28

 

 

 

 

28

 

 

We’re at the pizza place around the corner from Susie’s house. A takeaway spot with restaurant ambitions. Checkered tablecloths over plastic surfaces, fluorescent lights swapped out for candles melted into green bottles. The seating is too tight; tables and chairs crammed up against the counter where waiters do the ordering right over your head. The menu is written out in chalk on the blackboard up on the wall. Swirly letters all shaded skew.

Margherita, but not like the cocktail.

Regina, the name that makes boys smirk.

“And what’s the little lady keen on?” Susie says to me. Smirking.

“She likes calzones,” Mom says. “The more mushrooms the better.”

My mother and I ate mushrooms together once a year or so back. The colors brightened up around us in booming tones, and the sand we lay on snaked in loops and patterns. I’d never understood before how everything is alive. Even dried-up water weeds. Even grains of sand. The moss growin