Maybe this isn’t entirely untrue. If my parents are alive out there, they wouldn’t approve of the way Moody, Iris, and I live our lives. Butthen again, they abandoned us without so much as a note to tell whoever found us what our names were supposed to be.
“We moved here for Tim’s family.” She sighs, and I can hear that she’s aggrieved. Dara isn’t the sort to get mad or to push back. I can tell that much already. But she makes her displeasure known, even if there’s no one around to acknowledge it. She’s chatty with the neighbors, but she doesn’t seem to have any true friends. I’ve overheard her phone calls as she sits on the balcony outside her unit. She only ever calls her parents.
Tim has trapped her here. His beautiful wife all alone in the desert, where she’s his and his alone.
Dara stares out at the desert for a long while, and when she suddenly spins to face me, my heart leaps anxiously. “Can I ask you for a favor?”
“Of course.” My heart thuds. She’s going to tell me something, gift me some piece of what’s happening in that head of hers. We stop walking, and she digs into her pocket and extracts the wad of bills I’d already suspected was in there.
I pretend I’m not astonished by the sight of it. Not because it’s easily five hundred dollars—the maximum withdrawal that particular ATM allows—but because she trusts me enough to let me see.
“Can I hide this at your place?” she asks. We’ve stopped walking, and the sun is beating down on my shoulders, my neck. Even with sunblock, I’m always sunburned in this place.
I don’t answer Dara’s question right away. Uneasy at my silence, she charges on. “It’s not for anything sketchy. It’s just, I’ve been sending money to my parents at the end of every month. Tim hates it. We had a big argument last week when he found the money in an envelope, and he made me put it all back into our savings.”
Her parents. So, she’s the dutiful child, then, trapped between herdevotion to them and her loyalty to an exasperated spouse.What else is eating at you?I want to ask her. A fight about money shouldn’t be enough to make her this upset. But she’s said all she’s going to, and for now, it’s enough. The rest will come later. Like Edison, Dara is a long-term project. I need her to trust me; I need to be the shoulder she can lean on, the one who doesn’t take too much or give too little. That way, when Edison is gone, she’ll be my primary character witness.Jade loved him; Jade is a caring person who couldn’t hurt a soul; with Jade, you always know where you stand; she couldn’t lie to save her life.
If Tim doesn’t support her, I will. I’ll be the friend she can turn to when he’s being unreasonable, when she’s down to her last cigarette and she has no one else.
For a long moment we stand there, the only beings in this burning wasteland, the green bills pinioned between us. Dara is giving me something much more precious than money. She’s giving me her friendship. On the other side of her unit, a woman named Mrs.Keltch has lived there for more than a decade. She comes out sometimes and makes a fuss about how bad those cigarettes are for Dara’s skin, and occasionally to pour us a glass of boxed wine. Mrs.Keltch doesn’t know about the money Dara is hiding from Tim. No one in the world knows but me.
Finally, I take the money and I tuck it into my own pocket beside the box cutter and my keys. I pretend that something ceremonial didn’t just happen. “Sure,” I say. “No problem.” A pause. “Hey, I don’t know if church is your thing, but there’s a Fourth of July cookout on Thursday.” I am giving Dara something equally precious: an opportunity to meet my Edison.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m not going to try to recruit you or anything.”
She laughs, and it’s the lightest her voice has sounded all day. “Oh, honey, believe me, I’m not worried about being recruited.”
“Is that a yes?”
She throws her arms up. “Why not?” she says. “Can I bring Tim? He works so much—he really needs a social life, even if it is a G-rated soiree.”
“Of course. Tell him it will be PG-13,” I say. “You might hear an errantholy shitor two.”
“Just so long as it’s holy,” she says.
We’re laughing and the air is lighter when we start walking again. I know that something powerful has just happened between us. We’ve just given each other a tiny piece of our trust.
I have decided I want Dara to know him. When Edison is dead and gone, and I’m lost in my grief, Dara will comfort me. She’ll come into the apartment and sit on the edge of the couch where I’m curled up. She’ll bring in the smell of her sangria hair conditioner and menthols, and she’ll put a hand on my shoulder. She’ll remind me that I have to eat, that life still goes on. She’ll open the curtains and fill the room with sun. When I’m strong enough to speak, we’ll share memories of him. In my darkest hour, I’ll have afriend.
11
I don’t like Tim.
He’s a calm, quiet, stoic thing beside his wife’s effervescence. His eyes are pale blue, but they’re dark in a way that doesn’t have a logical explanation. It’s as though the light never fully touches him. He doesn’t talk much.
Still, I pretend to think he’s delightful. I introduce Dara and Tim to Edison at the picnic as “the world’s best neighbors.”
“Hardly,” Dara says, shaking his hand. “We’re really loud. Jade is just being sweet.” There’s a gleam in Edison’s eye when he looks at me over the top of Dara’s head. He thinks I’m sweet too.
I was worried about abandoning Dara at this party to steal off with Edison, but she’s at home in crowds. I hear someone laugh at a joke she’s told by the bowl of sherbet punch. Tim stands beside her like a shadow, looking uncomfortable in his ironed blue T-shirt and khakis. Someday, I would like to know their story. Dara doesn’t make a movethat he isn’t watching, and I think it’s because he knows how mismatched their love is.
When I look to Edison, he’s watching them too. “They seem nice,” he says. He hands me a bottle of water that’s ice-cold and drenched from being in the cooler. I press it to the back of my neck gratefully before I take a sip.
“Did you bring your guitar?” he asks. “Maybe you could sing something.”
“I don’t want to sing in front of all these people,” I say.
“Sing something for me, then.” He tucks a stray lock of hair out of my eyes. “I love your voice.”
