Arrogant Bastard - Julie Capulet Page 0,3
and dirt all over my clothes. And what was I even thinking, trying to improve the look of the place with a hammer and a few nails?
But I’m a salt-of-the-earth type of girl. I don’t sweat the small stuff. Not that being pregnant is small, but still. We’ve handled bumps in the road before. Including the bumpiest one of all, which I make a point of shoving back into its hidden corner of my most difficult memories.
“We’ll figure it out, Josie. We’ll get through this. Everything’s going to be fine.”
“Fine? How will it be fine, Luna? And how will we get through this? You don’t get through parenthood. It’s with you forever.” The comment digs deep, for both of us. Tears pool in Josie’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Loon. I shouldn’t have said that.” She hugs me. “Now I know how you felt,” she sobs. I ignore her murmur. There are certain things from my past I definitely don’t want to revisit right now. Or ever.
“Come on.” I put my arm around her shoulders and lead her inside, where it’s cool. One of our bartenders, Rico, just arrived and is starting to set up for the lunch crowd. I give him a little wave, grab some napkins and hand them to Josie. I help her up the back staircase that takes us up to our two-bedroom apartment. “It’s not all bad. At least we have a business. An awesome one. It’s what we always wanted. In time, it’ll be just perfect.”
I lead her over to the couch, which is in front of the windows and bathed in sunlight.
I love our apartment, even if it is “retro,” as Josie generously describes it.
It’s rustic and on the small side, but the views are to die for. From up here, when the sun sinks over the water, you feel like you’re flying on wings made of gold. Like, despite the underbelly of desperation that sometimes infuses your days, from up here the melting horizon is so full of promise that nothing can touch you.
But now, in the blue light of mid-morning, things have touched us. Again. Very real things that are going to cry a lot and require healthcare and food and round-the-clock care and supervision.
“I’m going to call Owen,” Josie says. Owen is her brother who lives down the street from their family home in Iowa, which is now owned by Josie’s oldest brother Marlon. Her other brother Drew lives one street over. I can already see that it’s this detail—one of the reasons we hit the road all those years ago in the first place—that’s calling to her now. Five years ago, we couldn’t imagine staying put like that. We were different from the people we knew. We had a wanderlust that no one understood except us. And I, in particular, had a lot to work through. I needed to leave, is what it boiled down to.
I bring her a glass of water and a box of tissues and set them down on the coffee table. “I’ll go help get ready for the lunch crowd. You just relax and I’ll bring you up some food.”
“Thanks, Luna.”
“We’ll figure it out, okay?”
“Sure.” She smiles at me weakly and it makes me sad that she’s so beautiful and that the man who slept with her and left her in the dust with his babies on the way will never even know. We looked for him for months. He was blond and handsome and had a cool, surfie vibe—Josie’s absolute weakness. I didn’t mean to have unprotected sex with him, she sobbed after she peed on the stick and those two unmistakable blue lines showed up. He told me he wasn’t looking for anything serious. And neither was I! We just got carried away.
It happens.
They will have made some beautiful babies.
But even though we wandered the streets and the hotels and the bars and asked around for a tall, sandy-blond Californian named Noah, he was already gone. The only thing our online searches revealed is that there are a lot of people named Noah in California.
And I don’t like the defeated edge to her voice today.
I leave her to her phone call and walk past my tiny yoga studio where I do my practice every morning at sunrise. I go into my bathroom where I start stripping off my dirty clothes. I take a quick shower and pull on a sleeveless yellow sundress. I run a towel through my hair, which is dark and cut into