“Okay, wait,” I said. “Start at the beginning. You told your parents you were staying with Emily, but you obviously didn’t even go over there, so who took you to this party?”
She looked away. “This guy.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding. “What’s his name?”
As I watched her struggle with wanting to tell me and knowing she probably shouldn’t, I wondered if it was possible that my own emotions had played so nakedly across my face at her age, and if they had, had I learned to mask them, or was I still that transparent? She finally gave in.
“His name’s Seth,” she said.
“And he’s older?” I prompted. “He’s driving?”
“You have to promise to not tell,” she pleaded, clearly already regretting saying his name.
“Oh, honey—”
“Aunt Cora, please, you have to promise. Dad will kill him. He was crazy last night.”
“Okay, I promise I won’t tell your father.”
Letty wasn’t stupid.
“You can’t tell Mom, either,” she said.
I thought fast. I wanted to be her confidante, but if she told me something Ali needed to know, I was going to tell her. I made up my mind to lie.
“All right,” I said.
“Say it.”
“I promise.”
She sighed, believing me. “Okay. He’ll be sixteen next month, but he’s driving already because he lives so far out.”
“Wow, and his parents let him?”
“He just lives with his dad. It’s his own car, so I guess he doesn’t care. Or, well, I guess he doesn’t even really live with his dad anymore.”
“Where’s his mother?”
“I—I don’t know.”
She’d clearly never asked. How well did she know this kid?
“Where does he live, then?”
She shrugged and bit her lip. “He’s been staying with friends a lot.”
I filed that away to come back to later. “So, okay, Seth asks you to this party . . . then what?”
“Well . . .” She stopped speaking and looked up at the ceiling. “See, I knew Mom wouldn’t let me stay out late, so I said I was staying at Em’s.”
She looked at me as if gauging what she could tell me next and then went on in a rush. “And then the cops got called and busted the party, and I told them about Dad and they came to pick me up.”
I suppressed a smile. There was an awful lot missing between deciding to lie about staying at Emily’s and her parents picking her up.
“What did they have to say?”
“Oh my God, it was unbelievable! It was like he went nuts, and he went through all my stuff. He tore up my whole room, everything, went through my clothes, and my drawers, and even all my shoes and boots. And he flipped my mattress up, like I was hiding drugs or something. He took my cell, and my purse, and all my notes, and my diary—”
“And what is he going to find in those?”
She looked down at her knees. “It’s not going to be good.”
“About Seth?”
She nodded. I tucked my hair behind my ear and peered out the front window to make sure Ali wasn’t pulling up. Letty looked fearfully over her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I said. “She’s not back yet. But listen, Letty, what’s going on with Seth? Is he your boyfriend?”
She nodded and wouldn’t look at me. I had to ask, but I didn’t want to.
“Are you having sex, Letty?” I said it softly, but she still jumped. When she met my eyes the answer was clear, and she looked terrified. “Okay,” I said, grasping her hands.
“When did this start?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Just last night,” she whispered.
“Oh, Letty.” I closed my eyes for a moment, just feeling her hand in mine, trying to adjust to the new reality of who this child now was. It had already happened, couldn’t be changed now. When I opened them again she still looked exactly the same. Scared.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Was it . . . okay?”
I wasn’t even sure what I was asking for. I certainly didn’t want details. I didn’t want to know if she liked it, if Seth was a skillful fifteen-year-old lo ver.
She looked down, unable to meet my eyes.
“I guess.”
I cast back to myself at sixteen, losing my virginity in my own bed at home after school, feeling like sixteen was so old. Some friends had said it hurt, some had said it hadn’t. It had for me, but not horribly, not as much as I’d built it up. The boy was a short-term boyfriend, though of course I’d thought it was love at the time. I tried to remember the things I’d felt, the things I was worried about.
“Letty? Did you use birth control?”
She nodded, and I almost shouted
Amen
out loud. I had not, despite knowing all about it, despite being terrified of getting pregnant.
“You’re pretty young, honey,” I said.
“Almost all my friends have already done it,” she said defiantly, but I wasn’t buying it.
“Really? At fourteen, all of your friends are having sex already? Is Emily?”
“No. I mean, not all of them, probably, but a lot of them. I’m gonna be fifteen soon.”
“I know, sweetie, I remember. It’s still pretty young. Are you in love?”
She seemed surprised I’d asked, and for a moment appeared at a loss for what to say. “I—yes, I am,” she said.
“Is he a nice guy? Do you go to school with him?” I was trying very hard to not allow my frustration to creep into my voice, to keep her talking and open. I knew I was being traitorous—there was no way I wasn’t going to talk to Ali about it—but at least I knew I was doing it for her own good. Which, in itself, made me squirm. I’d rarely ever done anything for my own good, much less anyone else’s.
“He’s a sophomore,” she said. “We have lunch together.”
Wow. Lunch together. Romantic. I resisted saying it aloud. “How long have you known him?”
“I don’t know, a while.”
“And where is he today? What happened to him last night?”
“I don’t know,” she practically wailed. “Dad took my cell, and I tried to call him when Mom left but there’s no answer, and I don’t even know if he got home.”
A flash of light caught my eye, and I looked over her shoulder to see Ali’s car pull into the lot. “Okay, get yourself together, honey, your mom’s back.”
She looked panicked and grabbed my arm. “Aunt Cora, you can’t tell her anything I said, you promised. You can’t tell.”
I nodded. “Okay, come on now, come on. Get to work.”
She scrambled off the stool and was in the storeroom by the time Ali came in, bearing subs. She was surprised to see me but smiled wearily. “Hey, I wish you’d told me you were coming, I’d have gotten you a sub. You can split mine with me.”
I waved her off. “No, I already ate.”
“All right. Letty!” she called. “Come get lunch!”
She looked at me shrewdly.
“You talk to her?” she asked.
I wanted to grab her arms and blurt out,
Oh my God she has a boyfriend and thinks she’s in love and she had sex last night!
But I managed to keep my mouth shut and just nodded as Letty joined us. She held her hand out for her sub, and Ali looked at her for a moment before giving it to her. Letty turned away and started back toward the storeroom.
“You’re welcome,” Ali said to her retreating back.
“Thank you,” came Letty’s sullen reply. I heard the storeroom door slam and whistled softly.
Ali sat on the stool and groaned, dropping her head in her hands. “Oh God, Cora, what am I going to do?”
“What happened?” I asked, certain I knew more than she did at the moment.
“Benny has lost his mind,” she said.
That I hadn’t been expecting. “What do you mean?”
“Well, after he picked me up he accused me of being a bad mother, basically blamed this whole thing on me because I work at the store, and indicated that he’d been miserable for years, because he’s responsible, not only for everything in our lives, but for everyone in the state of Florida.”
I looked at her in amazement. “Where did all that come from?”
“I have no idea. And then, you should have seen him with Letty, Cora. Five o’clock in the morning, and he’s tearing up her room, like she’s a criminal. And Letty, you should have seen her—” She stopped with a gasp. “Oh! And you would never guess what she had in her bag. Thongs. Fourteen years old, and the girl is wearing thongs. She went and bought them herself. What the hell is she doing wearing thongs, Cora?”
“Avoiding panty lines?”
She gave me a look.
“Sorry,” I said. “Did you ask her?”
She shook her head. “No. It was so late, and I just wanted Benny to calm down and let us all get some sleep. She looked . . .”
“What?”
“When we picked her up, she was a wreck, hair all over the place, way too much makeup. When we got home, Benny made her go change and wash up, and when she came back in the room she was wearing her old pajamas. And they should have made her look younger, but, Cora, I swear, she looked like some little Lolita. It was embarrassing. Benny flipped. He was just—a stranger, he was like someone I didn’t even know.”
“So what did she have to say? Did you talk to her this morning?”
“Not yet. I don’t even know what to say. She’s grounded, of course. She’s not going out of our sight—oh, that’s the other thing,” she said, interrupting herself again. “I’m supposed to drive her to school and pick her up every day.”
“What about the store?”
“Well, since apparently he doesn’t think I should be working here anyway, I’m just supposed to close it up when I go to get her in the afternoon.”
“Why can’t he do it?”
She sighed and began pulling tomatoes off her sub. “He’s on days. Really, it’s not that big a deal. The school’s only ten minutes away, if that. And I don’t want him working nights. It was just that we didn’t even
talk
about it.”
She suddenly looked at me with narrowed eyes, a plump, deep red tomato slice hanging from the tips of her fingers. I used to love tomatoes. I hadn’t had them in months; too much potassium. Some PKD patients had too little potassium, and I envied them their tomatoes the way I used to envy happy, intact families.
“You know, there are a lot of things he’s not talking about,” Ali continued, oblivious to my tomato obsession. “He never told me he was thinking about going back to being a street cop, he never told me he has these horrible feelings about me. God, Cora, I was convinced we had a really good marriage until just this week. What the hell is going on?”
She laid the glistening tomato slice down on top of the others she’d pulled from the sandwich, and I was tempted to pick them up, en masse, and stuff them in my mouth. I restrained myself and tried to concentrate on my friend rather than her lunch.
“I don’t know. Midlife crisis? Stress in general? Ali, you do have a good marriage; you have a great marriage. I don’t know exactly what’s going on with Benny, but I do know he’s been madly in love with you since he was fourteen years old. Try not to worry too much about this. He’ll pull it together. He’s just having a tough week, being back in his old job and everything. Hey, maybe that’s it? Maybe he’s not sure he made the right decision?”
“Maybe,” she said slowly. “You don’t think . . .”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.” And I didn’t. If there was one thing Benny had proven it was that he could fully commit to something, and once he did he wouldn’t be swayed. I knew he was committed to Ali. He’d never have an affair.
Her face cleared, and she gave a little laugh. “No, of course not.”
“So are you going to talk to her together?” I asked, unwilling to spill my info with Letty eating her sub in the storeroom. The least I could do was wait to betray her until Ali and I were alone, but I would rather she told her mother herself.
“When I get her home, we’re going to have one long, honest talk. And the honesty part better be coming from her.”
“So the big thing is that she lied about staying over at Emily’s?”
Ali took a big bite out of the sandwich and shook her head. “I’m not going to go over us doing the same thing at her age—”
“No, no, I wasn’t going to say that,” I said, though of course I was. I was also going to reference the boy she broke up with Benny for when she was fifteen. The boy she’d lost her virginity to . . . at fifteen. A boy she’d said she was in love with, who’d said he was in love with her.
“Can I still take her up today?”
Ali looked at me incredulously. “Of course not. This is really serious, Cora. I can’t just reward her the very next day—”
“Mom, please?” Letty said from the door of the storeroom. I had no idea how long she’d been standing there.
Ali glared at her. “Absolutely not. Are you finished with your lunch? There are fifteen instruments back there for the elementary school that need to be unpacked and checked. You can start on that.”
“Mom—” Letty started.
“Go,” Ali said, with such hardness in her voice that I was embarrassed.
Letty fled back to the storeroom, and Ali wrapped up the remains of her sub. She hadn’t eaten much.
“I don’t know what to do with her,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with
him
. I don’t know much, do I?” she asked with a rueful laugh.
“Hey,” I said, “why don’t you let me help? Just hear me out for a second. Let me take Letty. Let me get her up in the air and talk to her, find out what’s going on, and get her out of your hair for a while. You both need a break from each other. In fact, I can keep her for the night, and you can talk to Benny.”
“No, Benny would kill me. He’s reading all these notes—”
“Yeah, Letty mentioned that. Her diary, too, huh? Was that really necessary?”
She shrugged. “He was just determined. What did you want me to do? Tackle him? I got him calmed down eventually, but, he was just . . . a different person. Or, maybe, he was the same person he’s always been; I’ve just never seen that side. He was the big cop, you know? And maybe he’s right. Maybe I’ve spoiled her, or haven’t been paying as much attention as I should.”