Page 9 of Fa-La La-La Land
Every time I think about that moment, I relive the humiliation of it. The smell of weed drifting from the apartment next door is still etched in my senses, along with the concrete, rough and cold under my bare feet.
My meet-cute will not involve weed in any form—or rough concrete, or a metal apartment door with chipped black paint slammed in my face. I willnotsettle for anything less than the ideal meet-cute. Not when Mom and Dad’s love story is part of my origin story.
So, after confirming my meeting with Danny at VibeHouse tomorrow and with perfect meet-cutes still in mind, I call Mom. She answers on the first ring.
“Stella? What’s wrong?” Thirty years in America and she still has her Italian accent.
“Nothing, Mamma. I just wanted to talk to you,” I say and stop myself from smiling at the guy in the car next to mine. Lesson learned there.
Mom asks me a million questions about how I’m doing, even though I’ve only been gone for a week, and I’ve talked to her nearly every day. She tells me about my step-niece, Charly, and all the progress she’s making before switching to FaceTime so Charly can say hi to me.
“Mamma, I’m driving.” I swing my gaze from the stoppedtraffic to take a quick peek at Charly, who’s waving wildly at me, her eyes magnified behind tiny glasses.
“Hi, Charly! How’s my girl?”
Traffic moves, and I peel my eyes away from the screen to accelerate. While I drive, Charly chatters excitedly, and I force myself to keep my eyes on the brake lights in front of me.
I love it all, but fifteen minutes later, I still haven’t gotten what I called for, and I’m almost to Georgia’s. At the first opening I have in the conversation, I interrupt Mom and Charly’s running dialogue.
“Mom…I want to hear the story of how you and Dad met,” I say.
“You’ve heard that story a thousand times,” she exclaims, but there’s no real resistance in her voice. She loves telling the story.
“Make it a thousand and one. It’ll help me feel less homesick.” I exit the freeway and then pull into a park overlooking the ocean.
“He was stationed at Camp Darby near Livorno,” Mom starts, her face still on my screen, and I sit back to listen. “One night he came into the restaurant where I worked and…” She slaps her hands together to mimic the explosion of love that happened in that moment. “I didn’t speak English. He didn’t speak Italian, but I fell in love with him the second he smiled at me. His blue eyes reminded me of the Adriatic…”
I never saw my dad’s eyes in real life, but I know the color she means. Rhys’s eyes are that blue. His hair is black, though, while Dad’s looks dark blond in the pictures I have of him.
Mom tells me all the things she’s told me so many times. Her meet-cute was my favorite bedtime story. The way she and Dad danced that night, under the lights in the little town square, while a live band played. They held each other closeeven when the musicians played faster songs. I suspect she embellishes a few parts, but I drink it all in, like I always have.
She finishes the way she always does. “My biggest wish for you is to have that kind of love once in your life.”
“Me too, Mamma,” I sigh.
But I leave out my goal to not fall in love until I’ve checked everything else off my 30 Before 30 List. I want the kind of meet-cute Mom and Dad had, but not the same ending their story has.
I’m just enough of a realist to understand I have no control over that. God laughs when we make plans, so I’m going to control what I can—like when I fall in love. And that’s definitely not at the age of twenty-three, which is three years older than Mom was when she eloped with Dad and moved to Paradise. And only three years younger than she was when he died, leaving her alone in a foreign country to raise a five-year-old and a baby by herself.
I tell her I love her, then drive the last ten minutes to Georgia’s.
The rest of the night, we spend eating takeout Thai while working out what Georgia has in mind for me as her social media manager. When I tell her about Rhys and the call from his record label, she breathes a sigh of relief.
“If the terms aren’t good, don’t take it, but if they are, I think we’ve got a clear case of serendipity here.” Georgia takes her first bite of food since we started talking—a forkful of plain white rice, one of the few things she can keep down.
“Serendipity, without a doubt. Good things are headed your way, Sparky, with or without us,” Zach says through his bite of pad thai.
“Withus. Because we’ve always got your back, and you still have a place here for as long as you want,” Georgia adds. “Wecan figure out the bedroom situation with you and the baby when the time comes.”
I scan their two-bedroom condo. It’s a decent size for a place by the beach in California, but not really big enough for three adults and a brand-new baby. Especially when one of those adults—me—is young, single, and on her own for basically the first time. Rooming with girls my age in college was challenging enough. I can’t imagine a newborn baby would be easier.
“Depending on how this meeting with VibeHouse goes, I may be able to get a place of my own.”
Georgia and Zach glance at each other, and I don’t miss the flicker of relief on their faces.
Georgia looks back at me. “Don’t let our situation influence your decision whether to take whatever job they may offer. But if you want to move out, make sure they’re ready to pay you enough that you can. Cost of living is a lot higher here than in Paradise,” she adds with her usual go-getter attitude.
I return her smile, pushing back my disappointment she didn’t fight me a little harder about moving out. I always knew I wouldn’t be living with them forever; I just thought it would be longer than a few weeks.
