Chris McCormick - Desert Boys

And then, just a few months ago, Emily called again to say she was engaged. Gunnar had taken her out to the desert on his four-wheeler, proposed to her from his dusty knee while she sat on the ATV. How romantic —imagine how Jean must have sounded on the phone, trying to congratulate her. Emily — still not dumb — could sense Jean’s condescension, and so my sister started to feel like a jerk. She loved Emily, after all — she really did. So she said, You know what? If you’ll have me, it’d be great to visit, to meet your fiancé, and to say congratulations in person.

And so Jean took two days off from work, bought a plane ticket, and stayed with our parents the night before she planned to meet up with Emily.

The next afternoon, Emily came by to pick her up. My parents hadn’t seen Emily in years, and Mom tried her best to bridge the awkward gaps in her knowledge of Emily’s new life. Eventually Mom — she was feeling pretty good that day, Jean thought — resorted to the past. They spoke of sleepovers and grade school teachers and the time Jean, chasing an eight-year-old me through the house, cut open her head against the corner of our kitchen cabinet. Before taking Jean in for stitches, Mom had come home from work to find Emily rinsing Jean’s scalp with the garden hose out front.

Even after they said good-bye to my parents and left for Emily’s house, in the car on the ride over, Jean and Emily slid back into their old roles with one another — Emily the star and the storyteller, Jean the supportive listener — using a kind of muscle memory learned only in friendships developed before puberty. In fact, in those fifteen minutes before they pulled into the four-car-wide driveway of chez Gunnar, Jean laughed at a joke Emily made, looked out at the blue mountains surrounding the desert, and felt, for the first time since she’d left for college, happy to be home.

The house, though, was an underfurnished monster. Everywhere Jean looked, she saw spiral banisters, hardwood floors, and mirrors. Dozens of mirrors, not a single wall spared. A couch sat in the middle of one room, facing an enormous flat-screen TV. As far as home furnishings went, that was all Jean could find.

Unless you count Gunnar, which Jean was prepared to do, just from what she knew of him already: right-wing, war-profiting, typical AV white guy that he was. But when he shook her hand—“The famous Jean!”—and pulled her in for an impromptu hug, she had to admit she liked him. He was long-haired and handsome, wearing a sports coat and brown saddleback shoes — she’d imagined him in fatigues, for some reason. He smelled like a green tea latte. He feigned embarrassment about the size of his house and the proposal on his ATV, mocking himself, calling the four-wheeler “the adult skateboard.” This, of course, reminded Jean of their predilection as kids for boys on skateboards, a reminder she found sort of endearing. Not to mention he was kind to her, and curious about her work, and asked follow-up questions even Emily had neglected to ask. If he thought something wicked about Jean helping undocumented LGBT immigrants seek asylum in the United States, he didn’t let on. They all three stood in the kitchen around a rectangular marble-topped island, drinking red wine. At one point, Emily said, “Isn’t my life pretty great?” And Jean said — without having to lie even a little — that, yes, it was.

Then Emily went to the fridge and pulled out a large dish covered with aluminum foil. When Emily uncovered the dish, Jean saw eight bloody strips of steak. “Marinated London broil,” said Gunnar, “once I get it marinated, broiled, and London-fied.”

Emily knew Jean had been a vegetarian since high school. She knew because she’d been the one to convince her, way back in her animal rights days. Apparently, Emily had given up vegetarianism herself in the years since, but Jean couldn’t figure out why Emily would invite her over for lunch without having anything she could eat. Jean took it personally, as if Emily were making a point. On what, she couldn’t say. She just knew that the point felt directed at her — chicken in the salad, bacon in the macaroni and cheese — and she considered faking a stomachache and calling home.

Instead, Jean said she wasn’t hungry — large breakfast, you know — but they should go on and cook, obviously, and she’ll fill up on wine, ha, ha.

This last joke turned out to be truer than she’d meant. Every time the three of them finished a bottle, Emily found another to open. Jean became drunk — so drunk, she couldn’t tell if Emily was even drinking with her any longer or just pouring. Soon the meat was done, sizzling on a porcelain platter on the kitchen island between them, and Gunnar and Emily were digging in — except for the occasional swipe of a lemon-scented wet wipe — like hyenas.

Which is when Jean saw, in one of the kitchen mirrors, the old terrarium, iguana and all. She went over to look, drunk enough to confuse mirrors with hallways. When she found the terrarium, she reached into the tank and stroked the iguana’s back. Gently she pinched the tail and turned the loose skin this way and that around the solid flesh, as if twirling a flower by its stem. The feel of the tail between her thumb and fingers made her laugh, and she leaned against the wall until Emily came over to insist she eat something.

“Oh,” Emily said, “I know what you can eat. It’s not much, but…” Off to the fridge she went, and when she came back, she was holding a tiny circular cake. It might’ve been four inches in diameter and two inches tall, and was covered in a dark chocolate ganache topped with an elaborate series of miniature roses — red, yellow, and white. Jean knew right away that Emily’s mother had made the cake, and for some reason — the wine, maybe — Jean started to cry.

The wine wasn’t entirely to blame. Jean cried because she understood for the first time that everything she had accomplished, everything she had become, was what she’d once had in mind for Emily, and now, because Emily had a mother and Jean soon wouldn’t have a mother, none of Jean’s accomplishments — not one — mattered.

Emily went over to hug her, and she was crying, too, Jean realized, and soon they were both laughing, embarrassed. Gunnar fetched them two forks, and together, Emily and Jean ate the small cake. Gunnar threw his arms around them both and asked Jean, “Are you sure you don’t want a bite of steak?”

And before Emily brought Jean home and said good-bye, before Jean kissed Mom on the way to the airport and told her how much better she was looking every day, Jean took Gunnar up on the offer. For one bite, she pretended to be someone else, someone who had stayed in that place and never wanted to leave. Her only bite of meat in over a decade — though it wasn’t her bite, really, but someone else’s — and the meat was good. A shred of the steak stuck between her teeth, and the person who was not Jean tongued at it all night, even in the morning. She never got sick, and she never felt guilty.

* * *

The rain had steadied, light enough now for some of Habibi’s shelter seekers to pull their outer layers up over their heads and walk out into it. The line cooks seemed no less bored for having heard Jean’s story, if they’d heard the story at all. Maybe, what with the steam in the windows, they’d kept their ears perked for a sexy moment that never came. One by one, they fell back into the kitchen. Simon lifted his hands to the chandeliers to inspect the towels. Still wet. By the time Jean and I finished eating, we were ready to brave the weather. Simon tossed us the wet towels, told us to keep them. He mimed the act of stretching one over his head in a storm. New customers came in, putting him to work. We gathered our belongings and tossed out our trash to the sound of the rain dulling itself against the windows. As we were about to leave, Jean turned to the counter and asked in our mother’s language — which I understood but never learned to speak — for dessert.