I remembered Sinatra, how he would sing in our living room, all my mother’s friends gathered around.
She sighed. “I’m going to bed.” Before she disappeared around the corner, she said, “Where does the time go?”
I’d begun to wonder the same thing myself.
Slippers scuffed down the hallway, followed by Joey Bishop’s nails slipping across the floor. Her bedroom door clicked shut. I held Ernesto’s business card, kept turning it over in my hands, and finally gave in. I texted him, asked what he was doing. Watching TV, he said. Come over, I said. He lived in Cathedral City, the next town over, and could be here in a half hour.
I cleaned the kitchen and paged through a newspaper that had fallen from the stack. A feature about the growing crime of elder abuse in the desert, prevalent because there were more and more older people coming here with property and money.
I didn’t want to believe that’s what Ben was doing. But somebody was doing something nefarious.
Such a sweet little boy.
When did sweet turn to sour?
I flipped through the paper. Buried on page five was a story about a pool drowning from electric shock. A lot of swimming pools in Palm Springs were built before 1963 and not all were up to code. Who even knew to get the wiring of their pools checked twice a year?
I called my brother. He picked up.
“What did you do with her car?” I asked.
“Look,” he said. “You’re not around. You don’t know what goes on here.”
“Enlighten me: what goes on here?”
“She’s losing it,” he said.
“Today you said she has her good days and her bad days.”
“You’re afraid for your inheritance, aren’t you? I’m the one who deserves payback. You left. You don’t care about Mom.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and hung up. My face felt hot. I found a bottle of tequila in the liquor cabinet, probably five years old from when Jerry was still alive — maybe from their last cocktail party — and set it on the counter. There was a faint rap on the slider. A silhouette of a man framed against the turquoise of the pool. I jumped.
“You scared me,” I said, hand on heart, sliding open the door.
“I have a key for the gate,” Ernesto replied.
I held up the bottle. “Look what I found. I’ll pour us some over ice.”
We took our tumblers out to the pool along with the half-full bottle and sat side by side on lounge chairs.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.
“What did you think?”
“You in that bikini.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s right here.”
“I thought of you too,” I said. Tequila was wending its way through me, tamping down the circuits, loosening the boundaries between me and everything else.
He took hold of my hand and gave it a tug.
“Come sit with me,” he said. I snuggled into him on the lounge chair as if I’d known him forever. He stroked my arm, then my shoulder, trailed his fingers over the cliff of my clavicle and kept traveling south under my tank top. He gave my chest a delicious massage.
“You have some hands on you.”
“That’s not all I have,” he said, which is when he tugged at the waistband of my shorts and I let him. I pulled them off, pulled his off. We fucked by my mother’s pool under the stars as the bats fluttered among the palm fronds.
Afterward we jumped in the pool to rinse off, wrapped ourselves in towels, and went back to the lounge chairs. I poured us more tequila and we toasted to us.
I awoke as the sun inched up over Indian Canyons. On the other side of the pool a coyote sniffed the water. I clapped my hands and he jumped over the gate and ran.
Inside, my mother was still asleep. After a shower, I tied on my sarong, brewed a pot of coffee, and checked my cell phone. A message from my brother.
“I don’t appreciate being hung up on—”
Delete.
Another message, this one from Little Dick.
“Greta, I keep telling you, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I meant it when I said want to marry you.”
Delete.
Screw them. Screw both of them.
My brother continued to come over every night to swim — usually at sundown when my mother went to bed. We ignored each other. My mother was the same, ignoring me but vaguely glad I was here.
Each night as soon as Ben left, I’d text Ernesto. He’d come over and we’d have sex, and then we’d talk. Mostly I talked. Over the next few nights, I told him the long story of my past with Daniel, my painting, why I was here. Admittedly, I’d grown addicted to his silky fingers that made my body feel things it hadn’t felt in years.
It was bugging me, what my mother said about going to the bank. I wondered if I’d find out anything if I went through her expandable file.
As soon as I started riffling through her file, I found papers for a reverse mortgage. What the fuck? I about exploded out of my sarong.
My mother was in the garage, going through a box of old photos.
“Why’d you take out a reverse mortgage on the house?” I asked.
Studying a faded color photo, she said, “Ben told me I should spend the money before I croak.”
“But what do you need it for?”
“I don’t need it but just in case.”
“Unbelievable,” I said, and returned to the file and the bank statements, accompanied by a huge headache that two Advils and a glass of wine helped to mute.
That night as Ernesto and I lay naked in the balmy night air, I said, “I have to do something, go to court, get power of attorney or something, so my brother doesn’t take all my mother’s assets.”
“Court takes a long time, no?”
“By the time it goes through, my mother could be penniless. Fifty grand is already gone.”
“How much is left?”
“Around a hundred grand. Probably more.”
“Still, a lot of money,” he said.
We watched the glimmery blue water, listened to the mockingbird that ran through its repertoire of cell phone ring-tones, and sipped tequila. My eyes fixed on the underwater light.
I brought up the article. “I’ve read that a lot of pools here are not code compliant. Old pools, old wires.” I paused before asking, “Is it painful, drowning that way? Do you think it hurts?”
“The swimmer feels a tingling, becomes kind of numb, can’t get out, gets sucked under.”
“My brother swims all the time,” I said.
“I check pools to make sure this does not happen.”
A shiver ran through me when I realized what I was thinking. I wanted my brother gone and I needed Ernesto’s help to make it happen. There was a name for that, and it wasn’t good.
The next evening when Ben came over, he brought Mom a cherry pie, her favorite, and exclaimed for the universe to hear that he’d hired a cleaning lady.
He went out to swim laps and Mom went to bed. I stood over the glistening pool.
“I know what you’re doing,” I said.
He pretended not to hear me. Water in his ears or something.
“You don’t fool me,” I continued, and sat on a lounge chair with my drink, hoping to intimidate him into leaving. I watched him swim back and forth — not for much longer, though, if things went as planned. I used to like my brother more, even love him, but for years now he’d been all about Ben and I’d had my fill.
That night Ernesto and I went at it in our usual place, on the lounge chair beside the pool. Thank God for mothers who go to bed early and for magenta bougainvillea that grows tall along stucco walls surrounding properties. Sex with Ernesto was good for my nerves — better than any antianxiety medication. This thing with my brother had my nerves sheared raw.