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Ramsey hates LA. She hates the smog, the noise, the preening showiness.
“So you hate LA cause it's posh,” Tej scoffs, when she said this. “You’re from Chelsea!”
Roman wanted to live closer to Hollywood - for the parties - but Tej and Ramsey shut it down pretty quickly, and Roman subsided with nary a grumble. Ramsey has long suspected that Roman runs his mouth mostly for show, and has yet to be proved wrong.
So they end up buying a house in Monterey Park, near the Torettos, right on the street that separates the gentrified rich from the houses with cars on cinderblocks. The problem is, once they buy it, they don’t really know what to do with it.
“I’ve never owned a house before,” Roman says, nonplussed. “Now what?”
Ramsey has rented many a ramshackle apartment in London, couchsurfed in many more, and hacked AirBnB for many more than that. She’s never even owned a mattress. Not since she left home, anyway.
Tej puts his hand over his heart. “Children. Children. Listen to me. I own many houses, and -”
“Oh yeah?” Roman says, “And when was the last time you actually lived in one that wasn’t a shitty apartment over a body shop that had pool furniture in the living room?” Tej scowls. “At least my trailer had a table that wasn’t a turned-over milk crate, man.”
“How about we start with a couch?” Ramsey suggests, but then it turns out none of them can agree on even that. In the dead of night, Ramsey furtively buys a couch, hoping when her pick turns up the others will just have to accept it, but it backfires when Ramsey comes home from spending the day with Mia and the munchkins, and there’s three plastic-wrapped couches in the living room, interlocked like the world’s worst game of four-dimensional tetris. Tej and Roman look at her, sheepish.
“Why don’t we just, like, buy a bigger house?” Tej says. "A mansion in Malibu. Three living rooms. Three kitchens. Hell, three backyards."
“No,” Roman says, stubborn all of a sudden. “My name - my real name, man - is on the deed to this thing. We’re keeping it.”
“Okay,” Ramsey and Tej say, almost in unison.
“So we better return two of these couches, and we better pick the two that give full refunds, if you know what I’m saying.”
They argue over it for a while but end up doing exactly that - returning the two that would give them full cash back. They’re left with Ramsey’s pick, a black leather industrial-style monstrosity that Ramsey can admit, now, looks disproportionate in their modest suburban home. It is comfortable, though, and on the day the other couches are picked up and taken away, Ramsey sinks down onto it smugly. Roman and Tej sit either side of her, looking straight ahead at the blank white wall.
“Well that worked out well,” Tej says.
“How the hell are we gonna decide what TV to get?” Roman says.
“I was thinking - no TV,” Tej says, and Ramsey does an emphatic finger gun in his direction and nods.
Roman makes a blustering, outraged sound. “It is my god-given right, as a man in this country!” he says. “I demand the full American home-owning experience!”
“Man, what do you care about the American experience,” Tej says, just as Ramsey goes, “Well I’m English,” and kisses Roman just where the corner of his mouth dimples into his cheek. “You watch everything on your computer, anyway.”
Roman looks suspiciously at the both of them, smiling at him like angels. “What we gonna sit here and stare at, then?” he says.
“Each other?” Tej says. Ramsey gives him another finger gun.
“We could buy some board games?” she says.
“Boa - board games!” Roman splutters. “Just cause we moved out to the suburbs don’t mean we have to go suburban, homes!”
“I do want to make it our home, though,” Ramsey says. “It’s all of ours. Equally.” And then, because why not, she adds, “That’s important to me.”
“I know, baby,” Roman says, “I just think you both got some ugly-ass taste, though.”
“First of all, how dare you,” Tej says. “Second, we could…IKEA?”
Ramsey low-key thrills at the thought of taking her boys to IKEA, bouncing on all the beds, buying meatballs in the restaurant and loading up on cinnamon rolls and weird Swedish chocolate for the drive home. She yearns for it, like she does most stunningly ordinary things that she’s never had the chance to do. Sometimes it feels like most people got dealt the same pack of cards, just shuffled and played in varying hands, but the dealer missed her altogether, and she’s stuck with whatever is left at the table when others have moved on. But by Roman’s spluttering about having to revoke his African-American membership card to go in there, Tej how could you, etc, Ramsey figures it’s a non-starter, so she looks Tej straight in the eye, claps one of his hands in both of hers, and says, “Tej, I love you, but we’re not ready to take that step just yet,” and Tej laughs just like she meant him to do.
“How about we look at some flea markets tomorrow?” Ramsey suggests.
“They only open on weekends, mostly,” Roman says. It’s a Thursday.
“Man, how do you know that?” Tej says.
“Let me keep some secrets,” Roman says.
“I think it’s a great idea,” Ramsey says, doggedly, so Tej says loyally, “Then I do too.”
“We should go on Sunday,” Ramsey decides, just because it seems like something normal people do on a Sunday, and that’s what she wants.
“Okay,” Tej says. He pulls out his phone. “It looks like the closest one is called the Queer Mercado, in East LA.”
“Yes,” Ramsey says, immediately.
Tej’s brow furrows. “It doesn’t look like the kind of flea market to sell furniture, though.”
“I don’t care, let’s go,” she says.
“Well this is a great start,” Roman says.
----
“I would have thought y’all would have just bought a suite of furniture online or something,” Letty says. “You know, how you can buy an entire room’s worth of ex-display pieces, or something.”
Ramsey blinks at her. “I didn’t know you could do that,” she says. They’re back from another day spent spelunking, and have moved on to the regular Toretto Sunday Afternoon Barbeque. The place no longer looks like a literal bomb has hit it, as most of the detritus has been cleared out. Work has been completed on the two garages first, as they were not completely razed to the ground - one for Letty, Dom, and Little B to sleep in, and one for the cars and tools and boxes of whatever possessions they have left. Dom has set a few pavers in the grassless backyard so they can level out a place for a grill and some seats. The actual house is less than a shell; it’s nothing but timber beams latticed by scaffolding.
“Mmm,” Letty says. “Pretty easy to find out, though. Dom and I did a Google search. Can you imagine me dragging Dom into a Pottery Barn?” Letty mimes wide open eyes and a scared expression, and Ramsey laughs.
Later, when she’s slouched on a lawn chair, beer in hand, she relays this new information to Tej and Roman.
“What,” yelps Roman, while Tej nods sagely.
“I heard you bartering with that woman for that silk-screened lampshade, though,” Tej says, pointing the neck of his Corona. “Do not front with me, young man. We not dragging your ass around on this, you feel me? You’re digging it, I can tell.”
Roman shrugs and takes a sip of his beer. “That lamp do be fucking sick, though. It’ll look cool on that mid-century telephone seat we got out at Silverlake.”
“Hell yeah it will,” Ramsey says, smiling. Her feet are sore from walking, and when she was helping load a vintage cherry wood dining table onto the bed of Tej’s truck, a protruding nail got her right across the meaty part of her palm. The band-aid is already starting to peel from the condensation on her beer bottle.
“I don’t know what we need a telephone seat for,” Tej says.
“Hey, man, you know the rule,” Roman says. “We all agreed. No take-backs.”
“Yeah, but -”
“We all agreed,” Roman says, louder.
“Hey,” Ramsey says. “Cheers.” She holds out her Corona, and they all clink in some kind of Californian Pavlovian reaction. “To telephone seats,” she says.
“To telephone seats,” the boys echo.
“Hey, mom?” she can hear Little B say from somewhere behind her. “What’s a telephone seat?”
“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” says Letty.
-----
It takes them, all told, three months worth of Sundays to fill the house: three months of day trips to Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, and one delicious weekend up in Sonoma County. They fill three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, the combined living-dining area, and the kitchen. The backyard is pretty pitiful, so they mostly leave it, because if they’re hanging around outside they’re hanging at Dom and Letty’s anyway. Ramsey puts up a string of naked solar-powered bulbs that look nice from the kitchen window, and calls it good enough.
They argue over paint chips, and how many accent colors are allowed, and how much of said color one can use before it’s no longer an accent, Roman, goddamn. The only thing they each have free reign over is their own bedrooms, even if they all mostly sleep in the master suite that is nominally Ramsey’s, something the boys all made she knew they were sacrificing in deference to her feminine right to the ensuite bathroom. They don’t end up buying a television, or even the massive computer Ramsey was half-thinking about mounting on the wall, but Tej found a painting of a cowboy riding a bucking horse he inexplicably took a shine to and somehow convinced Ramsey and Roman of it’s rugged and manly beauty, so now it hangs on an otherwise empty wall they painted the creamiest, palest shade of peach they could find. It hangs squarely over their massive coffee table, a roadside find Tej sanded, primed and stained, and now permanently seems to house an in-progress jigsaw puzzle thanks to Ramsey impulsively buying one at a thrift shop, and then another, and now one seems to mysteriously appear every couple of weeks like magic.
The weird thing is, they don’t even jigsaw together. They’ll put a few pieces together when they walk past in the morning, or when they are waiting for someone to get out of the shower, or when the bedroom is feeling particularly full. Ramsey likes to sit down in front of it with her coffee in the morning, but she’s seen Tej hovering over it as dinner is simmering, or heard Roman yelling, “I’m making this puzzle my bitch!” as she’s hanging sheets to dry in the backyard. And then one day they’ll come traipsing down the stairs, separately or together, and the puzzle will be done, and they’ll leave it on the table for a week or so to gaze upon it in satisfaction, but then they’ll break it up, put it back into the box, and give it back to the thrift store again.
Even if this was the type of life Ramsey had imagined for herself when she was growing up lonely in a house with an elevator on the inside, she would have thought she had missed the boat on it - obsessed with her work on the God’s Eye, and proving herself again and again and again. But here she is, with a proper family, and even within that, a little pod to which she could belong, where they have a table just for jigsaws, a cabinet full of paint samples, and an UberEats account with a joint credit card attached.
“Hey,” Ramsey says, poking Tej with her toes. They’re laying on the couch, Roman on one end with Ramsey’s head in his lap, Tej at the other.
“What,” Tej says, absently. She can’t see what he’s doing on his little blackberry-style thing, but she bets it’s fucking stocks or something.
“Is this how you thought your life would turn out?” she says.
“Nah,” Tej says. “Until I met Brian Fucking O’Conner I was all set to open up my own body shop. Was gonna get me a real rich clientele, selling souped-up shit to the Miami club kids.”
“Boring,” Roman says.
“Which,” Tej says, “Was gonna let me experiment with real cutting-edge stuff. Integrating specialist tech into cars, shit like that.”
“Like Tesla?” Ramsey says, straight-faced.
“The fuck you say!” Tej squarks. “None of this janky-ass AI shit, I’m talking about useful changes operable by the discerning driver.”
“Sounds like Tesla to me, brother,” Roman says. “And you could still do that.”
Tej shrugs. “It all seems so small, now.”
Ramsey hums. “Rome? What about you?”
“Back in prison, probably,” Roman shrugs. “I always wanted to go straight, but I got them whatchumacallits - impulse control problems.” Tej snorts. “Bit ironical now to think about, ain’t it. Going straight. Getting a real job.”
“Yeah you straight as hell,” Tej says, and they hi-five over Ramsey’s head as she rolls her eyes.
“Brian came and got me too,” Roman continues, “Even though I didn’t want to be got. I always knew I’d be driving, though, even if it was only between stints on the inside. I didn't see my life being something like this, though, if that’s what you’re asking. Steady roof over my head, and a mortgage to boot.” Roman makes a mind-blown kind of sound.
“We don’t have a mortgage,” Ramsey and Tej say, in sync.
“Man, I told you I don’t know how houses work!” Roman says. “Anyway, I didn’t really see myself as the type to have something like this, neither,” and here, he gestures to Ramsey and Tej, lounging on the first thing the three of them de facto purchased together, “I didn’t think I’d want it with anyone, and I really didn’t think anyone would want it with me.” He’s silent for one beat, then two, and says, “I’m thankful for what we got here, you know,” and of course it’s Roman who says it out loud, who out of the three of them says what he means exactly when he means it, and for whom the entire improbable situation may not have eventuated if he hadn’t, one day, gone in to hug Tej, but instead of his usual back-slapping bro hug he turned his face into Tej’s neck and lingered; and when he was done he turned, one arm still around Tej, and gestured to Ramsey to join.
And Ramsey didn’t even think about hesitating, didn’t even think about what it might mean, for which she is thankful, as she has a general history of neuroticism and would have talked herself out of it given even the slimmest chance.
As if sensing what she is thinking, Roman holds out his hand, and Tej slaps his hand into it in the macho half-bro-shake half-loving-handhold thing they’ve perfected. Their hands come to rest on her chest, so she tucks one of her hands in between theirs, even if it’s an awkward angle.
“This is nice,” she says, which sounds ironic, but isn’t.
“What about you?” Tej says. “Is this what you pictured for yourself?”
Ramsey wrinkles her nose. “Me? In LA? I can honestly say I never saw it coming.” They laugh, gratifyingly. Roman sinks down on the couch a little, and she has to adjust her head so it’s lying on his stomach, but it means her shoulder isn’t overextended as she grasps their conjoined hands.
“Hey, what we gonna eat tonight?” Roman says, to a chorus of groans and we just had breakfast!s.
-----
Brian and Mia come over with their kids one night, when the house is no longer a mess of drop cloths and electric hand tools. They come in the front door, which no one ever uses, so they get the full effect of the antique mirror placed at the end of the narrow entryway.
“There’s…houseplants,” Mia says, blankly.
“It’s my job to water them,” says Ramsey proudly. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Tej in the mirror, gesturing to himself and mouthing ‘I water them’, which makes her frown, but is probably very true. She already killed the first lot and was really congratulating herself on a job well done with the current crop.
When they head into the living room, Brian stops just inside the doorframe and says, “Whoa. My grandmother died in a place just like this,” but Roman snorts from behind Brian, bumping his shoulder as he charges through.
“Man, you didn’t even know either of youse grandmamas,” he says.
Brian just shrugs with his easy smile. “Could still be true though,” he says.
Brian and Mia are the first outside people to see the house, so Ramsey tries her best to look at the room with fresh eyes: the furniture is all dark wood, cherry or walnut, some of it upholstered in dark greens or dusty pinks. Roman’s silk-screened lampshade is in the corner, with its serene Japanese-style scene of a stork dipping its bill into a river. There’s a crocheted blanket draped over the couch, which they bought from a very heavily tattooed young girl who had a stall of handmade handicrafts at the market in Los Feliz. And down the end, just before you turn the corner into the kitchen, there’s a round dining table, which the salesgirl had told them had ‘the iconic beveled edges and tapered legs indicative of the mid-century era.’ Around it sits six mismatched dining chairs.
Ramsey’s grandmother’s house never looked like this. It was white, with cool tile and cold terrazzo marble. Her childhood bed was white wrought iron and pressed French sateen sheets that were icy in the middle of both summer and winter.
“Hey, what does everyone feel like eating? We’re ordering in,” Ramsey says, smiling.
They end up getting burgers because it’s the easiest for everyone to order what they want while still having options for the kids. Mia presents them with their mini cheeseburgers and a mountain of chips with gravy like she’s bestowing a gift to a queen. When they reach for the food with greedy fingers, she snatches it back to a chorus of groans.
“What do we say?” she says.
“Thank you,” Jack and Olivia say in tandem.
“You’re welcome. You can eat outside,” Mia says. She gives them the package of greasy wax paper. “Don’t make yourselves sick,” she says, but they’ve already disappeared out the back door.
“They can eat in here,” Tej says. “We can find more chairs.”
“I hate watching them eat,” Mia says. “It’s like a Looney Tune. It goes straight down their gullet, no stopping to chew.”
“Hey,” says Brian, whose burger is half gone already. “They’re growing kids.”
“Jack’s going to be a teenager next year,” Mia says, dragging her hands down her face. “I’m so old,” in response to which the room erupts into the customary soothing sounds of denials and outrage.
“How’s the main house going?” Ramsey asks between bites. It’s what they call Dom & Letty’s because everyone spends most of their time there, even if the building’s not weatherproof yet.
“Slowly,” Brian says.
“Dom’s decided he’s project manager,” Mia adds.
“So now everyone’s too scared to do any work.”
“He may end up building the whole thing himself.”
“Which is probably what he wanted all along,” Brian finishes.
“Bet you Letty loves that,” Ramsey says.
Brian snorts. “You know Letty. She’ll live in a tent under a tree. And even then, she doesn’t need the tree.”
“I don’t know,” Roman says. “I saw her in a silk robe the other day. I think our Letty is getting a taste for the finer things.”
“You have, like, five silk robes,” Tej says. “Be careful what you say about that.”
Roman mock gasps. “Ah, but I, my fine friend, have never pretended to be other than that which I am. Which is someone with taste.”
“’Than that which I am,’” Tej mimics in a high falsetto. “A dick with more money than sense, you mean,” he says, normally.
“See, it’s funny,” Roman says, “I’ve always found the more money I have the more sensible people find me.”
Ramsey points an emphatic fork at Roman in agreement, before returning to scrape avocado off her burger because Roman ordered for her while she was in the bathroom, and California is the sort of hellscape that allows these kinds of things to happen. Next to her, Roman scoops the green mess off her plate and onto his own burger. It has pineapple on it. She wrinkles her nose at him.
“What about you, Ramsey? What are you working on?” Mia says.
“Learning to drive,” Ramsey says. Brian laughs, but not meanly. Someone clearly gave him the Sparks Notes about what went down in Edinborough. She hopes it was Mia, who is kind, and would have made it sound daring and heroic, rather than a screaming mess.
“Baby girl doing good too,” Roman says, digging an elbow into her side.
“I’ve only burned through one clutch,” she says.
“And two piston rods,” Tej adds.
“But that was on us,” Roman says, loyally. “We shouldn’t have done a driving lesson on Mount San Antonio on day two.”
“Dom taught me how to drive,” Mia says. “It was the worst experience of my life.”
“Not Jakob leaving?” Roman says.
“Not your house blowing up?” Tej says.
“Not your dad dying?” Brian says, because he’s her husband, and allowed to say it.
“Minor pot holes in the road of life,” Mia says, sagely. “I smashed the windshield of Dom’s Camaro with a baseball bat in the middle of the night so he wouldn’t make me go out again and talk to me about matching my heartbeat to the rhythm of the engine.”
Brian and Roman nod, while Tej and Ramsey wince.
“I pity Little B,” Ramsey says.
Mia shrugs. “He’s young. He’ll bounce back.”
The truth is, Ramsey enjoys spending time in a car with both her boys with no one’s life on the line. They balance each other out in this as they do all other things, Tej’s calm water to Roman’s choppy histronics, Roman’s straight talk to Tej’s hedging and attempted diplomacy. Roman keeps saying they should take her down to Venice Beach and enter her in a race because nothing teaches like real-world experience, to which Tej says she should learn how to do an e-stop and complete one of their handmade driving courses without destroying a traffic cone (or several). Ramsey doesn’t care, one way or another. She’s too old now for driving to be anything other than a way to get from Point A to Point B. The mysteries of combustion offered no interest to her after the age of eight, so she doesn’t even find cars scientifically interesting. But she does love the way the boys love what they do, and how much they want her to love it too.
“I know what a twin cab is now,” is what she says, aloud.
“Nice,” says Brian.
When all the wrappers have been thrown out, plates washed, kids wiped down and ushered, yawning, into Brian’s Supra, Ramsey turns out all the lights except for the lamp beside the coffee table. She sits down to do fifteen minutes of jigsawing before bed; this week it’s a reproduction of a vintage poster of different classifications of butterflies, and they all look the same to Ramsey.
“Hey,” Tej says, coming up behind her. He tugs on a braid to get her attention, but smooths his finely-fingered hand over the curve of her skull, and cups her there, on the back of her neck. When she looks up at him, she sees Roman standing behind him, half hidden in the dark.
“I was thinking we go for a drive tomorrow,” Roman says. Ramsey makes an inquisitive noise, a soft upward inflection. “I know I said it’s for tourists, but maybe we could check out the Rose Bowl Flea Market. See if there’s anything good.”
“Sounds nice,” Ramsey says. The house is done; there’s not another thing they need. Roman nods, once, then he and Tej turn and start climbing the stairs into their bedroom.
“I’m setting an alarm,” Roman calls from the dim upstairs, like it’s not Tej and Ramsey who’ll be kicking Roman out of bed in the morning.
“Okay,” she says. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight,” they both say, one echoing the other. She can hear them bickering indistinctly as she puts together two pieces of a butterfly’s antennae. Yeah, she’s making this puzzle her bitch.