“I . . . Honestly, I don’t know,” he said finally. “I just knew that if I didn’t talk to you, I’d regret it.”
You are not an experience, Rational Angie said, but Hopeless Angie had already taken over. This close, I could see that Ricky’s eyes were the color of Coca-Cola, the kind in a glass bottle, clear mahogany in the shifting afternoon light. That he smelled like freshly laundered clothes and spearmint gum. My gaze drifted to his exposed forearms—not muscular, exactly, but masculine, with roping veins and long lines of sinew. I wanted to ask him what about me he thought he would miss. I felt like he would answer truthfully, and that that answer would fill me.
“Fine,” I said. “But . . . law of equivalent exchange,* okay? I need your tales of woe too.”
If he was offended by my demand, he didn’t show it. Instead, he let out a bark of laughter.
“Oh my god,” he said, looking at me with awe. “Is that a Fullmetal Alchemist reference? Are you a weeb?* See? I knew it. I knew you were kin.”
His smile was so damn bright that I had to avert my eyes. Thankfully, he was too busy fiddling with the zipper of his hoodie to notice. I thought at first that he was removing it because he was too warm, but instead he pulled the lapels apart to show me the symbol on the shirt he was wearing underneath it.
“An Earthbender,* really?” I said, chuckling at his enthusiasm. I would give the man credit where it was due; he was very good at cheering me up. “Would’ve pegged you for Air, actually.”
Ricky looked genuinely affronted.
“An Airbender? Me?” He scoffed. “What would give you that idea?”
“Your sunny disposition?” I posited. “Your general spontaneity?”
“Me?” Ricky said. “I’m not spontaneous at all.”
I snorted, gesturing in an arc around us.
“Ricky. Hate to break it to you. But, uh . . . why am I here, talking to you right now, if you’re not spontaneous?”
“I thought we established that my talking to you is part of a great cosmic plan,” Ricky said, smirking. “No, but really, I’m not. I angst over every decision I make. It took me years to build up the courage to just say fuck it and do what I wanted to, you know? I almost ended up going to law school because of that.”
“Law?” I swallowed, imagining Ricky, hair slicked back, socializing with Frederick and his seedy lawyer friends in the back of a bar that straddled the line between classy and drug front. “That’s . . . huh.”
“Yeah, I don’t see it either. My grandpa did, though, so I entertained it for a bit,” he explained.
“Really?” I asked. Immigrant parents pushed their kids into medicine all the time, but, as Momma had astutely observed, Lawyers don’t make that much money these days. “Does he work in the field?”
Ricky laughed.
“Nah,” he said. “He’s a carpenter. Like it or not, I clearly got the art thing from him. He mostly builds custom furniture these days.” He pulled out his phone, beaming with pride. “Like . . . check this out.”
He skimmed through a series of photos showcasing beautifully sculpted, detailed vanities. One of them even had an interactive mirror, the likes of which I had only seen on the internet. I gaped.
“That’s amazing,” I said. “He should’ve just taught you to do this! Why even bother with law?”
Ricky shrugged.
“Pretty sure he just likes the billboards.” He smirked. “You know. Gutiérrez and Sons. ‘We bring the hammer!’”
“Didn’t work on your dad?” I asked.
“My dad,” Ricky said without skipping a beat, “is a piece of shit. So . . . no.”
He sounded bored as he said it, not impassioned or even angry but weary, the way you’d get over rain that never stopped or a drain that never completely came unclogged.
“That was very un-feminist of you, by the way,” he said, chugging along as if he hadn’t just dropped the Daddy Issues bomb on me. “Jumped straight to Dad. Why can’t Mom be the potential lawyer parent?”
I scrunched my nose.
“How’d you know that that wasn’t my next question?”
Ricky squinted one eye at me.
“Because it wasn’t.”
“You’re right. I’m problematic.” I watched a striped caterpillar inch its way up one of the bench’s legs. “So you decided to be an artist even though your grandpa was pushing for the J.D. because your dad is, what, unworthy?”