Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Bea showed up at the bungalow on Wednesday afternoon with a backpack full of homework she wasn’t going to do and two bottles of the weird kombucha Meg had started buying in bulk from the co-op.
“Your dad home?” Bea asked at the door.
“Garage.”
“Okay.”
Stella closed the door behind her and followed her through to the living room. Bea dropped the backpack on the couch and held up the bottles.
“Ginger or mango.”
“Neither.”
“Those are the options, Stella.”
“I’ll have water.”
Bea sat down on the couch with her feet tucked under her, cracked open the mango, took a sip, and made a face that suggested the mango had personally wronged her. “More for me.”
“You don’t even like kombucha.”
“I’m developing a palate.”
“That’s not what a palate is.”
She took another sip. Made the same face. Stella reached over and took the bottle out of her hand, sniffed it, took a drink, and handed it back.
“That’s terrible,” Stella said. “Give me the ginger.”
“You said you didn’t want one.”
“The ginger is less terrible. Give it.”
Bea handed her the ginger. Stella twisted it open, took a sip, and settled into the chair across from her. They drank their terrible drinks and looked at each other across the coffee table.
“So,” Bea said.
“So.”
“Calculus.”
“You brought calculus.”
“I brought the book. I have zero intention of opening it.”
“Then why bring it?”
“Because it makes me feel responsible.” Bea set the bottle on the coffee table. “My mom is being weird about Sedona.”
“Big surprise there.”
“She said it’s my decision. But I don’t think she wants me to go.”
Stella shrugged. “She said you could.”
“That’s the kind of thing parents say when they actually mean something else.”
Bea paused for a moment, peeling the label off her bottle.
“What would you do? If you were in my shoes?”
Stella had been waiting for her to ask, but not quite like that. She’d expected the question to be about Sedona. This one was bigger.
She picked up a pencil from the side table and turned it in her fingers, set it down, picked it up again.
“I’d go,” she said.
“Really?”
Stella nodded. “Yeah.”
“Even if your mom was weird about it?”
“Especially then.”
Bea looked at her.
“That’s very you,” Bea said.
“It’s just true.”
Bea took another sip of the mango and grimaced. Set it down. Picked at a thread on the edge of the couch cushion. Stella thought about picking up her camera but didn’t.
“Will you come with me?” Bea said.
She had known this was coming since Sunday night. She had decided not to say it too fast.
She said it too fast.
“Yes.”
Bea blinked. “Really? You didn’t even think about it.”
“I thought about it.” Stella shrugged.
“Why do you want to go?”
There was the question. Stella turned the pencil in her fingers one more time and set it on the table.
“Because you asked,” she said. “And because somebody should keep an eye on you.”
“I don’t need looking after.”
“Everyone needs looking after.”
Bea watched her—patient, quiet, the same look she gave Anna before Anna said something hard, or Michael when he did something she hadn’t seen before. Bea could wait out most people.
She waited out Stella for about eight seconds.
“I think there’s more,” Bea said.
“I want to see what she is.” Stella took a drink she didn’t want. “Not sure why I should care. I’ve never met her. She doesn’t know I exist. But you’re going and I’m going and that’s it.”
Bea watched her for another second. Then she nodded. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
Outside, the February light had shifted—the window going from gold to blue, the shadow of the fence stretching across the living room floor. Tyler moved around in the garage—a drawer sliding open, a drawer sliding shut, silence.
“I keep trying to remember what she’s like,” Bea said.
“Sam?”
Bea nodded. “I have these pieces. She made me a birthday cake once with real flowers on it—not frosting flowers, actual flowers from the yard. And she took me to a gallery when I was maybe seven and let me touch a painting when the guard wasn’t looking.
” Bea picked at the thread on the cushion some more.
“But I don’t know if I’m remembering her or remembering the idea of her. ”
“What’s the difference?”
“The difference is whether she’s going to be the person I remember or someone else.”
Stella thought about that. She had nothing to compare.
She had only the shape Sam had left in other people.
Anna’s too-carefully-no-comment. Tyler’s eyes going somewhere else.
Margo’s occasional sentence that landed in a different language than the rest of her speech.
Meg’s wide-eyed uncertainty. Stella had never met Sam.
“She was fun,” Stella said. “Everyone says she was without saying she was.”
“She was,” Bea said. “I remember that part.”
“And she’s an artist. Just like you.”
“Yes. And she’s not going to be what you’re expecting.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody ever is.”
Bea leaned her head against the back of the couch and closed her eyes. Stella pulled her feet up into the chair and tucked her chin on her knees. They stayed like that for a while—not talking, not needing to. They’d gotten good at that.
“She’s going to be so excited to meet you,” Stella said.
Bea opened her eyes. “Why?”
“Because you’re her granddaughter and you’re going all the way out there just to see her.”
“You’re going too.”
Stella pulled at a thread on her jeans. “Yeah, but that’s different.”
“How is that different?”
“She knows you exist, for one.”
Bea reached across and squeezed Stella’s ankle, which was the closest part of Stella she could reach from the couch.
“She’s going to like you,” Bea said.
“Everybody likes me. I’m delightful.”
“You’re something.”
Bea left at five with the leftover ginger kombucha and the calculus book she still hadn’t opened. Tyler came in from the garage with grease on one wrist and the smell of toast already starting because he’d put bread in the toaster before washing his hands.
“Good homework session?” he asked.
“The best.”
“How’s the calculus?”
Stella leaned against the kitchen doorway. “Calculus is a human construct.”
“I’ll tell your teacher.”
“Please don’t.”
He ran his wrist under the faucet and dried it on the dish towel. “So what’d you actually do?”
“Talked.”
“About?”
“Bea decided about Sedona. She asked me to go too.”
Tyler was quiet for a second. The toast popped up. He didn’t take it out.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“I said okay.”
The toast sat in the toaster. Stella could smell it starting to burn. She waited for him to say something else—something about Sam, something about being careful, something about the phone call he was going to have to make. He didn’t.
“Your toast is burning,” she said.
“I know,” he said, and she heard him pull it out and scrape the black parts over the sink. She went to her room, lay on her bed, and stared at the ceiling, thinking about a woman in Sedona who didn’t know she was coming.