The Vista Del Mar

My name is Bobbie, I'm fifty-two years old, and until three weeks ago I had never spent a night outside the Pacific Northwest. Not once in my whole life. Then Karl told me he was moving out, and twenty years of my life packed itself into boxes, and I sat on the floor of my empty living room in Portland and called my best friend Sonya.

"Bobbie? Baby, you sound terrible," she said.

"I feel terrible. He took the good coffee maker, Sonya. He took the coffee maker and left me the futon."

"Come to Miami."

I laughed. I actually laughed, which I hadn't done in a while. "I can't just come to Miami."

"You can. You're a grown woman with vacation days you never use. Get on a plane. I have a spare room and I have rum. Both of those things are yours."

So I did it. I bought a ticket, I told my sergeant I needed two weeks, and on a Thursday in October I landed at Miami International wearing a rain jacket that I immediately regretted. Do you know what Miami feels like in October? It feels like walking into someone's mouth. The heat came at me sideways, thick and wet, and my glasses fogged up before I even got to the curb. I stood there half blind and sweating and Sonya found me anyway. She always does.

She's fifty-three, one year older than me, born in Santo Domingo and shipped to Miami at twenty-two, and she has not slowed down a single day since. She grabbed my suitcase out of my hand before I could argue.

"Look at you! You're pale like a fish belly. We will fix that."

"I'll burst into flames first."

"That's the vitamin D, baby. You're overdue."

Her apartment is in a complex called Vista Del Mar, a few blocks from the law firm where she works as a paralegal. Two bedrooms, a balcony, and air conditioning set to a temperature I did not know existed. I dropped my suitcase in the guest room and lay down on the bed with my shoes still on. The ceiling fan turned in lazy circles. I could hear traffic and somebody's music and a kid yelling about something down by the pool, and it all felt like a world away from my quiet street in Portland where I now technically owned half of a futon.

Twenty years. Twenty years with one man and then he's gone and I'm staring at a ceiling fan in South Beach. I know people go through worse. I know that. But in that moment it was the whole world to me.

* * *

Sonya is not the kind of person who lets you mope. I learned that the hard way around five o'clock the next day, when she came out of her bedroom in a dress I have no business describing to you and announced we were going somewhere.

"There's a happy hour at my firm. Rooftop bar. Casual Friday. You're coming."

"Sonya, no. I'm fifty-two years old and I'm heartbroken."

"You're fifty-two and you're on vacation. Different thing. Also I told everyone my best friend from Oregon was visiting and they don't believe you exist. You have to exist."

"What did you tell them about me?"

"That you're gorgeous and hilarious."

"Sonya!"

"Both true. Get dressed. Something that isn't a rain jacket, please, I'm begging you."

So I put on the one nice blouse I'd packed and followed her three blocks to the firm's building. We rode an elevator full of lawyers up to the roof, and when the doors opened my jaw dropped. String lights everywhere. A bar set up along one wall. The whole downtown skyline glowing orange behind it. Portland has its charms but nobody in Portland ever took me to a rooftop bar.

And then I actually looked around and felt about a hundred years old. The place was packed with people in their twenties and thirties. Young women in little dresses, young men with their sleeves rolled up, everybody laughing at jokes I couldn't hear. I hung back by the railing while Sonya did her rounds, hugging people, introducing me over her shoulder. "This is Bobbie! She's real, see?" Everybody was polite. Everybody smiled. Then their eyes slid back to their own conversations and I stood there holding a club soda like a chaperone at a prom.

One of the young guys, an associate named Luca, did spend a few minutes with me. He's thirty-one, Italian-American, originally from Brooklyn, and he told me he'd moved down here at twenty-six and never looked back. He asked me questions about Oregon that made it sound more exotic than I've ever found it. "You have volcanoes? You can just go look at a volcano?" He was sweet. He was also clearly performing for Sonya, who was watching us from across the roof with an expression I did not appreciate.

Then Ray showed up.

Ray is a law clerk at the firm. Sonya hired him herself, three years ago, right out of UM law school, and she'd told me about him on our phone calls. "You'll like Ray," she'd said. "Everybody likes Ray." He's twenty-eight, from Miami Gardens, tall, and when I first saw him he was walking across that rooftop in a crisp white shirt, sleeves rolled, and I want to tell you the exact thought I had, which was: that man's skin against that shirt is the most handsome thing I have ever seen. And then I thought, Bobbie, he is young enough to be your almost-kid, behave yourself.

He came straight over, which nobody else had done, and he was carrying two drinks.

"This one's for you," he said, holding out something orange with a little umbrella in it. "Sonya said you'd refuse and I said watch me."

"She set me up."

"She did. She's very powerful." He handed me the drink and I took it, mostly because it felt rude not to. "You're Bobbie. I've heard a lot."

"All lies."

"The laugh, though. Sonya says you have a great laugh. I told her nobody's laugh lives up to the hype."

"Oh, thanks a lot."

"No, that was the setup. I'm waiting for the punchline. That's it. That's the whole build." He grinned at me and I laughed, and when I laughed he pointed at me like he'd won a bet. "There it is. Knew it."

I laughed again, which proved him right, which made him grin harder. It was a stupid little loop and I fell right into it. I hadn't flirted in twenty years. I want you to understand I didn't even know what was happening at first, my body remembered before my brain did. Standing a little closer. Tipping my chin up. Feeling that jolt low in my stomach when he said something quick and I saw how dark his skin looked against all that white shirt.

He asked me what I did back home and I told him I was a police sergeant, and his eyebrows went up in a way that was flattering and not mocking, which is a rare combination.

"Sergeant. Okay. I believe you could arrest me."

"I absolutely could."

"Has that ever happened to you? People getting weird about it?"

"All the time. Mostly they just get chatty. People confess things in the back of my car that their lawyers made them stop saying."

He laughed, and I caught myself cataloguing his hands around his glass, and I made myself stop. He was twenty-eight. I was fifty-two. There was a whole law school education between us in age difference. But he kept coming back to me across the night, every time I started drifting toward the railing he'd appear with a question about Portland or a story about a deposition gone wrong, and every time the sound of his voice did something to my ears that I refused to examine.

Sonya found me by the bar around nine and put her arm through mine.

"You two are disgusting," she said, quietly, like it was a compliment.

"There is no two. I'm standing near a coworker of yours."

"Bobbie. Baby. You're glowing."

"I'm sweating. It's Miami."

"Mmhm." She squeezed my arm. "He asked me if you were staying through the weekend. I said two weeks. He looked very pleased about it."

"Oh my god, Sonya."

"What. I stated a fact. You are staying two weeks. That's just scheduling."

The skyline had gone fully dark by then, all the buildings lit up like somebody's idea of a postcard, and Ray was across the roof telling some story with his whole body, and I caught him glancing over at me mid-sentence, checking if I was still there. For the first time in three weeks, I was glad to be somewhere.

We walked home. It was only a few blocks and the night had cooled down to something almost humane, and Sonya kicked off her heels two blocks in and carried them by the straps like a teenager sneaking home, except she's fifty-three, so like a fifty-three-year-old sneaking home.

"Bobbie. You have to tell me what you're thinking right now."

"Nothing. I'm thinking nothing."

"You have your cop face on. Your cop face is for suspects and drunk guys on the MAX, not for me."

I laughed. She was right and she knew it. We got into the elevator at the Vista Del Mar and I watched the numbers and said it to the door instead of to her.

"I don't know what I'm doing. I haven't done this in twenty years. I haven't done any of this since basically Obama was president."

The elevator opened and Sonya held the door with her foot and looked at me.

"Sex. You're telling me you haven't had sex since Obama was president."

"First term. Maybe the start of the second. I don't remember exactly and I don't want to remember exactly."

She stepped out and shook her head at me the whole way down the hall, that way she has, like I'm a project she took on out of love and is now regretting slightly.

"Bobbie. Baby. You and Karl were together twenty years. Twenty. Of course you forgot how this works. It's like riding a bike except the bike is a person and the person is twenty-eight."

"Sonya."

"I'm just saying it out loud so we both know what we're dealing with here."

"We're not dealing with anything. I met a nice guy at a bar. That's it."

"You met a nice guy who found you three separate times in one night. I counted. Three. I was there the whole time, I have a legal mind."

"You file things."

"I file things very accurately."

We got inside and the air conditioning hit us and we both made that noise people make in Miami when the AC hits, that ahh sound, and she went to the kitchen and came back with two glasses of water because we're fifty-three and that's what we do now instead of another round.

"Okay, real talk," she said, sitting down across from me with her feet tucked under her. "What are you actually scared of?"

I thought about it, which surprised me. I thought I was just going to deflect.

"That I'm somebody's pity project. That he's being nice to Sonya's friend. That I go home in two weeks and it turns out I was the funny story."

"Ray doesn't do pity. I have watched that man tell a partner at our firm, to his face, that the partner's brief was bad. He told me he liked my haircut when I hated it. He says what he thinks. It's actually kind of a problem for him sometimes."

"That's not exactly reassuring."

"It's completely reassuring. He is not nice to be polite. He is nice because he is nice. And he was standing next to you like a plant toward the sun, Bobbie."

"A plant."

"You know what I mean."

I did know what she meant. That was the problem.

"Here's what you're going to do," she said. "Nothing. You're going to do nothing. You're going to sit by my pool tomorrow and wear that green thing you brought and stop overthinking. You are not solving a case. Nobody is being interrogated. A man thinks you're pretty. Let it be what it is for one night."

"And if it's more than one night?"

"Then we'll deal with that when you're panicking about it too."

She went to bed and I stayed up on the balcony for a while. The complex was quiet except for some music somewhere and the sound of the highway far off, which sounded different than Portland's highways, wetter almost, which makes no sense, but it's what I wrote in my notes app at one in the morning so I'm reporting it honestly.

* * *

Saturday, Sonya had to go into the office for a few hours, some filing deadline, which she announced with enormous drama, and I stayed by the pool with a book I didn't read. Around noon there was a shadow over my chair and it was Ray, in shorts and a t-shirt, holding two coffees.

"How did you even know I was here?" I said.

"Sonya told me. She said, and I'm quoting, she said you'd be by the pool pretending to read. I asked how she knew you'd want coffee and she said everyone wants coffee."