ANDREA WAS ON HER HANDS AND KNEES UNDER THE KITCHEN SINK, unscrewing the U-pipe section of the drain. Lucia appeared behind her; she could see the kid’s denim knees and Converse, one turquoise and one purple. “Mom, I have a question.”
“Fire away.”
“Do you know what really happened to my guitar?”
“What do you mean, love?” She emerged into the light and sat up. “Is it missing? Did something happen to it?”
“I mean a long time ago, before it was mine.”
Andrea set down the wrench. “Tell me what you’re talking about.”
“I saw a picture of it with the neck all broken. Like really broken.”
Fucked. That was the word. Andrea pressed her lips together. If Lucia had been going through her box of old Polaroids, Andrea would have to explain some drunken hijinks and far too many cigarettes. And that time in college when she and Vivian had wrapped themselves, nude, in clear plastic cling wrap. And—who knows what else. “Where’d you see that?”
“On the cover of a record. It said you took the picture.”
“Oh. The record.” Andrea frowned. Surely that EP was long out of print. “Where did you see that?”
“I think it was at Sydney’s house,” Lucia said vaguely. “I just wanted to know if that was my guitar. I’m pretty sure it is.”
“Yeah. Someone had smashed it up, so I took a picture of it before I got it repaired, and the band liked the picture. They thought it would make a good image for their last record, since they were breaking up.”
“So it was your guitar, and someone broke it?”
“No, it wasn’t mine then. It was given to me as sort of . . . a gift.”
“I thought you got it from The 12th Fret.”
“I got it fixed at The 12th Fret.” Andrea wiped her brow. Lucia should be the one to role-play the immigration officer from now on.
“Did Jesse Stratton give it to you?”
“Jesse?” She laughed at the thought of Jesse Stratton giving her anything but a practiced suave grin. “No.”
“Then who?”
Forward, Andy, she thought. How to say as little as possible as truthfully as possible? “It belonged to a guy named Ryan. He played drums in that band. That was his guitar.”
“Did you buy it from him?”
“He gave it to me. Well—you could say I gave it to him, too. I mean, originally, it was his. He broke it. I took it to the shop and got it fixed. Like it is now. All better. And all yours.” Andrea picked up the wrench again, ready to return to the fixable problem under the sink.
“Wait, if you gave it to him, why do I have it?”
She stopped. “He left it here, Luz. When he left Portland. For good.”
“He didn’t want the guitar?”
“Well . . . no, I guess he didn’t. Or he didn’t want it enough to come back for it.”
“Why didn’t someone mail it to him?”
“Luz,” Andrea said sharply, “I have to finish clearing out this pipe, and it smells like wet death down here.”
“Sorry. I was just curious.” That forlorn voice.
Andrea hated herself when she snapped at Lucia. “I know.” She exhaled heavily and pulled off her rubber gloves, one finger at a time. “Honey, would you mind getting me a glass of water? My hands are all gross from these gloves.”
Lucia filled a pint glass with water and handed it over. She sat down on the floor in front of Andrea and looked at her expectantly.
“Actually,” Andrea said, “I did offer to send it to him. And he said no, and that I should just keep it.”
Lucia waited for more, then said, “That’s it?”
“That’s it. And now it’s yours.”
“But that’s crazy. It’s a really good guitar. Beatriz even said so the first time she saw it.”
“It’s an awesome guitar.”
“Why wouldn’t he want it back?”
“I never knew him well enough to understand how his mind worked, babe. Just count yourself lucky. That guitar was meant for you.”
Andrea could feel the flush rise in her cheeks, and she took two more fast drinks from the water glass. Lucia was studying her face. “You know what? I need plumber’s tape. When Beatriz comes in from the garage, tell her I had to run to Lowe’s, would you?”
“Can I come?”
“No, you should stay put. I’ll be right back.”
This was the story Andrea and her friends had hashed out together, the one they agreed was the smartest, honest yet vague, life-affirming: Lucia’s bio-dad was a friend who had helped out Andrea. He gave her a seed so that Lucia could join her in the world, and he left Portland before Lucia was born. He didn’t really want to be a father, Andrea explained. But he was a good friend in the end, because he gave Andrea the best gift she ever received.
The first time Lucia asked about him was at age three, when they unwittingly went to Oaks Park on Father’s Day. “Do I have a father?” Andrea froze but Meena stepped in like a champ and said all families were different: some had fathers and some had mothers and some had both.
As Lucia grew older, more questions arose:
What was his name? (John, Andrea said. Which was legally Ryan’s first name.)
Do I look like him? (Not really. You sort of have his eyes, and your hair color is halfway between his and mine.)
Do you have a picture? (I don’t. We didn’t take as many pictures in those days. It was expensive to develop.)
What was his job? (He cut hair, mostly.)
Why did he leave? (He was the restless kind. He never stayed anywhere long. One day he just took off. But I wasn’t surprised.)
Did he not want me? (It was not like that. He didn’t want to be a dad, not to anyone, but he did want me to have you, and you to have a good life. He knew that I would love you double.)
Can I meet him? (Honestly I don’t know what became of him, baby. If he ever gets in touch with me again, I’ll let you know.)
Andrea pulled into the lot at Lowe’s, turned off the car, and called Beatriz’s cell phone.
“You went to get plumbing tape? I have some in the basement, dummy.”
“Is Lucia in the same room as you? Can you go somewhere she’s not?”
Andrea waited while the falling rain thickened on the windshield, blurring the world. “Okay, I’m in the bedroom,” Beatriz said. “What’s up? Are you okay?”
Andrea’s breath was tight and shallow in her chest, each inhalation a gasp. “I think she’s going to figure it out. She’s going to figure out who her—who the man who is her father is. I don’t know what to tell her, Beatriz, I don’t know what to tell her. I’m not ready.” The air in the car thickened, humid as breath; it seemed as beige and dingy as the upholstery. She rolled the window down an inch and tried to drink the cool gray air outside. She pressed her hand against her pounding heart, as if she could hold it quiet. Such a cliché, the heart, until fear or love struck and it got literal, became the muscle of the feeling.
Beatriz told her the first thing to do was leave the parking lot. “We’ll figure it out, Andy. Go stand in the lumber aisle and smell the wood. Then get back in the car and come home.” Come home. It was all Andrea had ever wanted to hear.
Andrea wouldn’t discuss it until Lucia’s light had been safely out for a full hour. Then she closed the bedroom door behind them and explained in a hushed voice. The song Lucia was playing. The odd questions about the guitar. Somehow she’d seen the album cover. “She’s onto something. Fucking Internet! I don’t know how to stop it.”
“She’s smart, Andy. If you don’t tell her who he is, she’s gonna figure it out anyway. Better she hears it from you than from one of your friends. Or the fucking Internet.”
“I don’t know if she’s ready.”
“I think she’s more ready than you. What are you afraid will happen?”
“Worst-case scenario? That he’ll want her.” It had always been there, usually latent, sometimes not, the fear that Ryan would somehow find Lucia and stake his claim. Andrea knew it was irrational, that he was hardly the kidnapping type (but who ever took up with someone they thought was a kidnapping type?), and there were abandonment clauses that probably stripped him of his legal rights, but still. She had forbidden everyone she knew from posting pictures of Lucia on Facebook or MySpace or wherever people were now posting their antic evidence and self-portraits, where they gazed coyly into a webcam, looking at themselves looking at themselves in arm’s-length images that somehow managed to be both vain and insecure.
Beatriz set her hands on Andrea’s shoulders and held her steady. “He’s the one who left and never came back.”
“But do you know why he didn’t come back?” Andrea sat heavily on the edge of the bed. “I told him not to. I told him I didn’t need him. It’s my fault.”
“What do you mean you told him?”
“He’d been gone a week. I finally tracked him down with caller ID. He was in some random town in Minnesota. I told him not to bother coming back. And he didn’t. What if Luz learns that? What if she hates me? I can’t have her hate me. Not already. Not until she’s a teenager, at least.” Andrea dropped her gaze as Beatriz studied her face. What did she see now?
Beatriz said, “If he had really wanted to be in her life, he would have found a way.” Andrea looked up. “You were still here, right? Did you change your name? Did you go into hiding?”
“No. Never.”
Beatriz shrugged and released Andrea’s shoulders. “See? Not your fault.”
“Okay. True.” Andrea wiped her eyes. Beatriz went to the dresser and dropped her work pants. Then Andrea had a terrible thought. “But what about this? What if Lucia finds him, and he doesn’t want anything to do with her?” Andrea pulled off her shirt, balled it up, and threw it hard at the hamper. “All this time I’ve been able to protect her from the fact that he ditched us. I didn’t want her to feel abandoned. I wanted her to feel fully wanted. He can’t just fuck that all up.”
“Who is this guy?” Beatriz said. “Is he that big an asshole?”
“No, he’s not an asshole. He wasn’t. I mean, I liked the guy. I slept with him, multiple times, which is saying a lot.”
“Did you love him?” There was a smile on Beatriz’s face, a loaded one. Part skepticism, part suspicion.
“No.”
The smile fell. “That sounded more like a question than an answer.”
“We said I love you at some point, but the feeling was not—for me, it was not that kind of love.” Andrea tried to summon it, to replay the feeling so she could clarify. But all that emerged was a faint nauseous tingle of wrongness. “I honestly can’t even recall what I felt for him,” she said. “It was ten years ago.”
Ten years ago! Her brain had barely finished forming at that point. And time had seemed endless. She and her friends had joked back then about their quarter-life crisis—which was no crisis at all, and they tacitly knew it, they said the words quarter-life crisis with a capricious false dismay, fully aware they were only halfway to midlife, and twenty-five years on this earth had already seemed forever, eternal, the abundance of time to come unfathomable. Then, they could still remember the details of elementary school, high school intrigue, and every college course they had taken, each house they had lived in and the rent they had paid there. They still remembered every weekend escapade, every teenage prank, the name and face of every person they had kissed. They had not known how much there was to forget, what could be forgotten that you wanted to hold on to, and what you desperately wanted to shed but could never let go.
Beatriz carefully removed the tiny black hoops she wore in her ears and dropped them on the dresser top. “Do you think that will ever happen with me?”
“What do you mean?”
“You say you love me now, but in ten years maybe you’ll say you don’t even remember what you felt for me.” Beatriz pulled her sports bra up and over her head and Andrea’s breath caught. She still felt unbelievably lucky every time she caught sight of Beatriz in her tight boy-short underwear, a glimpse of her breasts before she turned her smooth tan back toward the dresser.
“Oh my god, you? In ten years, I won’t remember what it felt like not to love you.”
“Yeah?”
“In ten years, Lucia will be nineteen. Nineteen! She’ll be away at school, or on tour or something, and it’ll just be you and me here.”
“We’ll miss her.” Beatriz came to bed in her boxers and tank top. “But not all her drinking and running around.”
“We’ll stay up late and play our music as loud as we want,” Andrea said.
Beatriz lay down and pulled Andrea to straddle her body. She gripped Andrea’s hips. “We’ll fuck on all the furniture.”
Andrea tipped her head down and whispered, “I won’t have to be so quiet when I come.”
Beatriz slid her thumb inside the edge of Andrea’s underwear. “You still need practice on that.”
Andrea’s eyes went hazy. “I do.”
“You won’t forget this? Not even in ten years?” Beatriz said.
“Not if you keep teaching me.”
“Good girl.”