13. Stevens

THIRTEEN

Stevens

Nothing brings people together like a group chat.

~ Unknown

I have one dive tour this afternoon, but my morning is free, so I’m on my boat in the harbor, reading the last few chapters of Gone With the Wind .

I smile thinking of Alana’s reaction when I told her what I was reading. I enjoy stories and poems that have spanned generations of readers. It may not be the conventional choice of most men, but I’m not exactly conventional in most things.

My phone vibrates with a text alert. It’s the family chat my mother created.

Can I just take a moment to say whoever created group chats should have a close encounter with a slime eel? Not only do you get a notification of the original message, but that’s followed by all the thumbs up reactions from every single member of the chat. Then another comment is made which instigates the flurry of hearts, LOL comments, and various emoji reactions. I might feel differently if something significant were actually being said.

Trust me. There isn’t .

Mom : Hey, my fam. I’m hoping we can hang for supper.

Dustin : Is this my mother or the teen boy from down the street?

Mitzi : Seriously, Mom. It’s not cool to use slang at your age.

Mom : And by my age, you’re implying I’m some sort of Karen Boomer?

Me : A what?

Mitzi : I’ll translate later.

Against my will, I put a thumbs up emoji in response to my sister’s message. See what these group texts do to a person?

Mom : So, are we all down for picky bits?

Dustin : Lost me there, Mom? Could you speak English?

Mom : Bruh. Picky bits. A meal you eat in hot weather that consists of cooler food so you don’t sweat trying to cook in the kitchen. Get with the times.

Mitzi : Is anyone else snort laughing?

Me : I’m not. I’m getting a headache, though.

Dustin : Lighten up, bro. And yes, Mom. That’s a yes to dinner.

Mom : I’m stoked!

I shake my head.

Me : I can be there.

Mom : Yay! Mitzi?

Mitzi : Do you want me to just bring tacos from the shop?

Mom : Could you? Dad and I will reimburse you.

Dad : #facts

I laugh at Dad’s text. My dad is outgoing and a great host, but when it comes to Mom, he steps back and lets her do her thing. He’s probably at work. He goes into Ventura a few times a week to meet with clients. The rest of the time he runs his marriage and family therapy practice here on the island.

Mom : Peace out, fam.

All the heart and thumbs up emojis filter through, and even a GIF from Dad of a guy frantically waving from the back of a boat with the caption BON VOYAGE . The responses keep pinging until my family wears themselves out and gets back to whatever each of them were doing.

Peace out, fam . I chuckle. My mom. The thing is, she’s not trying to be something she’s not. She’s just prone to picking up the culture around her. And right now, that culture is high school.

I text Mitzi.

Me : Let me know if you want me to bring anything to dinner.

Mitzi : Just yourself. Unless you want to bring a date.

Me : Ha. I’ll be solo.

Mitzi : Me too. Seems to be a thing with us Stevens kids.

Me : We do single well.

Mitzi : Poor Mom.

I smile.

Me : She’ll survive. I’ve got a plan. Let’s get Dustin a girlfriend. Then Mom will leave us alone.

Mitzi : Bet.

Me : Did you just say, bet?

Mitzi : Hahahaha. Just playing with you. But I am down for fixing Dustin up so we can get off the “when are you going to start dating someone” radar. Let’s give this some serious thought .

Me : You know lots of people. All my friends are couples.

Mitzi : On it. See you tonight.

Me : See you. Love you, Mitz.

I set my phone aside, kick back and finish my book. After a light lunch, I head to the shack to meet the group I’m taking out for a dive in a cove just north of the resort. We use one of the Kodiak inflatable rafts provided by the Alicante for these kinds of tours.

Kai’s in the watersports shack with Jeremiah and Bodhi when I get there. I greet the three men.

“I’ve got your tanks out already,” Kai tells me. “Want to check them over and top them off?”

I nod and follow him through the shop and out the back door.

“So, you’ve been MIA this week,” Kai says.

I pull the first tank over to the air compressor and start to work.

“I’ve been working some per diem jobs, privately. And I had an assignment in Avila checking radiation impact from the Diablo plant over the past two days.”

“You’re such a stud,” Kai says casually. “And you don’t even know it. Do you?”

I study his face to see if he’s teasing me. He looks sincere. “I guess not.”

“It’s impressive—all the things you know. We need to find you some nerdy woman who likes to talk about marine life and play word games in her spare time.”

I instantly think of how Alana Graves reacted to the photos of the slime eel. Of course, she’s not nerdy—not in the least. And she’s also obviously not the one for me—not at all, considering I nearly lost my mind when I first met her. Besides, according to my mom, Alana’s got some celebrity romance rekindling, anyway. I always take all of that kind of information with a grain of sand. Rumors need to be substantiated by proof, and not merely an image in a tabloid which could mean anything.

My mind shifts to SaturdayIslandGirl. If she didn’t live in Bora Bora …

“You’re thinking of someone,” Kai says—perceptive as ever.

“It’s no one.”

“Oh, no. No one is someone. Who is this girl?”

“Really. It’s inconsequential. Basically an impossible situation.”

“You think you get to say, impossible situation, and then take off for a dive tour without filling in the blanks on that? No. Just tell me about her.”

“She’s a woman on the word game I play. We compete regularly. Sometimes we’re on there for hours together.”

“You’re spending hours playing the equivalent of online Scrabble with this woman?”

I nod.

“Like, once a week? Or more often?”

“Four or five nights a week, and then we leave games open for one another to play on when the other person isn’t available.”

“Four or five times a week? You’re spending eight to ten hours a week with this woman. Do you two chat?”

“We do. But we just recently started sharing significant details about ourselves. Before that it was just banter about the game. Smack talk.”

Kai laughs hard. “Smack talk over a word game. Oh, man. That’s rich.”

“It’s cutthroat.”

He laughs some more.

He doesn’t get it. He’s physical—an ex-pro surfer. Competition for him involves his body. For me, it’s my mind—and hers.

“She calls herself Saturday Island Girl. I think she lives in Bora Bora or the Caribbean.”

Kai raises a brow. He knows the oceans of the world. He’s surfed over half of them. “Dude. That’s a broad range of possible locations.”

“I haven’t narrowed it down.”

“Obviously.” He chuckles.

“I’ve gathered data. I’m still in need of more information before I can determine anything conclusive.”

“Are you cyberstalking this woman?”

“What? No. I’m just developing hypotheses from what she gives me.”

“Sounds like you like her.”

I can’t help but smile. “I can be different with her.”

Kai’s quiet. He passes me another tank and I turn the compressor on to fill it.

“I’m not nervous around her at all. Besides, she has no idea what I look like, so I know everything we say is authentic.”

“Authentic?” Kai chuckles. “She could be an eighty-year-old man. Or a lonely housewife who lives in sweats and has ten kids, but is actually married to a man who’s too busy with work to pay enough attention to her.”

I’m horrified. “She’s not.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“You. The man of science? You are going on what? A hunch?”

“Hunches are some of the best starting points of science. We sense things outside our awareness. It’s a fact that the brain only raises a fraction of what we see and hear, smell, touch, taste to our awareness. The rest filters in. We simply don’t acknowledge it. So, hunches aren’t so mysterious. And I know she’s a woman. She’s actually beautiful.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know.”

“Then she knows you're not ugly.”

“Nah.”

“I bet she does. Does she flirt with you?”

“Flirting? I don’t know if you’d call it flirting? ”

“Tell me this. Did she always know you were a man?”

“No. She just recently found out. My gamer tag on Play on Words is Wordivore. No gender is evident. She had to ask.”

“And she asked. That means she was thinking about you.” Kai’s eyebrows lift quickly and he flashes me a grin. “And did she act more flirty—warm, open—after that detail was revealed?”

I consider Kai’s question. He may be on to something. It doesn’t matter because SaturdayIslandGirl lives so far away. This is not a realistic line of thought to pursue.

“It really doesn’t make a difference. It’s not like we’re going to start an actual relationship.”

“You never know. Weirder things have happened.”

My dive group shows up after Kai and I finish filling the last of the tanks. We spend three hours in the water, plus the short boat ride over to the cove and back. Once the equipment is cleaned and stored, I head to Mom and Dad’s for family dinner.

Mom greets me at the door. I’m the last one to arrive. The sounds of Mitzi and Dustin’s voices carry through to the front room from the kitchen.

“Everyone’s here.” Mom’s face looks less cheerful than I’d expect considering all three of her grown children are under one roof for the evening.

“Are you alright?” I instinctively reach out and pull her into a hug.

She clings to me and takes a deep breath. I think I hear a sniffle.

“You’ll know soon enough,” she mumbles her words into my chest.

Dad comes out from the study.

“Everything okay?” I ask him over Mom’s head while she still has a death grip on me like a barnacle to a barge.

“You’ll hear about it at dinner.” Dad pries Mom off me. “Come on, Judith. Let’s enjoy dinner with our three kids.”

I leave Dad to comfort or cajole Mom, whatever it is she needs, and walk through to the kitchen where Mitzi’s laying out an assortment of tacos from her restaurant onto a platter next to a massive tin pan of beans and another of Spanish rice.

“Hey,” she says to me. “Grab the salsa and guac out of that bag, would ya? And put a spoon in each.”

I get busy following my sister’s directions.

“I might be called out on the wildfires near Malibu this week,” Dustin says by way of greeting.

“Is that what has Mom so worked up?”

I wouldn’t think she’d get upset over Dustin going on fires. He’s a volunteer here on the island and often pitches in on the mainland when needed. His primary job is split between solo music gigs at local bars and nightclubs and other events, and being a bouncer. Where I’m tall and lean, Dustin is built like a house.

Dustin and Mitzi share a look. Then Mitzi says, “You’ll hear soon enough.”

“That’s what Mom said,” I tell her. “I’m ready to hear now, thank you.”

“I’m leaving,” Dustin says.

He and Mitzi glance at one another again.

“For the fires?”

“Yes, and no. I’m …” .

Mom walks into the kitchen with Dad right on her heels. “He’s enlisted.”

“In the military?” My confusion carries through in my voice.

My brother never even liked getting into the usual scrappy fights boys would pick with one another in elementary and junior high school. He’s a bouncer, but his gift in diplomacy is how he handles ninety-nine percent of the situations that other men might handle with force. Besides, this is Marbella. The usual night for a bouncer involves telling a teen who’s here on vacation that they can’t enter Club Descanso.

“Not military,” Dad supplies.

“Fire,” Dustin says. “I’ve been accepted to a station in a small town called Waterford. ”

“I’ve never heard of it,” I tell him.

“You’ve never heard of it because it’s in Tennessee!” Mom throws her hands up as if Tennessee is also in Bora Bora. Maybe we can make a trip of it and I can meet SaturdayIslandGirl while we visit my brother.

“I think we had a little heads up that this was coming,” I say in my talk-you-down-off-the-ledge tone of voice. “Maybe when he got his bachelor’s in fire technology?”

“I’m right here,” Dustin says.

I nod at him, but I keep on. He’s diplomatic, but I’m the family balancer. I usually step in when things are off-kilter and help everyone see each others’ sides of a situation.

“And also when he spent summers volunteering on wildland crews. I’d say we had more than a fair amount of data to lead us to conclude that Dustin was going in this direction. Objectively speaking.”

Mom makes a “pfft” sound. “You’ve been doing all those regular gigs around the island, and even those few in Oxnard and Ventura. I thought you wanted to get into music. I’m fine with you choosing a career in firefighting, but why Tennessee?”

She looks up at my Dad who’s standing right behind her. “It’s so far. We’ve all been here on Marbella since before Ren was born.”

Mom’s face contorts with sadness. My brother looks equally distraught, like he’s five seconds from breaking into tears.

“Mom, it’s not that I want to leave you. It’s not always easy to get a position at a fire station. You have to wait for an opening, and they have to accept you. You know all this. I’d love to stay here. But I also want to explore other places. I’ve spent my whole life living in this bubble. I want to see what other parts of the world are like while I’m still young.”

“You don’t need to. Your father and I have done that for you. We traveled before we had kids and found the best place of all here on the island.” Mom’s voice has a note of finality to it, even though she knows Dustin is not going to be swayed—or at least, I think she knows.

She’s being unreasonable, grasping at straws. We all know it. I can’t blame her. This is a bomb dropped and detonated. I’ve never lived further than ten miles from my brother. Sure, he leaves to volunteer on fires or to play the occasional off-island gig. I have to leave a few days a week to assess something underwater. But we always come back here—to Marbella—back home.

Mom dabs her eyes with one of the paper napkins Mitzi brought from the restaurant. Mitzi and Dad immediately flank Mom.

“It’s just a lot to swallow,” Mom sniffles. “I know I’m being delulu thinking you’d all be here with me and Dad forever. I’m just full of beige flags.”

“Delulu?” Dustin asks.

At least I’m not the only one who needs a translator for Mom’s hip lingo.

She scoffs. “Delusional.”

And … dare I ask? I have to, though. “And beige flags?”

“They’re between green and red,” Mitzi explains.

“Huh?” Dad asks.

“It applies when you’re thinking about dating someone,” Mitzi tells us. “There’s green flags. Red flags. Beige flags. The beige flags aren’t green or red.”

“Why mention them then?” I ask.

Mitzi shakes her head like I’m hopeless. No one points out how Mom totally misused the term and I’m surely not about to—not after Dustin dropped the news he did. I am going to have to talk with him. I would have liked a heads up. I wonder if Mitzi already knew. Nope. I don’t even have to ask. I’m sure she knew. She didn’t even flinch when Mom brought it up. I’m almost always the last person in the family to know about things like this.

One person comes to mind. It should bother or surprise me. But it doesn’t .

I can’t wait to chat with SaturdayIslandGirl about this new development in my family.