need a man to hand it to us.
If money is tight, we work harder.
Two women working together are a force to be reckoned with.
She managed to make ends meet by working multiple jobs, renting studio apartments when we could afford the security deposit, and staying with Nana and Pop when we couldn’t. I marked the periods of time we spent with them as some of the happiest I’d ever known. Nana taught me how to bake chocolate chip cookies from scratch. She showed me how to start a vegetable garden. Pop taught me how to play cribbage and poker.
The second—and last—time my mother fell in love was a few years after Nana and Pop were gone. His name was Ron Ashton.
