“Yes. Right,” Shayla said as Harry laughed and whisperedOh my God is this guy real? I need you to have sex with him, immediately.“Shhhh—sure! Absolutely!” She cleared her throat and focused on the computer. “Where were we…? Ah.”
I was safe in the quiet of her garden. And I quickly established a routine of stopping in for an early-morning swim, before heading off to the pain in my ass that was school.
Anyway, that long introduction—how I met Hiroko—brings us to a foggy San Diego morning, several weeks later.
I’m sure you can guess what’s coming, since you already know that Hiroko was Lisa’s great-aunt. She’s Lisa’s grandfather’s youngest sister, and was childhood friends with Kiyo, Lisa’s grandmother.
But back then, I didn’t know about that connection and I was caught off-guard.
I’d seen Lisa at school. It would’ve been hard to miss her. She was a senior and one of the popular kids. She had the lead in the school play, she was dating the school basketball star, she was the prom queen….I stayed far away. I had no time for any of that. But Lisa had this charisma. When she walked down the hall, it was impossible to look away.
So. Foggy morning. I drove over, parked in the driveway, and went for my swim.
Hiroko had an outside shower—a small, wooden, open-aired stall attached to the side of her little cottage. I used it to rinse the salt from my skin before I changed and went to class.
Sometimes she was awake and in her kitchen. On those days she always shared her breakfast with me.
But sometimes, probably when she hadn’t slept much the night before—insomnia was her mortal enemy—her kitchen door was tightly closed, and the windows were dark.
This was one of those shuttered mornings.
I was quiet as I came, barefoot, up from the beach. I silently unlatched the gate to the garden, and went around to the back of the house.
I was running late, so I went for the efficiency of pulling off my trunks and hanging them over the clothesline on my way to the shower. I swung open the door, turned on the water, and was underneath the spray before I realized I was not alone in there.
Lisa was sitting on the bench where I’d left my clothes for school.
That was as far as they’d gotten. “So yeah,thatwas awkward” was how Peter had concluded the story when he’d first recounted it. “We talked, she made sure I wasn’t taking advantage of her aunt, and, well, that was that.”
Except for the part where he’d been naked in front of a girl he couldn’t keep himself from watching when she walked down the high school corridor.
“We’re gonna need a few more details,” Shayla said briskly now.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Like, what exactly happened. Did you dive for your towel?”
“Nope,” Peter said. “She handed it to me. Eventually.”
“Eventually? So you’re just standing there, hanging out, everything just kind of…lazily blowing in the breeze…?”
He smiled at that. “Yeah, but no breeze. I think Lisa was as surprised as I was—maybe more, because my family was unconventional. So I was comfortable with nudity. I turned off the water, and I think I might’ve saidWhat the hell,or the equivalent. She was trying to play it cool, but she blushed, which pretty much gave her away.”
Shayla’s fingers were flying as she typed his words, even as she asked, “So what did she say when you saidWhat the hell?”
“She goes,Of course Auntie’s new pool boy is you, Goldilocks. I should’ve known.And I now know what she meant—but then I didn’t get the cultural reference, having lived on an island for two years, and also having never seen any porn at that point, so I said something like,Hiroko’s your aunt?And then,She doesn’t have a pool.”
“Wait,” Shayla said. “Rewind. She called youGoldilocks? Like,And the Three Bears?”
Pete laughed. “Yeah. Here’s another of those shameful secrets. At that time, I had really long blond dreadlocks. One of my friends from the island was a Rastafarian.”
“A Rastafarian?” Shay repeated.
“He was from Jamaica and was best friends with a Tibetan monk who’d taken a vow of silence. I’m pretty sure they communicated via interpretive dance. We also had a curmudgeonly eighty-year-old former rock drummer who used the beach as a giant Zen garden, these incredibly jacked German women who were into blacksmithing, and a constantly rotating group of Americans looking for inspiration, which I’m pretty sure was code for getting high and sleeping with someone else’s spouse.” He laughed again. “It was an artists’ colony.”
Shayla nodded—suddenly it all made sense. But as fascinating as this was, and as much as she hated reining in this backstory tangent, these were details for another chapter. It was nearly ten-thirty. Her boys had been home for a while—she could see the shifting glow from the TV through her living room window—and she wanted to get back there before they went to bed.
Still, her detail-loving heart broke a bit as she forced herself to ask, “What did Lisa say after you pointed out that Hiroko didn’t have a pool?”
