This Must Be the Place: A Novel (32 page)

Every night, after their respective shifts ended, they would meet at the amusement park at the far end of the boardwalk, eat blue Italian ice, and connive their way into extra turns on the Ferris wheel from the operator, an eager, chubby boy who came to the House of D’Angier every afternoon, blushed at Mona, and only said three words: “Cheese pizza. Thanks.” The wheel would lift them high into the dark sky, its blinking red and yellow and purple bulbs manic beneath the looming white moon, and they’d talk about the minutiae of their days—which, by virtue of being utterly and completely their own, were nothing short of miraculous.

The Ferris wheel was enormous, the kind with circular banquettes instead of two-person swings. Each car could seat eight to ten people, but Chubby Cheese Pizza let them have one all to themselves. Amy liked to prop her aching bare feet on the railing and Mona would lie down and follow the curve of the basket with her body.

“Hey, guess what happened to
me
today,” Mona would say.

“Wait wait wait, let me guess.” Amy tapped her forehead and furrowed her brow. “
You
made out with David Danger?”

Mona laughed. “Yes,” she said. “It’s really slow in the afternoons. What else are we supposed to do?”

“Mother, may I sleep with Danger?” Amy’s voice squeaked. It always squeaked when she rushed to speak, trying to get the words out before she was laughing too hard to talk.

Mona cracked up. “Oh,
may
I?” she drawled, and she and Amy both hooted into the dark night air.

Their conversations danced neatly around the truth of their situation and were full of gossip and jokes and laughter without ever addressing anything serious, anything with repercussions, anything (God forbid) grown up. But at the time, neither of them realized it; neither of them cared. They were friends at the top of the dark world, held aloft in an electric basket, and though they must have known the wheel would turn and bring them back to the ground, for that month the ocean wind ruffled their hair and they swung, weightless.

Through the end of June and into July, whenever Mona would start to feel despondent that her parents had read her note and
taken it at face value
, that they
weren’t
moving heaven and earth to find her, David Danger kept her doped and ecstatic. Instead of sitting alone in her room at the Pink Seahorse while Amy pulled another double shift at Maggione’s—picking up the pink plastic phone, dialing home, slamming the receiver down before it had a chance to ring—Mona went to the House of D’Angier just to hang out, to flirt with David and learn, from his Uncle Rufus, how to bake.

Uncle Roof had a penchant for humming the Beach Boys and a constant tang of pot; he reminded Mona of a hippie walrus. He was also a trained pastry chef and only ran the pizza place out of filial duty. The room marked
OFFICE
was his laboratory, a cramped windowless closet
with just enough space for a table, a giant KitchenAid mixer, and three people, standing, if two of those people (and Mona and David didn’t mind) stood right on top of each other. Deflated pastry bags and enigmatic implements hung on the pegboard walls; powdered sugar drifts filled the crevices and gaps in the floor tiles. They spent hours sculpting cakes, shaving and rounding the corners into obscene and surreal shapes; one night, they covered stuffed animals with fondant and left them on the beach to freak out the gulls. David stayed at his uncle’s beach house for the summer, and Mona developed her taste for beer on his rickety porch, watching the surf break and pull against the sand, break and pull. At the end of July, instead of feeling terrible and selfish and that this whole thing had gone on far too long, Mona and David slept together—just slept (after rounding a few bases), but still. Mona woke up first and watched David sleep for a long time.
So this
, thought Mona, fascinated by the movement of his eyes beneath closed lids,
this is love. I knew it.

The next morning she snuck back into the motel, grinning so hard her face hurt, but Amy was already awake, sitting upright in a nest of bed linens and reading the newspaper.

“Guess what.” The way Amy said it, it wasn’t a question. “It’s August.”

“August already?” Mona kicked off her flip-flops.

“Watch it. You’re getting sand everywhere.”

“What do you care? Someone comes in and cleans this place every day.”

Amy glared at her. She had purple shadows around her eyes and her hair looked dull and unwashed.

“What’s the matter?” Mona bit her tongue. What a stupid question.

“Other than the really fucking obvious?” Amy wadded up the newspaper and threw it at her. “Where are you?”

“I was at David’s, I told you—”

“No, where
are
you.” Amy covered her face with her hands, and Mona’s heart leaped. She hadn’t seen Amy this upset since the afternoon she confessed her crush on Ben Tennant—she hadn’t even cried when she first laid out the Ocean City plan, which had been a fairly upsetting afternoon. Before Mona could even move closer, Amy began sobbing,
violently, and this time Mona knew exactly what she wanted to do: she wanted to run. She wanted to run back to David and Uncle Roof immediately. She knew that Amy had been working hard, working all the damn time, in fact, which had made spending her free hours with David easy. Natural. If she’d even suspected Amy was this close to breaking down, she would never have left her side.

That’s such a lie
, she thought;
you lie you lie you lie
.

“Haven’t you wondered?” Amy hiccuped and pulled the comforter closer around herself, tighter, until she was completely tucked in, immobile. Only her head was visible, a disheveled cherry on a blanket sundae. “Where I am when I’m not here? I’m never here, Mona, I’m only here when I’m asleep, and sometimes not even then. Sometimes I sleep in the break room at one job for two hours and then get up and go to the next.”

Mona’s stomach hovered and dropped. “How much money do we have left?”

“Oh, that’s not the problem,” Amy said. She rolled her head back. “I have plenty of money. I could leave tomorrow. I could fly to LA first class—”

Mona burned. “If you have plenty of money, why did you hock the cuff links last week?” Last Tuesday, Amy had been nervy and short about ordering a huge fish fry dinner that neither of them could finish, which Amy had pronounced a disgusting waste of money.

“Take the cuff links,” Mona had said. She couldn’t bear to hock them herself. “If it’ll make you feel better, take the cuff links, take the money.” She’d tried to feel noble, like her sacrifice was precisely what Amy needed at the moment she needed it most. But when the cuff links, cool and heavy, tumbled out of her sock and into her palm, and then passed from her palm to Amy’s, Mona mostly felt like dying.

And now—to find out Amy hadn’t even needed them and had accepted them anyway—she felt worse than sick. She felt stupid and used.

Amy shut her eyes and shook her head. “There’s no such thing as enough money,” she said. “I’ve been cleaning other rooms before my shift at Maggione’s every day. I get tips and we get to stay in this room for free.”

“I thought you took double shifts—”

“I did. I did both. And then Maggione’s fired me last night. They decided they just didn’t need my help anymore. I wonder why.” Two twisted blooms appeared on the comforter as Amy clenched her fists inside her pink cocoon. “Those stupid assholes. I was the best waitress they had and they threw me away like a piece of garbage. And of course I’m still scared that there’s not enough money. There isn’t, ever, enough—what happens if the Seahorse fires me next; will they kick us out? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do next. I want to give up and I know it’s too late, but if I can’t work—if I can’t work, I don’t know what to do. I’m so—scared of everything that’s going to happen next.”

Mona was standing by the door, her flip-flops less than two feet away. Her brain blazed white with an image: she saw herself grabbing her shoes, looping her fingertips through the purple plastic thongs, and running.
Amy Henderson has made her own bed
, she thought,
Amy Henderson must lie in it. This has nothing to do with you. Amy Henderson has used you to make herself feel better about doing the stupidest thing she could possibly have done in her situation, and you need to get away, get away, get away. Save yourself.

Part of Amy gave up. Mona saw it happen: Amy stopped crying and deflated inside her tepee of blankets, her eyes glazed and unblinking. A terrible calm settled over the room. Mona, who had only understood love as something that burned bright and then out, was forced to consider that love was something you didn’t really understand, ever, at all. Because it must have been love that made her kick her flip-flops under the bed and bring Amy a cup of cold water. It must have been love that reminded her, in that tacky room so far from home, that Amy was her best friend, and had been her best friend for as long as she had memories; that Amy was selfish but had her own kind of magic; that Amy, who never needed anyone, needed her and needed her now. So it was love that pushed Amy’s sweaty bangs back from her forehead and tucked her in. And it was love that made Mona walk into the Pink Seahorse office and tell Ralph the night manager, just coming off his shift, that she would be taking over Amy’s cleaning duties for the foreseeable future.

But it wasn’t love that made her want Amy’s widower. It couldn’t be, because she barely knew him. It couldn’t be, because he barely knew her. And it couldn’t be, because if it were, then love was even more inexplicable than Mona was prepared to accept.

They finished the Waters-Kessler wedding cake on Friday evening. Despite Arthur’s presenting himself as willing to talk about the circumstances of Oneida’s conception—and what it had meant to Amy—Mona hadn’t pursued the matter further. She was both relieved he hadn’t pressed and thrilled that he wanted to hear at all; because he did want to hear, and not just because of the Amy factor, she thought. And she did want to tell him, though she just couldn’t figure out how.

Or
did
she want to tell him? She didn’t know. She hadn’t told anyone in so long, she didn’t think she still knew how to say the words. She had tried whispering them to herself in front of the bathroom mirror, and her entire throat had constricted. The fact that Oneida was twenty feet away, silent but most definitely in the room next door, probably had something to do with it.

It was easier to focus on assembling the Waters-Kessler cake.

“My daisies are too dense,” Arthur said.

“So spread them apart. Start from the center of the layer and fan out.” Mona was painting the requested happy yellow centers on each daisy with food coloring. She held two finished flowers up over her eyes. “Does this look as terrifying as I think it does?” she said.

“Yes,” Arthur said, and laughed. It was a nice laugh. She thought if she ever heard it when he was really, truly happy, it would be a wonderful laugh.

They were through at eleven o’clock and toasted their success with hastily mixed screwdrivers. “To your health,” she said, and clinked her juice glass against Arthur’s mug. And after she went to bed and fell asleep, she had an astonishingly powerful dream about her able assistant that was as surreal as it was pornographic: about the two of them, lying in a field of rippling fondant daisies, powdered sugar blowing on the wind. It stuck to their skin, collecting in the hollows of their collarbones and frosting their bodies.

Apparently her feelings for Arthur had moved beyond the contact high of novelty and the allure of friendship to something more elemental. She didn’t quite know what to do with it, other than explain it in terms like
biological imperative
, and
last adolescent gasp
, and
Jesus, woman, it’s not like you didn’t
know
you need to get laid
. She hadn’t had a crush—a real crush—in years.
Years
. She had had sex with Eric Cole, yes; she had gone out with the FedEx guy. Forever ago, when Oneida was still a toddler, she dated the son of one of her mother’s bridge club friends. She couldn’t even remember his name. He had been the first boy she kissed after David Danger, and the comparison was so pathetic that it broke her heart all over again. It reminded her that David Danger existed, that he was somewhere in the world—somewhere else. She hadn’t spoken to him since she came home from Jersey, back to Ruby Falls. She had been too embarrassed after her parents threatened to press charges against the House of D’Angier for hiring and sheltering a runaway minor, which she didn’t think was even actionable or provable (she’d never been on the books) but had been the only concrete action they could think to take.

And there was Oneida. Whom she had no explanation for—at least, no explanation that would make sense to David. As Oneida became a larger part of her life, a greater responsibility and a greater joy, so David Danger began to fade, until Mona could only think of him fondly, remotely. He was crystallized with that summer, like Amy: kept whole and perfect and still as a photograph in her mind.