broke up?”
“We got together a few times. Wasn’t the same. Didn’t want to keep doing a circle dance in a yo-yo relationship.”
I should’ve told Dana then.
I opened and closed my fingers the same way I was opening and closing my mind, imagined my ex-wife’s damp, curly hair, the strawberry scent it held after she washed her mane. Remembered the last time I touched her the way a man touches his wife. I’d loved her to a depth I never thought possible. She’d hurt me to a depth I never thought curable, betrayed me and I’d lost my motherfucking mind. Went insane. I’ll never live it down.
Dana spoke on other things. With every word, she was more real to me. So far from being perfect. That was why I was so attracted to her.
I asked, “Where’re your folks?”
“I buried my mother three years ago, the Saturday before Mother’s Day.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Momma worked at a publishing company in the Village, busting her butt housekeeping, moved up to the cafeteria and got a job as a cashier, went to school in the evenings, eventually became an editorial assistant.”
“Impressive.”
“I was so proud of her.”
“Your dad still in Florida?”
She tossed a rock out toward the ocean. “He died right before Momma did. Heart attack.”
“Sorry to hear that too.”
“Don’t be,” she said in a joking way, but still with the kind of finality that let me know a deep story lived there. “It’s not like they remembered to put my name on the obituary.”
I nodded. Had empathy for her old man.
“I loved ’im, just didn’t like the way things turned out. I said some things that hurt him, but I apologized. It hurts a kid when their old man promises to call, or promises to write, and doesn’t.”
No words were spoken into the light winds for a moment.
She mumbled, “Yep, I come from a family of weak hearts.”
Dana didn’t have to say it, but for a woman to leave New York and jet to Los Angeles, a place where she had no friends or family, ran here before she had a job, things had to be pretty rough in her life at the time.
Me and a past I couldn’t erase.
Her and a past she was trying to escape.
Between us, we had more issues than Stephen King had books.
So much baggage, so few baggage handlers in this world.
She asked, “You want some gum?”
I answered, “Sure.”
She pulled out a stick of Big Red, licked the stick top to bottom, then eased it into my mouth. Did that without expressing any emotion.
Around three a.m., we pulled up in front of my peach stucco apartment complex at Stocker and Degnan. Stocker Avenue is a main east-west throughway, lined with two-level stucco apartment buildings that have been here since the 1940s. Single-family homes were on the side streets—the sections that had less traffic and pandemonium. This was a world of African Americans, Hispanics, and others, all living under the shade of palm trees in Mexican-style homes and apartments.
At the same time I turned my engine off, a golden CJ-7 Jeep parked right behind me. Two women got out before we did, passed by my car laughing and giggling. Naiomi, the dark one who had big legs and a short black dress, saw my face, perked up, and waved. Juanita, the mulatto one, looked back to see what her buddy was waving at, what had slowed her giggles, then briefly smiled.
In a skeptical tone, “Who’re those women?”
“My landlords.”
“Uh-oh. Sure that’s not your woman?”
“Nah. Just my neighbors.”
She paused. “Mind if I use your bathroom before I head home?”
“Just don’t be critical. Martha Stewart didn’t show up this month.”
A soft, uneasy chuckle. “At least have two-ply tissue.”
“I can handle that.”
We crawled out of my car about the same time as Juanita and Naiomi disappeared into our shared stairwell. By the time we made it into the staircase, Juanita and Naiomi were up at the top, in front of their door. So close that I couldn’t tell where one of them ended and the other one began. Juanita had on a red miniskirt, yellow blouse thin enough to show the outline of her dark bra, colors that looked good on her skin. Naiomi’s black dress clung to her Jamaican-born backside. Not a big butt, just noticeable, shapely, and hard to deny.
They were breast to breast, sounding like they were about to explode with desire, sloppy kisses, voracious noises, hands rubbing on each other, tongues wildly snaking in and out of each other’s mouth. Naiomi