“How would you feel about it?” I asked. “If he moved here again.”
“Eh.” She shrugged. “I don’t expect it to change anything for me. I don’t see him.”
I nodded, not entirely sure whether I believed her. My parents’ divorce was not amicable, though they communicated about me via oddly abbreviated text message when necessary. Which must have been how my dad had informed her of the job interview. I wondered why he hadn’t yet told me. Maybe he didn’t want me to freak out before he knew for sure. Or maybe he was just waiting for our breakfast, so he could freak me out in person. He did love a big reveal. I’d have to pretend Mom hadn’t already told me so he wouldn’t be mad at her for ruining it.
I leaned over to kiss her on the cheek, and she hugged me around the neck, still propping her book open with her other hand. “I don’t think it will change much for me, either,” I said, both reassuring her and trying to convince myself.
“I hope not.”
“Yeah. Okay.” I slung my beach bag over my shoulder, suddenly desperate to get away. “I really have to go.”
“Be safe. And say hi to Jamie for me.”
“I will.”
Despite what she’d said, my mom loved Jamie, a fact about which my feelings had changed at least seventeen times. I had been relieved, and jealous, and happy, and proud, and surprised. Lately I hovered somewhere between sad and touched. She’d been good enough about hiding her personal disappointment when we broke up, but I knew she felt that she, too, had been in some way dumped. The affection was mutual: she and Jamie had been on a semiregular texting basis with each other, and they’d even hung out without me a few times. Sure, it was mostly in the context of attending my soccer games—sitting together in the bleachers, stopping for drive-through In-N-Out milkshakes on the way to one of my away games—but still. Jamie never said so, but it was clear she viewed my mom as a sort of second mother, more supportive than her own. Jamie’s mom hadn’t spoken to her for almost three months after learning she was gay, which only made my mom love her harder, and which made me jealous. And yet I was incapable of being as straightforwardly kind to her as Jamie was. I still kept so much to myself. I hadn’t explicitly told my mom Jamie and I were dating until three months in, and then I’d found out she knew almost to the day when things had changed. She never pried. She never asked me if I was sure this was what I wanted. I knew I should be grateful. And I was. It was not impossible for a person to be deeply grateful and profoundly annoyed at the same time.
When I pulled my truck into Jamie’s driveway, I realized that the last time I’d been there, we’d been together. I wondered, not for the first time, how long I’d have to keep having these before-and-after epiphanies: the first night I went to bed without calling her to say good night; the first Friday night she wasn’t my built-in plan; the first time I watched one of our movies alone. At first it was devastating, and then it became soothing in its devastatingness: for a while, all I’d wanted was to keep crying. I came to know my most reliable triggers and I pulled them again and again. But they stopped working, or else my body decided it had had enough. Now that the glamorous part of the suffering was over, I hoped someday soon I might order my life around some other major event. Or person.
* * *
—
It was early enough when we got there that the beach wasn’t yet swarmed, and Jamie and I trudged through hot sand to get to our usual spot, perfect for being equidistant between the ocean, the outdoor bathrooms (Jamie refused to pee in the ocean, not wanting to harm any fish), and the pier, which we’d walk under when we needed shade and a breeze, and which we’d climb the stairs to when we needed shaved ice. When the beach was available to you every day, almost year-round, people tended to get lazy, showing up midday, squeezing themselves into four-foot spaces between other towels, applying sunscreen upon arrival. But I took the beach seriously. Being there was often the highlight of my week, and I thought it only fair to give it the attention to detail it deserved.
While Jamie stripped off her T-shirt and shorts, I twisted my umbrella down into the sand and tried not to stare. When I sat down next to her, she held out the tube of sunscreen, somewhat apologetically. “Can you get my back? I tried, but…”
It was funny, or maybe awful, that after a certain point in our relationship, I’d stopped noticing her body so much. Her strong swimmer’s shoulders, the dimples at the small of her back, the curve of her waist, even her breasts, which for a time had been virtually all I could think about—these things faded into the background of her role in my life. It wasn’t fair, how something stopped feeling so special once you were used to it. I hadn’t meant to stop feeling that I was lucky just to touch her. I hadn’t meant to forget that I might not always get to.
I rubbed the sunscreen between my hands to warm it up first, but Jamie still arched in shock when I pressed them to her skin. Her back was fair and freckled, and I told myself it was only her safety I had in mind when I slipped my hands under the straps of her bikini to make sure no skin went uncovered. I wiped the extra lotion down her arms and then my own.
“Do you need me to do yours?”
I quickly shook my head, even though I wanted her to. “I put it on at home.” I’d worried in advance about the erotic potential of sunscreen application and decided it was best to limit it as much as possible.
Instead I unpacked our lunches, though it was barely eleven o’clock. Being on the beach, even for a minute, made me ravenous. We chewed our sandwiches silently, watching people arrive all around us. At the far end of the beach the last surfer holdouts were coming out of the water in their glittering wet suits, done until the late afternoon, when the rest of us would start packing up to leave.
“How do you make such good sandwiches?”
I laughed. “Me?”
“Yeah. Whenever I make one, even if it has the same exact ingredients, it tastes like shit.”
“That’s because you made it for yourself,” I said. “Food always tastes better made by someone else.”
“I think it’s specific to you, though,” said Jamie. A warmth entirely unrelated to the sun spread across my chest. “I mean, my mom’s food tastes like shit too,” she added.
I grinned. “It really does.”
Jamie elbowed me in the ribs. “Only I’m allowed to say that.” I winced from her touch but smiled through it. It was a nice but complicated feeling for her to tease me now, especially for something no one else knew me well enough to joke about. While Jamie could tolerate criticism of the people she loved—especially of her mom, especially during those few months of post-coming out silent treatment—I could not, even and maybe especially when I knew it was fair. One of my and Jamie’s biggest fights as a couple had started because Jamie had agreed when I said my mom seemed lonely. I’d stormed out of the restaurant where we were eating late-night tacos, gotten in my truck, and driven away. I came back for her a minute later, but still. It had not gone over well.