Chapter 15: What’s Your Name?

Scott reeked of sex.

He smelled like sweat and shampoo, vanilla body lotion and Lena. His thighs were sore, his back ached like he’d been thrown against a wall twice, and there was a faint, tacky smear on the inside of his left knee he was choosing not to investigate. The Reverse Cypress Starbucks Maneuver had gone off exactly as planned—silent pickup, low-profile drop-off, not a single HOA busybody spotted him climbing out of Lena’s back seat like a well-used secret.

He came in through the garage just before 11:30, locked the door behind him, and sighed into the stillness of the house. Maggie was asleep—dead to the world after finishing her last shift of the week and meeting Stacy, her enthusiastic newly discovered that she is a lesbian lover, at the gym after work for a little parking lot tuna casserole. The kids were at school until 2:35. He had the house to himself and no obligations until it was time to go pick them up while pretending he hadn’t spent the morning getting railed into a puddle.

He opened the fridge and grabbed one of the bottles of Gatorade Maggie kept stocked for general hydration. It was the green kind, which was his favorite. He drank half the bottle in one go, standing in front of the open fridge like a man trying to cool off from the inside out. Then, with a satisfied grunt, he shut the door and headed to his bedroom.

He stripped down to his boxers, dropped onto the bed, and grabbed his phone from the nightstand. He opened the alarm app and toggled on the preset labeled 2:15 PM – KID RUN—his go-to for nap days, post-shift days, or mornings like this one, where a few hours of unconsciousness might be the only thing standing between him and a catastrophic mood crash. He did need to get some sleep before returning to work tonight after his RDOs.

He set the phone down.

And then he remembered.

The gummy.

Lena had brought it up about an hour earlier, sometime between round two and the brief but spirited attempt at round three.

“That gummy your mom gave me last week?” she’d said, brushing her fingers along his stomach. “Do you think she’d let me have another one?”

“You liked it that much?” he’d asked, already knowing the answer.

“I took it after dinner and spent two hours floating around the kitchen listening to a lo-fi playlist and reorganizing my spice rack.”

“That’s the mango-lime for you,” he said. “It’s for vibes and focused domestic energy. Mom swears by it for full moon cleaning days.”

“You’re familiar with it?” she asked, surprised.

“Not from personal experience,” he said. “I haven’t had any THC in my system since college. The department rather frowns upon us imbibing even if it is state legal in California. It’s still federal illegal and that makes it a no-no for duly sworn peace officers.”

“That’s a bummer,” she said.

“Kind of,” he agreed. “Mom tells me about the stuff all the time though. She wants me to run for head of the deputy sheriff’s union and make allowing recreational ganja use for cops my platform. Says it’ll make a more efficient and less violent law enforcement presence in Heritage County.”

“That’s wild,” Lena said. “Anyway, whatever it was, it was heaven. Tell her I’ll pay for it.”

“She won’t take your money.”

“What if I made her a batch of sholeh zard?”

“What’s that?” Scott asked.

Lena smiled, still tracing slow circles on his stomach with her fingers. “It’s a saffron rice pudding—Persian-style. We make it with rosewater, cardamom, slivered almonds, sometimes pistachio if it’s a fancy batch. Sweet, silky, yellow as hell. My mom used to say it could heal a broken heart if you stirred it slow enough.” She shrugged. “It’s basically comfort in a bowl.”

“Would it taste good if she had the munchies after a double dose of Tequila Sunset Nightberry gummies?” he asked.

“It would be the ultimate in stoner food,” she said. “I’m pretty sure my ancestors came up with it after smoking some Tehranian Terror hashish back in the glory days of the empire.”

“She would consider that a fair and equitable trade,” Scott said. “Especially if you tell her that ancient Persian stoners have been ritualizing it since the days of the Muslim Conquest.”

Now, Scott smirked faintly and reached for his phone again.

He flipped to his starred contacts.

Mom.

He tapped the number and waited.

It rang once.

Then—

“Hi, my beautiful boy,” Mom answered, her voice full of sunshine and sandalwood. “I was just thinking about you...”

“Hey, Mom,” Scott said, settling back on the bed. “Just wanted to check in. You’re still good for tonight?”

“Of course,” she said. “Already set the alarm on my phone. No repeat of the Great Thursday Night Forgetting of last month.”

“You weren’t that late,” he said diplomatically, though he had been forced to call the watch commander to let him know he would not be able to attend briefing that night but would be able to hit the streets more or less on time. Awkward. Not the sort of thing that built favor with the bosses.

“Well, I still felt awful about it. Memory slips are just part of getting older, honey.”

Especially when you’ve been marinating your brain in THC daily since the original Thursday night lineup of Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, he thought but did not say.

“Shit happens, Mom,” he did say, using one of her favorite expressions in life. Sometimes he thought that she was the one who actually came up with that phrase in the first place.

“I’ll be there at 7:00 PM sharp,” she said. “I picked up a new blend of lemon balm tea and some freeze-dried mangoes I want to try out on the kids.”

“They’ll love that,” Scott said dryly, knowing they probably wouldn’t, but they’d eat it to make her happy. They were good kids and they both loved ‘Nana’, as they called the only grandparental figure they had in their lives.

“Oh, and I found that lavender lotion Katie likes—the one that smells like sleepy clouds. I swear it makes her dreams more peaceful. You should try some on your temples.”

“I’ll add it to the list,” he said. “But actually ... I have a gummy request.”

“Oooh,” she said. “For who?”

“Maggie’s friend Lena. The one she asked for last week. Apparently she really liked the mango-lime. She was wondering if you might have another.”

There was a delighted pause.

“She wants another one? That makes me so happy,” Mom said. “And tell Maggie she has such progressive and honest friends. I never even met the girl but I can feel her energy’s in the right place.”

“She also offered to make you some kind of Persian rice pudding in return,” Scott said. “I already forgot the name.”

“Sholeh zard, ” Mom said immediately. “Oh my God. I haven’t had that since my pilgrimage to Haight-Ashbury during the Occupy Wall Street Movement. There was this Iranian anarchist named Pejman who lived in a painted school bus and made the most amazing sholeh zard in a solar-powered crockpot. His chakras were all misaligned, but the man could infuse saffron like a sage.”

Scott closed his eyes and breathed through it. Of course there was an anarchist named Pejman. Of course there was solar pudding.

“She doesn’t have to trade for it,” Mom continued, “but I’ll accept the gift with love and intention if it’s made from the heart.”

“It’s definitely made from the heart.”

“Oh! Speaking of THC and all of its beneficial aesthetics, have you given any more thought to my idea?”

Scott rubbed his eyes. “Which idea?”

“Running for union president on a platform of letting deputies bong out after hours if they want to. I honestly believe we’d have a more peaceful and emotionally available police culture.”

Scott sighed. “I’m still too new for union leadership, Mom. I’ve only been on patrol for a year. I don’t even get to sit at the cool table at in-service training yet.”

“Well,” she said, undeterred, “just keep it in mind. Law enforcement officers with access to the soothing and introspective qualities of good ganja are cops who will break down the so-called ‘pig culture’ and bring about true reform to the institution. It could change the world.”

“I’ll start gradually introducing the concept,” he promised.

“You will be such a wonderful reformist leader,” she said, fully sincere. “You’re grounded. You’ve got vision. You don’t overreact. And you’ve been watching authority systems crumble since the Clinton administration. You’ve got the context.”

Scott let her talk, smiling faintly.

“I’ll bring an extra gummy,” she said. “Tell Maggie’s friend she’s got cosmic clearance from me.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“You’re welcome, sweetheart. I’ll see you tonight. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

She hung up. He set the phone down and exhaled slowly, still half-smiling, half-bracing for the energy storm she’d bring with her.

Lena’s gummy was secured. She would stroll by with Ranger at 8:30 AM the next morning and he would hand it off to her like a prisoner passing a kite on the fifth floor of the main jail.

Now it was time to catch a little shut-eye before his shift tonight. Dinner would be Doordash pizza. And they would have dried mangoes for dessert. What could be better than that?

At exactly 6:46 PM, the sound of a struggling air-cooled engine rumbled up the street and into the driveway.

Scott didn’t have to look.

It was the unmistakable chug and cough of the 1967 VW Microbus—cream over rust with a peace-sign bumper sticker and one mismatched rear window that had been plexiglass since the early ‘90s. His mother’s pride and joy. His father’s ongoing mechanical nightmare.

It was the very same bus that his grandparents—OG hippies in the most committed sense of the term—had driven to Woodstock in back in 1969. They swore they’d made the cross-country journey with Tom and Mary Kingsley, the parents of Jake Kingsley from Intemperance, the infamous local boy turned rock god whose reputation could still make a dive bar bartender roll their eyes. They even had a pair of blurry Polaroids showing a man and a woman—both long-haired and barefoot—playing guitar and fiddle on a dirt hillside. His grandparents insisted the one with the guitar was Tom Kingsley, and the woman with the fiddle was Mary.

Scott had seen the photos. He wasn’t convinced. But Mom believed the story like gospel.

The engine cut off with a triumphant cough and a rattle. A moment later, the driver’s side door creaked open and Mom emerged, radiant as always in her own eccentric, sun-kissed way. She had a large reusable shopping bag slung over one arm—the brown canvas kind with a mandala print and a faded patch that read Eat Like You Love the Earth.

Her reddish-blonde hair was twisted up into a loose bun held by what looked like a carved stick. She wore a flowy top, loose hemp pants, and hiking sandals that had probably seen every inch of Avila Beach at some point in their career. At 54, she was still lean, still light on her feet, and still exactly the kind of woman who could walk into a yoga retreat and be mistaken for a founding member.

She closed the door gently—always gentle, like the bus was a sacred relic—and made her way up the walk, beaming, bag in hand, ready to feed children and shift the spiritual balance of the household through snacks, intention, and small doses of cannabis. She walked into the house without knocking, using her own key. She was family.

The front door opened and Mom swept in with a gust of lavender and lemon balm, her bag thumping softly against her leg as she moved.

“Nana!” Katie shouted, launching herself from the living room rug like a missile.

Christopher was only half a second behind her.

“Oh, my sweet babies,” Mom crooned, dropping to her knees and gathering both of them into a full-body tangle of arms, curls, and long necklaces that smelled like incense and patchouli.

Katie giggled as Mom kissed the top of her head. Christopher wriggled a little under the squeeze, but didn’t pull away. She kissed his cheek anyway, then gave them both an extra squeeze for good measure.

“Did you bring snacks?” Katie asked, eyes hopeful.

“I did,” Mom said, pulling the shopping bag up to her chest like it contained a sacred offering. “But I need to sort them first to make sure my personal snacks aren’t mixed in with yours.”

Christopher tilted his head. “Like the kind that make you want to talk about the moon for a really long time?”

“Exactly,” she said, beaming. “Not for kids. Yours are full of vitamin C and ancestral love.”

Maggie, watching from the kitchen doorway, smiled to herself. The kids didn’t actually like the snacks—nobody liked her roasted kale and dried fruit and whatever weird-ass trail mix she was experimenting with that week—but they ate it anyway. Because they had a Nana. And she’d made it. And that was enough.

And to be fair, she also made the best sweet snacks in the world. Stoners always did. Her no-bake cocoa balls, agave granola bars, and maple cardamom crunchies were weirdly addictive—perfectly chewy, just sweet enough, and somehow exactly what you wanted, even if you didn’t know it.

Despite all her quirks—or maybe because of them—both kids loved her deeply.

Mom finally stood and turned toward the adults.

“Hi, Mom,” Scott said, stepping forward to kiss her cheek.

“Hey, Mom,” Maggie echoed, offering a warm squeeze.

She’d been calling her Mom since she and Scott had moved in together—at Mom’s insistence. And it hadn’t taken much insisting. Maggie had no relationship with her own mother, who had disowned her after she got pregnant with Christopher. Mom had offered to fill that space from the start, and Maggie had accepted it without hesitation. The name had stuck.

Mom couldn’t be dissuaded from the belief that Scott and Maggie were secretly in love. Not even the well-established fact of Maggie’s lesbianism could shake that conviction. In her mind, love was love, and the two of them were clearly soulmates—just waiting for the stars to align or a full moon on a Friday the 13th to unlock their destiny.

Maggie had stopped arguing about it. In truth, she’d never even started.

It was a ritual now—Scott and Maggie giving Mom five or ten minutes of real face time before the evening settled. She called it “calibrating the household energy.” Scott called it “preventing her from smudging the hallway with burning sage again.”

She dropped her shopping bag on the kitchen table, began unpacking jars and co-op bulk baggies and unlabeled tins like she was stocking an apothecary, and then turned with a grin.