Page 2 of Desert Rain
My phone lit up on the table.
Mom.
I stared at the screen for two rings, then answered and put her on speaker while toeing off my boots. “Hey.”
Wind rushed through the phone. Music played somewhere behind her, bright and percussive, all sunshine and steel drums. The sound made my apartment feel even smaller.
“We’re in the Bahamas!” Mom announced, delighted and breathless.
Of course they were.
Good for them. Really. They had sold the house last year, bought into cruise life like they’d joined a cheerful nautical cult, and disappeared into permanent vacation mode. My father had discovered linen shirts. My mother had discovered rum punch. Their retirement photos looked like pharmaceutical ads for joint mobility.
“You sound tired,” Mom said.
“Long day.” I walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, because apparently I enjoyed confirming my own despair. Half a jar of pickles. Two eggs. Coffee creamer. A takeout container I was afraid to open. Glamour, thy name is adulthood.
Dad’s voice boomed in the background. “Tell her about the dolphin excursion!”
Mom laughed. “Your father almost cried.”
“I did not,” he shouted, sounding exactly like a man who had absolutely cried near dolphins.
I smiled at the refrigerator light. They sounded happy. Genuinely, beautifully happy. I wouldn’t be the daughter who dragged debt, mold spots, and career panic into their sunset years. They’d earned ease. They’d earned bad cruise buffet desserts and matching sun hats and the right to believe their only child was doing just fine.
“I’m good,” I said. “Work’s good.”
“Apartment good?”
A bead of moisture gathered at the swollen edge of the ceiling stain. I watched it tremble there, fat and indecisive. “Yep.”
“You eating?”
“Constantly.”
That was technically true if thinking about food counted as a metabolic category.
“Dating anyone?”
A laugh came out before I could stop it. Sharp. Hollow. “No.”
“Well, honey,” she said, her voice softening in that way mothers had when they wanted to touch a bruise without admitting they’d noticed it, “don’t work your life away.”
Too late, Mom.
After we hung up, the apartment seemed to inhale the silence and hold it. I made toast from the last two slices of bread, scraped peanut butter over them, and ate standing at the counter because sitting down felt too much like surrender. The gray cat appeared on the fire escape outside my window and stared through the screen with all the entitlement of a retired judge.
“No,” I told him. “You already had turkey.”
He continued staring.
“I respect the hustle, but boundaries matter.”
He blinked.
My phone buzzed again. This time it was Lena, my old roommate, back in town for one night and apparently determined to drag me into the world of the living. Loud, reckless, beautiful Lena, who had once convinced me to skip a graduate symposium because “your thesis will still be boring tomorrow, but karaoke waits for no woman.”
Her text filled the screen.
