But as I hold the door for Jasmine and Maui to jump down, Joel comes out the front door, a thick utility belt around his waist. He’s still good-looking in a haunted sort of way. I wonder what has left those lines around his mouth.
Seeing me, he lifts his chin my direction. “Hey, Phoebe! How are you? You guys are still friends, huh?”
I’ve been keeping her at such a distance that this is a loaded question, but honestly, how do you stop being someone’s sister? Suze is my family. There’s unresolved stuff between us, but . . . “Yep. How’s it going back in Blue Cove?”
A nod. “Good enough. I was sorry to hear about your grandmother. She was one of the best people I’ve ever known.”
“She was. I still miss her.”
He gives Jasmine a kind smile. “Hello, young lady. Is this your grandmother?”
“She’s my nana,” Jasmine says. “We brought Yul Brynner back to Suze.”
He gives me a quizzical look. “Like The King and I?”
“Yep.” I touch my girl’s head. “This is Jasmine.”
“Like Aladdin,” she pipes up.
It makes him laugh. “Smart, too, I think. She’s inside.”
Maui bounds up the steps, Jasmine right behind him with the cat carrier in hand, leaning sideways to balance the weight of it.
“How are you, Phoebe?” Joel opens a toolbox on the side of the truck and reaches inside. “I see the flower farm every morning on my way down the mountain. It’s a splendor.”
“A splendor,” I repeat, smiling. “You always had the most surprising vocabulary for a guy.”
“Yeah?” He glances at me over his shoulder, and I remember how bad my crush was, a living thing that was born of a single week of kisses followed by nothing at all. “Thanks,” he says as he straightens. He’s gathered a handful of bits and pieces. Waits for me, and we walk up the steps. “You were the only person I ever met who read more than I did.”
“Suze was pretty close.”
“Nah. You always outread us both.” He gestures, and I step inside ahead of him. Maui bounds toward me, slurps my hand, runs back toward the kitchen, his nails clattering on the floor. I’m here all the time in my capacity as caretaker, for which Suze pays me too much money. I’ve repeatedly told her I’d do it for free, for the love of the place, but she continues to deposit a ridiculous sum in my account every month.
The thing is, I do love the pleasure of the quiet rooms when I’m here by myself, disturbed by nothing but my ghostly presence. I love the space and have since I climbed in a window when I was ten and found the abandoned rooms still perfectly furnished, as if someone ran away in the middle of the night. The truth was much sadder—an old man died here and had no heirs, so the place fell into probate and was somehow forgotten.
Filled now with animals and a little girl and Suze and Joel, it’s an entirely different place. The kettle has made the window behind it steamy. A seagull is sitting on the railing outside. Jasmine and Maui have landed in the living room, near the bookcases, and Joel walks toward the back of the kitchen. “Don’t turn anything on,” Suze says, poking her head into the living room from the kitchen. “The electricity is off.”
“Okay.”
Suze stands by the counter, one foot over the other—it’s a tic we both have, one among many. In the soft, stormy light, she looks haggard. Older than I could ever have imagined back in the day.
As if to mock us, behind her on the shelf is a photo of the two of us when we were three weeks past our twenty-first birthdays, at the premiere of A Woman for the Ages.
She invited Amma, too, but Amma didn’t want to bother with all the folderol and dressing up. I was a nervous wreck on the inside, but my entire job for the night was to be support for Suze, who pretended she wasn’t nervous, but I knew she was by the torn thumbnail on her left hand, which a nail tech fixed with some glue and fresh polish and then painted with a bitter something to keep her from doing it again.
We got ready at her new house in Bel Air. It wasn’t huge, only three bedrooms, but it boasted a courtyard with a swimming pool under palm trees, floor-to-ceiling windows in all the interior rooms, and an elegance of line my years of architecture drooling could appreciate. “Did you ever think you’d really have a house like this?” I asked the day I arrived.
She snorted. “No way! I’m still pinching myself. Beryl told me to buy real estate, so I did.” She squeezed my hand. “A swimming pool! Just like yours.”