Pineapple Street(69)
“There was one dance in seventh grade where you danced with Andrew Bowalski, do you remember that?” Mullin asked and Sasha shook her head. Sure, she remembered Andrew Bowalski. He was in her classes from kindergarten through high school. He was in their gifted and talented program. He had a dark buzz cut, wire-rimmed glasses, he was lanky and nerdy and had just the biggest crush on Sasha for years. She found it mildly embarrassing, but he was a nice enough guy. She never went out with him, and sometime in high school he moved on. He was in the chess club and got into Rutgers and ended up dating a girl from Boston. Sasha thought they were married now.
“Andrew liked you so much, and he told everyone that night that he was going to ask you to slow dance to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ because it was the longest song.” Mullin laughed remembering it. “And you did. Everyone knew you didn’t like him that way, but I remember you being so nice about it and letting him put his hands on your waist and rock back and forth for all seven minutes. That was when I fell in love with you.”
“Mullin—” Sasha tried to interrupt him. Whatever he was about to say, she didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t love Mullin and wasn’t going to change her mind.
“But here’s the thing,” Mullin pressed on. “I loved you, but what I really saw was how loved you were. How you had this amazing family, parents who would do anything for you, a mom who took you to buy the clothes you wanted for a dance, a dad who coached your softball team. You had friends, you had so much love surrounding you that it was easy for you to share it. You could dance with Andrew Bowalski and make his night. You were just so open and light, and I saw how closed and dark I was. I was like twelve years old and I knew I didn’t want to live like that. I wanted to have that kind of love. So I fell for you. And no, it didn’t work out between us, and that was my fault. I acted like an idiot. And who knows? Maybe even if I hadn’t it wouldn’t have worked out anyway, we were kids. But being with you and being with your family saved me. I know that. I knew it then too. Your mom will forgive you because that’s how she is.”
Mullin was staring intently across the yard, and Sasha saw how much it cost him to say this, to say it to someone who had hurt him so badly. She could stop hurting him now. She could be kinder to Mullin than the Stocktons were to her. She could be open even if the Stocktons were closed.
“Did you know that the pineapple symbolizes welcome and hospitality?”
“Yeah.” Mullin gave her an amused frown. “Sailors would bring them home and put them in front of their houses back in the day.”
“Exactly. But it’s actually kind of messed up. Columbus first saw them in Brazil and brought one back to Europe for the king of Spain. They were a prestige fruit for the uberelites. A status symbol that only the wealthy could have. We think of pineapples as this whimsical fruit, but they’re actually a symbol of colonialism and imperialism.”
“Good to know.” Mullin nodded, smiling.
“I’ll take a penny for that one.”
“Come here.” Mullin reached out. Sasha stepped in and let him hug her. She wasn’t sure she’d felt his arms around her since she was nineteen; it was strange. The way he smelled was both familiar and not, the way his beard scratched her cheek, the broadness of his chest. Mullin pulled away and together they sat down on the bottom step of the deck, facing the maple tree and listening to the neighborhood.
Sasha’s mother and brothers came home an hour later. The treatment had gone well. His lungs had been filling with blood clots, so the doctors injected him with a medicine they use for stroke patients. It had restored blood flow and then after a few hours they put him on heparin. He’d be on blood thinners for six months, but he was already breathing better. It was a reprieve, but a reprieve from a fate Sasha hadn’t even known to fear, as abstract as the truck that barrels through an intersection an hour after you’re safely home making a sandwich, scaffolding that collapses onto an empty sidewalk while you’re snug in bed. How could Sasha know what to even worry about when the world was so random? It left her further unnerved, imagining how easy it would have been for her to be working, poring over three different shades of cream, eating tea sandwiches in a flowered crown, eavesdropping on her husband outside her own bedroom door while hours away her family was on the brink of sorrow and loss. She composed a text to Cord, telling him the good news, and let her finger hover over the button before sending it, wondering for a moment why he wasn’t there by her side.
SEVENTEEN
Georgiana
When Georgiana woke on Monday morning, her head aching with a potent mix of Klonopin, Blue Arrows, and remorse, she couldn’t remember anything from the night before. She knew she had embarrassed herself, she was awash in shame, but she wasn’t sure why.
She showered and dressed and went to work, sat in the maid’s room where she tried to focus on writing an article, but she couldn’t. Georgiana was tired of herself. She was tired of being drunk and hungover. She was tired of dressing up for parties. She was tired of tennis at private clubs. She was tired of waitstaff asking still or sparkling. She was tired of Berta cooking her meals and mopping her floors. She was tired of clicking away in the smallest room of an enormous mansion pretending to be doing something—anything—that mattered when, in her entire life outside her job, she was yet another cog in the machine that kept everything moving away from fairness and justice and humanity. She couldn’t do it anymore. She couldn’t be this person. She needed to change. But she had no idea how, and it made her so sad she could barely stop herself from crying into her hands.