After I’d woken up today, I called into work to check the schedule and found that a staff meeting was being held at seven thirty p.m. to discuss the ongoing sewage cleanup in the hotel garage, so I decided to take the ferry over a little early with Aunt Mona to waste time and perhaps get some advice.
“Okay, ’kay, ’kay. You’re telling me that the boy who wrote this unbelievably romantic Missed Connections ad is your coworker? Rewind what you just told me,” Aunt Mona said, handing me back my phone. Today she was wearing her Oscar Wilde “dandy” outfit: green velvet jacket with tails, tweed waistcoat, oversize neck scarf with twinkling pin, and heeled spats. A tiny top hat was tipped rakishly over one brow, and her wig beneath it might not have been out of place in Victorian England if it weren’t a color that was somewhere between lime and shamrock. As she strolled, she tapped the tip of a sparkly cane on the floor as if she were Willy Wonka touring his own chocolate factory.
“Please don’t make me say it again,” I begged as we passed a movie-worthy gray view of Puget Sound through the dingy restaurant window where Tom Hanks talked to Rob Reiner in Sleepless in Seattle.
Aunt Mona blinked eyes trimmed in enormous fake green lashes and dramatic eye shadow. “You’re telling me that this is the guy you did the four-leg frolic with in the back seat of a car—”
“Shh!”
“He works with you at the hotel? Holy smoke, Birdie, that’s . . .”
“A nightmare?”
“More like destiny,” she said, grinning at me like a deranged psychopath. The green lipstick didn’t help.
“Don’t start with that,” I said, shoving my phone in my purse. “Daniel already said something about fate.”
“Daniel,” she says, shivering dramatically with both shoulders, causing the LED-lit boutonniere pinned to her velvet jacket to blink. “Sounds so sophisticated. I need to see a photo.”
“Keep on needing. I don’t have one.”
“I’m a visual person, mi corazón. I cannot give you my blessing until I see how hot he is.”
“I’m not asking for your blessing. I’m asking what I should do. He wants to talk about what we did.”
“The banging? The horizontal mambo? A little pickle-me, tickle-me?”
“Please stop,” I begged, glancing around to make sure no one heard her.
“Stop being your prudish grandmother. She’s gone, Birdie. It’s okay to live a little.”
“Like mother, like daughter, huh?”
Aunt Mona stopped in the middle of the market, hooked her cane on her forearm, and grasped my shoulders with both hands. “Your mother was a goddess. Not a whore. Not a sinner. You know this.”
A sudden swell of emotion tightened my throat. I whispered, “I think I made a huge mistake.”
“Look. So, you had sex. Big deal. I’ve told you a million times—virginity isn’t something you lose. It’s not a missing sock. It’s a state of mind.”
“It was weird and awkward.”
“Because you ran away afterward?”
“No. It’s why I ran. It was . . . not like what I expected. It wasn’t magical. It wasn’t . . . I don’t know . . . Disneyland.”
“Disneyland?”
“You know. Matterhorn. Churros. Fireworks. The happiest place on earth.”
Mona laughed softly. “God, I love you, kid.”
“Really?” I said, scowling. “Because it sure seems like you’re laughing while I’m trying to spill my guts to you, which is what you’re always begging me to do.”
“You’re absolutely right, darling. Forgive me.” She slung an arm around my shoulder, and we strolled together while she talked. “Look. Sure, my first time was magical—”
I’d heard about it. In detail. Many times. I really wish I hadn’t.
“But since then? Pfft. Do you know how much weird sex I’ve had in my life?”
“Don’t want to know.”
“Good, because I can’t count that high. Sometimes it’s good; sometimes it’s awkward. Sometimes it’s just plain bad. It’s never the same. It’s like . . .” Her mouth twisted as she searched for the right words. “Okay, think of it this way. You brought up Disneyland. . . . Remember when we went?”
A few months before my mom died. They’d saved money for two years. Ms. Patty from the diner even chipped in. We drove down through Oregon and California, and we couldn’t afford to stay in an official park hotel, so we ended up in a motel outside that had roaches. But I didn’t care. Those three days inside the park were pure joy.
Aunt Mona continued. “You had a great time. I had a great time. But your mom was miserable.”
Huh. I’d forgotten that. She was sick with a chest cold that had developed into bronchitis and sat on benches hacking her lungs up while Mona and I stood in line for rides.
“Disneyland was a miserable experience for her. Maybe another time, when she wasn’t sick, it wouldn’t have been. And that’s pretty much how sex is. Sometimes it’s the happiest place on earth, and sometimes it’s too crowded, and sometimes there are no fireworks over the castle, and that’s something you need to address with the prince, and if he doesn’t listen to your complaints, then you need to find a new prince.”
“Good grief,” I said, checking to see that no one was listening to us.
“If Daniel wants to talk about what happened, then maybe you should talk about it. Or maybe you should talk about other things? What’s the worst that could happen? You get embarrassed? Even if it’s not wuv, twue wuv,” she said, quoting The Princess Bride, “you never know what may happen. I mean, it could turn out that he’s a really sweet boy whom you cherish as a friend for your entire life, and when he has a kid and dies suddenly, you might find yourself promising to look after that kid and one day giving it advice about another Daniel.”
“Circle of life?”
“Circle of fucking life,” she says, smiling through green lipstick. “Now, the only payment I ask for the gift of my advice is for you to secretly take a photo of him, so that I can confer my official blessing upon this union, which is my sacred duty as your unofficial godmother.”
“Will you wear a Pope outfit?”
She thought about this for a moment. “I could alter my purple nun habit and pair it with a wizard staff.”
“Good enough.”
“Excellent. Now, the stalls will be packing up soon, so I’m going to fetch my check. You coming with?”
“Meet you downstairs in the usual spot in thirty?”
“Thirty it is.” She pointed a gloved hand at me, doing a finger-gun motion, before swishing her dandy butt away to the art stall, cane clicking on the tiled floor.
Inside my head, I filed away everything she said and made my way through the market. A riot of cheerful neon signs greeted me as I rambled through the main level, passing stalls laden with tulips, vegetables, freshly smoked salmon, and Pacific Northwest cherries. I followed a neon arrow down a ramp to the lower levels under the main arcade. Down here, windowless halls and creaking wooden floors led to an odd array of shops that seemed to stand still in time while the rest of the world moved on.