“It’s all yours,” I said.
When she was done making her pile—she’d taken almost everything I no longer wanted—she told me she was lonely. Well, she didn’t say that, but that was what I heard. She said that after six months of living in Kona, she still missed San Diego. She said Brad worked longer hours here, and she told me unconvincingly that it was a good thing, maybe, because it had given her a chance to enjoy nature more. She told me about a trail near my house people called the Pig Trail and how she had walked it alone once. She had felt afraid doing that. “Because there’s no one else. It’s just you in the forest. I prefer walking down Ali’i now.” She said her new friends—all great people I had to meet—were so incredibly great but also incredibly busy. Which was why it was important to stay busy herself. Marcy talked almost the whole time and I barely said anything. As I watched her restless hands move around with every new thought, I understood that Marcy had not come here to check up on lonely little Nancy. Marcy had come here because she was a lonely little Marcy.
When she’d said enough about herself, she moved on to the topic of the volcano—“Can you believe it’s going to destroy that town? I won’t go anywhere near that thing.” And then, after a long sigh, she said, “We should do something fun.”
“Like what?” I was ready for her to leave.
“Let’s get our nails done! I know a great place down near KTA.”
I was about to say no, but then I remembered Sara Beth’s bright green polish. And Ana—her toes and fingers had been a sparkly purple. And then I thought of myself at yoga with my ugly naked nails, and I said, “Okay, I’ll follow you.” This way, we could take a little break from each other in our own cars.
“Fun!” She sprang from the couch.
“Fun,” I repeated, because she was waiting for me to speak.
?
The nail place was crowded, so we couldn’t sit next to each other. “That’s okay,” Marcy said, “We’re going to be spending so much time together soon anyway.”
I chose a shocking red that was out of my comfort zone, and Marcy chose a responsible red. Afterwards I said no thanks to Orange Julius and thought about how it was going to be hard to avoid a person who thought coming to your house uninvited was an acceptable thing to do.
?
When I got home, Chuck and the boys were kicking a soccer ball around in the grass. It was dusk. The light was pink. The grass was green. Richly, fully, unbelievably green, and, again, I was amazed by just how beautiful it was here. I’d been living in a washed-out, dry land for so long and not even known it.
I already had my plan, of course, because I always had a plan, and I’d already imagined myself carrying it out. I would park and go inside and make dinner and do everything gingerly so as not to ruin my nails. I had already decided Chuck wouldn’t notice my nails, and I had decided to use the black sesame seeds I’d bought at KTA. Salad with black sesame seeds? Brown rice with black sesame seeds?
I don’t know what it was that made me stop. But for some reason, instead of getting out of the car, I sat there instead, watching my family kick this soccer ball around. They waved when they saw me and then kept kicking. They were barefoot. Their faces looked joyful. The boys are doing well here, I thought. Thank God, because I hadn’t been sure how it would go. Cam, in particular—he had trouble with change.
And then, despite myself, and despite all my anger at him, my eyes wandered from the boys and fixed on Chuck. Chuck in his well-worn “hang-out shirt.” Chuck’s calves, which I had always liked. I was fighting myself a little. It wasn’t hard to find reasons to be angry. Shelly Shelly Shelly. Everything that had led up to Shelly—every imagined interaction between them—and everything after. And then all the other reasons I was annoyed, which had nothing to do with Shelly, but which, really, were all about her. Chuck’s drool on the pillow, which had never bothered me that much, was now a reason to spray my Shout with vengeance. Even the slow way he walked, which I used to think said something positive about how patient he was, had begun to piss me off. In the airport I’d wanted to kill him. Because in my head, I was thinking, You would probably walk faster with Shelly, you asshole.
But in this moment he was very hard to hate. The soccer ball was new, which meant that he’d just bought it. My husband had bought a soccer ball to kick around with our sons after school.
Even now, years into my suburban adulthood, scenes like this had the power to astound me. I had no memory of playing on lawns as a kid. And if I ever had a soccer ball, I’m sure it was stolen, and I might have been trying to sell it. Lawns during my teenage years, and after that too, and maybe also a little before, were a place to have quick sex with men who were probably in jail now. They were lawns that usually belonged to a golf course.
So yes, Chuck had failed me, but it was, compared to what it could have been, a small failure. It was also a failure that one couldn’t see just by looking at him, and this was comforting: how virtuous and clean he looked there on the grass with his sweet and dapper boys. And then there was me, the responsible mom, coming home to make dinner. No one looking at this family would have thought we were anything but innocent.
6
“Good morning, yogis.” She yawned. Her face was dewy and pale and glowing, and an orange scarf hung loosely over her shoulders.
“Normally, now,” she said, sitting taller, “I’d ring the gong, but I don’t have it with me today. I left the house in a rush. I don’t have my books either.” Her eyes landed right on me when she said, “We are creatures of habit,” and I wondered if this meant something, which of course it didn’t—we were all creatures of habit.
“Even the way you guys have organized yourselves—you’re sitting in the same way you sat last time.”
We looked at each other and smiled because it was true. Patty, Sara Beth, Kurt, and me had laid out our mats in the exact same order.