The restaurant is called Tony’s because that’s what it is—my dad’s. It feels as much like home as my own house does. I know every scar in the wood floors and baseboards. I know every ingredient in the kitchen. I know that you have to pull the freezer handle up and over at the same time if you ever want it to open. When my dad bought the building, it was a pizza kitchen. He and Felix redid most of it years ago, but the old brick oven remains. Both before and after my dad.
The menu consists of things my dad liked best when he opened the restaurant two decades ago. Most entrées are inspired by the Italian cuisine my dad learned at home or the French cuisine he learned in culinary school. Chicken piccata, steak au poivre, pesto tortellini, that kind of thing. He made the simple classics so well that they tasted brand-new again.
When working lunch prep, I have the same routine: wash and tear lettuce, dice tomatoes and onions, grate cheese. I like the ritual of it. But today I can’t focus. Bad news for someone wielding several types of knives. All I can think about is dinner. I scrubbed my hands in the industrial sink but didn’t touch the blue-paint phone number on my arm.
My shift is almost over by the time Felix busts in through the back door, carrying two cardboard boxes. I can’t see his face, just his tanned arms on either side. “Hola, amigos!”
Everyone grunts their hellos. In a kitchen, you call the chef “Chef.” It’s protocol. I mean, football players don’t call their coach “John” or “Eric.” They call him “Coach.” But my dad was Chef for almost twenty years. I thought it was his first name until I was four. Like, I thought he became a chef because he already had the name. There couldn’t be another Chef at Tony’s. Felix insists that we still call him Felix, even though he’s the head chef now.
Felix is my dad’s best friend. Was. No—is. I never know which tense is right. When someone dies, that person no longer is your best friend. He was your best friend. But when you’re the person left here, like Felix is, you’re still in the present tense. Like I am. Tony Daniels was my dad. But I am his son.
“Got yourself a tattoo, Maní?” Felix glances at my arm as he places the boxes on the counter near my work space. My dad called me Peanut when I was in elementary school. It embarrassed the hell out of me until I made him stop. Never thought I’d miss it—never in a hundred years. So I like that Felix still calls me that, but in Spanish.
“That a phone number?” Felix leans closer to see the marking. “A girl’s phone number?”
I try to sound all casual. “Oh. Yeah.”
“No way.” He waits for me to surrender, to admit that I’m lying. When I don’t, he punches my arm. “It is? You asked a girl for her number?”
Gabe, one of the prep cooks, overhears this. “Oooh, Daniels. Got yourself a lady?”
He dances a little, thrusting his hips as the other guys whoop. But I’m actually glad they razz me. After my dad died, they could barely look at me. The whole kitchen was so quiet.
“Nice moves,” I tell Gabe, who is still doing his stupid-ass dance. “Had plenty of practice humping nothing, huh?”
He flicks me off, grinning while the others start in on him. Even Felix laughs. It’s a big, round laugh like my dad’s. Their friendship spanned so many years that their personalities melded together. Felix uses a lot of the same words and phrases from inside jokes. Sometimes he inflects a word the way my dad would. Or maybe it’s that my dad sounded like Felix sometimes. On the good days, he makes me feel closer to my dad. On the bad days, he makes me miss my dad until it feels like my ribs are splitting apart.
“Get out of here, then, Maní,” Felix says as he heads into the office. The office is really a broom closet with a desk and shelf shoved in. My dad, tall as he was, always looked ridiculous in there. “Go call your girl.”
I return home with two grocery bags of supplies for my usual pizza menu. One pizza will be simple, for Silas, Bekah, and Isaac—the pepperoni purists. And for Vivi, if she’s a meat eater. If not, she can have some of the artichoke, spinach, and feta cheese pizza. My mom loves it, and so does Naomi, because she’s a vegetarian. I hope Vivi wants that one because it’s my most inventive pizza—the impressive one. I’ll also make a small cheese pizza for Leah. She hates any other toppings to even touch her pizza, and she barely likes tomato sauce. Basically, it’s round cheesy bread. I’ll eat whatever is left over because I like them all.
When I turn onto our street, I see Silas on the front lawn. He’s pitching a Wiffle ball to Isaac, who swings and hits nothing but summer air. Bekah laughs from the infield, and Leah doesn’t notice. I think she’s supposed to be playing outfield, but she’s dancing around in the grass instead. By the time I’m near them, Silas’s pitch connects with Isaac’s bat, and Silas misses the catch, pretending like he made an honest effort. Isaac stumbles toward first base, which appears to be a flattened cereal box.
They only ask Silas to play Wiffle ball these days, not me. When I stopped coming home in my uniform last spring, I told them I’d stopped liking baseball. That I hadn’t gone out for the team again because it wasn’t as fun as I thought. The truth was that I had to be home with them. Naomi was at college, my mom wouldn’t get out of bed, and Silas couldn’t do it on his own.
“Hey, guys,” I say. There are several responses at once. Isaac demands to know if I saw his hit, Bekah asks what’s for dinner, and Leah wants to know when Vivi is coming over. “Yes, I saw the hit, and it was awesome. We’re having homemade pizza for dinner, and I told Vivi to come over around six.”
“Who’s Vivi?” Silas asks, recovering the Wiffle ball that Isaac hit.
“My friend!” Leah says.
I make eye contact with Silas. “I’ll tell you later.”
That’s all it takes for me to become old news. Isaac begs Silas to pitch again, and Bekah argues that it’s her turn. I’m not dealing with this noise. No way. I’ve paid my dues for the day.
Inside, I assemble the ingredients from the store with the ones I already had at home. I use my dad’s pizza sauce recipe, which he altered from my grandmother’s recipe. She was born in Sicily, so that piece of paper is Italian gold. Not that I need the recipe card anymore. The trick is a little bit of honey and some marjoram. A little sweet, a little spicy. Like me, eh? my dad would say, narrating from behind the kitchen island. My mom would mutter uh-huh and roll her eyes even as she smiled.
I shift into my cooking trance easily. When my mind is juggling all the steps in a recipe, I can’t think about anything else. Well, I guess I could, but I’d screw up the food. Every time I finish one task—mix dough so it has time to rise, defrost pepperoni—my mind adds another task onto the end of the list. My hands have to move to keep up with the ongoing tasks. I like making a whole meal at once because it’s even more complicated than just an entrée. Tonight, I’ll make a salad and a dessert, too.
In the kitchen, my dad is still everywhere. In the wooden handles of the knives, in the heavy pizza stones. His hands touched these things a thousand times. I know it’s lame, but when I’m cooking, I can remember his voice most clearly. Jonah, try the julienne for those onions; good work, kid. You know what they say, son—a watched pot doesn’t boil, but an unwatched pot makes for soggy pasta. Keep an eye on that thing.
I’m not sure how much time passes as I finish prepping the pizzas and mixing the salad. Eventually, Bekah and Isaac bound into the living room to play a video game, and Silas leans on the kitchen island. I glance up at him from pitting cherries for black cherry cobbler.
“So, Leah really invited a friend over for dinner?” he asks. I knew he’d be surprised. We both worry about her.
When I nod, he says, “That’s awesome. Did she run into someone when you guys were out this morning?”
“Um, sort of. Met someone new at the pottery place.”
“Even better.”
“She’s . . . a little older than Leah.”
“Like Isaac’s age?”
There’s a knock from the front of the house. I lean back to look out the storm door. Vivi’s standing there, waving and holding what appears to be a bottle of wine. She’s almost an hour early. Shit. She wasn’t supposed to know how much effort went into dinner. It was supposed to appear effortless. Like a feast at Hogwarts. Wait, no! I don’t want to be Dobby in this equation. Jesus. “No. Like the age of that girl right there. Because that is her.”
Silas glances at me, waggling his eyebrows as he moves to open the door. “You’re going to explain this to me later.”
Vivi’s wearing the same thing as she was earlier, short shorts and a loose sweater that is a useless shield for the bathing suit top beneath. She introduces herself to Silas and says something about not realizing I had a brother. Then she laughs when Silas tells her there are six of us total. I probably should have warned her this morning. Maybe she scares easy. If she does, she won’t last through the salad course.
“Hey, Jonah,” Vivi says brightly. She sets the bottle down on the counter. “I’ve never been early to anything in my life, but I thought I’d come over and hang out for a while before dinner, just because I kind of needed to get out of my house. And I brought some sparkling grape juice because I thought it would be fun, but that was before I knew that you have five siblings. So I guess everyone can have about as much as a shot glass can hold.”
She laughs again, that trilling sound. Silas stares between us, looking for the missing link in this story. Before I can respond, Leah turns the corner, almost crashing into Vivi’s bare legs.
“Vivi!” Leah cries. “You’re here! Hi! Do you want to see my coloring books?”
Without missing a beat, Vivi nods in amazement. “Of course! How did you know? That is precisely why I came over early.”
She winks at me as Leah tugs her by the arm, and my face is probably turning the color of the tomatoes. When they’re out of the room, I return to my pitting. I can feel my brother’s stare boring into me.
“Jonah, don’t lie to me. How did you get that girl to come over to our house?”
“What? I don’t know. What does that even mean?”
“Did you adopt her? Or hire her in some way?”
I make sure none of the littles are looking before giving Silas the finger with both hands.
“Chill.” He hits the back of my shoulder. “I’m just impressed you invited a cute girl over.”
“I didn’t. Leah did.”
“I get it now,” he says, pointing at the island. “Why you busted out the black cherry cobbler. Nice.”
“Shut up.” God, I’m a loser.
I used to be good at talking to girls. Or at least not bad. With three sisters, I know girls aren’t that mysterious. They’re just people. I used to talk my friend Zach through this like, Dude, just ask her questions like you would anybody. What’s she interested in? What does she care about? It’s not that hard. So I think I’m just rusty.
Leah and Vivi settle onto one of the benches at our huge farmhouse table. There are single chairs at each end, one for my mom and one for my dad. I always found the benches annoying during family dinners. You can’t shift around without making two of your siblings move with you. But now, I’d do anything to have a table filled with eight people. One of us always sits in my dad’s chair and another in my mom’s. It’s awkward, and it feels wrong. But it’s better than staring at two empty chairs.
Armed with a whole stack of coloring books, Leah explains every picture.
“See,” she tells Vivi. “This is where she goes out in the snow and wears the green dress.”
I try to keep focused on the dessert, but I can’t help eavesdropping on Vivi. She’s asking Leah about all of us, about how old we are and what we like to do. Vivi’s a snake charmer, making words rise out of Leah’s mouth. My sister chatters on—three bigs, three littles, but thankfully no mention of our parents.
“Smells great, Jonah!” Vivi calls when the pizza is hot enough to melt the cheese.
“Thanks.” Back to my cobbler. Because my talking-to-her track record is at crash-and-burn, screaming-as-we-plummet status.
Vivi squares her shoulders back toward Leah. “Okay, I think I’ve got them all. Naomi, Silas, Rutherford, Bekah, Isaac, and Leah.”
Leah dissolves into giggles. “No! Not Rutherford. Jonah.”
“Oh, right.” Vivi smacks her forehead. “Duh, Viv. Okay, tell them to me one more time.”
Taking a big breath, Leah recites all our names. “Naomi, Silas, Jonah, Bekah, Isaac, and me.”
“Naomi, Silas, Jonah, Bekah, Isaac,” Vivi repeats, “and me.”
The giggling starts all over again. “No, me . . . Leah!”
“My name’s not Leah!” Vivi says. “It’s Vivi!”
Leah’s a goner, sideways on the bench with laughter. I feel myself smiling.
“Sounds like a party in here.” Naomi appears in the kitchen doorway, work bag on her shoulder. She stops short when she sees a stranger at the kitchen table. “Um. Hello.”
“Hello!” Vivi says, sitting up straight. “You must be Naomi.”
Naomi stiffens. Maybe it’s the surprise of an unexpected addition who somehow knows her name. Maybe it’s that Naomi is not exactly a warm person to begin with. Maybe it’s that Naomi is perpetually tired from the commute to her internship. But whatever it is, my sister is not thrilled. “And you are . . . ?”
“Vivi,” she says simply, as if her name is an explanation in itself. And, as I’m coming to find out, it sort of is.
“She’s my friend,” Leah announces, lifting her chin up.
“Leah invited me over for dinner after she found me wandering around Main Street like a stray cat, with no one around to feed me. Does that sound about right, Leah? Meowwww.” Vivi glances at my little sister, who nods confidently through her giggles.
“Umm . . . okay.” Naomi’s not even fake smiling. “Jonah, I think we have some soda in that garage refrigerator. That’ll be good with pizza. Help me carry it?”
She’s giving me an intentional look. In response, I throw a glance at Silas. I don’t have to—he’s already lifting himself off the couch. We each play referee for the other two. Silas and I rarely fight, but we’ll both get into it with Naomi every once in a while.
When we’re all three in the garage, my sister turns with her hands on her hips. “In the future, I’d appreciate if you didn’t invite total strangers into our home.”
“She’s not a stranger. And Leah invited her—not me.”
“We agreed. We agreed to keep things quiet around the house for Mom.”
“Yeah, and look how far that’s gotten us. Besides, I like her. She’s . . . sunny.”
She snorts. “I’m shocked. You like a girl who looks and dresses like that.”
Okay, as if I wasn’t pissed already. That’ll do it. My face goes hot. “You know what, Naomi? I don’t really give a shit what you think.”
“That’s just charming, Jonah. Very mature.”
“You’re not even here most of the time. I don’t know why you think you can move home for the summer and start telling everyone how it is. We did this for months without you.”
Her eyes narrow. “So my opinion no longer counts because I have to be in college some of the time?”
“Hey, you said it, not me. This is our full-time reality. You get to come and go.”
Naomi recoils. Her voice becomes a scary whisper. “I come home every chance I get. Most kids my age go on spring breaks and study abroad, and I’m here. Do you know how insane my commute is?”
“And I dropped baseball to be home with them after school.” I gesture to include Silas. “We get up at the ass crack of dawn; we help with homework and school projects. We—”
“Enough.” Silas’s voice is quiet. “We’re not playing the game of who has given up the most.” Naomi and I both open our mouths, still arguing our cases. Silas holds up his hand. “Stop. Jonah, you don’t get to disregard Naomi because she was at school most of the year.”
She looks vindicated, but Silas keeps talking. “And Naomi, you don’t get to make unilateral decisions because you’re the oldest. Jonah’s right. I’m okay with anyone who can make Leah laugh like that.”
Naomi’s eyes burn into me. “Fine.”
“Fine.” My jaw clamps after I say the word.
We come back in, holding the soda as our excuse. Vivi has made setting the table into some sort of game, and Leah’s so delighted that Isaac and Bekah wander into the kitchen, too, wanting in on the fun. I give Naomi a look, like See—this is a good thing. She avoids me.
When Vivi’s not looking, I poke Isaac’s shoulder and hand him the plate of food for our mom. He turns to take it upstairs without a word. We do this every night, even though she only sometimes eats it. Other times, she shuffles downstairs to the kitchen at odd hours, searching for anything appetizing. If one of us sees her, she startles like she’s a burglar caught red-handed stealing our food.
“Oh! I almost forgot!” Vivi leaps up as everyone else assembles around the table. I’ve set all the food out to be passed around already, so I don’t know what she forgot. “The sparkling juice! Jonah, do you have some little glasses for it somewhere?”
“I think so.” I dig around the hutch until I find mini champagne glasses that must have belonged to my grandmother. There’s a pop as Vivi opens the bottle, and she pours a bit of sparkling juice into each glass, passing them out to my siblings.
It’s a holiday. It was not a holiday five minutes ago.
Vivi climbs back onto the bench with Leah. I nestle in between Isaac and Bekah. Silas and Naomi sit at the ends of the table—their natural places as the oldest.
“Thank you so much for welcoming me into your home,” Vivi says, lifting the little glass. “I don’t have any siblings, and I’m so glad to pretend to be a Daniels for the night.”
A Daniels is not something anyone in Verona Cove has wanted to be for six months now. Her ignorance is a relief. Like we don’t have to fit into our New Life of Mourning as long as Vivi is here. We can breathe easy in our stiflingly sad house.
“And thank you especially to Jonah for the most beautiful meal I’ve seen in ages. I swear to the Man in the Moon, if it tastes half as good as it looks, I’m going to come meowing back at your front door for table scraps.” She winks at Isaac. His cheeks redden beneath the rims of his glasses. “So . . . cheers!”
Vivi holds up her glass and clinks it against everyone else’s. Leah looks like she’s been invited to a tea party with Alice in Wonderland.
Bekah scrutinizes Vivi’s face, in awe of her. “So, your mom lets you wear that lipstick?”
Oh God, kill me. Someone. Anyone. End it. My sister is going to grill Vivi about her appearance. And parents.
Vivi smiles. It makes her lips look like an apple slice. Red Delicious. “My mom is a painter, so, really, she can’t get mad if I paint my lips, now, can she?”
“Cool,” Bekah says under her breath. She’s resting her left hand in her lap, the way Vivi is.
“Oh my God,” Vivi says, swallowing her first bite. “This is the best salad I’ve ever had in my life. Literally. What is in this thing? Like, manna or something?”
“What’s manna?” Leah frowns down at her bowl. “This cheese tastes like barf.”
“Leah,” Naomi snaps. “That’s not nice.”
Vivi just laughs. “Manna is the food they eat in heaven. And stinky cheese is delicious cheese; you just don’t realize that until you’re older. Trust me, though. Someday, you’ll eat this salad again and realize, holy moly, it’s sprinkled with magic.”
I clear my throat. “It’s just lettuce, Gorgonzola, honey-glazed pecans, and diced pear. The dressing is a plum vinaigrette.”
“He makes the dressing himself,” Bekah says. I’m pleasantly surprised that she’d brag about me.
“It’s kinda more of a fall salad,” I say, “because of the—”
“Oh no.” Bekah groans, glancing at Vivi. “I got him started. We’re gonna have to hear about food for the rest of dinner.”
Okay. No longer pleased with Bekah.
Vivi launches into a story about how she once ate armadillo by accident, which has everyone cracking up. Even Naomi wants to laugh. I mean, she’s not actually laughing—she’s ripping pieces of her pizza crust off and chewing them mercilessly. But I can tell she wants to laugh. Once my sister decides to be grouchy, she never changes her mind.
My gaze moves clockwise, taking each person in. The kitchen feels warmer, fuller. Vivi teases Silas and Isaac, who seem sheepish and delighted by the attention. She compliments Bekah and asks Naomi questions about her internship. My siblings are locked into her, rotating in her orbit. I am, too. It’s like I can’t look away.
“Oh my God, Jonah, look at this dessert. Are you kidding me?” Vivi stabs at the cobbler. “Black cherries are my life. I’m serious. They’re my absolute favorite fruit; I’m totally obsessed, like cannot stop eating them the past few weeks.”
“Jonah and me are obsessed, too!” Leah says. “We eat cherries every day over the summer, but we know how to spit out the pits, so it’s okay.”
Silas shoots me a look, impressed that someone coaxed Leah that far out of her shell.
After dinner, Vivi announces that she’ll hang around to color more with Leah. I bus the table with help from my brothers, and Naomi disappears upstairs, still annoyed with me. Bekah sits on the couch pretending to read while still watching Vivi like she’s a unicorn in the wild. My hands dunk dishes into warm sink water, but I keep stealing glances into the living room. Vivi is lying on her stomach, coloring alongside Leah on the floor. Their knees are bent, feet swaying up in the air. My eyes follow Vivi’s body from her red toenails, up her legs, tiny shorts. When she laughs at something Leah said, it’s loud and happy and changes the whole shape of her face. The knife in my hands clatters into the metal sink.
“Jonah!” Leah yells. “Come look!”
I glance away so Vivi won’t realize I was already looking. God. I once saw a video online of a dog crashing into a screen door. Over and over. He couldn’t figure it out. This is me and trying to be cool in front of Vivi.
“Come look at my picture!” Leah demands.
Fortunately, I have a master’s degree in Leah’s Art Criticism. I say everything looks beautiful and ask the artist lots of questions about her color choices. She loves her princess coloring books so much that I’m surprised she’s letting Vivi use one.
“Wow! Your mermaid looks just like in the movie,” I tell Leah. Then I steal a glance at Vivi’s coloring page. Her princess has purple hair, thick-rimmed glasses, and a lip ring.
Leah examines Vivi’s drawing, too. “Belle doesn’t have purple hair. Or glasses.”
“This isn’t Belle,” Vivi says. “This is her twin sister, Claudette. She goes to a university where she’s studying marine biology. She has to wear her glasses because she’s farsighted and because she reads a lot of textbooks.”
“But why is her hair purple?”
“Because she goes scuba diving sometimes, so she’s seen how many colors there are underwater.”
“Like fish?”
“Like rainbow fish and coral and underwater plants and all kinds of things. She can’t just go down into that kingdom with mousy-brown hair, you know? She’d be out of place.”
Leah nods as if this is totally sensible. “Cool. What’s it called? Marinabology?”
“Muh-reen bi-ol-o-jee,” Vivi says. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A teacher.” This is Leah’s stock answer to something a lot of adults ask kids. Also, this might be the only profession she knows other than chef. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
Vivi presses her for more. “Okay, clear your mind. Like, totally blank—are you picturing nothing in your head? Nothing at all. Infinite black space.”
Leah pinches her eyes shut. “Uh-huh.”
“You can be anything, anything in the whole world. Imagine the entire blue-and-green planet with swirly white clouds—the way it looks from space. Out of everything on this enormous Earth, what do you most want to be?”
Leah considers this. “A peacock.”
I almost choke on my laugh. She’s the funniest, most creative kid in the world. “You’d be a peacock?”
She nods, eyebrows pulled down. I know that look. It says, You better not be teasing me. And I’m not. “They’re blue and their feathers are the prettiest.”
Vivi stares at her, totally serious, with her lips pursed in curiosity. “What makes you think you can’t be one?” She says this like she truly doesn’t understand why peacock isn’t a profession.
“I guess . . .” Leah’s little face creases between her eyebrows and beside her mouth. “I guess I don’t know how.”
“Oh.” Vivi shrugs. “I do.”
“You do?”
I try to imagine Vivi turning my sister into a peacock, but the image won’t come. Maybe if I turn my head away, Vivi would shoot sparks at my sister with a wand, turning her into a peacock. It wouldn’t surprise me that much at this point.
“Of course I do. We’ll work on it soon, okay?”
“Okay!” Leah’s excitement leans into a yawn.
“Bedtime, sleepyhead,” I announce. “You too, Bekah.”
“I was going upstairs anyway,” Bekah says, flipping her hair as she gets off the couch. Leah, however, gives me a murderous look, like I’m embarrassing her.
“Jonah,” she howls. “Noooo.”
Vivi slides in easily, climbing to her feet. “Leah, if you don’t go to bed, how will we hang out tomorrow?”
Leah turns. “We’ll hang out tomorrow?”
“Sure. If you want.”
Leah hugs Vivi’s legs, squeezing quickly, and then bounces upstairs.
I shake my head as Leah disappears around the corner. Now it’s just me and Vivi, and I’m not sure what to say. I’d rather flirt by making her really good food. “A peacock. Leah’s a riot sometimes.”
Vivi shrugs. “She was probably a peacock in a past life. Her spirit is still part avian.”
I feel my eyebrows rise. “You believe in reincarnation?”
She gives me the eyebrows right back. “You don’t?”
Um, no, I do not. “So, what have you been in a past life?”
“It’s not what; it’s who,” she says. “I’ve been a dolphin and a ballerina, probably in the 1920s or so, and I used to be part of a pack of stratocumulus clouds. Those are the only ones I know for sure.”
Either this girl is certifiable or she’s saying this for my entertainment. But the craziest part is that I can imagine all those things. I can picture her above the waves in the slick body of a gray dolphin. I can imagine her in a tutu or floating above the stratosphere as a puff of cloud. I feel oddly out of touch with my own self, that I don’t know what I used to be. Or, apparently, who I used to be. “I must be new to the world.”
Vivi shakes her head vehemently. “No, no. I can always tell when this is someone’s first life. This is Bekah’s first life, for example, so you should cut her some slack because it’s really hard to figure things out without having some preexistence instincts.”
“So, who did I used to be?”
She tilts her head, and the curls on that side fall toward the ground. Her eyes are looking through me. She places her hands on my chest, palms warm. I tense up so any muscles there will be more pronounced.
“Hmm,” she says. “In your last life, you spent many years as a tree—oak, I think. Somewhere in the Great Plains. It’s why you feel deep roots in this life, here with your family. Your tree life was so long that you still have strong instincts to shelter little ones. You may not remember it, but your shoulders do.”
She slides her hands over my shoulders, but I know she means it to be clinical. An examination, like she’s diagnosing me with former lives. I’m not sure where to look, so close to her face. Skim milk skin, dark eyebrows. My mom used to watch all those old black-and-white films. I never understood them, but the first dirty dream I ever had was about Brigitte Bardot. No! Think about . . . cooking. Vegetables. Parsnip! Parsnips are hideous.
“Wow, the tree life is still so present for you.” Her laugh warbles in my ears. “It’s also why you can be a bit . . . immovable.”
I frown. Immovable? Does that mean boring? She touches the tip of my nose like I’m a small child. “The best part is that before you were a tree, you were a sea captain. And before that, an otter.”
“Why is that the best part?”
“Because it’s still in there!” she exclaims. Her fist knocks on my chest. “All of it. First you were an otter, the most playful creature in the world. And then you were born as a human boy for the first time, and you became a sea captain because the water called to you from your otter days. But it’s all still in there, Jonah. The tree stuff is more recent, but there’s an otter in there dying to make a Slip ’N Slide in your backyard and spend the whole day doing nothing else.”
Wow, that’s a lot of weird information. “Okay. When do you think I was a sea captain?”
She shrugs. “It’s hard to say specifically. Turn of the twentieth century or a little before, I think.”
“Maybe I sailed to New York City, where you were performing as a ballerina.”
Her air intake is sharp, almost a gasp, followed by a brilliant smile. “Yes! Maybe you watched me dance.”
To demonstrate, she backs away from me and lifts to her tiptoes. She moves her arms in graceful lines, then drops her limbs back to the ground, smiling. “I took lessons for a few years because I missed my former ballerina life so much that I needed to relive it a little.”
I play along, smiling. “Yeah. I’m sure I’ve seen you do that before.”
She steps toward me, delighted, and bubbling over with energy. “Maybe you came backstage after you saw me dance. Maybe I took you underground to my favorite Prohibition spots, and we drank bathtub gin together. Then maybe we got stupid drunk to jazz music and stumbled back out onto the cobblestone streets to my apartment and made love the whole night, sweaty because there was no air-conditioning back then. I bet if we smelled juniper, we’d remember pieces of that night; don’t you think so?”
Now, what in the hell do I say to that? Did she say make love? I’m not sure which is more confusing: that she’d use that phrase like someone’s mom or that she just casually suggested maybe we were doing it in another life? There can be only one response. “Maybe.”
“Well, I should get going,” she says. “Are you busy tomorrow morning? I’m off work.”
“Not busy. Just home with the other three.”
“Good. I’ll bring supplies.”
“For what?”
“A Slip ’N Slide.” She flashes me that strawberry smile. “God, Jonah, keep up.”