by Amy Craig
Tower eight looked empty in the mid-morning light, but children played on the rope playground and Penny Lane stood at the edge of the water, singing off-key while the other beach-goers gave her a wide berth. Wylie walked up to the woman and considered what she could do to support her harmony. “Don’t you know any other songs?”
The woman smiled and turned until Wylie no longer saw her tanned skin and age spots but saw the sunlight reflected from her blue eyes and the laugh lines that lined them instead. “It’s such a pretty day. Why are you doing walking along the beach by yourself?”
“Looking for you,” Wylie said.
Penny Lane laughed. “I told you I have too many people.”
Wylie recalled the woman’s backstory and realized there was nothing she could do to balance out Penny Lane’s dearth of family resources and account balances, but Wylie knew she had more than pride and ambition—she had the ability to serve as the woman’s friend. “I found a pretty sweet rental deal up in the hills.”
“The hills can be dangerous,” Penny said as a gull flew overhead.
“I don’t think a bunch of tech-focused hippies are going to do me any harm. It’s a bit of a commune, where everyone chips in and gets ahead on economies of scale.” The older woman wrinkled her nose and Wylie continued to talk. “I don’t think they want anything from me but rent and some household chores. It’s a safe place. You could come sit by the pool with me. Take a hot shower and leave well-fed.”
“You’re always trying to feed me.”
Wylie shrugged. “It’s all I’ve got.”
Penny Lane continued to stare at the ocean, humming to herself.
She strained her ear, trying to catch the point where lyrics gave way to spoken words, but the words never came. “You could tell me about your best friend, Larry, the one with Parkinson’s disease.”
“You remembered his name.”
It was a memorable day. She shifted. “I’m sure you still miss him.”
“He died.”
She nodded but acknowledged there were some things about Penny Lane’s life she could never understand.
“But I took care of him and stuck with him until the end,” Penny Lane said.
“So let me take care of you for a day.”
“You’ll have to take me back to the bus stop.”
She nodded. “I can do that.”
“And find a new hobby after you’re done clearing your conscience.”
“Hobby?”
Penny Lane smiled. “I’m not above spending the day with you, but I told you, you’ve got to offer the whole package to make a difference in someone’s life. One day of playing savior to the homeless isn’t going to help either of us figure out what to do next.”
“What about one day of eating ice cream and forgetting about our worries?”
The woman smiled. “I’ve always had a soft spot for ice cream. Did I tell you I grew up in New Jersey?”
Wylie nodded and turned to retrace her steps. “You told me about your mom.”
“She was lovely,” Penny Lane said.
* * * *
An hour later, they sat by the pool sunning their legs with an oldies station filling the gaps in their conversation. Penny Lane adjusted a borrowed baseball cap and dropped her metal spoon into the melted remnants of her ice cream bowl. “Are you sure this isn’t a scam?” she asked. “I feel like the music’s going to change and your roommates are going to emerge from the house in their cult robes. Am I the first victim?”
Wylie laughed and considered the strawberry ice cream she had found in the freezer. “Each roommate has a sphere of influence to help the household run seamlessly. Their method of governance cuts down on duplicate expenses and builds a sense of community dependence. The chatter I’ve seen on the messaging app reads like the newsfeed for a boring club—local events, house details and zero gossip.”
Penny Lake opened one eye. “Cult.”
“I swear, so far, so good. They were friendly the other night when Nolan and I came home to find them watching a movie.”
“Who’s Nolan?”
She cocked her head. “Good question. He’s”—she hesitated, wondering how to describe a man she still wanted to get to know—“one of the original roommates and he owns a food truck that serves basic food for fair prices. I think he envisions expanding the truck into a kind of nonprofit restaurant chain.”
“Nobody’s going to invest in that,” Penny Lane said.
“I know,” Wylie admitted, “but it’s nice to have a dream.”
She thought about the intimacy of the previous night and the pleasure of knowing Nolan had been waiting for her, his arms wide with an open invitation. Well, at least an open bottle of wine. Although, theoretically, I paid for a fifth of that wine. She smiled. Aren’t we modern?
Penny Lane slouched on the chair and closed her eyes. “Maybe you need your own dream.”
“I have one,” Wylie said, unwilling to challenge the older woman’s statement and turn it back on her. “Baby steps toward self-sufficiency. Isn’t that the badge of honor in this town? You’ve found a way to make it.”
“Make it and thrive,” Penny Lane said. “I wish I could have taken Larry somewhere other than the beach. He would have enjoyed sitting by the water without worrying about the sand.”
Wylie laughed. “Why didn’t he like the sand?”
“Parkinson’s disease is a movement disorder that affects the nervous system. The symptoms become worse over time.”
“I hear getting old sucks.”
Penny Lane laughed. “Tell me about it. But Larry’s personality changed as well between the time I met him and the time he died. He lost his motivation and became more inverted and withdrawn. The beach used to cheer him up. ‘People pay millions for this view,’ he would say, ‘and we’re getting it all for free.’ But during the last few months, he hardly saw anything good or bad in the world around him. It was like he began to process the world more slowly and just couldn’t take it all in.”
“The brain’s part of our nervous system,” Wylie said. “Maybe his disease just advanced.”
“I think he knew what was coming,” Penny Lane said. “Whatever spark of personality remained in him didn’t want to die in a hospital bed, but I have a hard time understanding why he killed himself and extinguished the possibility of experiencing anything else but that final white light. That’s not something the man I first met would do.”
“But you were there for him,” Wylie said. “That counts.”
“Yeah. I hated his choice, but he still got to make the final decisions.”
“You could help a lot of families navigate their experiences. You called yourself a caregiver without the right credentials, but what if you called yourself a counselor?”
“Same problem,” Penny Lane replied. “Wealth of experience, but zero credentials. I’m too old to go back to school, even if I could afford it.”
Wylie protested the woman’s defense. “You’re not old, but in a decade, you’ll be older. Why put off what you can accomplish today?”
“How’s that accreditation going? They offer credits for lounging by the pool with a bum?”
“Point for Penny Lane,” Wylie said. “I’m working on that.” Her phone pinged with a notification and she ignored the device, choosing to respect the sun-drenched afternoon she had devoted to her guest. The device pinged again. “I need to change my notification settings to a daily review. Maybe I can just mute the channel for a while.” Picking up her phone, she cupped her hand over the edge to read it in the bright sunlight.
Who the fuck ate my ice cream?
Wylie swallowed and struggled to remember whether she had checked the carton for a name.
And who left their dirty dishes in the sink?
“Um, I’m just going to slip inside and check on something,” she said.
Penny Lane waved her off, the rest of her body unmoving as she soaked up the sun beneath the blue suburban skies.
She entered the house, blinking to adjust to the dim interior.
Jack stood at the kitchen counter and stared at the empty carton of ice cream she and Penny Lane had abandoned. Their lunch dishes rested in the stainless-steel sink, just as they’d left them. He looked up, anger stiffening his shoulders as his bloodshot eyes peered at her through smudged glasses.
“Hey, I just saw your messages on the messaging app,” she said.
“Did you fucking do this?”
Wylie swallowed. “I didn’t realize you’d bought the ice cream for yourself.” He turned the package and she shook her head at the stenciled black marker that spelled ‘Jack’ next to a list of ingredients. “I mean, to be fair”—she swallowed—“at first glance, that just looks like part of the packaging.”
“You have to notice the details, Wylie. It’s not part of the list of ingredients. It’s my name and the only thing that separates what’s mine from what belongs to the house.”
“What happened to spheres of influence and helping the household run seamlessly? I made a mistake and I’m sorry. I’ll buy you some more ice cream.”
“I don’t want ice cream when you get around to it. I want it now. I want fifteen minutes of peace and quiet so I can check out of my high-stakes world and just relax.”
She glanced at Penny Lane, who sat at the edge of her chair, aware of her isolation in a place where Wylie had intended to treat her like an invited guest. “Come out by the pool and sit with us.”
Jack threw up his hands. “You don’t understand. My world requires more than peace, love and harmony. I told you it’d be hard to empathize with a bunch of stressed-out entrepreneurs.” He looked at her and shook his head. “You’re just a stupid yoga instructor with a good ass.”
She bit her lips and discarded a stream of defensive responses.
He scanned her body and raised his eyebrows. “What are you doing to add to the community? Screwing Nolan doesn’t count unless we’re all invited to take advantage of this community benefit?” He walked toward her. “Is that how you’re planning to make amends?”
“That’s enough,” Rikard said.
Wylie turned to him, embarassment flooding her cheeks, though she’d never been to happy to see another person in her entire life.
“Fuck off, Rikard,” Jack said. “This conversation doesn’t concern you.”
“Everything in this house concerns me. I live here and I’m not interested in exploring other options.” The blond came to stand beside Wylie. “You’re about to cross a line we’ll all regret.”
“Could you stop thinking about yourself for ten minutes? My whole damn business is about to explode and take me down with it.”
“Then go cool off in your room and find a way to save it.”
The men stared at each other until Jack swore and stormed from the room. Rikard turned to look at her. “Did he touch you?”
She shook her head and rubbed the fear from her skin. “It was just a carton of ice cream.”
Penny Lane walked to the threshold and stopped before she entered the house. “Wylie?” she called into the tense silence permeating the room. “I think I’d like to go home now.”
“Where is home?” Wylie whispered as her gaze swung back and forth between the hovering presence of Rikard and the wavering uncertainty of Penny Lane.
The woman turned toward the hills. “Wherever I belong.”
Wylie drove the SUV down the hill, using a maps application to guide her through the city streets. Penny Lane stayed quiet in the passenger seat and stared out of the window. “Is this better than the seven-twenty?”
The older woman smiled. “I appreciate the concessions, but I hope I didn’t get you into too much trouble.”
Wylie kept her foot on the brake at a red light. “You and Larry lived together for a long time. Is it possible you had a common-law marriage?”
Penny Lane shook her head. “It wasn’t like that between us. Is that even a thing?”
“I’ve heard of it. Maybe in, like…Montana,” Wylie said. Penny Lane laughed as the light turned green and Wylie accelerated with the traffic. “Hear me out. Widows are eligible for survivor’s benefits. The time you spent caring for Larry could keep you from sleeping on the streets.”
“I’m not going to claim something I’m not entitled to receive.”
“But what if you were entitled to receive it?”
Penny Lane shook her head. “Sometimes friends take care of each other and it just works out.” She pointed to the cluster of tents behind a commerce center on Whittier Boulevard. Fifty colorful shrouds and a bike chop shop filled the space between the commercial loading dock and a stand of trees.
They passed the entrance to a parking lot serving the big box store and Penny Lane reached for the door handle. “You can let me out here,” she said.
“I’ll take you all the way.” She stared at a line of red bollards designed to block cars from crashing through the store’s plate glass windows. What will block cars from crashing through the tent city Penny Lane calls home? A pile of trash marked the edge of the encampment and Wylie wondered what happened when the pile grew too big and began to slump.
She knew rental rates had outpaced wages for people living near the margins of minimum wage, but she prided herself on her professional skills. What about the people like Penny Lane who had lost that source of pride? Could she walk into the chain store and ‘present her credentials’ with an address ‘just around the back’? Thick brush might hide the rows of tents from passing drivers, but the hiring manager would see the traces of indignity from a lifestyle that depended on public toilets, sinks and donated supplies. She shook her head and looked at her friend. “You live here.”
The woman nodded. “Home sweet home.”
“I can take you back with me. We can figure something else out.”
Penny Lane reached for the door handle. “You are like a scrappy little coyote, aren’t you? I told you a day wouldn’t matter. This isn’t your problem to solve. The city wastes tens of millions of dollars each year cleaning up these messes. They sweep in to scare away the rats, remove used needles and piles of garbage. Hell, they’ll even powerwash the sidewalks if we have one. You know what happens? The camps come back when the cleaning ends.”
Rats? Wylie closed her eyes for a moment. Cholera, typhoid and hepatitis A could run through this camp like wildfire, but rats conjured images of typhus and old-school plagues. Sleeping in the SUV felt like a joke when the reality of a homeless camp sat before her. She slammed the steering wheel to vent her frustration. “But this is America! You shouldn’t have to live like this!”
The woman smiled. “I remember what it felt like to be twenty-one.”
“I’m twenty-six,” Wylie whispered. Her job searches and petty complaints felt like childish exercise when she compared them to the burdens Penny Lane had to overcome to get on her feet. I thought I could take credit for the beachside yoga sessions and the income I earned, but mom and dad sat with me at the kitchen table. They gave me family resources I never knew I had.
She looked at the camp and thought of Nolan’s food truck and the momentum he would have if he managed to get it off the ground—low prices, no guilt and no empty stomachs. The scale of his ambitions had taken her breath away, but Penny Lane’s reality brought it all rushing back. He can’t be everywhere when he opens more than one store. She focused on Penny Lane. “I’m going to get you a job and a place to live.”
The older woman laughed. “Get yourself one first.”
Chapter Twelve
Wylie drove back to the hillside mansion and climbed the stairs, her thoughts a kaleidoscope of vague ideas and the frustration of navigating rush hour. She found Rikard sitting at the kitchen table with a bottle of clear liquid and two empty cordial glasses. The silence of the house loomed in her consciousness. “Thank you for coming to my defense.”
“Jack and Antonia went to dinner to help him cool off.”
“And Neil?” she a
sked.
“In his room.”
She stepped into the common space. “Did you orchestrate that?”
Rikard pushed a glass across the table. “I orchestrate a lot of things. Care for a drink?”
Scanning the open space, she eyed the next flight of stairs, intent on finding a quiet place to research local outreach organizations. “Not really.”
Rikard raised his eyebrows. “It’s an herbal rakija known as travarica. My family likes to drink it at the start of a meal with some dried figs.”
“Did you label it?”
“No.” He smiled as he filled her glass. “Who else could stand it?”
She swallowed.
“As my family says, the more the merrier. I gave up smoking, but I didn’t give up this crutch.”
Pulling out a chair, she faced the man and raised the glass to her lips. The fruit-flavored brandy packed a punch and she coughed. “It’s like forty percent.”
He smiled and looked at her.
She cleared her throat. “Like I said, thank you for defending me.”
“Yeah, let’s talk about that little incident.”
“It was a mistake,” she said. “I didn’t know that ice cream belonged to Jack.”
“Do you know the house belongs to Nolan?”
She put down her glass and looked at the man. “Say that again.”
“You’re not among peers, Wylie. Neither of us should trust these people. Nolan rents out rooms in his million-dollar mansion to fulfill a high-minded quest for community.”
“So you’re not loyal to him.”
He raised his glass. “Živjeli. I know a good deal when I see it.”
She took a deep breath and considered the implications of his claim. Nolan’s custom-built Bronco should have been her first clue. The easy relationship with Patty and John Abramowitz? The accountant’s respect when she dropped his name? He hasn’t just lived in this house for a few years. She swallowed, fighting the realization that threatened to steal her breath. He built this house on the site of his childhood home. Shit. Does he enjoy my company or see me as a quirky diversion? Shaking her head, she replayed their interactions but couldn’t ignore the reality of Rikard sitting across the table, cataloging her reactions. “I asked Nolan if his daddy had money.”
