did have a pseudo-romance of sorts and hooked up many more times. Throughout my teens, I never dated a guy without cheating at least once with Billy. Even now, I google him. I’ll be with someone from Pleasanton and he’ll come up in conversation. The other person might say, “I wonder what he’s . . .” and immediately it’s “Hold, please,” as I start typing. Or if I’m with a mutual friend from home and they have a laptop open, I direct them: “Go to his Facebook.” I don’t want to actually connect. I just want to be a voyeur. I want to see how his kids turned out. I want to see if they’re ballsy like him.
But it doesn’t matter. As many times as we hooked up, there would never be BILLY AND NICKIE painted on the back of that GMC. I was never his Chosen One.
five
OPEN HOUSE
When I was little, my mom would take me with her to open houses. We’d drive out to Oakland and San Francisco—cities she loved far more than our town of Pleasanton—and we’d wander from house to house. These were homes that we no way in hell could afford, but we toured them just to see how other people lived. People who were not us.
I was eight when we toured a huge San Francisco Victorian, all light wood and curving staircases with a bay window that actually looked out on the bay. I ran to the window to take in all the blue of the water.
“Your world is only as small as you make it, Nickie,” she said.
That was the same year she took me to see Nikki Giovanni recite poetry at the Oakland Children’s Museum. We sat high up in coliseum seating, listening as Nikki talked about dragonflies and strawberry patches. My mother kept nudging me into listening. “Isn’t this wonderful?” she asked again and again.
Mom was always taking my sisters and me to events like this. She loved the ballet and would take us to see The Nutcracker at Christmas. She would buy tickets for the Alvin Ailey dance company whenever they were in the Bay Area. On every one of these excursions, she would inevitably start talking to a stranger. My sisters and I called them Random Acts of Conversation, rolling our eyes. “Where are you from?” she would ask the rando she had found, whose existence we would then be dragged into acknowledging. “Oh, wow,” she would say.
Mom was so bored and lonely in the small world of Pleasanton. When my parents moved there, my father simply stopped including her when he went out. And Cully Union, an extremely social person who could also talk to anybody—except his wife Theresa—went out a lot.
My parents both had telecommunications jobs, he at AT&T and she at Pacific Bell. Back in Nebraska, they also worked a night shift cleaning a day-care center so I could receive free care when I was little. My father was obsessed with upward mobility and after he got his BA degree from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, he later got an advanced degree going to night school. My mother was pursuing her master’s at Holy Name, a Catholic college in Oakland. My dad thought that her studies would help her move up the ranks at Pacific Bell. But learning for my mother was about her love of literature. Her time at Holy Name was meaningful for her. To this day, she talks about two classmates, a Chinese American and Mexican American who took her out to try Thai food for the first time. When my father realized her higher education was in the humanities and would not result in more money for the household, he stopped funding it. He hadn’t cared to know what she was studying, because Dad is always oblivious to things he isn’t interested in. She never completed her master’s.
Meanwhile, he was funding his second life. Around my junior year of high school, I discovered a green ATM card in a drawer. I brought it to my older sister, Kelly.
“There’s a lot of money in that one,” she said.
It was the card Dad used to finance his life with another woman. Kelly was aware of the reality long before I was. She had gotten a sales job with AT&T, working out of the Oakland office while my dad was in San Jose. Kelly’s job took her up and down the bay, and whenever she was close to San Jose my dad would say,