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The house on Gran Canaria is pretty nice, all brick terraces and white stucco walls and red shingles. It’s not very big, but Letty still gets this feeling like she isn’t allowed to touch anything. She gets that feeling just about everywhere that doesn’t have grease streaked across the floors.
It has a swimming pool, a big one, lined in blue tile. There’s a vine growing up along the wall behind it, hibiscus or something, hot-pink flowers a little wilted from the heat. They’re falling into the water, floating on the surface. She’ll go out with a skimmer later, maybe, if she can find one.
“There’s a pool,” she says, leaning out onto the patio.
“I know,” Mia says. She doesn’t come to look at it.
In the kitchen, she’s opening all the drawers, cataloging all of the things they don’t have. Letty stands in the doorway and watches her, her bent head and her back and her blurred reflection in the window. She’s sorting through the silverware slowly, too slowly, picking up the forks and then putting them back. Her half-grown-out bangs are falling into her eyes, and she doesn’t move to brush them away from her face.
Almost eleven years, and Letty probably knows her better than anybody. She still never knows what to do when Mia gets like that.
-
It was better in Rio. It was better, then, when she was their eye in the sky and Letty was driving. She was still up at night, pacing the floor, but she was thinking about the plan. Letty woke up and went out and found her, and Mia was going over the blueprints. She said, I’m worried about this angle. There were so many things to think about.
It was better when they were first on the run, after Brian, after it all went to hell. All those nights in hotel rooms in Navolato and Guadalajara. She used to cry back then, at least. She used to get angry. They were fighting in the car all the way down to the border, until they made it over into Tijuana and Letty said, we should split up. The cops were looking for – the both of them. Maybe not together. She didn’t know how much Brian had figured out.
Mia said, don’t be fucking stupid.
They went to a cyber and looked up: countries without extradition treaties. That was stupid. They were wearing sunglasses inside. They didn’t know how to do it, yet.
Letty likes to think she’s pretty good at it by now. She can get packed quick. She knows how to hit the ground running.
Mia has four different passports in her nightstand. Letty doesn’t like to think about how Mia’s good at it.
-
Sometimes, she’s okay. She walks down to the grocery store. Letty works on her car in the driveway, and waits until she hears her footsteps. She slides out on the creeper, and Mia pulls a bottle from the six-pack at the bottom of the bag and passes it to her.
They can talk through the kitchen window. Mia pushes it open and calls things out to her while she’s putting everything away. She comes back and runs a hand along the passenger-side door, where it’s chipped. It’s a new find, kind of beat up. She says, “Remind me, and I’ll paint it for you.”
That night, she’s in the bathroom for too long. Letty’s pacing outside the door, listening to the water running. Eventually she gives in and picks the lock, which Mia probably knew she was going to do, anyway. She’s just sitting on the floor of the shower, back to the tile, letting the water beat down on her.
Letty reaches in and turns it off. She never knows what to say to her, so she just dries her off and gets her into bed and holds her for a while. Mia doesn’t cry. She’s probably finished already. In the morning, she doesn’t want to talk about it.
-
The problem, Letty thinks, is that this is about as good as her life could have turned out. For one thing, she’s not locked up, and she isn’t broke, and she has the type of rig she used to dream about ten years ago. She has Mia, even if it kind of shocks her sometimes that the universe let that one work out. She used to think that was its way of throwing her a bone – you can’t stay out of trouble and you don’t have a dad, but look who’s sneaking out of class to make out with you. Letty still doesn’t really get it, but Mia’s stuck around. So.
The thing is, Letty never wanted to be anything. Even when the jobs were working, when it looked like they were going to walk away clean with a million each after that last one, she just thought that they wouldn’t have to worry so much about the mortgage. She was going to get a nicer engine, and some clothes, maybe, and something for Mia. She was still deciding what.
They have eleven million dollars in offshore accounts, in unmarked bills in Letty’s bag and stuffed underneath the mattress. She can’t think of anything Mia would really want – at least, nothing you can buy with loose cash.
They’re closer to thirty than twenty, now, and she’s not any closer to finishing college than she was at twenty-one. They have eleven million dollars, and they still flinch when somebody rings the doorbell. They’re still up all night if a cruiser goes by, Letty pulling herself up to sit on the kitchen counter while Mia makes tea and darts glances towards the driveway.
It’s better, a little, after Rio. That time, when Dom said, I have this idea, Mia was there.
-
At fifteen, Mia said: um. I got a speeding ticket, once. She was sitting on the dirty tile floor of the girls’ bathroom, knees pulled up to her chest.
Letty had asked: you ever do anything bad? She had meant it like, you ever get caught smoking behind the portables? She was kneeling on the sink, working at the window. Leon had finally coughed up the pack he owed her. It was the first time they ever really talked, the only time Mia ever got detention. It wasn’t her fault – it had been Dom’s, what a shocker. Hey, come on, you want Jesse to flunk? She had tilted her head so he could read off her paper. She hadn’t been a good liar yet.
Letty thinks about that sometimes when she’s feeling selfish. She had thought Mia had been going to say no. Mia said, going thirty-five over. She barely had her learner's. They didn’t know each other back then.
She had kind of meant it like, you ever kiss a girl? That was the follow-up, after Hendricks had come by and knocked on the door, after Letty had hissed and hit the lights and thrown the cigarette out the window.
In the dark, she heard Mia stand up.
-
The house on Gran Canaria has a lawn – not patchy and dry like their old yard in California, but wet, lush grass stretching all from the house to the low wall. Dom mows it for them when he comes to visit. Mia looks at it kind of wistfully, sometimes, standing on the deck when she’s hanging up the laundry.
The landlady comes once a month to check on them. Her name is Lucia, and her sons are grown up and living on La Palma. She thinks their names are Marta and Ana Maria. She thinks they’re sisters, or cousins, or something. Letty tries to do most of the talking.
Letty tries to keep two feet of distance between them. It makes her feel like she’s seventeen again. They used to avoid making eye contact in the hallway. Letty used to sit four rows behind her in English. She would slip out and head for that same bathroom, the one on the second floor that nobody ever used. She would slouch against the sinks and count to sixty, and right on cue, the handle would turn.
As soon as they’re alone again, Letty’s on her, pressing her up against the counter. When Mia’s in a good mood, it makes her laugh. She pokes Letty’s ribs, tugs on her ponytail. She says, “Do you think I forget?”
Once, the landlady comes with her grandson. Letty doesn’t catch the name. He might be two or three – big brown eyes, stumbling over his feet. Mia tours him all through the house, through the yard, talking to him in her halting Spanish.
He likes her. Little kids always like her. He’s reaching for her hand, climbing into her lap. Letty makes coffee and says stupid things - ¿qué calor, no? She shows Lucia the leaking faucet, even though she already knows how to fix it.
Mia’s reading something to him. Letty doesn’t even know where she got a kid’s book. Probably, it came with the house. She’s pointing to the pictures, asking him questions. When he answers, it just sounds like gibberish, but Mia acts like she understands.
Letty kind of can’t look at that. She keeps talking, so Lucia won’t turn around. Eleven years, and she knows how Mia’s voice goes when she’s really trying not to cry.
-
There’s another way Mia gets sometimes, where she wants to make Letty dinner and watch her eat it. She wants to shampoo Letty’s hair and brush it out and braid it, and work the knots out of her shoulders, and hold her in their bed and kiss her on the forehead. It’s better than that awful, spacey silence, so Letty tries to just put up with it, to act like she doesn’t know why Mia does it. She can pull that off, mostly, but it makes her get antsy.
When Mia falls asleep, she takes out the braids, and runs her fingers through her hair until it goes all wild. She slides out of bed and goes into the kitchen, and paces around and drinks out of the faucet. She has to glare at her own reflection in the window for a while before she feels like herself again.
She’s twenty-seven, and she never feels like it. She goes back to bed, and buries her face against Mia’s back. It’s not Mia’s fault that she’s not great at being taken care of.
So many things somebody else might do better. Letty gets these dumb ideas sometimes, like: she could get her a puppy or something. A cat, maybe. Like it wouldn’t just be one more thing that she’d get attached to and have to leave behind.
Sometimes, she gets even dumber ideas, like: if she left, Mia might find someone. If she crept through the door, out into the driveway in the middle of the night, and drove slow enough to keep the engine quiet. Mia would be safer, that way. Letty slips up. She goes to races. She gets herself a reputation, and then they have to skip town again.
And the dumbest idea of all, which is: she could ask Dom to knock her up. Not that he would ever do that, not that she could keep it, anyway. Not like she would be any good at it. She doesn’t even like little kids, or she wouldn’t know what to do with one. She thinks the hormones would kick in, maybe. If it had Mia’s eyes, maybe. Mia would know what to do. They would work it out.
Sometimes Mia’s standing in the yard, looking out over the valley. Letty thinks about her sitting cross-legged in the grass, a dark-haired toddler taking wobbly steps into her arms.
She tries not to think about it. There’s no point.
And Mia would never ask her to. That was the first thing she ever gave up for her, before everything - that and prom and white picket fences. There’s no fence around the back yard, only the wall. Red brick, crumbling.
-
But sometimes, Letty kind of thinks it might all work out. She wakes up, and she can hear Mia in the kitchen, frying something and humming along to the radio. She lies there and listens to that for a moment, the oil spitting and some old song she vaguely knows. Their bedroom window faces west, so the sun’s not coming in. She still feels warm, looking up at the ceiling.
She pads out and finds Mia cracking eggs. Her jeans are probably Letty’s jeans; they’re too short. She’s painted her toenails.
“Happy anniversary,” she says lightly. She doesn’t even turn around, just waves a hand towards the refrigerator, where the calendar is pinned up with two magnets.
They don’t have an anniversary. It wasn’t like that. There were other guys, and then there weren’t.
What she means is: eleven years ago today, Letty stood up and said, I’m going to the bathroom. She didn’t stick around long enough to catch Mia’s reaction, so she doesn’t know which of them it surprised more. She didn’t think anything was really going to happen.
Mia’s circled the date with a Sharpie, right under the picture of the white egret. The calendar is all the birds of the islands – not just canaries, actually. She got it at the drugstore. She’s so stupid. She’s so - something.
She has bacon grease all over her fingers. She holds her hands above her head when Letty kisses her.
-
Later, she goes out into the garden. She’s been buying flowers at the supermarket checkout, the potted kind that they sell for cheap ‘cause they’re half dead. African violets. She’s been planting them in the dirt at the edge of the patio, and some haven’t made it, but the rest are doing okay.
Letty watches her through the screen door for a while, and then goes and stands in the grass with her hands on her hips. She asks, “You ever kiss a chick?”
"A couple of times," Mia says. She sets the watering can down on the wall and turns around. “Your hair looks nice like that.” She’s touching the ponytail with her fingers, the only other way Letty knows how to do it. She’s touching the nape of Letty’s neck, tilting her head up.
The sun’s setting, drenching everything in red. Letty still sees it behind her eyelids. Mia kisses her like it could be enough, maybe. She’s holding back a smile against Letty’s lips.
“And how was it?”
“Pretty good,” Mia says, nodding, serious, but the corners of her mouth are still twitching. “I mean, I liked it.” She twists in Letty’s arms so she can see the view, the clouds reflected in the swimming pool, the petals. One of them needs to go out again with the skimmer.
“Christ,” Letty says suddenly, because there’s a lizard the size of her hand on the low wall. A blue-throated lizard, with its tongue darting out. Two lizards – the other is the color of the brick, and she almost misses it until it moves.
“Leave them alone,” Mia says. Her hand is trailing down Letty’s spine. “They’re in love.”
Letty wasn’t really going to go after them, or whatever. She’s feeling pretty amicable. She says, “Oh, yeah?”
“They’re in love,” Mia says again. “Like how-” and she lets Letty drag her up the stairs and through the kitchen. She says, “I was going to make dinner,” but she doesn’t mean it.
-
After, Letty’s looking at the way the light hits her, the lamplight, now that the sun’s gone down. Mia’s lying on her back, looking a little spacey – not in that distant way; she’s just happy, and her head is against Letty’s shoulder. They aren’t going to sleep; it’s like nine, maybe. The alarm clock’s broken – it only shows eights. They’ll get up and watch TV or something. Mia probably can’t be bothered to cook. Letty thinks they have tequila, and limes, and maybe tortilla chips.
Letty pushes herself up on one elbow and says, “You could take a class, if you wanted to.” It feels like it’s the right time to say it, maybe. It feels like - it’s not too much. It’s just something. There’s a college up in Tafira. They have money.
“We aren’t staying,” Mia says. She’s probably right.