to caucus with the Society of Banana Babies unless you want to share a juicy story about the first girl to break your heart or the time you were passed over for something really important and that's why you work your tail off to avoid the tiniest suggestion of failure now."
Ash was silent a minute or two before saying, "I don't think anyone's ever broken my heart."
Without thinking at all, I replied, "That's funny because everyone breaks my heart."
Why was I doing this? Why now, why here? I'd always managed to keep a lid on it all. No one ever knew my true stories because I never gave them reason to look for one. No one looked at me and saw loss or fear or abandonment. I'd always been cautious about letting loose the frayed, knotty bits because I couldn't take them back once they were out. Yet here I was, unraveling those knots with Ash as my witness, nearly begging him to pull the threads and tear it all apart for me.
"Zelda." He plucked my hand from my lap and slipped his fingers between mine. "What's the Society of Banana Babies?"
"People who grew up in completely, unbelievably, indisputably bananas situations."
"Give it to me. Let me take it off your hands."
My defenses gathered around me, rising and closing until I could only speak in fast, snappish words designed to fill the gaps in my armor. "It's weird. The weirdest thing ever."
"Weren't you the one who said something about being outside the mainstream wasn't grounds for disparagement?"
I knew what he was doing and I fell into the trap regardless. "All right, Ash. You want to know, I'll tell you. My mother and father aren't my mother and father. They're my grandparents. My sister is my mother. Since my life is an actual mistake deep fried in shame and regret, I have interacted with them no more than a handful of times in the last ten years." I yanked my hand back because I needed everything inside the crispy shell of my defense mechanisms. "So, no, Ash, my family hasn't noticed I'm gone. The truth is, they're much happier when my sister-mother's teenage lapse in judgment doesn't trouble them."
"I heard you when you told me to fight fair. Now I want you to listen to me about sharing fair." Ash reached for me again, his touch gentle yet steady. "Take yourself away from me if you need space. Don't do it because you're bracing yourself against my saying something terrible. I told you I could take this. I meant it."
I nodded. "Okay."
"Can I ask how—how that all happens?"
I stifled a bitter laugh. The leather-wrapped steering wheel protested, an impolite squeak of skin I wouldn't have noticed if not for the sudden silence between us. I followed his white-knuckled grip to the bulge and twitch of his forearm muscles up to the stiff set of his jaw. "Which part?"
Ash cut a hooded glance in my direction, his eyes burning dark and serious like a storm. "The part where anyone could ever look at you and see a mistake."
14
Ash
I didn't understand.
Not the part about the sister-mother. I had a decent idea how that one shook out. It was the piece where Zelda dipped out of her own family and they didn't care whether the door hit her in the ass.
The Zelda I knew gathered up asshole men and carted them off to urgent care clinics, she stayed with those assholes when they were drugged and punchy, and she accompanied them to Sunday dinner after fair warning about those gatherings.
The Zelda I knew was loyal to a fault. She was smart and caring and perfect.
"I mean it," I added. "I don't know how anyone could see a mistake in you, love. They must be deeply confused."
I lifted our joined hands to kiss her knuckles because, yeah, we did that now. Whatever that was, whatever the fuck was happening with us, I was here for it. Even when a sizable portion of my brain drew up lists and decision trees and indexed arguments as to why this was not a good idea, not at all, I was here for it.
"Actually, yes. They were confused," she replied. "They didn't know what to do when Deanna got pregnant. She was fifteen. I'm told she was an otherwise exemplary child without so much as a lunch detention to her name. But it all happened around the time Roseanne—that's my mother, or Deanna's mother—accepted a new job in Utah. She's