Wednesday In Miami

Feel free, my mom said as she was driving me to the mall to meet my best friend, to tug my coat if you feel like I’m treating you like you’re thirteen. I don’t mean to, honey. It just happens sometimes. She pulled over at the light and I hopped out, saying, Mom, it is WAY too late for that, and then I met Manya at Victoria’s Secret before we walked over with our iced coffees to our old high school so we could sit on the bleachers and look out at the bay.

What do you remember about high school, we said, as we walked around and looked at the old buildings and the new buildings and tried to picture what it looked like in the nineties, what it was like our senior year after the hurricane when all the trees were down. Whatever happened to that one girl, we ask each other. I’m totally Facebook friends with that guy, the one I sort of wanted to go to prom with. Can you believe that person turned out gay? Can you believe that other person turned out not gay? We haven’t seen each other for three years but there’s no awkwardness, no so-how-have-you-been. This is so normal for us now that we don’t even comment on it.

I tell her about my mom’s new-to-me house. I tell her about my new boyfriend. I tell her that I had a very difficult time bra shopping in Wellington and am planning to stock up while I’m here. She tells me about how she gets worried about the kids’ safety. She tells me she wants to take a trip by herself one of these days, maybe to New Zealand. She tells me that she blowdried her hair today and that’s why it looks so sexy and awesome.

My sister picks me up in her boyfriend’s car and drives me back to the island and the three of us (Mom’s yoga class was canceled) sit around the new-to-me living room, talking about Samoa, talking about my sister’s job at the library, talking about how Cuban food was one of the only things I missed about America. After Becca leaves for her hour-long drive back to, basically, the Everglades where she lives, Mom and I chat for a while more and then she comes and tucks me into the bed in the guest room. I know you’re not thirteen anymore, she says, but it’s just so nice to have you here. She gives me a hug and a kiss when she says good night. Marah and her kids arrive in a couple days and then we will have a Key Girl quorum for the first time since 2005. It’s still eighty degrees outside and I can hear the anoles scritching around the new-to-me garden, under the hurrican-shuttered windows.

A pause, a rest, a place I recognize intimately and am still getting lost in because so much has changed, because I have changed, because everywhere in the world is strange at the moment. Eight hours of sleep underneath only a sheet, still settling in, still wondering what will happen next.