SAM.
Sam measured out the flour. He hadn’t made hamantaschen in a while. Brandi Rose loved the prune ones best, so he was making those. It was time to go see his mother.
As he threw the mixer on low speed, his mind wandered to Penny. Dark eyes. Hands pulling him closer by the belt loops of his jeans. Her breath hot against his throat.
Jeez. What was that?
Sam recalled the impossible softness of her skin. The way her hair fanned out on his pillows as if she were floating on top of water.
But then she took off.
Sam didn’t know where to go with her and how far. Maybe Penny changed her mind. Maybe she’d tried it out and realized—to her horror—that she’d made a mistake and decided that they were better off as friends.
It would make sense if she were skittish, given the events of her life. But she’d been the one to kiss him first. Sam’s mind flashed back to the way her lips yielded to his and the sigh that escaped when his mouth brushed her shoulder.
When the cookies had cooled, Sam drove over to his mother’s. He took the left into Forest Park, through a cluster of mobile homes that had been built before the highway in 1964. He wiped his sweating hands onto his jeans.
Sam knew she’d be home. Brandi Rose stayed home most afternoons, ever since she sought early retirement and workman’s comp for fibromyalgia—a mysterious rambling pain that assaulted her extremities. Autry, her current boyfriend, took care of her most days.
Sure, Austin had a few kitschy trailer parks, cutesy chrome Airstreams that were rejiggered as Airbnbs or else food trucks and cozy bars where the cocktails cost as much as Sam’s pants. Sam’s mom’s place was nothing like that. The rooms were drafty and the neighbors rowdy, and they only got rowdier when they drank. Which was often.
Sam could see her car in the driveway and rang the bell.
Autry answered. “Sam!” he said, and slapped him on the back. “Honey, it’s Sam.” Autry was a sometime auto mechanic who was wearing his usual outfit of an undershirt, cargo shorts, and beer in his hand. He was tanned and slender through the limbs with a bowling ball of a booze gut. Autry was a simple happy guy. Though if he put up with Brandi Rose, something had to be going on with him.
Sam followed him into the living room to see that his mother hadn’t stirred from her usual spot right in front of the TV. Brandi Rose was angry. Her absorption in her TV watching and the abject lack of effort to glance over betrayed her sentiments. It took real work to ignore someone in such close quarters.
She was smoking a cigarette and drinking a tall glass of bourbon with an iced tea floater. He remembered when he was younger, how Brandi Rose had made the effort to hide the handles of Ten High whiskey. That was, until he’d partially melted a plastic bottle heating up a pizza. Brandi kept them stashed in different places in the house, and one hiding place was the roomy metal drawer under the oven. It had ruined the frozen pizza he’d paid for with the last of his sofa change. Sam left the gnarled, blackened bottle in the sink for her to see. He’d wanted her to be embarrassed. Brandi Rose had started drinking in the open after that.
The screen door opened and clanged shut, signaling another of Autry’s walks. That man loved his constitutionals. Talk on the block was that he never wandered far, since he frequently entertained Mrs. Packer, whose husband went to get TP one morning and never returned.
“Hey, Mom,” he said. She kept her eyes glued to the demonstration on induction ovens. You could cook a whole chicken—a frozen one—in under fifteen minutes.
The antique, cordless phone was in the pocket of her beige dressing gown. It was eerie. It was as if someone dumped amber over her head like the slime on children’s TV shows and preserved her whole. Nothing had changed since he’d left. Kicking her son out of her life hadn’t made a lick of difference.
Sam felt sweat sting at his armpits. He tried to look at something that wasn’t depressing. Like the dark brown stain on the carpet that resembled the head of fat Elvis in profile. Or the piles of catalogs that lay collapsed at her feet. Sam slowed his breathing. What he was tempted to do was make a movie about his mom. It would cover depression, addiction, and the poison it becomes when you don’t get a handle on any of it.
Sam felt strangely calmer thinking about filming her. Sad yet calm. Distant.
“I made you something.” He placed the Christmas tin of fresh cookies in her lap. The tin with gold and white reindeer was hers from when she was a kid. It used to be Sam’s stash box, and he’d had to wash it twice to scrub out the stink of burnt weed. “Prune, your favorite.”
“You know I almost had to sell the house,” Brandi Rose said, finally diverting her attention from the screen. When Sam was very young he remembered how her mouth would move along to the parts of the ads she knew by heart. “Me and Autry were almost homeless after the stunt you pulled.”
The stunt he pulled was that he called fraud protection on the credit cards she’d opened in his name.
Sam remembered the bills. His mother had spent four hundred dollars on anti-aging face peels that had literal diamonds in it. Not figurative. Literal diamonds.
Finally, Brandi Rose looked at her son.
Her eyes were dead. Sunken. Her hair had been dark once, but as she got older she’d dyed it a brassy, orangey-red. He realized it was exactly the same color as her bronzed skin. The way her cheeks had collapsed into jowls gave her chin and mouth the hinged appearance of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s. Brandi Rose’s thin lips puckered in disgust at him, as if she’d swallowed a bug.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Sam said. There was no sense in trying to explain to her that his credit was ruined. That as it stood it was near impossible for him to sign a lease or get loans for school.
“Selfish,” she said, turning back to the TV. “What good are cookies when it’s cold outside and I don’t have a house?”
Sam considered telling her that a residence you could put wheels on didn’t quite qualify as a house, and that as far as winters went she could do a lot worse than Texas.
“Share them with Autry,” Sam said. “Autry knows his way around a cookie.”
His mother didn’t say anything else. Sam turned his attention to the magical oven that was cool to the touch and made fruit leather for the kids and if you ordered now you could get a second for your RV half off. Sam was desperate to reach out and place a hand lightly on her shoulder. He knew exactly how the fuzziness of the robe would feel on his palm, the warmth and familiarity. Yet he also knew that if she flinched or pulled away he’d be devastated.
“All right,” he said brightly, kissing his mother on the head. “It’s nice to see you, Mama. Happy holidays.”
Sam couldn’t believe Thanksgiving was a week out.
There were dirty dishes in the sink, as usual. Sam thought about washing them and tidying up, maybe cooking something nutritious for her to eat. But it wouldn’t make a dent in the guilt he felt or in her resentment. There was a time when he’d thought he could pull them out of this. That he would man up and rescue her and move them someplace nice. But even if he freed her from the trailer, there was nothing he could do about the raging inside-person’s headache you get when you watch TV for too many hours in a row and her compulsion to do only that.
“I love you,” he whispered to the dishes, and let himself out.
• • •
When Sam got back to House, Jude was waiting for him on the porch swing.
“Hey!” he said brightly.
“Hey,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he responded.
“I can see that.” Jude extended her long legs forward to see how far the porch swing pitched back. “You look like hell.”
“I went to see my mom,” he said, taking a seat next to her. “Which is why the next order of business is to smoke this.” He held up a cigarette.
“Jeez, that good, huh?”
Sam sighed.
“Did you tell her Fraser’s granddaughter says hi?” Jude nudged him in the ribs.
“Who the hell is Fraser?” Sam laughed dryly and lit his smoke when he realized. “You know I only ever knew him as Mr. Lange?”
“Wow,” breathed Jude. “That’s twisted. Okay, so I’ve come to a conclusion,” she told him.
“Sounds fascinating.”
“Promise not to get mad?” Jude cast a sidelong glance at him.
“Nope.”
She laughed. “Are you in love with Penny?”
“How is that a conclusion? That’s a question.”
Jude rolled her eyes. “She says she’s in love with you.”
“She did not.”
“Fine, she didn’t say those exact words, but it’s the only explanation. She’s in love with you.”
“Stop,” he said. “You know she’s inscrutable. You ever notice how she seems furious when she’s super excited?”
Jude laughed. “Or when she’s actually furious and starts bawling? That’s a classic,” she responded.
Sam thought about the last time he’d seen her cry. How he’d wanted to place her in a bubble and firebomb everything around her.
“So it was you on her phone.”
Sam nodded.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Sam sighed. He glanced down at the tattoo of a horse head partially covered by cloth on his forearm. It was how they used to train wild horses way back when, throwing fabric over their eyes so they wouldn’t get spooked by their surroundings. They’d have to submit to the rider’s commands. Surrender.
Sam mulled over everything that had happened in the past month. Lorraine. Penny. What Lorraine had said about everyone knowing he was poor. And how Penny told him no one mistook him for someone who had his shit together. Hiding was not a coping mechanism. It was delusional. He had to let go.
“I should have told you and I’m sorry,” he said. “I was dealing with a lot of stuff at the time, and when you showed up here I felt overwhelmed.”
“You should have told me,” she said.
“Yeah, but I wasn’t ready to tell you personal details solely because we were related at one point and thrown together a bunch when we were kids.” Sam stubbed his cigarette out and looked at her. “I take longer to warm to people,” he said.
Jude nodded again, but this time there were tears in her eyes. She blinked, and they coursed down her cheeks to fall off her chin in fat drops.
“Jude,” he said.
“You seemed mad at me or something,” she responded.
“I’m not mad at you. Please don’t cry.”
Jude nodded, and despite the tears, she was smiling. “My therapist says I think everyone’s always mad at me. It’s equal parts my upbringing and my egocentrism.”
Sam laughed.
They rocked the swing in silence.
“The thing is,” she continued, “I’m also very perceptive. And I get now why you guys did what you did. Speaking of which, you’re both so lucky you have unlimited texting. You know she couldn’t even pee without taking her phone into the bathroom? I could hear her laughing in there.”
Jude smiled then.
“News flash,” she said. “At some point, your girlfriend might have been taking a dump while you were flirting with her.”
Sam promptly removed any indication from his brain that Penny pooped.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Sam said. His voice cracked on the word “friend,” which made both of them laugh.
Jude swatted his arm with the back of her hand. “That’s what I don’t buy,” said Jude. “You guys both say you’re friends or whatever, but you kept me in the dark because this is way more than that. Seriously, no heterosexual friends in the history of penises and vaginas are that into each other. Plus, you dress like twins.”
“Penny helped me through a dark time,” Sam said. “Me and my ex went through this crazy pregnancy scare.”
“Whoa,” breathed Jude. “MzLolaXO?”
“Her name’s Lorraine!”
“Whatever. But she’s not pregnant now?”
He shook his head. “We thought she was pregnant, but she wasn’t. Or she was technically. It was complicated,” he said. “I thought I was in love with her and I wanted so badly to be with her. So I was this completely insane combo of happy and freaked out at the same time.”
“Wow,” she said, and after a beat, “Can I have a cigarette?”
“Hell no.”
“Fine,” she replied. “Tell me more.”
“You want to know the most psychotic part of it?”
She nodded.
“Part of me was so happy she’d be stuck with me.”
“Ew,” said Jude. “Like you’d trapped her?”
It was so ugly when it was worded that way.
“I was out of my mind trying to figure out a way to get it under control. I had this panic attack and I thought it was a heart attack. It was insane and scary and I had no one to talk to. That’s actually how Penny and I became friends,” he said. “Right in the middle of when I thought I was dying, she found me on Sixth Street and took me to the emergency room. You should’ve seen her. She was so mad at me because she was terrified. She kept reciting these statistics on coronaries and feeding me nuts and making me drink her horchata.”
Jude snorted. “Sounds about right.”
“I thought that by not telling anyone else, it would make it less real, you know?” he said. “She was my anxiety sponsor, my emergency contact, and it was perfect. The only reason she didn’t tell you is because I told her not to. I didn’t want you to know about any of this. I didn’t want anybody to know.”
“I would’ve made a pretty good anxiety sponsor,” she said softly. “You didn’t have to blow me off so many times.”
“You’re right,” he told her. “I’m sorry about that.”
“You know, I’m going through things too. Believe it or not, I’m not normally this needy. My parents splitting up is a big deal to me. I know you’re not a huge fan of my family, but it hurts my feelings that both of you basically pretended not to hear me when I needed to talk.” Sam watched his niece’s eyes water. Jude seemed so happy and capable that he hadn’t considered she might need anything.
Sam wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “You’re right,” he said again. “I did a shitty job of hearing you.”
Jude sniffed. “I need people on my side too, you know.”
“Of course you do.”
They sat.
Sam thought back to Jude as a buck-toothed kid. It was a miracle she’d turned out so sweet given her upbringing.
“God, I wish Penny were here,” she said. “I need a tissue.”
They laughed. Sam wished she were there too. He had no idea what the hell he’d say to her.
Jude leaned over and jabbed him in the ribs. “I know you’re a real person or whatever, but, Sam,” she said, “you’re not that old. You’re basically a kid too. You’ve got your best screwing-up years ahead of you.” She nudged him with her leg. “So everything’s okay with Lola?”
“Lola’s swell.”
“And what about Penny who’s in love you?”
Sam laughed. “I don’t know that it’s a thing,” he said. “Me and Penny, we’re friends. Good friends. I put her through so much already, between talking her ear off about me and Lorraine. She knows everything about me, even the terrible stuff, and I don’t know . . .”
Sam thought about the kiss.
Penny’s pink, coaxing mouth was insane in real life. Out of the metal box. In meatspace on Planet Earth. Her lips were so full that it was as if they were smushed under glass. And her skin. And how she’d looked as she’d appeared to realize how incorrect it all was and sprinted from his room. He felt a tightening in his chest.
“Nobody knows anything,” said Jude. “But you know how Penny’s from a different planet?”
Sam nodded.
“So if you like that one, where the hell else are you going to find another one?”