“You told me you were taking my car to San Jose to go shopping, Vivian!” I thought my mom would be gone by the time I got back from Jonah’s. But there she was, all dolled up for the gallery event, walking out to the car as I zoomed back from Jonah’s on the Vespa. She marched me inside, face as crimson as her skirt.
“I was! For a Vespa! I told you I wanted one!” The very nice Vespa salesmen loaded it into my mom’s car, and I drove it back to Verona Cove, and I had a neighbor help me get it out of the car, and now it’s mine! Powder blue and quintessentially me—my mother cannot ruin this. “Why are you freaking out? I bought a helmet!”
It’s a totally sensible purchase. I already have my motorcycle license because the guy I was dating when I turned sixteen had a bike. And it’s a GT—fast enough for the highway! Now I won’t have to borrow her car all the time.
“This was thousands of dollars, Vivian.” I hate that she keeps saying my full name like it’s a swearword. “From a credit card you stole from my wallet!”
“It’s my card! And money Grandma left me! It’s not stealing when it’s mine!”
Her voice becomes hushed, scary. “I confiscated that card from you because you couldn’t act responsibly with it. It was understood that purchases go through me first.”
I am incandescent with rage, lighting up the kitchen with the redness of my face. “Stop treating me like a child! Do you even hear yourself? I’ll be eighteen next year!”
Her eyes narrow, but I can still see her pupils trying to pierce into me. “You’re not taking your pills, are you?”
“YES! I! AM!” I am taking them. Well, one of them. The other, I’m taking, too! To the cliff every day so I can watch them fall to their deaths.
“Let me see your purse.”
“What? No! Why?” But then I realize: I have nothing to hide. “Fine. Here.”
She extracts both prescription bottles and dumps the pills out on the table. She counts them and finds—I’m sure—the exact amount there’d be if I were swallowing them all daily.
I see her shoulders sag, in defeat or relief I’m not sure.
“You can’t blame me for being worried. This is how it started last time. Next thing I know, you’ll be getting another tattoo without permission!”
My eyes blur over with angry, hurt, everything-all-at-once tears. She knows I hate the stupid watercolor lotus inked on my side, that I’m getting it removed, that I recoil from it. “Don’t talk to me about last time! I’m having a wonderful summer, and I’m better, and you’re ruining it by not trusting me.”
She has no idea. She was there, but she has no idea how scary it got—like my brain, my body, my whole life was on fast-forward and I couldn’t push stop or even pause. How low it got after, living with what had happened. And then how numb. How much I missed feeling music in my bones.
I remember so much of it, and I would surrender my best vintage sewing patterns to forget. My mom doesn’t know the worst of it because I’ve never told her, because saying it out loud would be reliving it, because I know she’d never look at me the same way again.
“I think I’ll cancel tonight,” she says quietly, but she’s bluffing—she has to be. The gallery is showing one of her paintings.
“Well, do whatever you want, but I won’t even be here,” I say, as controlled and prim as I can muster. “I’m going over to Jonah’s. He’s making me dinner.”
Okay, he’s coming over here so we can be alone, but eh—details, schmetails.
Her posture relaxes even further, fists unclenched. “Well, that’s sweet of him. He’s quite the cook, isn’t he?”
“He is.” As far as my mom’s concerned, Jonah can do no wrong. He’s so normal, so stable—living proof that I’m doing fine. She saw him at the farmers’ market one day with the littles and wouldn’t shut up about how sweet and responsible he seems, how wonderful it is that I’m spending time with such a nice boy. She’s right, of course, but he’s not so nice that he won’t come over when she’s not home and make me dinner and spend the rest of the evening in my bedroom. I cover my mouth, as if I am thinking very hard. But I’m just hiding my smile.
“All right,” she says, picking up her keys. “This conversation is not over, but we’re tabling it for now. The Vespa’s going back. I’m not happy, Viv.”
Jonah shows up an hour later with a brown paper grocery bag. For some reason, this draws me to him even more, imagining he’s my older, live-in boyfriend bringing home groceries to our big, modern beach house.
“This is good timing,” he says. “I’ve been working on a few new recipes for the restaurant. You can try one tonight instead of waiting until your birthday party.”
“I’m getting a birthday party?” I clap with delight, and I’m already imagining silly hats and fairy lights.
Jonah rolls his eyes. “You said what you wanted for your birthday was for me to fix up the patio, so that’s what I’m doing.”
I watch him unpack the groceries and lay them on the table, and there are plenty of things I don’t recognize—something green and leafy that is not exactly normal lettuce, a vegetable that looks like a cross between a potato and a radish. We find pots and pans and spatulas together, roving through Richard’s kitchen because my mom and I almost never use it, so I don’t know where anything is. Jonah puts salmon in the oven, and he places the potato-radishes—which he called red potatoes—into a saucepan of boiling water.
My mom said she’d be home late. But, even after our fight, I won’t be surprised if she has a few glasses of champagne and goes home with another tortured artist. I’ll get a regret-filled text message by midnight, but it won’t be so regretful that she actually changes her mind. I’m not judging her—I don’t want it to sound like I am—because I understand; I do. My mom wants someone to love her, and I recognize that having a daughter who loves you is not enough and that she craves to be adored by a steady, interesting, kindhearted man. I’m not saying I think going home with randoms is the best way to figure it out, but it might be fun and it’s certainly better than staying home and meeting no one.
I didn’t figure that out on my own, about my mom. My aunt has always been chatty and judgmental about my mom after a glass or two of wine. Because she’s not happy in her marriage and jealous that my mom isn’t tied down to anyone. That part, I figured out on my own.
I sit on the counter, swinging my legs as I watch Jonah work. It’s all so lovely, the easy rhythm as he slices peaches for a salad, the deftness of his hands in every movement between stove and island and sink. “This is really beautiful to watch, Jonah—I mean it. It’s like watching you speak a different language, you know? It’s like when you walk past two people speaking Spanish, and you don’t understand the meaning of each word, but the sound of it is beautiful, and you can tell they understand each other. That’s how you are with food.”
He smiles, stirring at some kind of sauce. “It’s not that complicated.”
Well, only because he grew up speaking food.
“Hey, Jonah? What’s a reduction? Like, it’s on menus sometimes—a balsamic reduction or something.”
“Oh. It’s a technique for making a sauce. You heat ingredients in a pan until enough evaporates, reducing it. The remaining sauce is more flavorful. Sometimes thicker.”
“Hmm. Good to know.” From my seat on the counter, I’m eye level with him, which is new, so I grab him by the front of his shirt and tug him toward me. It’s the kind of kissing we sink into so fast, my hands drawn immediately to that gorgeous hair, tugging him in farther. I feel that moment where rational thought swishes out of me, and it’s like a lever that propels a train out of the station; I’m gone, there’s no stopping me, we’re riding this rail all the way to the end.
But he pulls his mouth away from mine, and I think he’s going to say something sexy to me, but instead he says, “The salmon’s going to burn.”
It takes a moment for me to get my bearings because my mind is so fogged over, levitating above us. You’d think this would hurt my feelings, that my kissing talent isn’t enough to distract him, like I can’t transport him far enough away from the reality of cooking. But I don’t want someone who makes it easy; I don’t want someone who follows every slapdash plan that I create in my mind. Jonah Daniels can be such an enigma. There are smudges of my red lipstick across his mouth, making him more delicious than any of the food in this kitchen.
I watch him carefully as he lifts the salmon from the oven. “Jonah?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you want to be a chef?”
“I think so.” He sets the pan down and lifts up the saucepan from the stove. When he drains the water into the sink, steam swarms the air. “I can’t really imagine doing anything else.”
“So you’ll go to culinary school, do you think?”
“I hope so. Eventually.” After he dumps what I now know to be red potatoes into a bowl, he adds a little milk and a cut of butter. I keep waiting for him to elaborate, but like I said, Jonah Daniels can be an enigma.
So I’ll prod him. I know we’re not in the most comfortable topical territory for Jonah, but it’s good for him to talk about his feelings and plans. “Would you take over Tony’s?”
Jonah frowns thoughtfully. He mashes the potatoes with a silver kitchen tool I don’t recognize, and the muscles in his arms flex as he does so. I sit on my hands so they’ll stop trying to reach over and unbutton his shirt. “No. I don’t think so. At least not for a long time. I love the restaurant, and I love Verona Cove . . . but I want to live in a bigger city.”
The scents carry across the air between us—faint garlic and melted butter and another earthy spice that I can’t place.
“There’s school for costume designing, right?” he asks. “Are those in big cities?
“New York and LA, mostly, I think. But I’m sure I can find an apprenticeship with some fabulous designer because I’m already a rather talented seamstress. Also, I want to go to Japan for at least a year. After that, I’ll probably live in California for work.” I consider this, opening my mind to the many possible visions I see of my life. “But maybe New York, doing TV or indie films. You know, people tend to think of costume design as, like, beautiful, accurately re-created gowns in period films. But there’s such an art to costume-designing for modern realism, like in TV shows. You have to study the character and know what choices he or she would make, and you help create the idea of the portrayal, you and the writers and the actor or actress and the hair and makeup team.”
“I can see you doing both,” Jonah says, smiling. He’s spooning the smashed red potatoes onto a bed of lettuce called arugula. I’m becoming very well-versed in vegetables tonight.
“You’re right—I’d love to do a current-day TV show, but I’d have to have at least one big, sweeping statement movie. Because, you know, clothes can be the difference between a movie scene and an iconic moment in film.”
“Oh yeah?” He looks amused by such a grandiose statement, but I’m right. I’m always right about costume design.
“Of course. Without the black scoop-back gown, the elbow gloves, and the statement necklace, Audrey Hepburn is just a random girl on a New York City street.”
“And the tiara.”
I blink at him a few times while I process this. “What?”
“She wears a little tiara, too, right? Holly Golightly?” He doesn’t look up at me because he’s carefully placing the salmon onto the mound of mashed potatoes.
I’m charmed. Oh Holy Mother Earth, am I ever charmed. “You’ve seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s?”
“Sure. My mom made me watch all those old movies when I was little.” Both plates are almost done now, and he’s putting a little more glaze onto the salmon. This whole experience is mouthwatering, and I have to wonder how I got so lucky—a beautiful boy on this beautiful night, making me this beautiful meal.
“Hey, Jonah?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t really know how to break this to you,” I say. I hop down from the counter and look up at him. “But I think you are maybe falling in love with me.”
He hands me my plate, and his smile is the faintest bit smug. “Viv, I just made you wild-caught Alaskan salmon baked with mango chutney, on a bed of garlic red potatoes and arugula. While talking about an Audrey Hepburn movie. I think you are maybe falling in love with me.”
I lift to my tiptoes so I can press my mouth against his. When I return to my heels, I smile right back. Even though there are no maybes at all in this situation and we both know it, I can be an enigma, too. “Maybe so, Jonah. Maybe so.”