17. Jasmine
JASMINE
Her mother’s condo was on the fourth floor of a building in Koreatown, with a small balcony that looked out over a courtyard full of birds of paradise and a view, if you craned far enough left, of the downtown skyline.
Jasmine had chosen it for the light, mostly.
Her mother had spent twenty years in a house in Arizona where the light came in flat and relentless, and Jasmine had wanted her to have something softer.
Something that felt like an arrival, like a new lease on life.
She’d also chosen it, if she were being honest, because it was the kind of building where nobody particularly cared who you were.
Her neighbors were a retired teacher, a young couple with a very loud baby, and an elderly man named Frank who grew tomatoes on his balcony and left them outside people’s doors with no explanation.
It was the kind of building where Jasmine could come and go without a camera, which was why she’d had to arrange the paparazzi herself this morning.
That whole charade still felt faintly absurd, calling Dove to ensure someone would be waiting on the sidewalk to photograph them arriving.
“How many are we talking?” she’d asked.
“Two,” Dove had said. “Enough for coverage, not enough to look staged.”
That was the line they were always walking. Enough to look real. Not so much that it looked like the performance it was.
Nate drove, because he’d insisted and because she hadn’t had the energy to argue about it. They’d met in the kitchen that morning, Nate looking like he’d slept well, which she found unreasonably irritating, and handing her a coffee from the place on Sunset that she’d mentioned once in passing.
He seemed to be trying, which she appreciated.
And she was trying too. Their staging of moving things out of her house had gone well, and the breakup rumors had lost their steam within a few days.
People had short attention spans, and those interested in pop culture were moving on to different dramas.
“She knows,” Jasmine said as they turned into the neighborhood. “About the arrangement. I told her everything. I want you to know that before we go in.”
He glanced over. “Everything?”
“The bet, the terms, the money. All of it.” She looked at her hands in her lap. “She’s my mother. I couldn’t not tell her.”
A pause. “Okay.”
“She’s not going to make it weird. She’s not that kind of person. But she knows, so don’t perform for her. She’ll see straight through it, and it’ll make everything harder.”
“I wasn’t planning to perform,” Nate said.
“You perform constantly. You just don’t realize you’re doing it.”
He laughed and shook his head. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black.”
She opened her mouth to argue, realized he was right, and closed it.
The two paparazzi were exactly where Dove had said they’d be, leaning against a car across the street with the studied nonchalance of people doing a very poor impression of not being interested.
Jasmine had made her peace with it. She took Nate’s hand on the sidewalk, let him match her pace to the door, tilted her chin at the right moment without making it obvious she was tilting it.
The shutters went. Thirty seconds, and then they were inside, the door was closed, and it was done.
Her mother was waiting in the open doorway of the condo before they’d even reached the fourth-floor landing, which meant she’d been watching from the balcony.
“Hello,” her mom sang out as she hugged Jasmine. Then she released her and turned to Nate, and Jasmine watched her mother do the thing she’d always done with new people.
It was a full, unhurried look, the kind that took in everything and showed nothing, that had unnerved every friend and boyfriend Jasmine had ever brought home.
“Nate,” her mom said. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
“I’d imagine,” Nate said, and something in the dry honesty of it made her mother’s mouth curve up at one corner.
“Come inside,” she said. “I made too much food, as always.”
She wasn’t lying; the small kitchen table was covered with it.
There was a pot of rice, a pan of something that smelled like the chicken stew Jasmine had grown up eating on cold nights in Arizona, cornbread still in the cast iron, a salad that was more of a gesture toward vegetables than an actual salad.
“You didn’t have to do all this,” Jasmine said.
“I wanted to.” Her mother was already directing Nate toward a chair. “Sit. You want sweet tea or something cold?”
“Sweet tea would be great,” Nate said and sat where he was told without a word of protest. He was good at reading people; she’d give him that. Her mother didn’t respond well to men who resisted being fed.
What followed was, contrary to what Jasmine had expected, a genuinely good afternoon.
It started with lunch, which stretched past the food and into the second glasses of sweet tea and the comfortable aftermath of a good meal, when the table was half-cleared and the conversation had room to spread out.
Her mother asked Nate questions. Where had he grown up? What his family was like. What he’d wanted to be before the company. Jasmine half-braced for him to deflect the way he deflected most personal things, to turn the answers general and say as little as possible.
But he didn’t. He told her about growing up in Ohio, a fact Jasmine hadn’t known.
A small city, a father who’d worked in manufacturing, a mother who’d taught fourth grade for thirty years.
He’d been, he said, an extremely difficult child who had been good at exactly two things: math and talking his way out of situations.
Her mother laughed. “And now you’re paid enormously for both.”
“Essentially, yes.”
“And the betting company,” her mother said, in the tone that meant she’d done her research. “That started from nothing?”
“Less than nothing.” He said it simply, without the fake modesty that some people used when they talked about their success. Just a fact, stated plainly. “I had about eight hundred dollars and a good idea, and I was too stubborn to let either of them go to waste.”
Her mother looked at him for a moment. “Jasmine’s the same way,” she said. “Stubborn as the day is long. Gets it from me, unfortunately.”
“I’ve noticed,” Nate said, and glanced at Jasmine with a look that was dry and warm at the same time.
Those feelings, the ones she wasn’t supposed to feel, peeked their heads out. Jasmine pushed them back down.
After lunch, her mother produced a photo album, because of course she did. Jasmine saw it coming from across the room and said, “Mom, absolutely not,” and her mother said, “Oh, hush,” and Nate said, “Please.”
They sat on the small sofa, the three of them, while her mother turned pages and narrated, and Jasmine died quietly at the photographs of herself at fourteen in a school production of Grease. The hair was big. Too big. The makeup too much.
“She was Sandy,” her mother said proudly.
“I can see that,” Nate said.
“I wasn’t supposed to be Sandy,” Jasmine said. “I was recast after the girl who originally got the part was out with the flu.”
“You made a better Sandy,” her mother said serenely, turning another page.
Nate laughed. It happened more often now, that laugh. She’d started noting the things that produced it without meaning to, which was the kind of behavior she needed to stop immediately.
They stayed longer than they’d planned. That was how it always went at her mother’s. You arrived with a set time for departure and left two hours later than you meant to. The light had shifted from afternoon to early evening gold by the time Jasmine started gathering her jacket and her bag.
Her mother walked them to the door. She hugged Nate, which Jasmine hadn’t expected, and which Nate accepted with only a brief flash of surprise before he hugged her back. Then she walked Jasmine the extra few steps to the stairwell door while Nate waited outside for her.
“He’s wonderful,” her mother said quietly.
“Mom.”
“I’m just saying.”
“He has my seal of approval. He’s a good man, Jaz. Under all that.” She waved a hand vaguely in the direction of whatever all that meant. The money, the suits, the six-foot-two boardroom energy. “He’s a good man.”
“It’s fake,” Jasmine said. “You know that. You know the whole story.”
Her mother looked at her for a long moment. Then she smiled, slow and certain. She reached out and patted Jasmine’s cheek once, lightly.
And winked.
“Mom,” Jasmine said.
But her mother was already turning back toward the condo, entirely pleased with herself, pulling the door shut behind her.
Jasmine stood in the stairwell for a second with her eyes closed. Then she turned and walked out to where Nate was waiting, phone pocketed, shoulders relaxed in a way they almost never were in the hours after they’d been anywhere public.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“She approves of you,” Jasmine said, starting for the stairs.
“I like her enormously,” he said, falling into step beside her.
“Don’t tell her that. She’s already insufferable.” She smiled, though, to show him that she didn’t mean it one bit.
He smiled back, and they went down the steps side by side. His arm brushed hers and neither of them moved away from it. Jasmine thought about her mother’s wink and the feelings she was nipping and how completely and totally she was failing at it.
The paparazzi had gone by the time they reached the street.
The arrangement was done, the pictures taken, the damage control underway.
There was no reason, practically speaking, for Nate to reach over when she shivered slightly in the evening air and settle his jacket around her shoulders without being asked.
But he did. And she let him. And they walked to the car in the early dark and didn’t talk about it.