She sips the sweet shake and revels in the honesty of this woman’s poetry—the boldness. And what they did to you / you did not do to me. She read the other day that Olds once refused to go to a luncheon at the White House to protest a war, and she likes that. She wants to be that brazen. In the last light of the evening, it gets harder to see, and she slides her bookmark back into place. She reaches up to touch her new pixie cut, her blond hair all one color now, and makes a slurping sound as she finishes the shake. She puts the cup on the ground and settles into Brandon, his familiar smell like sandalwood. Brandon will not want to admit the light is fading, and he’ll keep reading for at least another ten minutes, even if he has to squint, and she will lie against him and close her eyes and open them just in time to see the last blue and pink of the sky.
Now, Suzette walks upstairs to the bedroom she shares with her husband, Damon. In a gray T-shirt and her comfortable jeans, she notices lately that she can no longer feel the tenderness of the fractured rib from where that girl kicked her. That girl who the police found quickly, whose friend Felicia was a runaway from Virginia who was returned home. She wonders about Natalie and where all her anger came from. “Go easy on her,” she said to the cops that day in the hospital, even though Damon said, “Screw her. Let her meet a cellmate who’ll teach her some manners.”
She feels the place where her ribs were sore for so long and remembers her sister Lisa telling her once when Suzette was waiting for a headache to go away that the body notices pain, but not the absence of pain. “That’s why you keep feeling the headache when it hurts, but when it goes back to normal, you don’t even realize it’s gone.” She likes that explanation. She thinks of Lisa every time she hurts and then the hurt disappears.
She crosses her arms and looks out at the mowed expanse of lawn, the thick patch of trees outside her window. These days, she thinks constantly about Owen, the toddler in foster care whose mother has a heroin problem. He has been in foster care since that day in July, and Suzette inquires about him all the time, imagines bringing him here and letting him never feel pain again, letting him run across their backyard and cutting up French toast for him in his high chair. Damon has come around to the idea lately, and she wonders what the process would be like to foster him, wonders if the mother could ever stop doing drugs and if she and Damon would be okay if they had him and then had to lose him. She thinks of pain and the absence of pain and pushing Owen on a swing at the park and letting him climb into their bed every time he had a nightmare. She looks outside, and the moon sits like the bottom of an anchor over the rows of trees.
She sees that Damon has flicked on the porch light. She thinks of Ahmed and Ginger coming over in a few minutes, and something about the four of them sitting around the living room together makes her giddy. The laughing, the talking. Perhaps a card game or some Yahtzee. The wine. The scoops of ice cream in bowls. Giggling with Ginger as they go back for more ice cream and start raiding the cupboard for tortilla chips and salsa. Maybe tonight she will tell them about Owen and see what they say.
Not far away, the dark roads make Ginger Lord nervous as they always do, but Ahmed is singing Frank Sinatra to her in the old Saab convertible he got at Classic Motors last week. Yes, he’s singing. The car is pale blue, and when he showed up in it at their house, he beeped the horn, stood in front of it, arms crossed, Ray-Bans on, and said, “Hey, baby. ’Sup?” She shook her head and smiled. So this was his surprise? She didn’t say how impractical it was. She didn’t say maybe, with the wedding coming up, they should discuss big purchases like this. She didn’t even think any of this, because Ahmed’s charm just crept over everything. “You won’t be able to keep the chicks away,” she said. “How can I compete?”
He took out a small bag with a new pair of women’s Ray-Bans in it and handed them to her. “These will stay in the glove box, and you’re the only chick allowed to wear them,” he said. “Keys to the kingdom, baby.” Now they drive, top down, and the stars are out as they head to Suzette and Damon’s. She looks over at him as he watches the road and sings. This man will be my husband, she thinks. Less than two months until the wedding, where they will stand in her parents’ garden and she will wear a simple dress and he a tan suit. She still can’t figure it out. How did this happen? She remembers walking with him outside Suzette’s wedding. She remembers him driving her to the hospital that night in December. And she remembers finally kissing him months later and thinking, yes, yes, he is what I want. Nothing has ever happened this fast and unexpectedly for Ginger.