"You like her," Edison said as she opened the door of her ancient Volkswagen bug.

"Maybe," Jordan said, climbing into the passenger seat.

"But we don't even know if she's family," Edison said.  She started the car, ground the gears until she found reverse and backed out of the parking space without looking behind her.  A car slammed on its brakes and honked angrily at her.  Edison ignored it.

"Does it matter?" Jordan asked.

"Only if you want to date her."  Edison steered the car out of the hospital parking lot and toward the exit.

"Maybe I can finally get that toaster oven I've always wanted," Jordan said.

"She's a little on the short side for you."

"You're going out a one-way," Jordan said.

"So?"

"The wrong way."

Another car honked at them and the driver shook her fist.  Edison waved brightly at the angry woman.

Jordan said, "I don't think she's waving."

"What makes you say that?"

"The pinched red face and the spittle spraying out of her mouth."

"Some people are so excitable," Edison said.  She screeched tires onto the street and the angry driver laid on her horn and sped past.  Edison shook her head and sighed.  "You'd think one-way signs are written in stone or something."

"Well, they are kind of the law and all that."

They drove the next five minutes in silence.  Jordan closed her eyes and held her breath each time Edison cornered the car without braking.

"How old do you think she is?" Edison asked.

"Who?"

"You know who."

Jordan shrugged.  "Thirty."

"How do you know that?"

"I don't know that.  You asked me how old I thought she was and I think she's thirty."

Edison frowned.  "Kind of young for you."

"I'm thirty-two.  It wouldn't be like I was robbing the cradle."

"Your last one was much older." Edison punched the gas to make it through a yellow light.

Jordan braced herself by pushing her undamaged hand against the dash. "Age is relative."

"I'm pretty sure she had a straight vibe," Edison said.

"Everyone's straight until proven guilty."

Edison took her eyes off the road and looked at Jordan for a long moment.  "So, what's the verdict?  Are you going to ask her out?"

"No.  Please watch the road."

"No?"

"No.  I don't do conversions."  Jordan pointed out the windshield.  "The road, please."

Edison looked out the window, saying, "You converted me."

"That’s your version.  My version is that it was an accident."

"You make it sound like you tripped and fell on top of me until I came," Edison said.

Jordan sighed. "Ed, I don't want to talk about us again.  We're best friends.  We're better off that way.  And as for the doctor… I'm not going to try to convert her, that's all, end of story."

Edison looked doubtful.  She said in an off-handed way that meant it wasn't really off-handed, "Some conversions do themselves."

It was true that Jordan had met Edison when she was straight.  No, erase that.  Jordan met Edison when she wasn't a practicing lesbian.  She had hired Edison to hang some new cabinets in the kitchen.  Only half the cabinets were hung before Jordan had introduced Edison to the world of practicing lesbianism and it had been kind of an accident.

Jordan didn't blame herself.  She blamed her overactive vagination.  If Edison didn't want to be seduced and taken on the kitchen floor she shouldn't have bent over like that with her butt crack showing.

Jordan sighed.  She loved Ed.  But she loved her like a best friend.  The problem was that Ed loved her like a lover.  Jordan wasn't sure how it had happened, but Edison had moved into her house kind-of-sort-of uninvited.  Something about her apartment being flooded and being broke and she worked all day at Jordan's house anyway and she had more than enough room and her portion of the rent could be taken out of what Jordan was paying her to remodel.  The problem was that the remodeling was going on forever.  Jordan wondered if that was intentional.

Edison pulled her Bug into the driveway of their home.  They looked at the old house and sighed.  Once upon a time it had been a beautiful old Victorian but now the paint was peeling, the yard was overgrown and the windows looked like the cloudy cataracts of a senile old lady.  If the house were a person it would be Mrs. Haversham from Great Expectations.

"I wish this conversion would do itself," Jordan said, pointing at the house and referring to the ongoing house renovations.

"Where would the fun be in that?" Edison said.  "Isn’t putting in elbow grease and sweat and hours upon hours of work worth having something of your very own, something special and worthwhile, something to give your life meaning?"

Jordan got out of the car.  "Are we talking about the house or the doctor?"

"You tell me."  Edison shut her car door and headed for the porch.


Blue Amy

 

Jordan sat cross-legged on the floor in her drawing studio, in the middle of plastic tarps, paint buckets and half-painted walls, drinking Pinot Gris out of a coffee mug and contemplating her own conversion.  There were three distinct stages of her conversion.

Before she fell out the window:  Jordan did not believe in true love.  She did not believe in romance and happily-ever-afters.  She thought all that malarkey about love was brainwashing doled out by men to keep women barefoot and pregnant.  It was so ingrained in the female mind that even lesbians had contracted it like it was a pandemic flu.

During the fall:  The moment she slipped, the exact moment she reached for something to grab hold of and there was nothing there and she realized she was hurtling toward earth and imminent death, Jordan thought of how she was dying too young.  She thought of all the things she hadn't done yet.  She hadn't traveled to New Zealand. She hadn't been to the top of the Empire State building.  She hadn't written the novel that would be her seminal masterpiece.  She hadn't experienced true love.  That was her last thought and it was the clencher.  True love.  She was going to die a virgin, metaphorically speaking, of the heart.

After the fall:  Jordan saw Amy in the emergency room.  Maybe it was too many endorphins caused by the fear coursing through her veins, maybe it was the loss of blood, maybe it was the full moon, maybe it was the chili peppers she ate for dinner last night, but whatever it was, Jordan was now pretty damn sure she was in love.

She shook her head, gulped her wine, and reminded herself sternly that she did not believe in true love.  She did, however, believe in a second glass of wine.  She lifted the bottle from between her legs and sloshed more into her cup.

She looked at the half-painted walls and wondered when Edison would ever get around to finishing them.  It seemed like the whole house was always only halfway done.  Edison had steadily worked on projects but was always sidetracked by her brainchildren – the inventions that she was forever tinkering with.  As a result, the new dishwasher sat in the middle of the kitchen floor, the guest room toilet was in the hallway, sheets of drywall were stacked in the living room and not a single wall in the whole place was fully painted.

Jordan decided to be proactive.  She jimmied open a can of paint with a screwdriver, stirred the paint, grabbed a brush, and dipped it into the blue paint.  It was cerulean blue and her favorite color.  Edison stored most of the paint up here in her studio so that when it came time to paint a room she’d know where, in the mess of remodeling, she had stored the paint.

Jordan slapped the paint on the wall with one hand and sipped her wine with the other.  Well, she tried to sip her wine.  She couldn't hold the mug in her left hand because of the stitches and bandages.  And pain.  She located a roll of duct tape, which wasn't too hard because Edison bought the stuff by the case and left it lying all over the house.  Using her teeth, her knees and her good right hand, Jordan taped the mug of wine to her left hand.  She gave it a trial run by raising it to her lips and drinking.  It worked beautifully.  Jordan thought that Edison should invent something like this - a paint holder that had a sippy cup attached to it.  She could market it to the depressed artist.  And weren’t all artists depressed?

Jordan picked up the brush and smeared some of the blue paint on the wall.  She drank.  She painted.  She let her mind wander.

Jordan thought about Amy.  She thought about Amy's face.  She was beautiful in an unassuming, unpretentious way.  Jordan thought about using Amy's face in one of her illustrations.  She might be perfect for her book-in-progress.  Jordan had been working on her children's book for the past year.  She drew picture after picture but was never satisfied with the end result.  Using Amy's face might give her the inspiration she needed.

Jordan had a photographic memory.  She could recall in startling detail every face she'd ever seen.  That talent came in quite handy in art school when she never finished a drawing class by the time the bell rang.  She'd simply go home, finish from memory and hand it in the next day.  This talent would also come in handy if she were ever mugged or kidnapped or a victim of a senseless crime.  Which hadn't happened, thank God, but if it did she'd be able to draw her own police sketch.

While she painted the wall, she thought about Amy's eyes.  They were beautiful, sure, but so were a million other eyes Jordan had seen.  The thing that made Amy's eyes different was that what was behind them leaked out.  Okay, leaking wasn't the best word choice.  What she meant was Amy had eyes with a depth past the ordinary blue.  They were a blue so deep that they seemed to get darker near the center and swallow her up.