The Rom-Commers(103)

My dad started learning Japanese, by the way. Turns out, he has a knack for languages.

And he also has a great tutor.

Sylvie and Salvador turned my dad’s old room into a guest room. Sylvie also decided to redecorate the apartment in her spare time—dismantling our childhood bunk beds, and wallpapering an accent wall with tropical flowers, and filling up the windowsill with succulents in bright painted pots. She made a Pinterest page and everything.

Now Sylvie and Salvador are working hard, and saving up, and hoping to buy a house big enough for all of them, and a gaggle of kids, at some point. Sylvie even googled our sunny, rambling childhood home to see if that might be an option—but it had been bulldozed to make way for a megamansion.

“Maybe it’s better this way,” I said as Sylvie ranted about it on the phone. “Maybe life is telling us to keep moving forward.”

Kenji continues to come visit every summer and go to camps at the science museum. And it turned out, he has twin younger sisters, who started joining him when they got old enough. My dad loves it when all the kids show up at the apartment and fill it with life and scampering and giggling, and he’s taught them all how to play the harmonica.

“It’s a lot of harmonicas,” Sylvie says. “They could start a Bob Dylan tribute band.”



* * *



AND ME? WHAT became of me?

I moved to LA and kept writing.

I got my own tiny apartment for a while, right above a tattoo parlor.

It did just happen to be walking distance from Charlie’s place, but I swear that was a coincidence. Mostly.

It was my first time living alone in my life, and I did some hard-core nesting—amassing a block-printed cloth napkin collection, stocking up on kooky coffee mugs, and diving full-immersion into a throw-pillow lifestyle.

“What is it with women and throw pillows?” Charlie asked when my bed got so laden with them, it was hard to find the mattress.

“I think the words you’re looking for are ‘thank you,’” I said.

Charlie fully supported my commitment to independence.

But, even still, every single day … he asked me to marry him.

Which I loved.

Even though, every day, I also evaded the question.

A smile would take over my face, and I’d say, “You don’t have to be married to be happy.”

And Charlie wouldn’t disagree.

“I just want to belong to you,” he’d say. “And I want you to belong to me.”

And then I’d push him down into all those throw pillows in a way that left no doubt about who belonged to whom.

But I still resisted saying yes—in that way you can when absolutely everybody knows you want to say yes. And you will say yes—eventually.

And anticipation is half the fun.

One great thing about being writers is that our jobs are portable. So we spend summers in Houston, in Sylvie and Salvador’s guest room. It’s a total circus: Sylvie, Salvador, their two golden retrievers, our dad, Mrs. Otsuka (who, once we were family, encouraged us all to call her by her first name, Mitsuko), all three of her grandkids, and Charlie and me. All of us just back and forth between apartments, and sharing food, and babysitting, and helping out, and working in the community garden, and buzzing with kinetic energy in that cheery, noisy way that happens sometimes when families are piled into close quarters.

Sometimes we even add Jack Stapleton and his cute wife, Hannah, into the mix, and we all squeeze in around the dining table, grandkids on various knees, and have little impromptu sing-alongs after dinner.

Though my dad has never stopped calling Jack “Jake Singleton.”

And Jack never corrects him.



* * *



DID CHARLIE AND I wind up going to the Olympics for line dancing and taking the gold for the USA?

Well, since there is no line dancing at the Olympics, and since it’s much more cooperative than competitive, and since it’s not exactly a thing you can win—unless you count just being there as winning—and since I just recently pulled a muscle while executing a sailor step into a coaster step …

Not exactly.

But we did keep going to lessons.

Though, in an effort to minimize any and all six-foot cowboys, we signed up at the senior center nearby, where eighty-year-olds danced circles around us. The instructor herself was eighty-six—and still going strong in a pair of red rhinestone boots and a fringe jacket. We went every week, faithfully. Charlie was universally adored, and I was routinely pitied—but with a warmth and compassion that made it okay.

“Oh, sweetheart,” they’d say. “That’s not a rumba step.”

And then they’d show me. Again.

It’s fine. A little humiliation gets you laughing like nothing else can.

And I have begun to master right versus left.

And, for the record, I never mind having a reason to bump into Charlie.



* * *



DID CHARLIE AND I keep writing together? We did.

And did writing “lady movies” tank Charlie’s career, as Jablowmie had prophesized? Would Charlie have been better off lending his talents to the string-bikini reboot of Beer Tower III—or whatever project T.J. was meeting Donna Cole about at the coffee shop that day? A project she declined to work on, by the way. Which wasn’t my fault—though T.J. still insists that it was.