vacillated between aggression and remittance, had died suddenly in July. For years, the family had been squirreling away emotional reserves to cope with his prolonged illness. His death released a burst of excess.
While her sisters went through the motions of grief, Adriana thrummed with energy she didn’t know what to do with. She considered squandering her vigor on six weeks in Mazatlan, but as she discussed ocean-front rentals with her travel agent, she realized escape wasn’t what she craved. She liked the setting where her life took place: her house perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, her bedroom window that opened on a tangle of blackberry bushes where crows roosted every autumn and spring. She liked the two block stroll down to the beach where she could sit with a book and listen to the yapping lapdogs that the elderly women from the waterfront condominiums brought walking in the evenings.
Mazatlan was a twenty-something’s cure for restlessness. Adriana wasn’t twenty-five anymore, famished for the whole gourmet meal of existence. She needed something else now. Something new. Something more refined.
She explained this to her friends Ben and Lawrence when they invited her to their ranch house in Santa Barbara to relax for the weekend and try to forget about her father. They sat on Ben and Lawrence’s patio, on iron-worked deck chairs arrayed around a garden table topped with a mosaic of sea creatures made of semi-precious stones. A warm, breezy dusk lengthened the shadows of the orange trees. Lawrence poured sparkling rosé into three wine glasses and proposed a toast to Adriana’s father—not to his memory, but to his death.
“Good riddance to the bastard,” said Lawrence. “If he were still alive, I’d punch him in the schnoz.”
“I don’t even want to think about him,” said Adriana. “He’s dead. He’s gone.”
“So if not Mazatlan, what are you going to do?” asked Ben.
“I’m not sure,” said Adriana. “Some sort of change, some sort of milestone, that’s all I know.”
Lawrence sniffed the air. “Excuse me,” he said, gathering the empty wine glasses. “The kitchen needs its genius.”
When Lawrence was out of earshot, Ben leaned forward to whisper to Adriana.” He’s got us on a raw food diet for my cholesterol. Raw carrots. Raw zucchini. Raw almonds. No cooking at all.”
“Really,” said Adriana, glancing away. She was never sure how to respond to lovers’ quarrels. That kind of affection mixed with annoyance, that inescapable intimacy, was something she’d never understood.
Birds twittered in the orange trees. The fading sunlight highlighted copper strands in Ben’s hair as he leaned over the mosaic table, rapping his fingers against a carnelian-backed crab. Through the arched windows, Adriana could see Lawrence mincing carrots, celery and almonds into brown paste.
“You should get a redecorator,” said Ben. “Tile floors, Tuscan pottery, those red leather chairs that were in vogue last time we were in Milan. That’d make me feel like I’d been scrubbed clean and reborn.”
“No, no,” said Adriana, “I like where I live.”
“A no-holds-barred shopping spree. Drop twenty thousand. That’s what I call getting a weight off your shoulders.”
Adriana laughed. “How long do you think it would take my personal shopper to assemble a whole new me?”
“Sounds like a midlife crisis,” said Lawrence, returning with vegan hors d’oeuvres and three glasses of mineral water. “You’re better off forgetting it all with a hot Latin pool boy, if you ask me.”
Lawrence served Ben a small bowl filled with yellow mush. Ben shot Adriana an aggrieved glance.
Adriana felt suddenly out of synch. The whole evening felt like the set for a photo-shoot that would go in a decorating magazine, a two-page spread featuring Cozy Gardens, in which she and Ben and Lawrence were posing as an intimate dinner party for three. She felt reduced to two dimensions, air-brushed, and then digitally grafted onto the form of whoever it was who should have been there, someone warm and trusting who knew how to care about minutia like a friend’s husband putting him on a raw food diet, not because the issue was important, but because it mattered to him.
Lawrence dipped his finger in the mash and held it up to Ben’s lips. “It’s for your own good, you ungrateful so-and-so.”
Ben licked it away. “I eat it, don’t I?”
Lawrence leaned down to kiss his husband, a warm and not at all furtive kiss, not sexual but still passionate. Ben’s glance flashed coyly downward.
Adriana couldn’t remember the last time she’d loved someone enough to be embarrassed by them. Was this the flavor missing from