Nina LaCour - We Are Okay

“What are you trying to do?”

“I just don’t want you to be alone.”

“And Courtney and Eleanor are somehow going to fix that?”

“Okay,” she says. “You’re right. I’m acting desperate.”

I stand up to clear our dishes, but after I stack them, I just set them aside. I sit back down, swipe my hand across the table to sweep away the crumbs.

“I want to hear more,” I say. “We got off track.”

“I already told you about my favorite classes. . . .”

“Tell me about Jacob,” I say.

She blinks, hard.

“We don’t have to talk about him.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “He’s a part of your life. I want to hear about him.”

“I don’t even know how serious it is,” she says, but I know that she’s lying. The way she talks to him at night. The way she says I love you .

I look at her and wait.

“I can show you a picture,” she says. I nod.

Out comes her phone. She swipes a few times and then decides on one. They’re sitting next to each other at the beach, shoulders touching. He’s wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing. I look at the image of her instead. Her wide smile, her hair in a braid over her shoulder, her bare arms, and the way she’s leaning into him.

“You guys look happy together,” I say. It comes out true and simple. It comes out without bitterness or regret.

“ Thanks ,” Mabel whispers.

She takes the phone back. She puts it in her pocket.

A minute passes. Maybe a few of them.

Mabel takes the plates I stacked to the sink. She washes them, both plates, both bowls, and the pot and the pan, and the silverware. At some point I get up and find a dish towel. She scrubs the splattered chili off the stove while I dry everything and put it away.

JULY AND AUGUST

IT WAS A SUMMER OF STAYING OUT LATE,a summer of wandering. It was no longer a given that I’d be home for dinner, as though Gramps and I were practicing for our near futures without each other. Some nights early on he left food out for me. Once or twice I called to tell him I’d bring leftovers from something Javier made. Slowly, the dinners tapered off altogether. I feared he wasn’t eating, but he wouldn’t admit to it when I asked him. One day I went to the basement to do the laundry and found one of his socks was stuffed with bloody handkerchiefs. Seven of them. I laid them out one by one and used the tricks he taught me. I waited by the washer for its full cycle, hoping it would work. All seven came out clean, but my throat stayed tight, my stomach ached.

I folded them, one by one, in little squares. I carried them upstairs on the top of the pile. Gramps was in the dining room when I got there, pouring himself a glass of whiskey.

He eyed the folded laundry.

“How’ve you been feeling, Gramps?”

He cleared his throat.

“So-so,” he said.

“Have you been to the doctor?”

He snorted—my suggestion was ridiculous—and I remembered a time in junior high when I came home from health class and talked to him about the dangers of smoking.

“This conversation is very American,” he’d said.

“We live in America.”

“That we do, Sailor. That we do. But wherever in the world we live, something’s gonna get us in the end. Something gets us every time.”

I hadn’t known then how to argue his point.

I should have tried harder.

“You never touch this stuff,” he said now, holding up the bottle of whiskey. “Right?”

I shook my head.

“Besides that one time, I mean,” he said.

“That was the only time.”

“Good,” he said. “Good.” He twisted the top back onto the bottle and picked up his glass. “You have a couple minutes? I have some things to show you.”

“Sure.”

He gestured toward the dining table where some papers were spread out. He said, “Sit with me.”

In front of me were documents from my soon-to-be college, thanking us for our payment in full for the first two semesters. There was an envelope with my social security card and my birth certificate. I didn’t know he had them. “And this,” he said, “is the information for your new bank account. It looks like a lot of money. It is a lot of money. But it will run out. After you’re gone, no more four-dollar coffee. This is food and bus-fare money. Textbooks and simple clothing.”

My heart pounded. My eyes burned. He was all I had.

“Here is your new ATM card. The code is four-oh-seven-three. Write that down somewhere.”

“I can just use my normal card,” I said. “From the account I share with you.” I looked again at the dollar amount on the statement. It was more money than I had ever seen belong to us. “I don’t need all this.”

“You do,” he said. Then he paused and cleared his throat. “You will.”

“But all I care about is having you.”

He leaned back in his chair. Took off his glasses. Cleaned them. Put them back on.

“Sailor.”

His eyes were yellow as daisies. He’d been coughing up blood. He looked like a skeleton, sitting there next to me.

He shook his head and said, “You’ve always been a smart girl.”

It was a summer of trying not to think too deeply. A summer of pretending that the end wasn’t coming. A summer when I got lost in time, when I rarely knew what day it was, rarely cared about the hour. A summer so bright and warm it made me believe the heat would linger, that there would always be more days, that blood on handkerchiefs was an exercise in stain removal and not a sign of oblivion.

It was a summer of denial. Of learning what Mabel’s body could do for mine, what mine could do for hers. A summer spent in her white bed, her hair fanned over the pillow. A summer spent on my red rug, sunshine on our faces. A summer when love was everything, and we didn’t talk about college or geography, and we rode buses and hopped in cars and walked city blocks in our sandals.

Tourists descended onto our beach, sat in our usual places, so we borrowed Ana’s car and crossed the Golden Gate to find a tiny piece of ocean to have for ourselves. We ate fish-and-chips in a dark pub that belonged in a different country, and we collected beach glass instead of shells, and we kissed in the redwoods, we kissed in the water, we kissed in movie theaters all over the city during matinees and late-night showings. We kissed in bookstores and record stores and dressing rooms. We kissed outside of the Lexington because we were too young to get in. We looked inside its doors at all the women there with short hair and long hair, lipstick and tattoos, tight dresses and tight jeans, button-ups and camisoles, and we pictured ourselves among them.

We didn’t talk about Mabel’s departure, which was to come half a month before mine. We didn’t talk about the blood on the handkerchiefs or the coughs that ricocheted from the back of my house. I didn’t tell her about the paperwork and the new ATM card, and I barely thought about them—only when I found myself without Mabel, only in the darkest and most silent hours—and when I did, I pushed the thoughts away.

But it turns out that even the fiercest denial can’t stop time. And there we were, at her house. There, in her foyer, were the suitcases and duffel bags she’d packed when I wasn’t looking. They’d be loading the car the next morning. Ana and Javier invited me to come on the round-trip drive to Los Angeles, but I couldn’t bear the thought of returning without her, the only backseat passenger, and Mabel looked relieved when I said no.