“Anyway, Auntie Alice proved she was into multiculturalism in a big way. She had two kids, two boys by different fathers, two different races or at least two different cultures. The first was Ravi—after Ravi Shankar, of course—and the second was Dylan, after Bob Dylan, but she would never call a son of hers Bob or Robert, of all things, so she went with Dylan’s last name.
“Ravi’s father was Middle Eastern—Pakistani. He and Aunt Alice never married. They were together for maybe half a year. After she got pregnant, he took off, which I think suited her just fine. By the way, she’s fifty-five now and has never been married, and that suits her, too. Then came a Mexican guy, an illegal, who knocked her up and took off. Actually, I don’t know if either of them really took off or if she chased them away, but neither one was around long enough to have been like a father to the kids.”
I said, “Ravi was older than Dylan, right? I’m trying to keep things straight.”
“Uh-huh. Ravi is two months older than me. Dylan is two years younger. When my mom started traveling with Gerald, my sister, Allie, wasn’t two years old. Alice wouldn’t take two children, certainly not a kid eighteen months old. She said three children was plenty, more than enough, so when Mom and Gerald were gone, Allie stayed with Mom’s brother, Brett, and his wife, Gina. They had a girl—Misty—a month older than Allie, so that worked out.
“I was five when I first started staying at Alice’s. So was Ravi, and Dylan was three. Innocent ages. And . . .”
Holiday got up on an elbow and pressed her lips on mine, then hovered over me. Her face was a shadow, eyes reflecting pinpoints of light. “Things are going to get a little bit strange now. Not bad, but kind of strange.”
“Okay.”
She kissed me again, no heat, but a kiss all the same, then she settled back down like before, my left hand in both of hers, with that wonderful firm breast against my arm. I took it to be part of that non-serious touching Jeri had mentioned, so I did my best not to let it bother me.
“Come bath time, Aunt Alice would toss all three of us in the tub together. At those ages, five and three, a lot of mothers do that to save time, get everyone clean at once. Back then that’s what we did, laughing, rubber duckies, plastic boats, lots of bubbles. I was at Alice’s four or five times a year, two to four weeks at a time. The boys became like brothers.
“Next year I was six and the boys were four and six, still not a problem, all of us piled into the tub together.
“Next year, Alice moved into a new place. It didn’t have a tub, so she hustled us into a shower. By then, Ravi and I were seven. Sometimes Alice would get in there with us. She was really free like that. None of us thought it was strange. It’s just how it was. It was one of those good-sized showers, so it wasn’t really crowded, even with four of us in there. I guess we sort of bumped around, but that was part of the fun. It was even more fun when Alice showered with us. That happened half a dozen times that year. I still remember all of us laughing.
“I think it was the next year, when I was eight, that I started to notice the difference between the boys and myself. What I mean is, to care about the difference and . . . well, to like it. I thought it was cool even though I didn’t yet understand what the difference meant.
“But the thing is, to jump this story forward a little, I showered with Ravi and Dylan until my eleventh birthday—every time it was time for our nightly shower at Aunt Alice’s, there we were.”
“Eleven, huh? Wow.”
“Yeah, I guess. But shower time was more like a party. It was fun, not really a wow. It was . . . normal, what we’d done for years. We’d grown up with it. Maybe it was a little weird that Aunt Alice didn’t think anything about it, but that’s just how she was. If there was a wow part, it was how much I got to like it, especially when Ravi and I were ten, going on eleven.
“Mom and Gerald were away when I turned eleven. We had a birthday party for me, and that night after the party Alice came into my room and sat on the bed and told me she thought I was getting a little old to be showering with the boys. I told her I didn’t mind, that it was fun, but she said it was time. She even gave me my own loofa as a kind of growing-up gift, and that was that. We were done.”
Holiday squeezed my hand. “So. What do you think?”
“Ravi probably has a lot of terrific memories.”
She laughed. “Yeah, maybe.”
“And . . .”
“And what?”
“And, I have a nice firm breast against my arm that’s getting a lot of attention.”
“Well, good. I was hoping. Anything else?”
“I don’t know. That was quite a story, reasonably interesting—notice that I didn’t fall asleep—and I guess it might be part of why you like doing what you do, but I’m not sure it explains why Jeri thinks you’re safe for me to be around, other than trusting me—which, of course, only makes sense because I’m an IRS monk.”
She was quiet for a moment, then, “The first time I had sex, I mean the very first, one-and-only time I’ve ever had sex, it wasn’t that great—borderline awful, in fact—I got pregnant. First time, and boom. I was sixteen. I was
