Puerto Vallarta sits in the middle of the Bay of Banderas, surrounded on three sides by mountains, with a prevailing wind pattern from the southwest—all of which makes it a rare target for hurricanes.
The conversation about where to go to celebrate the big birthdays began more than a year ago, when Peter turned forty-nine. After much back and forth, we settled on Puerto Vallarta, taking into consideration the substantial bang for your buck, a glowing endorsement from my friend Sarah, and the minimal time difference (we wouldn’t want to mess with Ivan’s fragile sleep routine). We did not factor in susceptibility to hurricanes, though if we had, it would have been another check in the box in favor of Puerto Vallarta.
Because I’m a planner, and I consider a six-month lead time nothing short of reckless procrastination, we had the house booked and the deposit paid by August, a full eight months in advance.
Then, in October, shortly after that sit-down conversation with my doctor, the most powerful hurricane on record threatened to hit Puerto Vallarta, with sustained winds clocking in at 200 miles per hour and gusts approaching 250. The distinction between winds and gusts is something I still don’t understand, despite developing a hurricane obsession over those few days. I watched its every move from my kitchen in Los Angeles, on a weather-tracking website, while the sun shone outside my window. It was a welcome distraction from WebMD, every dark corner of which I’d already exhausted. Of course I worried about the people who lived in Puerto Vallarta and the fragile infrastructure of a town not accustomed to such violent invasion, but I also felt for the tourists who had maybe spent more money than they ever had before, who had probably been looking forward to the vacation for a solid eight months and who were now being forced to evacuate, rushing off to the airport, where more than five hundred flights had been canceled.
The hurricane ended up making landfall near Cuixmala about 180 kilometers south; Puerto Vallarta was spared the brunt of her wrath. Back home, I looked up from my computer and out my kitchen window at my orange tree heavy with fruit, and my freshly mowed backyard, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Now here I sit, alone at the dining room table at Villa Azul Paraiso, at half past seven in the morning, drinking a cup of excellent coffee, glued to the same weather-tracking website. There’s another storm, just upgraded to tropical cyclone, hovering over the eastern Pacific basin. Though she is not predicted to impose any threat to our temporary home on this placid bay beyond the possibility of some unseasonable showers, I am watching her carefully and anxiously, because if back in October the experts were off by 180 kilometers, who’s to say their calculations won’t be off again?
Roberto arrives with a leather satchel slung over his shoulder and a woman who must be Luisa, though I never did meet her yesterday. I found the kitchen empty this morning, and the coffeemaker fully loaded and ready to go, with a Post-it note attached: Please push button for coffee and a smiley face.
“Good morning,” he says and then says something to Luisa in Spanish. She hurries off toward the kitchen. “You are up early. We will make for you the huevos. Unless you like something else?”
“I can wait for the others. Really. I don’t typically eat breakfast right away. I like to ease into my day.”
“More coffee? I get for you.”
“No, no. It’s okay.” I want to tell him to relax, to put his bag down and ease into his day, too, but I worry that will sound condescending, or worse, like an order.
I gesture to my computer. “I’m a little worried about the weather.”
He looks out at the cloudless morning sky, the calm waters, the palm trees standing perfectly still. He’s puzzled. “It is beautiful, no?”
“Yes, but . . . I’m watching this, here.” I point to the screen. He comes closer and leans in. “It isn’t predicted to come our way, but it could. Because these so-called experts are really just in the guessing business.”
“It is only a tormenta. No worry.”
“A tormenta? That sounds bad.”
“No. It is okay. A tormenta—it is only a storm. Not a hurricane. And it does not come here. You will have sun.”
“Actually, they say that even though it probably won’t come here, we might see some rain as a result.”
“Okay. Maybe some rain. But rain, it does not last long. It is quick and then there is sun.”
“I don’t care all that much about sun. Too much sun is bad for your skin.”
“You do not want sun? This is why you worry?” Now he really looks puzzled.
I shut my laptop. “Maybe more coffee would be nice.”
“Okay,” he says. “I get for you.”
I hear Ingrid’s voice coming from upstairs. It starts as a whisper-shout. “Ivan? Ivan?” By the time she’s in the dining room, messy haired and wild eyed, she’s dropped the whisper. “Ivan? Jenna! Have you seen Ivan?”
“No,” I say. “I assumed he was still asleep.”
She’s wearing a white V-neck T-shirt through which I can see her nipples and boy-short-style underwear. “No, he was in our bed, but I just woke up and he wasn’t there and he’s not in his room and, oh, God . . .”
“Calm down,” I say, even though I know it’s the very worst thing you can say to anyone in a panic, especially a mother who can’t find her child. “This house has three living rooms. Let’s check them all. The one on this floor has the satellite TV, maybe that’s where he’s gone.”
We rush to the living room. It’s empty. I send Ingrid down to the ground floor and I run back upstairs to check the main living room and the bedrooms. The master door is open; I can see a Solly-sized lump in the massive bed. Ivan’s door is open and his bed is untouched. All the other doors are shut. Everyone is still asleep. He’s not on this floor.
I run to the top floor, with the Jacuzzi and the chairs for stargazing. I haven’t been up here yet. It would be a great place to have cocktails, there’s a palapa-style bar and some fairy lights, but no Ivan. I hurry back down through the house and into the kitchen, where Roberto sits at a table grating a block of cheese while Luisa stands at the stove.
“Have you seen Ivan?” I ask. I put my palm at about waist height to indicate his short stature. “The little one? We can’t find him.”
Roberto jumps up and follows me downstairs. The pool, thank God, is clear. Too many stories end this way, and truth be told, I volunteered to go upstairs to search because a part of me feared what I might find at the bottom of the pool. The gate to the beach is open. I can hear Ingrid, screaming now, “IVAN!!! IVAN!!!”
“What’s going on?” I look up two floors. Peter and Solly are standing at the balcony off the main living room, the place where just yesterday I stood and watched Clem sunbathe with her back to the Bay of Banderas. How could I have let something so small, so inconsequential, bother me?
“We can’t find Ivan,” I shout up at them. They both disappear from view.
“IVAN!” I hear Ingrid shout from the beach again, but there’s a different tone to his name. It’s not panic; it’s discovery. It’s eureka! It’s relief, with an undercurrent of fury. She’s found him.
I pass Roberto on my way out the gate. He pats me on the shoulder. “It is okay,” he says. “He is there on the beach.”
Ingrid is on her knees in the sand, clutching Ivan, who is trying to wriggle out of her embrace. Malcolm stands next to them with a bright-red bucket in his hand.
“What were you thinking? What the hell were you thinking?” Ingrid is screaming again. Not at Ivan. She’s screaming at Malcolm.
“I . . . I . . . He came into my room and woke me up,” Malcolm says. “He wanted me to take him to look for starfish.” He holds out the bucket and points up the beach, where the cove ends. “We just went over there. Near the rocks.”
I feel an arm around my shoulder. It’s Peter. He pulls me close and I let him.
“Are you okay, Ivan?” Ingrid holds Ivan at arm’s length and looks him up and down.
“Ding dong.”
“Ivan. Answer me. Are you okay?”
“Ding dong.”
“Ivan!” She shakes him just a little bit.
Solly runs out onto the beach. “There you are, little guy! You gave us a scare!”
“I was with Malcolm,” Ivan says.
“Yes, I figured. I looked in Malcolm’s bedroom and he wasn’t there so I guessed you two were together.”
I should have checked the bedrooms. Then again, Ingrid should have checked the bedrooms. This isn’t my fault, but I feel bad because if I’d checked Malcolm’s room, he wouldn’t be standing there looking so wounded.
“Malcolm took him out to the beach,” Ingrid says, not screaming anymore, but not doing much to contain her rage either. “He took him out to the beach without telling me, without telling anyone where he was going.”
“It was early,” Malcolm says. “Everyone was still asleep.”
All eyes are on Solly. What I want Solly to say, what I try to send him a telepathic message to say, is this: Malcolm is Ivan’s brother. You don’t need permission to take your little brother out hunting for starfish.
Instead Solly says, “You probably should have let us know, buddy.”
Malcolm looks down at his bare, sandy feet. He walks over to Solly, hands him the red bucket with the starfish in it, and heads back into the house through the gate. This time he doesn’t stop to rinse his feet in the faucet.
WE ALL RETREAT to our corners for a while. Clem comes into our room and I catch her up on what happened. She texts Sean while I’m talking, filling him in on the drama of the morning. This is a habit she has that I can’t stand, texting while listening, but I forgive her today because she is my only child, and I cannot fathom how I’d ever recover if I lost her.
This has all thrown a bit of a wrench in my plan to talk to Peter. Saying I have a “plan” might be an exaggeration. At some point I just figured I’d find a quiet moment to ask again about the call last night and give him an opportunity to tell me privately what he didn’t want to say publicly when it was clear I’d had more to drink than I’m accustomed to. That it was Gavriella on the phone. It was Gavriella on the phone even though I’d specifically asked him to tell her not to call while we were in Mexico.
It’s well established that I’m uncomfortable with the idea of Gavriella. What wife wouldn’t resent her husband’s gorgeous, needy young assistant? At first Peter laughed it off and even seemed to find my jealousy cute, but as the months have gone on, he has found it less so. He’s stopped reassuring me, stopped laughing at the absurdity of a young woman who looks like that having any interest in a white-haired married father pushing fifty. I’m not going to carry your baggage for you. Instead he’s taken to minimizing any mention of her and, yes, trying to hide when he’s on the phone with her during off-hours.
So when I saw that the most recent call was not from Jonas in tech, I wasn’t terribly surprised. It wasn’t a gotcha moment. It was more of a disappointment. He said he’d tell her not to call on our vacation. So either he never told her, or he did tell her and she chose to ignore him. But bringing up the phone call now, while recovering from the scare of Ivan having gone missing, seems petty and small.
“Poor Malcolm,” Clem says. She’s wandering around, sizing up the ways in which our room might be slightly better than hers. “He was just trying to be nice. Why did Ingrid have to go and get all mad at him?”
“It’s hard for you to understand, because you don’t have a child,” Peter tells her. “But the love we parents have for our kids defies all reason. I really don’t think Ingrid meant to lash out at Malcolm. She was just having a primal moment.”
However true that may be, this strikes me as yet another example of Peter’s deference to Solly. It extends to Ingrid, and to making excuses for her inexcusable behavior.
“Well, I think it’s because Malcolm is black,” Clem says, sitting down at the edge of our bed.
“What? Why would you say something like that?” Peter gets up from the armchair in which he’d been sitting and goes to stand in front of her. It’s almost, but not quite, threatening.
“Because it’s true,” Clem replies.
“There are so many things wrong with what you just said.” Peter is pacing now. “I don’t even know where to begin.”
Clem sighs. “Whatever.”
“Don’t say something incendiary like that and then follow it up with whatever. That’s just lazy.”
Clem and Peter rarely argue. They have a typically uncomplicated father-daughter relationship. She doesn’t get under his skin. He doesn’t embarrass her nor does he frustrate her with his hovering. They mostly bond over a shared love of Szechuan food, the spicier the better—digestive consequences be damned—and a shared disdain for the kind of sentimental movies I adore. So when they spar like this, I find it fascinating to watch, and maybe just the tiniest bit gratifying, too.
“Well, Dad, what I mean to say is that Malcolm is black. And because he is black, and because he is Solly’s son but not her son, Ingrid doesn’t trust him.”
“First of all, Malcolm isn’t black.”
“He’s not?”
“He has a black mother, yes. But he also has a white father.”
“Dad. What planet are you living on?”
“You know, Clem, you’re always so quick to remind me all the time about how gender isn’t binary, and how we should stop thinking of everyone as either male or female, so why are you suddenly applying a singular identity to Malcolm? How come when it comes to his race he is one, but not the other?”
I can’t quite figure out why Peter is tangling with her this way. Yes, I know that there are times he gets annoyed with the aggressive progressiveness of the private school we scrape together the money to send Clem to, with its gender-neutral bathrooms and the way they use their instead of his and hers. But the thing is, Peter is progressive and these are his values, even if he’s not totally made his peace with the gender-neutral new world order. I guess there are some ideas, some movements, it might take a fifty-year-old man a little bit longer to catch up to. But I know that Peter doesn’t really want to fight about whether Malcolm can choose to identify or to be identified as black. This is not the Peter I know. Why is he so agitated?
Before Clem has a chance to respond, Peter continues, “And second of all, Malcolm is Ingrid’s stepson, and she loves him, and he is a part of her family, and to imply anything else is just way off base.”
Peter sits back down. Clem isn’t looking at him anymore—she’s gone back to her phone. She’s given up. Or at least lost steam. “Fine,” she says. “Sorry.”
I try not to let it bother me that she offers her father an apology when she didn’t owe it to him, and she has never offered me an apology on any of the multitude of occasions I’ve rightfully deserved one.
There’s a heavy beat of silence before I break it. “Okay, team. This is our vacation. Let’s go get some breakfast, shall we?”
BY LATE MORNING, a peace and conviviality has returned to our group. Malcolm, Clem and Ivan are all in the pool, playing some sort of waterproof racquet game they found in a closet full of toys. The men have gone for a walk down the beach because Solly read something about a fishing vessel that pulls up into shallow water where you can wade out and buy fish directly off the boat. He’s already cleared his plan with Luisa, who is going to turn their haul into our dinner tonight. I’m sitting with Ingrid, watching the kids and a horizon of nothing but blue skies.
Ingrid is reading the runner-up to this year’s Newbery Award winner. Clearly she’s reaching for the stars with her middle-grade work in progress.
“How is it?” I nod to her book.
“Oh, you haven’t read it? It’s fabulous.”
“No. I don’t read much middle grade. Or even YA for that matter.”
“How can you not read YA? Don’t you need to know about what else is out there? Research the competition?”
“I guess that’s not how I think about writing. I don’t think about my books as competing with others. I just think about the stories I want to tell and I do my best to tell them in a way that won’t bore readers.”
I’m sure Ingrid sees right through my bullshit. Of course I care about the competition. I don’t read much YA because it makes me insecure about my own writing and I prefer to evaluate myself as a writer in a carefully constructed and protected vacuum of denial.
“Your books are never boring,” she says. “And I read a ton of YA so I can tell you, for what it’s worth, that I think your books blow most of the competition away. I don’t know why they aren’t mega hits.”
“That’s nice of you to say.”
“I mean it.” She puts her book down on the table between us. She adjusts her chair so that the umbrella blocks out the little sliver of sun that had been creeping up her arm. “Especially your first book.”
What a writer struggling to finish her fourth book does not need to hear is that her first book, the one that came out nine years ago, was her best effort. That it’s all been downhill since then. Obviously Ingrid would have no way of knowing this since she’s never published a book. Maybe I should say something about how the first necklace she designed was her most lovely piece of jewelry. But that would be spiteful. And it would be a lie. And also, she’s not even designing jewelry anymore.
“So how’s your project coming?” I decide there’s no way out of this conversation, and anyway, I figure maybe we can get into a halfway decent back-and-forth about craft and process, that maybe it will help light a spark that sends me back to the blank page.
“Well, like I said, since I’ve been on this new plan with my nutritionist I’ve been thinking more clearly and I’ve got more energy and it’s really helped me work through the second act of my book.”
“So you have your book organized into acts?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. Of course. Classic three-act structure.”
I have never broken down my books into acts. I’ve never written an outline. Never made character sketches. I don’t storyboard or clip images that inspire me from magazines or websites. I’m not a plotter, I’m a pantser—I write by the seat of my pants, which are currently frayed and torn. Maybe if I bothered with acts and structure, maybe if I started a fucking Pinterest page of inspiration, I wouldn’t be so stuck.
“Tell me about your book,” I say.
“Come on, you don’t really want to hear . . .”
“Yes, I do.”
She tells me the plot of her novel. It involves a boy whose father has gone missing. His mother, and everyone around him, believes that he ran off with another woman to start a new life, but the boy believes his dad is on a secret mission for the private space exploration company he worked for, and that he’s in grave danger. The boy and the two misfit friends he’s recruited try to work the interstellar communication device his father spent years building in their garage, certain that the father is transmitting a call for help. Meanwhile, the boy and his friends try infiltrating the company, run by a Russian billionaire, to get some answers. It is a classic tale of kids who believe in the impossible, kids who ignore the wisdom of the adults around them, kids who ultimately save the day. It’s a complicated story, full of plot twists, big action sequences and elements of science fiction. I write contemporary YA, typical coming-of-age angsty tales of love and friendship, so none of what Ingrid is writing is anywhere near my wheelhouse, but I do have to admit . . . it does sound kind of great.
“If you want,” I say to Ingrid, “I’d be happy to take a look at it for you. But only if you want. And whenever you feel ready. But seriously, no pressure.”
Malcolm is carrying Ivan on his shoulders. They’re engaged in a battle against Clem, some sort of gladiator fight where they try to knock each other over in the pool with brightly colored foam noodles. I can tell Clem is letting the boys off easy.
“Would you really?” She sits up straighter in her lounger and turns to face me. “That would be amazing.”
“Happy to do it.” Why shouldn’t I give Ingrid some feedback? It doesn’t mean I have to send her manuscript to Laurel; I still draw the line at that. Laurel is my agent, not my friend. She doesn’t owe me any favors. But I do know something about writing for young readers, I’m good at it when I’m not failing at it and I’m sure I can be helpful to Ingrid. I didn’t have anyone to turn to when I first got started, and it would have been nice if I had.
“You’re a great friend, Jenna,” she says. “A truly great friend.”
I REMEMBER the first double date Peter and I had with Solly and Ingrid. Still full of indignation on behalf of Maureen, I went along reluctantly. I’d somehow convinced myself I might get away with icing out forever the woman whom Solly had already announced he planned to marry.
“We’ll have nothing to talk about,” I told Peter.
“I’m sure you can find some common ground,” he said as he ran his electric razor over his chin. “Who knows—you might even like her.”
Peter had already met Ingrid a few times, including an evening of drinks at the Beverly Hills Hotel before Solly had come clean with Maureen—and before Peter had shared Solly’s secret with me.
“I doubt it,” I said. “She’s obviously just after his money. What else would someone her age see in Solly?”
Peter unplugged his razor and tucked it away under the sink. He looked at me in the mirror of our double vanity.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t?”
“You know what women see in Solly.”
He was right. I did and I do. But still.
I leaned in to apply my lipstick.
“By the way, you look smoking hot tonight.” Peter sidestepped closer to me and put his arms around my waist. “Ingrid has nothing on you.”
“You’re just trying to make me feel better. And probably trying to make tonight go smoothly.”
“I’m saying it because it’s true. And because I’d never leave you for someone I hired to design jewelry for you.”
“Ha. Easy for you to say as you’ve never hired anyone to design anything for me.”
“You’ve got a point.”
I turned around to face him and he kissed me deeply on my freshly lipsticked mouth.
The evening went better than expected, which tends to happen when you dread something so completely. Just like the way the things you look forward to rarely go as perfectly as you’d imagined.
I remember when we came home that night, full on an overly rich multicourse meal and drunk on expensive wine, Peter made love with an outsize exuberance and energy as if he had something to prove; to me or to himself, I wasn’t sure.
SOLLY AND PETER don’t get back until we’re finished with lunch, which we had served to us poolside. They’re loaded down with plastic grocery bags filled with fish packed in ice.
“We have returned!” Solly holds his bags high in the air. He’s dripping water everywhere. “We trust you’ve spent these hours stitching hides together for our shelter, or weaving baskets to carry our water, or whatever you’re supposed to do while we’ve been out hunting and gathering our motherfucking dinner!”
“Solly!” Ingrid points to Ivan, who isn’t listening because he’s too busy beating Malcolm at Ping-Pong.
I get up to help them bring their bounty to the kitchen. It smells like fish. They smell like fish. I imagine the label Peter might have designed at his old job for this distinctive men’s fragrance.
We put the bags down on the center island where Luisa is already at work, with Enrique’s help, hand making tortillas. Roberto is at the table folding the colorful cloth napkins from last night’s dinner.
Luisa peeks inside the bags. She reaches around, digging through the ice and manhandling all the fish. She says something to Enrique in Spanish.
“This is it?” he asks us.
“What, that’s not enough fish for seven of us?” Solly runs his fishy hand through his hair. “Actually we’re only six. Ivan won’t eat fish.”
Luisa is still speaking to Enrique.
“No. Is enough. I ask—this is the only kind of fish you buy?”
“Yes,” Solly says. “That’s what they had. They caught it this morning. It’s super fresh.”
“Es bonito,” Luisa says. “Es solo bonito.”
Solly grins and slaps Peter on the back. “It’s beautiful. She says our fish are only beautiful. Now let’s go get our margarita on. We’ve earned it.”
Roberto stands at the mention of margaritas. “I will make for you. But then, if it is okay, we go to town for one hour. We will leave you. For one hour only. Is this okay?”
I jump in. “Of course it’s okay. You can come and go whenever you want.” I knew it might be a little uncomfortable navigating a full-time staff, but I didn’t imagine I’d have to remind them that they are not actually enslaved to us.
“Yes,” Roberto says. “I know. We are here for work all day and for all meals. But it is Semana Santa, and today it is Palm Sunday. It is an important day. It is a day we go to church. We will only be gone one hour.”
“Go, go! Of course.”
“We come back and make the dinner and the appetizers.”
“No hurry,” I tell him. “We can eat later. It doesn’t have to be as early as last night.”
“It is beautiful the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is special day. It is in town. If you like to go, I show you.”
“That sounds cool. I’d like to check it out.” I turn around to see Malcolm standing in his bathing suit. I hadn’t noticed he’d entered the kitchen.
“Buddy,” Solly says. “It’s church. You don’t go to church. You’re Jewish.”
It is true that Maureen went ahead with having Malcolm bar mitzvahed despite not being Jewish herself. When she was still pregnant she promised Solly that they’d raise the child in the Jewish tradition, having no idea of course that she’d end up doing it on her own. I’m not sure I’d have kept that promise to Solly given the ones he broke, but Maureen got into it. She found a synagogue that served a diverse community and ended up joining the board. We all went to New York for the service and the party. It was the only time I’ve ever seen Maureen and Ingrid in the same room. They were equally adept at faking warmth for each other.
Malcolm gives Solly the kind of look I know well from Clem. It’s the you don’t know anything about anything look. “I’m just interested, Dad. We’re here in Mexico. During an important holiday. It sounds like something worth seeing. An opportunity to experience some of the real culture.”
Roberto has the uncomfortable look of someone who fears he’s said the wrong thing. He puts his stack of napkins away in a drawer and pulls out a map.
“Here,” he says to Malcolm. “I will show you where is the church. It is not a long walk from here. You will go if you wish. But it is not necessary.”
“Cool,” Malcolm says and they hunch over the map together, Roberto drawing the path he should walk with his fingertip.
“Maybe you should see if Clem wants to go,” Solly says.
“Ha!” They all look at me. I worry that Roberto and crew think I’m laughing at them, at their invitation to church, when I’m only laughing at the idea of Clem showing the sort of curiosity that would require she put on comfortable walking shoes and hoof it nearly a mile in midday heat. “Good luck with that,” I say. “Clem’s idea of exercise is rapid scrolling through her iPhone.”
“That’s rather ungenerous of you,” Peter says. Funny coming from him when just this morning he showed no generosity for his daughter’s perfectly reasonable position about Ingrid and Malcolm.
“It’s not ungenerous, Peter. It’s simple truth.”
Like she’s been summoned, Clem appears in the kitchen. Also in her bathing suit. No pink cover-up from the juniors department for her. Was that bikini that small when we bought it together last week? Did she swap it with a smaller one while I searched through my wallet for my Nordstrom charge card?
“What?” she asks. She must have sensed we’d been talking about her. That, or she’s responding to the way I’m looking at her suit.
“I was just telling Malcolm that he should see if you want to go into town with him,” Solly says. “To go see the church. It’s Palm Sunday.”
She shrugs. “Sure. I’ll go.”
“Really?”
“Yes, Mother. What’s the big deal?”
PETER AND I go back to our room for a siesta. At some point today, someone has come in and made our bed, replaced our towels, and put fresh flowers on the table by the window. I’m not sure who’s responsible for the cleaning. Luisa has her hands full with all the cooking, and yet, given my personal experience with men, it’s hard for me to imagine Roberto or Enrique having made this bed so expertly.
Before I’ve even kicked off my flip-flops, Peter says, “Jen. I gotta tell you something.”
I sit on the bed. I try to exude calm, but nobody, ever, in the history of the world, has enjoyed a conversation that begins with that opener.
“Okay . . .”
“Last night. The phone call. The one I took before dinner. It wasn’t from Jonas. It was from Gavi.”
Gavi. Gavi? I’ve never heard him refer to her as Gavi.
I don’t say anything.
“I know you told me you didn’t want her to call on this vacation, and I get that, I do. This is your vacation and I know you want a break. You need a break. From your own stresses and anxieties. About your writer’s block. About the cancer scare. I also know that those are the things that are really bothering you, not this nonsense with Gavriella.” He reaches out and he takes my hand. “But we had a crisis at work. A legitimate crisis. And I simply had to deal with it. I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t a cancer scare. It was cancer.”
Peter sighs. He has no way to come back at that. And I need a minute to regain control.
“You lied, Peter. I asked you who called and you lied.”
“I did. But you didn’t exactly leave me much choice. It was either lie, or have you throw a fit at dinner in front of everyone.”
“You didn’t tell me last night. When we came back to the room. When we weren’t in front of anyone.”
“You’re right. I didn’t. I think probably because I was still a little angry.”
“You were angry? You were angry?” I yank my hand out of his. There goes the calmness I was trying so hard to channel. Everything is going exactly as I’d planned—the only deviation is that I didn’t even have to bring up the phone call. Peter did that all on his own. He’s telling me precisely what I’d hoped to hear, that he’s sorry, that he lied only because he could see I was upset and a little drunk and he didn’t want to cause a scene. And yet: I’m still furious.
“Yes, Jenna. I was a little angry because I don’t want to have to lie about who I’m on the phone with. I want to be able to talk to my assistant about what is going on at work without being made to feel as though I’m betraying you. You are putting me in an unfair, and frankly, an untenable, position.”
I hate the word frankly. Just like I hate the expression to be perfectly honest. Both imply that everything else you’ve said is a lie. Peter and I keep lists of words or phrases the other is not allowed to use. The forbidden, inexcusable words. Peter knows frankly is on my list, so I can’t help but believe that on some level, he’s trying to needle me.
“It’s only untenable if she continues to ignore boundaries. A good assistant knows when to leave the boss alone.”
“Really? And what would you know about that exactly?”
Forget needling, that’s a full frontal punch to the face. That’s Peter telling me I’m useless. Peter telling me I don’t know anything about real work. Peter reminding me that he’s the breadwinner and I’m just the stay-at-home mom who can’t finish my fourth book for young readers. A book for which I’ll be paid barely enough to cover half of a single year of the mortgage on our three-bedroom house. This is a retreat into our old patterns. We aren’t our parents. We’re a team. We waded into the waters of this business endeavor together, hand in hand. The only reason he can put in the hours at work that he does is because I pick up the slack at home. We’ve talked about this. Ad nauseam.
“Fuck off, Peter.”
This is not at all how I wanted this to go. This was not part of my plan. For how to talk about the phone call, nor for how to spend our siesta. Clem has gone off to town with Malcolm. We have this wing of the house to ourselves. Nobody will come knocking on our door. I was hoping we’d make up for last night’s missed opportunity. This is vacation. We have a view of the ocean. These are high-value minutes.
I start to cry.
Peter comes over and he puts his arms around me. He reeks of fish. “Shhhh,” he says. I choose to believe he’s trying to comfort me with his shushing, not scolding me to keep quiet so the Solomons won’t hear us fighting.
“Come on, Jen. Please. This is stupid. Fine. Okay. I’ll tell Gavi not to call again. Even if the building is on fire. Even if we poison half of the Westside of Los Angeles with a batch of bad bagels. Even if . . .”
“I get it.”
He steps back and takes a look at me. He brushes the hair off my forehead. “We good?”
“Sure.” I try for a smile.
“I love you. You know that, right? You are my person, Jenna. You’re my wife. I don’t like all this jealousy and suspicion. It’s not who you are and it’s not who we are and I guess it just sets me off that I feel like I’m constantly answering for a sin I haven’t committed. So I’m sorry if I haven’t been patient with you. I adore you. I don’t know what I’d do without you and I’m so grateful for all the work you put into making this trip happen and please . . . let’s just try and enjoy it?”
He puts his chin on my shoulder and rests his cheek on mine. In his ear I whisper, “Okay.”
He takes a deep breath in through his nose. Then he leans away from me and makes a face. “What stinks?”
I tell him. “It’s you.”
IT’S NOT LIKE I’VE NEVER held a real job, but it is true that since Clementine was born sixteen years ago, I have not woken up in the morning, showered, put on a pair of panty hose and gone off to work in an office. I didn’t do this before Clem was born, nor did I ever aspire to; in fact my aspirations involved never having to wear panty hose at all. (Panty hose, by the way, is high on Peter’s list of forbidden words.)
I spent the first few years after college in a string of jobs at which my newly acquired degree was utterly useless. I worked in a clothing boutique, a fancy stationery store and waited tables at two different restaurants. I spent my off-hours sleeping with the wrong people and writing bad short stories. Eventually it felt like it was time to get a real job, something with some responsibility. Something that mattered and might lead me toward a career. That’s when I saw the listing on the bulletin board of the YMCA where I’d occasionally go swimming: a city agency was looking for caseworkers to manage teenagers in the foster care system.
I made less than I did at the combination of my meaningless jobs, but because the agency was overburdened and underfunded, they didn’t require that I have a degree in social work. I had a small budget to provide what they called “enrichment experiences” for the kids in my caseload. I’d take them to museums, or to the movies, and sometimes I’d buy them books, which is how I became familiar with the Young Adult genre. My job also required that I drive from home to home and sit with the kids and their foster parents to try to determine whether anything abjectly horrifying was going on, and if it wasn’t, I’d say, See you next month. If I worried something abjectly horrifying was going on, I’d hand the case over to a caseworker with an actual degree in social work.
I really loved the job and lasted longer than most. I connected with my kids and developed a deeper understanding of, and fascination with, teenagers in general. I even went so far as to start studying for the GREs, thinking maybe I’d go back to school and get that social work degree. But in the end, the path just seemed too long and too difficult and I never even took the test.
Peter and I got together when I was still in that job. When he’d introduce me around he’d often lead with: Jenna is a social worker. I liked that I impressed him, even if he had to fudge the details.
All along I kept up with my writing. My short stories got better and I started writing essays, too. Eventually I got some freelance work at various teen magazines and phased into writing full time. I ghostwrote a few books in a mass-market series about the dating shenanigans of teenage zombies and one short nonfiction book in a series about teen entrepreneurs. None of this required I don the dreaded panty hose, or go to an office, or negotiate boundaries with my assistant (because I’ve never had an assistant, so perhaps Peter does have a point there).
Once Clem was born I took on less freelance work and started spending what few precious hours I could find each week on my own writing. My first novel, my bestseller hands down—and also my best book, according to not only Ingrid but pretty much everybody else—is about a girl in the foster care system who falls in love with her foster brother.
After Peter finishes showering off the smell of fish, I decide I should probably shower off the smell of cheap sunblock. When I come out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel, he’s already sound asleep, snoring just loudly enough that I know siesta time is a total bust for me, so I decide to go for a walk.
The rest of the house is quiet. I don’t know where Ingrid, Solly and Ivan are, but I’m guessing they’re napping together in the master bed, Ivan sprawled out between them. Or maybe Solly and Ivan are napping while Ingrid soaks in the volcanic tub, balancing the shit out of her pH levels.
I go out to the beach and walk to the right, away from the rocks where Malcolm and Ivan hunted for starfish, toward the northern bend in the cove. On the other side of this bend are more private villas. After this there will be another villa, and then another villa, and then another, and then, eventually, there will be hotels with beaches packed with tourists, which will then give way to broader beaches fronting ritzy resorts.
Three villas share the first beach I come to, all built tall and shallow like ours, one a little shabbier than the others, one a little tackier, and one is flat-out gorgeous, with an infinity pool on the second level. I pat myself on the back for finding Villa Azul Paraiso, because even if our pool is shaped like a kidney and isn’t infinite, at least we don’t share our beach with Villa Shabby and Villa Tacky.
I can see people moving around in each of these villas. They are all living, like we are, out in the open, no walls to hide behind. I wonder about them. Are they also celebrating a big birthday? Did they come for the religious festivities? Did they experience a series of travel mishaps on their way here? Are they with their families? Are they groups of friends who gathered to share the same space? Do they have staff making them hibiscus margaritas? Who claimed the master bedroom?
On the second floor of the gorgeous villa, next to the infinity pool, stands a woman. She is tall with long black hair tied up in a bun, black sunglasses and a black sheer cover-up that most definitely did not come from a juniors department. She is glamorous. She is not fighting with her husband. She is not having trouble finishing her manuscript. Nothing is keeping her up in the middle of the night. She looks content. She looks . . . like she is staring straight at me. It’s hard to tell with the dark sunglasses. I look back at her for another beat before I stop and turn, continuing up the beach.
I scramble over a few rocks to reach the next stretch of sand. There is nothing here, no hotel, no villas, just a small patch of undeveloped jungle that has somehow managed to survive despite its prime oceanfront real estate. There’s nobody here but a young couple, sitting in the sand at the far end of the beach, under the shade of a palm tree. As I draw nearer, I sneak another look at them.
It’s Clem and Malcolm.
“Hey, Mom,” Clem calls and waves. She doesn’t seem embarrassed. She’s not behaving as though she’s been caught in the act of doing something she shouldn’t. She actually looks happy to see me. I probably imagined it was a young couple in the distance because I saw two species—male and female—side by side, and my brain connected the dots. Jumped to conclusions. They are lying next to each other in the sand, yes, but I can see, now that I’ve drawn close, that there’s a good two feet of separation between them.
“I thought you were going to the church,” I say.
“We did.” Malcolm reaches over and picks up a palm frond and waves it at me. Clem does the same with hers. “It was really crowded—the whole town must have shown up. There were these people in costumes. It was kind of awesome. We didn’t stay for the whole thing, though, because Clem got hot and thirsty.”
“I did,” she admits.
“We decided to take the beach route home instead of the road,” he continues. “And then we found this place.”
“It feels like a beach on a deserted island. Like in Lost,” Clem says.
“That show was sick.” Malcolm puts his hand up and Clem claps her palm against his.
“Totally.”
“Come on, Jenna,” Malcolm says. “Hang with us.” They inch a little farther away from each other and I squeeze in between them. Clem is right. From this spot you can’t see any signs of civilization.
“I haven’t even gone for a swim in the ocean yet,” Clementine says, staring out at the calm water. “I’ve only been swimming in the pool. That’s, like, what I do all the time back at home.”
“You probably don’t remember our house, Malcolm,” I say. “But we don’t have a pool, so I’m not sure what Clem is talking about.”
“Mom. God. I’m talking about L.A. and how, like, everyone has a pool.”
“Not everyone.” I’m annoying her, I know. But I can’t let her go around saying things like everyone has a pool. It’s tone-deaf and obnoxious. That school of hers teaches kids not to make assumptions about gender identity, but it doesn’t teach them not to walk around saying everyone has a pool. Of course, Solly and Ingrid do have a pool, so Malcolm probably isn’t offended by her crass generalization, but still.
“You know what we should do tonight,” Malcolm says to Clem. “We should go for a night swim.”
“Isn’t it scary swimming at night?”
“No,” he says. “It’s awesome, trust me.”
It’s always been this way with the two of them. Even if they don’t remember that this is their natural order, I do: Malcolm, older by fifteen months, leading the way. Walking, talking, stuffing Cheerios into his mouth by the fistful. Maureen was my first friend to have a baby and I carefully watched every move Malcolm made like those slow-motion nature videos of a flower blooming or a frog catching a fly on its tongue.
Malcolm leans back and closes his eyes. Clem does the same. It’s silent except for the water lapping at the sand. It’s almost eerily silent. That’s when I realize what’s missing. The sound of Clem clicking away on her phone.
“Clementine, where’s your phone?” I’m trying to quell my rising panic. If she lost her phone in Mexico, we won’t be able to replace it, and she’ll have a meltdown, and she’ll ruin the rest of our vacation with her sullenness.
“I didn’t bring it.”
“You didn’t?” Her phone is like an appendage. Or an organ. It’s as if she left the villa without a lung.
“Nah. Sean is off with Ryan and those guys at some soccer game or something so . . .” She shrugs. “Whatever.”
“I bet it’s nice,” I say. “Being out without a phone. Giving yourself a break from ubiquitous connectivity.”
“Let’s not push it, Mother.”
I open my mouth to say something back but Malcolm speaks first. “You know . . . I do remember your house, Jenna. I remember it almost as well as I remember my old house.”
“We did spend a lot of time together. Your mom was my only friend with a kid. We were in the trenches together.”
“Stop trying to make yourself sound like a war hero,” Clem says. “You were a mother. Big deal. And anyway, most of the time you just stuck us on the couch in front of a Disney video.”
“I remember that couch,” Malcolm says.
Clem turns to look at him. “Me too. I loved that couch. But we got rid of it years ago.”
I LET CLEM AND MALCOLM go back ahead of me. I’m not quite ready to see Peter and I want a few more moments to myself. I sit cross-legged in the sand and close my eyes. I breathe in deeply. My go-to stress reliever is picturing myself on an empty beach. Smelling the salt in the air. Feeling the breeze. Since that sit-down conversation with my doctor I have imagined myself in this very spot over and over and over again. And now here I am. No more imagining. So why don’t I feel the calm an empty beach promises?
Peter and I went straight home after the appointment. He took the rest of the afternoon off from work. He made me an omelet for lunch and he squeezed me some orange juice straight from our tree and he reminded me again and again that the doctor said I had every reason not to worry, that with minimal treatment I’d be shipshape. But I worried anyway. I pushed the omelet around on my plate.
“I used three different kinds of cheese,” Peter said.
“It looks beautiful.”
“Don’t make me force-feed you.”
I took a bite. And then another.
He grinned. “That’s my girl.”
“Remember, we have that concert at Largo tonight,” Peter said later as he rinsed the dishes. “That’ll take your mind off things.”
Of course I’d forgotten. Solly had invited us to a benefit concert at Largo. “I don’t think I feel up to it.”
“Jenna, come on. It’ll be fun. It’s just what you need. A night out. A distraction.”
“That may be what you need, Peter. But I don’t know if it’s what I need.”
“Solly paid a fortune for these tickets. I think we have to go.”
“I imagine Solly would understand. After all, I did just find out I have cancer.”
He sat down at the table beside me. He took my hand and he kissed it. “I know this is scary. But there are all kinds of cancer, and sometimes it sounds worse than it really is. The doctor said you’d be fine. You have to believe her. She has no reason to lie to you.”
“She can’t know for sure.”
“Oh, honey.” He leaned in close and took me into his arms. With his chin resting on top of my head he said, “I love you and I am going to be right here with you for all of this. It’s going to be okay.”
We went to the concert that night. We had drinks beforehand with Ingrid and Solly at a bar down the street from the club. Ingrid got tipsy—this was before the nutritionist took her off alcohol. We didn’t tell them about my diagnosis. We worried it would ruin the mood. Naturally, Solly’s seats were front-row center. He beamed up at the stage with Peter beaming along right beside him.
Afterward, in the car on the way home Peter squeezed my knee and said, “Wasn’t that fun? Aren’t you glad we went?”
It wasn’t and I wasn’t, but I didn’t see why I should spoil what had been a great night for Peter so I said, “Sure.”
I FINALLY GET UP from the sand to walk back, but only because I realize that after my shower I didn’t reapply any sunblock. I’m a sunblock Nazi with my daughter, but I’m not nearly so rigid with myself, when I need it even more than she does to ward off the wrinkles that multiply while I sleep.
At the next beach I see the woman in the sheer black cover-up and big sunglasses who earlier stood on the balcony of her perfect villa and now stands ankle-deep in the calm ocean water, wineglass in hand, staring at the horizon. I pause and I watch her watch the water because she looks like she’s standing in a painting and this painting is having the calming effect that eluded me moments ago.
I want to be someone like that—someone who exudes control, elegance and an aura of I don’t give a shit. This is what I attempted last night at the dinner table upon Peter’s return from the mystery phone call, but instead I came off as jealous and small with an aura of shrew.
This woman would never feel threatened by her husband’s assistant. She can’t be bothered with such clichés. When her husband returns from a phone call taken in another room, on another floor, she does not question his need for privacy. She runs a hand through his thick hair and kisses him. He pulls back and looks at her and says, loud enough for everyone to hear: “How did I get so lucky?”
Why can’t I be this woman? Is it too late to be this woman? When did I let my life get overrun by the devil grass of domestic obligation and worry?
The woman turns her back to the horizon and starts up toward her perfect villa. I am standing right in her path.
“Hello,” she says to me. “It is beautiful, no?” She has sized me up immediately. Tourist. American. No grasp of basic, conversational Spanish.
“Yes,” I say to her. It is beautiful: the beach, the sea, this woman and the perfect villa she is renting. “It’s lovely.”
She lifts her black sunglasses to the top of her head. She has large, dark, bottomless eyes. In her stare I feel tiny. “You’ve been to the service?”
“I’m sorry?”
She gestures to the palm fronds in my hand. The kids left them behind and I picked them up, because even for items I understand to be compostable, I can’t tolerate littering.
“Oh, no. I just—”
“It is okay. I did not go either. But I still pray I may be worthy of His love.”
“Me, too,” I say because I’m not sure what else one is supposed to say in this situation. It doesn’t seem like the right moment to preach my brand of atheism.
“Do you stay here?” She points to the villa next to hers, Villa Tacky.
“No,” I respond, trying to hide the sting that she could believe I have such dreadful taste. Maybe it’s my pink cover-up. Maybe she can see right through me, clear across the ocean and into the juniors department at Nordstrom. “I’m staying at the villa around the bend. Villa Azul Paraiso?”
“Yes,” she says. “I know this villa. It is rumored to have once belonged to Carlos Salinas de Gortari. He was the president, but he was very greedy, and also corrupt. He was . . . a disgrace.”
“Richard Nixon stayed there, too. And Martha Stewart. I guess it’s like a luxury haven for disgraced people.”
“This is funny,” she says and she smiles, but she is too in control, too composed, for real laughter. “Now it is owned by an old couple from the United States. They call it Villa Azul Paraiso when it should be called Villa Paraiso Azul. This is the proper Spanish. This couple, they live in Wyoming, so maybe they do not know.”
“Wyoming? That’s strange.”
“Yes. I had never heard of this place. But most of the owners of these villas now, they are from somewhere in the United States. There are restrictions for foreigners buying properties, but investors from the US have learned to work around these restrictions. Fewer and fewer of these homes are owned by the Mexican people.”
I worried about the weather, about the exchange rate and time change, I tracked the paths of hurricanes, but I did not think to factor in the socioeconomic implications of renting property from a nonlocal owner. My impulse is to apologize but I had no idea who owned the villa. We went through a rental company, and anyway, if I had known that the owners were two old people from Wyoming it wouldn’t have made any difference.
“Who owns the villa where you’re staying?” I don’t want to admit I saw her standing on the balcony of her enviable rental.
She makes a sweeping gesture toward Villa Perfect. “I do.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Do you think the only people who live here cook and clean for rich Americans?”
“Oh, God. No. That is not what I meant at all. I—”
“I am only making a joke with you.” She smiles again and this time, she laughs.
“Your house is . . . gorgeous,” I tell her. “Truly. It’s perfect.”
“Thank you. You are very kind.” She takes the final sip from her wineglass and then shakes the last drops into the sand. “Now I must go back inside. Please. Enjoy your time here in Puerto Vallarta.”
I HAVEN’T CHECKED CLEM’S TEXTS since we arrived in Mexico. I haven’t seen the point. It’s not like I have no respect for her privacy, but I believe it’s my job to keep her safe, to know the dangers she might be exposing herself to and to protect her from, or at least help her navigate her way around those dangers.
So maybe there’s no justification for me to open up my laptop now and load the app that lets me see her texts. We’re twelve hundred miles from her life back home, and we are under the same roof for the entire week—there are no dangers. But I look anyway, because I’m curious. I’m curious what she’s telling Sean about Malcolm. I’m curious what she’s telling him about our vacation in general. And curiosity, specifically the kind of curiosity a mother has with regard to her daughter, is a mighty force.
When Clem was in third grade, long before the days of iPhones and texting and Instagram and Snapchat, I found an envelope on her desk. I was straightening up for her; she’s never been particularly neat or organized. The envelope was sealed and stuck between two books. On the outside she’d written: PRIVATE. DO NOT READ. PERSONAL PROPERTY OF CLEMENTINE CARLSON. Underneath, she’d drawn a skull and crossbones.
I managed to hold out for nearly twenty-four hours before I opened that envelope. First I shook it. I held it up to the window. I placed it flat on her desk and shone a light on it. Nothing gave me the slightest clue about what skull-and-crossbones secret that envelope protected.
That night, when I put her to bed, I asked if there was anything she wanted to talk about. She said no. I asked if anything was bothering her. She said no. I asked if there was something she felt she couldn’t say out loud, something it might be easier to write down on a piece of paper and then put away someplace safe. She didn’t bite.
In the morning she boarded the school bus. I made myself a second cup of coffee. I poached myself an egg and read the news online. Then I went back up to her room, took out the envelope and tore it open.
Inside I found an itemized list of her Halloween candy.
It was three months past Halloween and all that candy had long since been devoured. I threw the envelope away and Clem never asked about it once.
If that should have taught me a lesson, I’m not sure what that lesson was meant to be, because here I am, sitting in one of the extra living rooms nobody ever uses, scrolling through Clem’s texts.
She’s mostly been texting Sean. There are a few exchanges with Ariella, who is still peeved about her parents’ kilim runner, and with her friend Sadie about some new song that just dropped on iTunes.
I scroll back to yesterday and our arrival at the house.
I whip quickly through volumes and volumes and volumes of texts and a full rainbow of heart emojis. I see spots where Sean redirects their conversation away from texting to FaceTime or Snapchat.
Those are the places I cannot see. They are the mediums of communication to which I have no access. Texting shows me only part of the picture. It’s like standing on the beach and peering into someone’s open villa—you may think you can see everything from your spot outside in the sand, but there are corners hidden from view, there are rooms with doors that shut.
I continue scrolling up to this afternoon and a long string of texts from an increasingly agitated Sean.
Finally, at 4:30, right around the time Clem and Malcolm returned to the villa, she texted him back.
WHEN WE SIT DOWN to dinner that night, I notice that Clem chooses a place next to Malcolm. I sit next to her, across from Peter, whose beard is softer now, and with all the color he’s getting from the sun, it looks like it’s coming in extra white. He’s handsome, my husband. I don’t say that because I’ve already had two margaritas (mango-orange); it’s just a fact. He’s tall with broad shoulders and he has strong cheekbones, kind eyes and a warm smile.
I pretty much won the husband lottery. I know this. I know this because that’s what everyone tells me, but also, I can see this for myself even if I sometimes forget to look. I know plenty of wives in addition to Maureen whose husbands left them for younger women. I know wives whose husbands won’t come to events at their children’s schools or who would never set foot in a grocery store or who can’t be bothered to pick their underwear up off the bathroom floor. Husbands who have gotten fat and bald, not that one can be blamed for the latter (or even the former—and shame on me for even mentioning it as I’m the one who has gained fifteen pounds in the twenty years we’ve been together, not Peter). I know wives whose husbands have taken up expensive, boring hobbies. Husbands who have become drinkers. Or worse: excessive watchers of college sports.
Peter had the perfect model for the husband he wanted to be: his father. Young Pete understood from back when he paid more attention to Dungeons & Dragons than girls that if he wanted to be a good husband he simply had to do the opposite of everything his father did. His father was a temperamental, distant, philandering, boorish bastard. Peter can sometimes be a little smug and dismissive, and he can retreat into his own dark moods, but he’s steady and loyal, and that he’s as sweet and loving as he is, well—it’s nothing short of a genetic miracle.
Instead of questioning his relationship with his young assistant, instead of punishing Peter for the small things he does to annoy me or even to occasionally undercut me, I should drop to my knees and pray like my new friend did today on the beach that I may be worthy of his love.
And did I already mention that he’s handsome? Especially tonight with the sun on his cheeks and wearing the blue shirt I bought him for Christmas. The terribly unfair truth is that Peter and I are on opposite trajectories—he gets better-looking with each passing year while my own attractiveness trends downward. I find that this is true of men and women across the board, which only goes to prove that God is cruel. And probably a man.
I catch Peter’s eye. He shoots me a grin. I point to him. He points at me. It’s something we’ve been doing across crowded rooms across our many years together, it’s our private sign language, our way of saying we belong to each other.
I look over at Solly. He isn’t classically good-looking like Peter. He’s shorter and stockier and, at nearly fifty, he’s starting to get some gray in the thick head of black curls he wears long and slicked back. Even though his face is getting heavier and drooping like a basset hound’s, he doesn’t seem to be losing any of his sex appeal.
I know people who see Solly and Ingrid together wonder about their Beauty and the Beast situation, and they probably jump to the same erroneous conclusion I did initially—that it’s all about his money. But they’d be wrong. Not about the money, because Solly does have a shit ton of money. But they’d be wrong if they believed that’s all that attracts women to Solly. Sexiness can be hard to quantify, but Solly is a bona fide member of the 1 percent. It’s a strange alchemy, some powerful brew of his charisma and confidence and intelligence and sense of humor, and the way he flirts. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, young or old, beautiful or hideous, when Solly is talking to you he is flirting with you. Who doesn’t enjoy that kind of attention?
Solly looks at the dish Enrique is holding out and makes a face. “What the fuck is this?”
Enrique laughs. He isn’t taken aback. Solly can even hurl an insult with a certain degree of charm.
We’ve all served ourselves the fish already. My piece is dark brown in spots and does not have an appetizing smell despite being smothered in onions and peppers and sprinkled with cilantro.
“It’s bonito,” says Enrique. “It is not a nice fish.”
Solly frowns. “I thought Luisa said it was beautiful.”
“No,” Enrique says. “It is bonito. It is not good.”
“Dad,” Malcolm says. “Bonit-a means beautiful. Not bonit-o.”
“Well, shit.” Solly throws his head back and cackles.
“Well, shit,” Ivan says. “Shitshitshitshitshit.”