Page 9 of #Moonstruck

When it became clear she wouldn’t get better, we were advised to put her in an assisted-living facility where they could watch over and help her. We were able to afford it only because my maternal grandparents had been really well off. My father had never contributed a single penny in child support; our mom had used her inheritance to take care of us. She’d paid cash for the Craftsman-style cottage in Venice Beach where I still lived with my siblings. We’d never gone without.

Until recently.

Because inheritances didn’t last forever.

“How’s your mom?” Angie asked me as I stepped inside the main building. She wore her favorite lavender scrubs and handed off a patient file to a coworker at the nurses’ station.

“Good. This was a good day.” This facility was how Angie and I had met. She had started working at Century Pacific Assisted Living three years ago. I had come to visit my mother on my nineteenth birthday. Cynthia couldn’t talk, couldn’t stay still. My being there only made her episode worse.

Angie found me sitting in the lobby, crying uncontrollably. She put her arm around me, told me everything would be okay. I wasn’t upset that I couldn’t talk to my mom. I was upset because now I was officially “older” than she thoughtshewas. In her mind she would stay young forever, like some kind of YA vampire, while I kept aging and aging. For some reason, that broke my heart. Angie promised she would keep a special eye on my mother and would be there anytime I needed to talk.

She’d been my best friend ever since.

“I’m glad she’s doing well. It’s time for my break. Want to do a lap with me?”

I nodded, and we went outside. The grounds had a large, looping asphalt path enclosed by high honeysuckle bushes and the fence they covered up. Sometimes I walked here with my mom, if she was feeling up to it.

“How is Hector Jr.?” I asked.

Her whole face lit up. “He is the cutest toddler in the whole world. Even when he gets up five times in a single night because his mommy went out and he didn’t like it.”

“Poor baby.” I wondered if now would be a good time to mention my plan to marry her off to Fox so she could have his babies. What do they call fox babies? Kits? Then she wouldn’t have to go out at night and could stay home and be a boring married person—making herself, Fox, and Hector Jr. extremely happy.

“But I don’t want to talk about my lack of sleep. I want to talk about whatever was happening last night with you and Ryan De Luna.”

CHAPTER THREE

I actually tripped over my own feet. “What?”

“There was something there last night. With you and Ryan.”

“You are certifiable. Which is probably okay, given that you’re currently surrounded by doctors who can treat you.”

She nudged me with her elbow. “I’m being serious. There was this, I don’t know, fiery spark or something. Like if you’d been alone with him in that room, the whole place would have burned down.”

Angie always had been prone to romantic delusions. “If it had burned down, it would have been because I was trying to destroy the evidence and the body. The only thing between us was a mutual disgust and animosity.”

I could see I hadn’t convinced her, so I pressed on. “Why are you even bringing it up? It’s not like we run in the same social circles. I won’t see him again.”

“Not unless it’s meant to be.”

My best friend fervently believed in “meant to be.” I blamed her mother for all the telenovelas.

It didn’t help things that Angie’s own love story had started because of “meant to be.” She’d recounted it a dozen times. She’d been late to an interview. Her alarm didn’t go off. The water in the shower wouldn’t turn on. Her dog threw up all over the outfit she’d chosen to wear. Just one delay after another.

And then, right as she was turning into the parking lot of her new potential employer, Hector ran into her, giving her a mild case of whiplash. I’d told her more than once that I didn’t think bodily injury via vehicular accident was particularly romantic, but Angie insisted it was. That if she hadn’t been late, if so many things hadn’t gone wrong, if she’d been just ten seconds earlier or ten seconds later, they wouldn’t have met. Hector felt so bad about her injury that he stayed with her in the hospital until her family arrived and then came over to check on her every day for a week. By the end of that week, they knew they’d be together for the rest of their lives.

But neither of them had known just how short that would end up being.

“Not everyone can have love at first crash. Which is another reason to never fall in love. My insurance rates wouldn’t recover.” Parker had a nasty habit of parking in illegal zones whenever he took the van out, and we had a small mountain of unpaid tickets. “Last night was not ‘meant to be.’ Last night was only about you meeting him. Nothing else.”

“Well, I thought Ryan was very charming. Didn’t you think so?”

See? Moonstruck. “No. He was a punk.”

“Only to you. I wonder why?” Her voice sounded sincere, but I saw the mischievous twinkle in her eye. Like his punkness had meant he liked me.

But this wasn’t elementary school. We weren’t six years old, and he didn’t pull my pigtails.

---