She laughs. “Damn right.”

  “Should I throw another log in?”

  She cackles and pantomimes throwing a log at our TV. “Boom!” she says, exploding her hands.

  She taps the end of the couch with her feet and I put my towel down and sit there, facing the TV. I can feel her eyes on my profile.

  “All weekend. You’re off your game, mijo.”

  I make a big show of leaning my head back like I’m exasperated. “You’re hallucinating.”

  “Yeah, right,” she says. “I’ve known you a little while.”

  I turn toward her and give her my best, most dazzling smile. “See?” I say. “All good.”

  She takes a sip from her water glass and raises her eyebrows at me. “That smile works with everyone else but me. C’mon. What’s going on?”

  “Mom. Stop.”

  “I know you like to say nothing, but something’s up. I know it. I feel it in here.” She points to her heart.

  “I’m fine. It’s nothing. It’s stupid stuff.” I flash her another smile.

  She pulls an orange throw pillow onto her lap. “You know I’m not going to stop, so why not just get it over with and tell me? So I can stop worrying and go back to my fireplace.”

  I exhale. It’s been a while since our last heart-to-heart. It was about a month after I told her I was gay, two years back. She was cool about it. Told me never to feel ashamed of who I am, and I was like, Yeah. I know. When she told Uncle Guillermo, our only relative in the States, he did the typical machismo thing for like a minute, until my mom reminded him that I play baseball and am bigger and stronger than him, and anyway to just cut that shit out. Which he did. She wanted to talk about sex and if I was dating, but I shut that down because, come on. She finally relented and said, “Just be careful, mijo. There’s lots of users and abusers out there.” And I nodded but I admit I was also like, Yeah. Not that worried. Nobody messes with me much. I don’t take a lot of shit because of my size, probably.

  I take a deep breath. If ever there was a mom a person could talk to about whatever the fuck that was Friday night, it would be Rosa Gutierrez. She’s definitely cool. But something tells me not to.

  “Just … boy stuff.”

  “Like, ‘I lost my football’ boy stuff, or ‘I like a boy’ boy stuff?”

  “The latter,” I say, omitting that I don’t actually like a boy. If only.

  “Tell me, mijo.”

  “Nah,” I say, and I sit up. “Thanks, Mom. But I’m okay.”

  She raises one eyebrow at me. “You get this from your dad. He thinks talking is for girls too.”

  “I can … talk,” I say.

  She gives me that toothy mom smile. “You can, but you don’t,” she says.

  And I can’t argue with her there. And anyway, I feel a bit better after our talk, even if I only said a little.

  After dinner, I call my dad.

  “Broseph!” he yells, picking up the phone. I don’t know why he thinks calling his son Broseph is funny, but that’s my dad for you. Oh well.

  “Yo, what up,” I say.

  “Chillaxin’. How’s school?”

  “Over for the year.”

  “Right on,” he says.

  Dad’s name is Ryan Morrison. He likes beer, fast cars, and TV shows where people get hit in the balls. Mentally he’s about twelve. He’s basically everything my mom isn’t.

  When I don’t say anything else, he says, “You gotta see this new club. Destroying. They fuckin’ love me. Those assholes at the Barn can eat my ass.”

  My dad, the poet. “Yeah?” I ask.

  “Got this new bit about throwing up in your mouth.”

  “Sounds epic,” I say. “Sounds like you’re really making the world a better place.”

  He laughs. I laugh. “How’d you get to be such a smart-ass?”

  “Gee, Dad, no idea.”

  He laughs some more.

  When I get off the phone, I smile. I think about my mom and my dad, and wonder what in the world made them think they should be together. Did he change, or did she? Because once upon a time, they must have liked talking to each other. But now, I can hardly imagine that conversation. Not even a little bit.

  Mom is in one of her good moods when I get home from the second day of just me and Max on the food truck on Monday afternoon.

  “Taste test,” she shouts from the couch in the TV room, and even though I’m covered in sweat and exhausted, I have to smile, because my mom’s back. “I was gonna do it alone, but now that you’re here …”

  She’s lined up five different rows of two jelly beans on the leather ottoman in front of the couch where we normally put our feet. I would probably not eat jelly beans off the ottoman Dorcas regularly sits her naked butthole on, but Mom is carefree that way and who am I to stop her fun? I drop my wallet and keys on the counter and join her.

  She sits up straight and closes her eyes. “Put them in whatever order you want. I want to see if I can figure out the flavors without looking.”

  I shuffle them around a bit and hand her a light purple one. She looks like a little kid, holding her hand out for a treat. It’s kind of adorable. She pops it in her mouth and her cheeks pucker as she makes a big show of trying to guess the flavor.

  “Hmm,” she says. “Chewing, chewing …”

  “What do you think?”

  “Nope. Withholding my guesses until I’ve had them all.”

  “You’re a jelly bean connoisseur,” I say.

  She smiles, her eyes still squeezed shut, and then she shouts “Next!” in a funny falsetto, like she’s the queen of England or something.

  As I hand her the second, I don’t notice Dorcas creeping around us. She jumps up on the ottoman, scattering the jelly beans, and hoovers down as many of them as she can before I can stop her.

  Mom’s eyes flash open. “Traitor!” she yells.

  Dorcas leaps backward into the television. It begins to wobble and I run over and try to catch it before it tips over onto the floor. I get a sweaty hand on the edge of it, and it steadies a bit, but it continues to teeter and my second hand whiffs trying to get a hold of it. Luckily, Mom has jumped up from the couch and is able to get a firm grab on the other side before it thwacks the floor and shatters into a zillion pieces.

  I look over at Mom holding the television up while I am standing there trying to balance the side of the TV like a stereotypical French waiter, and as Dorcas skulks away, we laugh and laugh, and I take back just about every negative thing I’ve been thinking about her all day as I was toiling away on the truck.

  She sets the TV back up and gets a drinkable strawberry yogurt to wash down her jelly beans, and despite being disgustingly sweaty I flop down on the opposite end of the couch and start to tell her everything about the truck. Dorcas curls up by my mom’s feet, still eating the last of the jelly beans she stole.

  “So Max is …”

  “Cute?” she says, raising an eyebrow.

  “I was gonna say annoying,” I say, grinning, and she raises her eyebrows a few times at me.

  “Sure you were,” she says, teasing.

  “And what have you been doing today?” I ask, changing the subject.

  She rolls her eyes. “Oh, you know. I get these ideas but then I don’t, like, I don’t know. My follow-through is subpar.”

  I smile at her. She smiles back, and then, it’s so weird and so fast. The smile turns to a grimace, and it’s like her face breaks and suddenly there are tears.

  “Mom,” I say, leaning forward.

  “Oh God,” she says. “Here we go again. It’s all to shit.”

  I jump up and sit down next to her head. “Mom.” I stroke her hair, which feels a little oily and unwashed.

  “I almost went to Casino Arizona today,” she says, and she sits up and puts her head on my shoulder and leans it into my neck.

  “Oh.” After Dad died, Mom went through a gambling stage. It wasn’t a ton of money, but I guess it was enough to scare her, because she started going to meetings about it. She hasn’t gambled since, and every year I go to her Gamblers Anonymous birthday, where people I have never met before hug me tight and tell me how great a support I am to Lydia E. I have never told Pam or Kayla. I definitely think they would not get it.

  “I didn’t, but. I definitely had the urge.”

  “Well you didn’t, so that’s something. Did you, like, call your sponsor?”

  She nods her head gently into my neck and I reach up and stroke her hair. “Good,” I say. “That’s good.”

  “It’s just the pressure,” she says, and part of me thinks, Yeah, I totally get that. Another part is like, What pressure? You sat on the couch all day.

  “Sure,” I say. “Well you should be proud. Willpower and all.”

  “I guess.”

  “You’re too hard on yourself. That’s like a victory,” I say, channeling the Gamblers Anonymous meetings I’ve been to. “You didn’t gamble today. That’s awesome.”

  She just keeps sniffling into my shoulder, and I keep on stroking her hair, and there’s this part of me that wants to not be here, doing this. Being her strength or whatever.

  I hate that part of me.

  “I need more jelly beans,” she says, and I laugh.

  “Well c’mon then,” I say, and I stand up.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Sweeties,” I say, meaning the huge candy warehouse in Mesa. “Jelly beans for dinner,” I say.

  Her eyes light up. I don’t think anything will ever make me quite as happy as when my mom’s eyes light up.

  “Yay,” she says.

  “And Pez for dessert.”

  “Ooh. Dispensers? Can we get Hello Kitty dispensers?”

  I think of my dad, and how he probably did this in a more normal way. Cheer her up. But at least she’s smiling and not crying. I do what I have to. After all, it’s just me and Mom. We’re all we’ve got. Mom had a brother who died as a teenager, and my grandparents on her side, Pops and Gammie, live in Ogden, Utah, and I get a card from them maybe every other birthday. My dad’s parents died when I was a baby.

  “Well obviously we have to,” I say.

  Sweeties with my mom is always like taking a kid to a candy store, because it is, in fact, a huge-ass candy store, and she is most definitely a kid when she gets in there. We walk quickly past the sugarless candies — I mean, come on — and she squeals with delight when we see the wall of Pez dispensers, and she goes off on how Princess Leia looks nothing like Princess Leia, and then she grabs two Hello Kitty dispensers as well as four Pez refill packages — one all sour Pez. Then she gives me a mini-dissertation on Hello Kitty and how the thing that is especially awesome about Hello Kitty is that everyone has a fake memory of her as being part of their childhood, but she really wasn’t.

  “Tell me one thing you know about Hello Kitty. Was she from a cartoon? No. A movie? No. She acts like she’s Woody Woodpecker or Ricochet Rabbit, but really she’s been superimposed upon all of our collective consciousness as if she was a thing. But she wasn’t. She’s a brand, not something to reminisce about.”

  We are pushing our little cart down the aisle where the Whoppers and various other malted chocolates live, and though I barely know Woody and have never heard of said rabbit, I nod. “You’re actually right,” I say, and she curtsies before throwing a red pack of something called Maltesers into our cart.

  “Thank you very much. And of course none of that changes the fact that we have to buy two Hello Kitty dispensers. Because Hello Kitty.”

  After, she sprints to the car, which is funny because she’s not so much a sprinting type of mom anymore. When she gets to the car, she says, “If you get here in six seconds, you get an amazing, special treat.”

  I make a dramatic showing of running, and she smiles wide, and I do too.

  In the car, she tells me to close my eyes, and I do. I enjoy the sensation of her making a few turns and not knowing where we’re going, and I resist the urge to peek. When the car stops, I open my eyes. We’re at Zia Record Exchange, which is about my favorite place in the world, and as much fun as it is to go there with Pam and Kayla, it’s never better than when I go with my mom.

  “Yay!” I say, and she says yay too.

  We go inside and feed our vinyl addictions.

  “Oh my God,” she says as she sifts through the “A” partition of the rock ’n’ roll section. She pulls out a rather dull cover with three ’80s-looking guys posing in the bottom right corner. It reads Alphaville in a funny font on top, and underneath, in all lowercase, it reads big in japan.

  She holds the record close to her chest, like she’s hugging it. Her hazel eyes are so big and filled with joy.

  “I heard this for the first time when Pops and Gammie sent me on this bike trip to France. I was seventeen. Oh my God. We have to buy this. We have to.”

  “Clearly,” I say.

  She nearly jumps up and down. “You’re gonna love it. Love it. Oh my God.” And then she’s back to shuffling through the “B” section, and my heart feels like it could burst because seeing Mom like Mom again is everything.

  We eat our jelly-bean dinner in my room. She grabs a pink boa from my bedpost and wraps it around her shoulders, and she sits down on the red beanbag chair in the corner, picking through the jelly beans carefully and throwing the licorice ones onto the shag carpet dismissively. Even Dorcas won’t eat those.

  The Alphaville album is all synthesizers and the singing is that Euro-emo style that would so not fly today. The “Big in Japan” song itself is just overflowing with cultural appropriation that would get the guys flogged in 2019 but apparently was all the rage thirty years ago. She listens, blissfully, with her hands behind her head.

  “Oh my God,” she says. “This so brings me back to biking these rural French roads, and the greasy guys at all the hostels. We hosteled for like thirty straight nights all through Brittany — Breh-tahn-yuh, they pronounced it, and the Euro guys were so cheesy. Those were the days.”

  I smile and recline too, trying to imagine my mom my age. I’ve seen pictures, but Mom is Mom, you know? She’s not a teenager and she never was, no matter how much she tries to act like she still is.

  Then, as the synth-pop assault continues on my phonograph, she sits up. “So what do you imagine?” she asks.

  “Huh?”

  “Like, imagine. For yourself. As an adult. Where do you live, what do you do, who are you with?”

  I roll onto my side and hold up the side of my head with my hand. We’re having one of our sleepovers again. We haven’t in a long while. I kind of love it. Where we just talk and talk and forget about the time. I miss these.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Bullshit,” she says, smiling. “You know. Tell me. Tell me!”

  “Well he’s a redhead,” I say quickly, and she giggles.

  “Knew it.”

  “Yeah, it changes. Like now, we live in maybe the mountains. Near a city because people are cooler in cities, but we’re in a cabin in the mountains, and I write poems and I’m famous somehow, I don’t know. Maybe I write books too. And he’s in finance or something like that where he’s on the computer all day making money, and we design the place so it looks, I don’t know, kind of like this. Like a speakeasy, maybe, and we get our living room featured in some national magazine, and we throw these amazing parties.”

  “Oh Jordan,” she says, and her smile is just blissful. “Do all that. Really. Do it. Don’t let people tell you that you have to be anything other than what you are. You’re really such an amazing person, you don’t even know.”

  I choke up and have to look away, because am I? But Mom thinks I am, so that’s cool.

  You know that feeling you get when you have no idea what you’re doing, like in calc, and then you see your teacher pause while trying to solve an equation on the blackboard, and you realize very quickly that she doesn’t have a clue either?

  This is how it feels when I arrive at Jordan’s place at 5:00 a.m. on Thursday. It’s allegedly our fifth day out. In our first four days, I’m guessing we have made two hundred dollars. Well, not made. Not including expenses. Just taken in. I’m the cook; I know how many orders we get. Whatever we’ve banked, it ain’t great. And it’s not including the money he is supposed to pay me, because to this point, I haven’t been paid. On the way home yesterday, he said, “I know you’re owed money. So far we haven’t made as much as you’re owed. I don’t know what to do about that.”

  I didn’t reply, and half of me thought, I’m getting fleeced; get me the fuck out of here. All this damn sweating, all this time spent in hell, and nothing to show for it. Cut your losses. And the other part, probably the part of me that Mom raised, has no quit in him. So I’m back here, a day later, hoping we finally take in some money so I can get mine.

  Jordan starts loading the truck from the refrigerator and freezer in the garage, and I guess I’m supposed to just go ahead and help, as usual. But instead I just sit on the dirt of the front yard and watch. Watching Jordan move is just — he’s graceful. The way those long, thin limbs break through the air, so effortless. What I wouldn’t give to move like that, to not be so bulky.

  For once, I don’t get up and go, take over. I sit and watch. It’s all I can do. This is just … Mom says insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If that’s the definition, then we are being insane.

  After a few minutes, he notices me. Jordan is not the most aware person of all time.

  “What?” he asks, and he comes and stands in front of me, his hands on his skinny hips, his red T-shirt hanging off him like his upper body is a coat hanger. His lean chest pulls the shirt in.

  “Naw, man,” I say. “Naw.”

  He frowns. “So you’re quitting? Is that what’s happening here? Fine. I mean. Great.”

  “Naw,” I say again, shaking my head. “Naw.”

  He kicks the dirt. “What the fuck does ‘Naw’ mean in this case? Don’t just ‘Naw’ me.”

  I smile despite myself. It’s not normal to be pissed, and at the exact same time think there’s something freakin’ adorable about this dude getting all angry. I don’t know why. It just is. “You got any incense?” I ask.