Sole Custody Shrunken First Semester chapter 20 by maximally

The sectional still smelled of them in the morning.

Max lay on his back on the dish towel on the coffee table and breathed it in whether he wanted to or not: Kenzie's vanilla body spray, Rory's sneaker funk soaked into the cushion where her bare foot had hung off the end all night, strawberry shampoo on the throw pillow Priya had slept on. They'd left at ten. Kenzie had blown him a kiss on the way out and said, "Bye, intern." Rory had said, "Later, dude," and fist-bumped the air above his head. Priya hadn't said anything. She'd looked at him over her shoulder at the front door, pushing her glasses up, and then Izzy had shut the door on her a little harder than she needed to.

Then Izzy had gone upstairs and slept, and the house had gone quiet, and he'd been alone on the coffee table for three hours with nothing to do but feel it.

He felt all of it. Rory's toes on his chest, the squelch of her insole. The fingertip Priya had circled on his ribs, the way her thighs had closed on him, the one, two, three. Kenzie's ring light. Four girls looking down at him at once, and him with nowhere to put his hands. And then Izzy's fist closing all the way around him, her nails in his back, her voice gone hot and shaking. He's mine.

He'd lain under her palm half the night afterward and felt something he didn't have a name for. This morning, in the gray light, with the sectional reeking and nobody's hand on him at all, he knew what it was.

He wanted his stepmother.

He didn't want to want it. He wanted it anyway, so badly it sat in his chest, a stone.

*

The red Mercedes came up the driveway at one-fifteen.

He heard the engine, then the car door, then her heels on the front walk, lazier than usual. The key in the lock. The door. And then Victoria was in the entryway with her overnight bag sliding off her shoulder and her sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and she was humming.

She was still in the black wrap dress. It was creased now, all down the front, as if it had spent the night on a floor. Her hair was down and a little wild in the back. Her lipstick was gone, and so was most of her eyeliner, except for one smudge at the corner of her left eye that she hadn't noticed. There was a pink mark low on her neck, half under her hair. She looked rested. She looked loose in her shoulders in a way he'd never once seen her, and her cheeks were flushed, and she was humming something old, Selena maybe, under her breath.

She saw him on the coffee table and her whole face lit up.

"There he is." She dropped the bag. It fell open on the tile. Something purple and lacy slid halfway out of it, and she nudged it back in with the toe of her heel without looking. "There's Mama's boy. Did you miss me? Mama missed you so much." She swept across the living room, kicked off her heels as she came, and scooped him up off the towel in both hands. "Did Izzy feed you? Did she do the scarf? She didn't do the velvet, did she?"

"She did the scarf," Max lied.

"Good girl." Victoria kissed the top of his head. She smelled different. Her own perfume was there, faded, and under it someone else's, something darker and smokier, and under that, sweat and sleep and hotel soap. She sat down on the sectional with him in her lap and wrinkled her nose. "Ugh. Why does it smell like feet in here?"

"Izzy had people over."

"Did she." Victoria's eyes narrowed toward the ceiling, toward Izzy's room. Then she sighed and let it go, all at once, as though she couldn't be bothered to be angry today. "Well. Mama's not going to fight about it. Mama had a very productive meeting."

"About the hold," said Max.

"About the hold." She smiled to herself. "Bea says not to worry. Bea says she'll make a call on Monday and we'll talk about deferring, or not deferring, or whatever we want. Bea says there's lots of time before the twenty-third." She stroked his back with one finger. "Bea was very, very helpful."

He didn't ask. He didn't want to know. He looked at the mark on her neck and then at her face, which was so happy and so easy around the eyes, and the stone in his chest got heavier.

"Mom," he said.

"Mm?" Victoria had her head back against the cushions, her eyes half-closed. She was still stroking his back.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Of course you can, sweetie."

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. His face went hot, and then his neck, and then all the way down to his feet. She didn't open her eyes. She just kept stroking, waiting.

"Never mind," he said.

"Okay."

The fridge hummed. A car went by outside. Her finger went up and down his spine.

Then her phone buzzed in the bag on the tile, and she was up off the sectional before the second buzz, with him still in her hand.

She read the screen. She didn't say anything for a second. Then she smiled at it, a small private smile that wasn't for him, and typed something back with her thumb.

"That was Bea," she said. "Bea's driving up tonight."

"Here?"

"Just till Monday, sweetie. We still have so much to go over. Your forms. Your housing. The deferral paperwork, all of it. Bea says it's easier in person." She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked at the creased dress, the shoes in the middle of the rug, the sectional. "Ay, this house. Mama has to clean. Mama has to—" She looked down at him in her palm, and he watched her get to it. Bea in the kitchen. Bea on the sectional. Bea upstairs. And a stepson three inches tall on the coffee table, who was supposed to be in Mexico building a school with his abuelo.

"Oh, mijo," she said. "Bea can't see you."

*

Victoria had him in the car by four.

She'd stood in her bedroom with her phone to her ear, still in the wrap dress, and said, in her brightest voice, "Mamá. Can you take him for the weekend? Just till Monday. Mama has a work thing at the house."

He hadn't heard what Lupe said back. He'd heard Victoria say, "No, nothing's wrong," and then, "Mamá," and then, "It's for Max. It's his college," and then, "Kettleman City. The In-N-Out. Seven."

Izzy hadn't come out of her room. When they went down the hall, her door was shut, and there was no music behind it.

So he spent three hours in the cup holder of the red Mercedes on a folded paper napkin, his dead phone wedged in next to him with its charger wrapped around it, watching the almond orchards go by on I-5 in long hypnotic rows. Victoria drove with both hands on the wheel. She didn't put him in her bra. She sang along to the radio for a while and then stopped, and checked her phone at every stretch of empty road. Once, around Los Banos, she reached over without looking and touched the top of his head with one finger, and then took her hand back as if she'd burned it.

"It's just a couple of days, sweetie," she said to the windshield. "Bea and Mama have so much to go over. Abuela will take good care of you."

"Okay," Max said.

"It's not anything you did."

He didn't say anything to that, and she didn't add anything, and the orchards kept going by.

Lupe was already there when they pulled in, leaning against the side of her silver minivan in the In-N-Out parking lot with a Neapolitan shake in one hand and her braid over her shoulder. She was in leggings and a turquoise blouse with red flowers stitched around the neckline, and she looked at her daughter's face for exactly one second and then didn't ask anything at all.

"Give him here, mija," she said, and held out her palm.

Victoria put him in it. Then she put the phone in Lupe's other hand. "Charge it. So he can call me."

"Mm-hm."

"And he's had dinner. Well. He's had a crumb of something. And he likes the—"

"Victoria Maria. I raised you. I can feed one little boy."

Victoria stood there in the heat with the trucks roaring by on the freeway behind her, her sunglasses in her hair and her face naked under them, and for a second Max thought she was going to take him back.

Then she leaned down, kissed the top of his head, kissed her mother's cheek, got in the Mercedes, and drove north.

Lupe watched the car until it was gone. Then she looked down at him in her palm.

"Okay," she said. "You don't have to tell Abuela. Abuela can guess." She took a long pull of the shake through the straw and tucked him into the front of her blouse, between her tits, where it was damp and smelled of rosewater and the drive. "We'll have a nice weekend. Abuela has plans."

*

The plans were on the list.

He found that out at seven-thirty the next morning, Sunday, in Lupe's kitchen, when she set him on the yellow Formica table between the sugar bowl and the salt shaker and unfolded a sheet of paper she'd clearly copied out by hand. It was Izzy's list. All of it, in Lupe's neat schoolteacher cursive, with her own checkmarks down the side.

"Izzy sent me a picture," Lupe said, before he could ask. She put her reading glasses on and ran her finger down the page. "Seven. Her shoes. In them. While she's wearing them." She looked at him over the glasses. "You put this on here?"

"I didn't put any of—"

"Abuela's going to Zumba at nine. Then Costco. Then home." She folded the list and put it back in the pocket of her housecoat. "That's a whole day. And Abuela only has the one pair of sneakers."

He looked at her.

"You'll be fine, mijo," Lupe said, and patted his head. "Abuela's feet are very clean. Mostly."

*

They were white Reeboks with pink laces and pink soles, worn thin at the toe box from three classes a week, and when she pulled the left one off the shoe rack by the back door and held it up to him, the inside was a cave. The insole had gone gray-brown in the shape of her foot, darkest at the heel and the ball, and the toe end was stained with five distinct ovals. The smell came out at him from a foot away: old rubber, foot powder, and under it the sour, cheesy ghost of a few hundred hours of sweat.

"Abuela doesn't wear socks to Zumba," she told him. "Too hot. Socks are for church."

She set him in the arch.

It was the only place that made sense, and she'd thought about it, which was somehow worse. The insole rose up under the arch in a molded hump, and if he lay on his back along the inside edge of it, just in front of the heel, there was a hollow there that her foot didn't fill. She showed him with her thumb. "Here. Abuela's arch is very high. You'll have a little roof." Then she sat down on the kitchen chair, set the shoe on the linoleum, and slid her bare foot in on top of him.

The light went. The heat came.

Her sole came down over him, not on him, not quite. The arch curved over his body a half inch above his chest, a firm pink ceiling, damp already, and the heel came down behind his head and the ball of her foot came down past his feet and the whole thing settled. He heard the laces go, the long rasp and tug, and felt the shoe tighten around both of them. Her foot shifted once, finding its place. The arch dipped and touched his chest and rose again.

"Okay in there?" Her voice came down muffled through the canvas, from very far up.

"It smells," he said.

"It's a shoe, mijo." He felt her stand. The world tipped and went heavy. "It's supposed to."

*

Zumba was in the multipurpose room of the community center on Whittier Boulevard, and he knew it was full before the music started, because he could feel the floor. Thirty pairs of sneakers on a sprung wooden floor sent a buzz up through the rubber sole and into his spine. Somebody's speaker was pumping out a cumbia. Women were laughing. Someone shrieked "Lupe!" and Lupe shrieked back, and her weight rolled forward onto the ball of her foot as she leaned in to kiss somebody.

"Where's your grandson this weekend?" someone asked. "The skinny one?"

"Oh, he's with me," Lupe said. "He's around."

Then Marco, the instructor, young and cheerful, shouted, "Okay, ladies! Vámonos!" and the music got loud.

Max had thought he understood what it would be like. He'd been under her feet. He'd been under Victoria's feet on the bed and Rory's toes in the Van and the whole weight of two women's asses on the sectional. He'd thought a shoe was a shoe.

It was not a shoe. It was a drum, and he was inside it.

Every step came down. Her heel slammed the floor behind his head and the shock went through the rubber and into him. The ball of her foot pounded past his ankles. The arch flexed with every beat, coming down to touch his chest and lifting away, coming down, lifting, faster than he could breathe in time with it. When she pivoted, the whole shoe twisted, and he slid sideways along the insole into the side wall and back. When she jumped, there was a half second where her foot lifted clean off him and the cool came in, and then she landed.

THUMP

The arch hit him flat. Not her full weight, the hump of the insole took most of that, but enough to drive every bit of air out of him and grind him into the damp foam. Then it lifted, and he gasped, and it came down again.

And she was sweating.

He felt it start in the first song. By the third, her sole was slick. The arch above him beaded and then dripped, hot drops landing on his face and chest, salty when they hit his lips. The insole under his back went from damp to wet. The smell bloomed. It wasn't the stale smell from the shoe rack anymore; it was fresh, sharp and hot and alive, salt and skin and that rich sour edge he'd come to know as feet, as Lupe's feet, rising around him every time the shoe flexed and pumping out the tongue in hot breaths that never quite cleared. Her toes worked at the far end of the shoe, curling and spreading, and he could hear the wet suck of her heel lifting off the insole and coming down.

Far away, Marco yelled, "Lupe! Así, Lupe! Look at you!" and Lupe laughed, and her whole foot shook with it, and she shook her hips harder, because Max could feel her weight swinging side to side over him, a pendulum of three hundred and ten pounds.

He stopped trying to breathe in rhythm after the fourth song. He lay there and took it. Heel, gasp, slick sole on his chest, gasp, heel. His hair was soaked with her sweat. His whole body was. He couldn't tell anymore where his skin stopped and her foot started; they were both just hot and wet and moving. Somewhere in there, the dread he'd carried from Sunnyvale got knocked out of him. There wasn't room for it. There wasn't room for anything except the next beat.

When the music finally stopped, Lupe stood still, panting, and her arch came down and rested on him, full and wet and heavy, rising and falling with her breathing.

"Ay, that was a good one," she said to someone.

Then, quieter, looking down at her own foot: "You still alive, mijo?"

He coughed. "Barely."

"Good boy. Abuela burned six hundred calories."

*

Costco was quieter and longer.

She didn't change her shoes. She just rinsed her face in the community center bathroom and drove to the Costco in Alhambra with the AC on high and her left foot propped up on the dashboard, so the cool air from the vent blew down into the top of the shoe and he could breathe again. It was the nicest thing that had happened to him in a day. He nearly cried.

Then she put her foot back down and walked.

Costco was concrete. Two hours of concrete, under her arch, in a shoe that had already been soaked through and was now cooking. She didn't stomp. She ambled. Every step was a long heavy roll, heel to ball, the arch pressing down on his chest and easing off as her weight went through it, and the rhythm of it was so steady that by the produce section he'd started to doze. Her sweat had gone tacky. The insole had gone from wet to tepid and gummy. The smell had settled into something thick and constant that he'd stopped noticing, which frightened him a little when he realized it.

She talked to him the whole time, to her own foot, out loud, in the aisles, the way old women talked to themselves and nobody looked twice.

"Oh, they have the mango again. Abuela loves the mango."

"No, look at this. Six dollars for one rotisserie chicken. They used to be four-ninety-nine."

"Mijo. Mijo. They have the churro samples."

She stopped. He felt her weight shift onto her right foot, and her left heel lifted out of the shoe a little, and the light came in at the back. Her fingers came down through the gap. They dropped something onto his stomach, a crumb of fried dough, sticky with cinnamon sugar, the size of a pillow to him.

"Eat," she whispered. "Don't tell anybody."

He ate it lying on his back in the arch of his step-grandmother's Reebok, in the snack aisle, with her toes wiggling contentedly at the far end of the shoe. It was the best thing he'd ever eaten.

She did the same with a corner of the pizza, and a shred of rotisserie chicken from the hot case, and a drop of pineapple juice from a paper cup that she tipped in carefully off the end of her fingernail. By the time they got to the registers, he was full and sticky and pickled in her sweat, and he'd stopped thinking about Victoria for almost an hour.

At the hot dog counter, she sat down at a red plastic table, crossed her legs, and let the shoe dangle off her toes, so he swung back and forth in the dark, a man in a hammock, while she ate.

*

She took the shoe off at eight that night.

She did it at the kitchen table, taking her time with the laces, while he lay there under her, and then she drew her foot out and the air came in, cool and huge. Her sole peeled off his chest with a wet sound. He lay on the insole, blinking up at the kitchen light, slick from his hair to his toes.

Lupe looked down at him and burst out laughing.

"Ay, pobrecito. Look at you. You're a little pickle."

She washed him in the kitchen sink with dish soap and a fingertip. She fed him rice and a bean mashed flat. She put on her pink housecoat and Amor Eterno and sat with him on the arm of her recliner for two episodes.

But when she turned off the lamp in her bedroom, he couldn't settle.

It came back all at once, in the dark, everything Zumba had knocked out of him. Victoria's face on the sectional, so easy around the eyes. The pink mark on her neck. Bea's car in the driveway by now, Bea in the kitchen, Bea upstairs. The cup holder and the orchards. Izzy's fist closing around him, he's mine. The twenty-third. Bea's call on Monday, and whatever Bea was going to say, and whatever Victoria was going to say back. He lay on Lupe's pillow next to her head and shook.

"Mijo," she said, after a while. "You're shaking the whole bed."

"Sorry."

"Don't be sorry." The lamp came back on. She sat up against the headboard, the housecoat rumpled, the braid down over her shoulder, and looked at him with her reading glasses off and her eyes narrow, the teacher look. "You want to tell Abuela?"

"No."

"Okay." She didn't push. She just looked at him a while longer. Then she sighed, and nodded to herself, and reached for the top snap of her housecoat. "Okay. Abuela knows what to do."

*

She undid the snaps one by one, all the way down to her belly. Her tits came out and settled, heavy and loose, the left one rolling over onto her arm. They were huge from the pillow. Lupe's were bigger than Victoria's and broader, older, the skin over them crossed with fine silver stretch marks and a little freckled across the top. Her nipples were long and dark brown, the areolas wide and creased, and they'd already started to stiffen in the cool air of the bedroom. The gold cross was on the nightstand by the phone. Her skin smelled of rosewater and Ivory and, faintly, still, of the day.

"Abuela had three babies," she said, matter-of-fact, picking him up. "Your Mamá was the worst. She cried and cried, every night, for a year. You know what worked?" She laid him on her left breast, on the high slope above the nipple, and cupped her hand behind him. "Only one thing."

"Abuela—"

"Shh. Abuela's not asking. Abuela's telling." She tipped him gently down the slope until his face was at the edge of the areola. "Go on, mijo. It's okay. It's just Abuela."

He knew what it was. It was nine on the list. He knew that, and he knew she knew, and he also knew she hadn't done it because of the list.

He put his mouth on her nipple.

It was too big for his mouth. The tip of it was wider than his head. So he did what he could: he opened his jaw as wide as it would go and fit his lips over the very end, the crinkled crown at the top, and closed them, and sucked.

Lupe breathed out through her nose, long and easy.

"There," she murmured. "Así. That's it, mi amor."

He sucked again. The nipple swelled under his lips and stiffened until it pushed back at him, hot and ridged and salty, and he wrapped both arms around it as far as they'd go, which was hardly at all, and held on. Her skin tasted of rosewater over salt. Her heartbeat came up through the whole breast into him, big and steady, the one he'd fallen asleep to in Sunnyvale.

She started to rock. Just a little, side to side, against the headboard, the way you'd rock a crying baby. And she started to sing, low, the same lullaby he half remembered from her kitchen. Señora Santa Ana, ¿por qué llora el niño?

His shaking eased. Then it stopped.

He didn't stop sucking. He didn't want to. He got hard against her, belly-down in the give of her tit with his hips sunk into it, and he couldn't stop it, and he hated that, because this was Abuela, singing to him, rocking him. She must have felt it. She didn't say anything about it. She just kept rocking and kept singing, and her hand behind him kept him there.

mm

"Shh," Lupe said. "I know, mijo. I know. Abuela's got you."

At some point she moved him to the other one without a word, the way she must have done it a thousand times, half asleep, forty years ago. He latched on. His jaw ached. Her nipple had gone slick and shiny with his spit, and her breathing had gone deep and even, and the song had worn down to a hum, and then to nothing. Somewhere in there she'd reached over and turned off the lamp.

She was asleep. He knew it from the snore.

He lay there with his mouth on her, and for the first time in two days the inside of his head was quiet.

On the nightstand, his phone lit up.

He could see it past the curve of her tit, the screen glowing in the dark next to the gold cross. Lupe had plugged it in last night and nobody had looked at it since. A text.

Artie: what the fuck

Then another, under it.

Artie: what the fuck, Max