Page 43 of The Paradise Problem

Anna laughs. “My dad, yeah.”

“No siblings?”

“No.”

“You’re—”

“Don’t say lucky.”

“I wasn’t,” I say. “I was going to say, are you close to your dad?”

“Yes.” She smiles. “Very.”

I pause over this next question. “And your mom?”

“Well,” she says, drawing out the word, “you have daddy issues, I have mommy issues. We’re evenly matched.”

She doesn’t elaborate, so after a few quiet moments, I change course. “I realize I never asked why you switched your major.”

She smiles up at me, squinting against the sun. “You mean telling you I was shitty at all the coursework wasn’t a sufficient explanation?”

I laugh. “Fair enough. But now that I’ve spent some more time with you, I guess I’m surprised you ever chose it to begin with. You lack the typical med student—”

“Intensity?” she finishes for me.

“I guess so,” I say, quickly adding, “That’s not an insult, or at least I don’t mean it as one.”

“Oh, trust me, I know this about myself. Whenever someone asks me what my Enneagram is, I’m like, ‘Whichever is the lazy, affectionate, cheese-loving one.’ ” She shields her face from the intense sunlight. “And, I don’t know. In hindsight I went premed for all the wrong reasons, related to the aforementioned mommy issues. She left when I was five, though she’d pop in and out without pattern or warning, which made it hard to ever move on from her leaving in the first place. My mom was an attorney, my dad is a mechanic, and I think when they first met, she was attracted to the hot blue-collar guy, the kid from the other side of the proverbial tracks. But as an aspiring adult, now I see how those kinds of surface attractions wear off. She didn’t hide her feelings about his coworkers or things like how his hands are never fully clean, even after scrubbing. Even as a kid I absorbed the sense that his was a job, not a career, and that there was a value difference there, in her mind.” Her rib cage expands and relaxes with a deep breath. “It sucks, honestly, but when I was starting college, I chose what I thought would be a career. We hadn’t spoken in a few years by that point, but I was still trying to make myself lovable to her.”

“You were just a kid. You weren’t doing it to reject your dad.”

Anna smiles. “I know. Dad knows, too. Once I figured out that I chose premed for the wrong reasons, it was easy to choose to do what I loved, rather than what might make someone love me. The bottom line is that my mom was never really interested in being a mom. But David Green more than made up for it.”

She says this like any other fact: it’s hot today, the sky is so clear, my mother wasn’t ready to be a mother. For a breath I’m so envious of her easy vulnerability. My siblings and I were raised with our shields up, swords drawn. It’s taken me years of therapy to be able to talk about what’s going on inside me, and I’m still not very good at it.

“Remind me where you grew up?” I ask.

Anna pulls her hand from the water and sends it absently down her stomach, leaving a trail of water that quickly pulls into droplets and evaporates in the heat. “Is it weird that we lived together for two years and you don’t remember this?”

“You didn’t even know my first name,” I remind her, laughing.

She grins. “Yes, but no one’s money is ever on me to be the keeper of details, Golden Boy.” She reaches up, throwing her arm over her eyes, and I look at the long line of her body soaking up the sun. “I grew up in Fontana. I can hear that face you’re making, you coastal snob.”

I rearrange my grimace. “I wasn’t making a face.”

“You were. And before you ask, no one calls it Fontucky anymore.”

I’m not so sure, but manage an unconvincing, “Fontana is… nice.”

“See? That’s how you do it! Say things like that to Alex.”

“I’ll try.”

“Practice with me. I’ll be Alex, you be you.”

“No.”

“Why?”

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