Page 50 of Don't Go
Sabrina was watching the side of my face. I caught it in the corner of my eye. She didn’t say anything, and she turned her head forward.
“How’s the tyrant?” I asked her.
“Excuse me?”
“Pickles. The cat. Your tyrant.”
She pretended to consider. “Pickles is well and is at home with Mrs. Park, ruling the apartment in our absence.”
“Does he like me yet?”
“Pickles only likes anyone who feeds him, actually.”
I turned the steering wheel. “He’ll come around.”
“He won’t.”
“He will. They all do.”
“Cross.”
“Eventually.” I winked.
She kept her eyes on the windshield. “They won’t.”
“They will. Sometimes it takes years.”
“Mm-hmm.”
The aquarium's lobby smelled of salt, and sunscreen. Bonnie looked up at the giant fish-tank wall above the front desk and stopped walking.
“Mom, look!”
“I see them, baby. Yes, they are inside the wall.”
I paid for the tickets, and Sabrina didn’t argue. She let me have it and I was glad.
At the touch tank, Bonnie put both hands in up to the elbow without prompting. The tank had bat stars, a horseshoe crab, and a sea cucumber the size of a forearm. I leaned over the rail beside her and named what we were seeing, and Sabrina stood on my other side, arms crossed, her expression saying she was prepared to have a hand washed if it came to that.
I put my hand at the small of her back without thinking about it.
She didn’t move.
“Sea cucumber,” Bonnie said. She was studying it with the suspicion she usually saved for her mother’s reasoning. “It looks like — ”
“Don’t say it.”
“A — ”
“Don’t, Bonnie.”
I looked at Sabrina. She was looking dryly at the sea cucumber.
“It’s a sea cucumber,” she said. “A vegetable that lives in the sea. Move on.”
I sneaked a kiss at the corner of her mouth.
I didn’t plan to. The kiss came up before I decided to do it, and she let me, and when I pulled back, her ear was a quarter inch redder than it had been a moment ago.
