Chapter Twenty-Six #2
“Only on the abortion issue. Not on the co-opting-me-and-my-face-and-my-body-to-further-your-agenda issue.” The pupacorn kicked hard, and I ran both hands over it.
“Our agenda,” Evangeline corrected.
“Our agenda is not forcing my body into someone else’s service, not reducing me to the potential of my flesh, and not treating me like someone who can’t make her own decisions. That’s our agenda.”
“Only some of it.” Evangeline nodded once and looked something like impressed, but then added, “We don’t get to stand on principle.”
“Principle is the point,” I insisted. “Principle is the important part.”
“It is, absolutely. We just don’t get to stand on it. You can’t let yourself be distracted by details.”
“Like manipulating photographs or sneaking into people’s homes?”
“Yes, actually. The other side isn’t playing fair. The other side isn’t worried about lying and cheating and manipulating. If they aren’t standing on principle—”
“We don’t have to either?”
“We don’t get to either,” Evangeline corrected. “We don’t have that luxury, and anyway, we’re smarter than that. We’ve seen that following the rules doesn’t work. And we know this issue is too important to be unwilling to compromise—”
“—our morals and our souls,” I finished for her so she could see how appalling it was.
But all she replied, unabashedly, was “Yes.” She stood, hands on hips, and regarded me grimly. “Sorry to break it to you.” But she didn’t sound sorry.
I heaved myself off the sofa to show her to the door. I was too tired to argue. “Couldn’t you at least have brought my cookies?” It was hardly the most pressing point, but it had been my plan for dinner.
“Sorry, I forgot. Delivery work is harder than you think. It’s my fault though, and”—she eyed my middle warily—“you must be starved. I know a place with the world’s best sweet-potato tacos. Seriously, they’re nirvanic.”
“Nirvanic?”
“Definitely. I got you, girl.”
She swiped at her phone a bit then left unceremoniously, but approximately thirty-seven minutes later, my bell rang again.
By the time I got to the door, no one was there, but in front of it were two enormous bags of food—tacos, chips, beans and rice, pickled vegetables, and, at the bottom, two entire boxes of Mexican cookies.
As far as peace offerings went, the tacos were very good. Maisie was willing to forgive and forget since it meant skipping the dining room for the evening, but Moth was unpersuaded.
“She broke into your home.” He was puttering around my kitchen, mildly doling out drinks and napkins and serving spoons, but I could hear in his voice competing impulses to keep me both calm and vigilant.
“I invited her in,” I said.
“Under false pretenses.”
“She asked. I said okay.”
“To an imposter.” He sat and opened all the boxes he’d piled on the table. It smelled like dusk after a day at the beach. “A con artist.”
“A con doodler,” Maisie hedged. We had no idea what she was talking about. “She didn’t have to work very hard to trick you. You’re too na?ve.”
“I am not too na?ve.”
“You are exactly the right amount of na?ve.” Moth put down again the taco he’d just picked up, so he could take my hands.
“You are trusting. You care about strangers you assume are having a wobble in the hallway. You imagine, having ordered food, that the person at your door intends to deliver some. This is one of the reasons I love you.”
“I mean, me too,” Maisie said through a mouthful of sweet potato, “but it’s also why you had a home invader.”
I tried to reach the guacamole, but my belly was in the way.
“I guess I’ll starve,” I sighed dramatically.
Moth dipped a chip and fed it to me like wedding cake, but I hadn’t been talking about the short term.
“We can’t leave Vista View with the horde camped out front.
We can’t order in because we don’t know who will deliver.
We certainly can’t eat in the dining room every night. ”
“Agreed,” said Moth.
“Agreed,” said Maisie. Then, “You could buy a weapon.”
“Brilliant,” Moth said, dry as his British accent allowed, which was dry indeed. “What could go wrong.”
“If it came to it,” I supposed, “I’d use something I had on hand.”
“Your knives are all dull,” Maisie warned.
“I’m not going to stab anyone!”
“Your carrot peeler’s quite sharp,” Moth said.
“I’m not peeling an intruder,” I said. “Bleak House maybe? Someone’s collected works? Shakespeare? Chaucer?”
“You’re going to bore your intruders into submission?” Maisie said.
“Hey! They’re not boring. Just heavy.”
“Or a disguise!” Maisie clapped. “Fake mustache? Giant glasses?”
“How is a disguise going to vanquish an intruder?” I said. “And I already wear giant glasses.”
“One of those shoulder cloaks villains drape over one arm to hide their faces?”
“How did I get to be the villain of the piece?” I said.
“You are not the villain.” Moth wiped salsa off his fingers, then pulled me up so we could slow dance without music as we had the night of the not-that-sort-of-senior prom.
A lot had changed since then, nearly everything really, so it made sense that I looked changed too, my body misaligned and off-center, no longer matching front to back nor top to bottom.
“You are good and smart and beautiful and generous and principled. You are fun and kind and forgiving and terribly amusing.” He spun me around very gently, so I wouldn’t get dizzy or go flying off, and wrapped my back against his front, my own front now precluding close-together dancing.
“You are a wonderful washer of cars and eater of ice creams and reader of books and carer of humans and purveyor of grammar, and you have excellent taste in cookies as well as men.” Because in fact love is transformative.
It comes upon you, and it changes everything, your whole world new again, your whole life altered.
It is only surprising you can’t always see it in the face and on the body.
“No wonder people are camped out round the clock and committing fraud just to be near you. I would do the same were it my only option.” He turned me back around, leaned over my protrusive front, and kissed me.
Of all the improbable things that were true anyway, this was the clearest and loveliest, more foreseeable than other aspects of my life maybe, but not any less astonishing or wondrous.
I closed my eyes and breathed in the good Moth smell of him, the steady warmth of his nearness, and felt his mouth on mine, his fingers behind my ears.
My head spun in ways that had nothing to do with my unruddered limbic system.
Eventually, he stopped kissing me to whisper, “You, Sarge, are nirvanic as tacos.”
Maisie finished one box of cookies and opened the other. “Hanging out with you two is like drinking eggnog.”
“Festive?” Moth guessed.
“Sweet,” she said, “but kind of nauseating.”