He’d turned to go back to his catalog when out of the corner of his eye he spotted a blue van on the forest road. Cheryl drove a red Subaru; it couldn’t be her. Still, he stayed where he was and watched as the van cleared the forest and came toward the houses. He watched right up to the minute the van pulled into the driveway of the Chapman house and the driver’s door opened and Cheryl stepped out.
He moved to go outside to greet her when he saw two more doors open and three teenage girls get out.
Cheryl looked at Andrew’s house, saw him standing at the window, and waved. Instead of waving back, he came outside. He stuck his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and crossed the path, stopping at the end of the driveway.
“Heavy traffic?” he said by way of greeting.
“Late start.” She came forward but left a telling distance between them. Their planned month together would not start with a kiss. “I should have called, but was so grateful finally to get on the road that I didn’t want to take any more time.”
Cheryl didn’t have a car phone and didn’t want one. He couldn’t imagine being out of touch with the office when he was away from the nursery. Somewhere they’d switched places, he’d become the button-down businessman and she’d insisted on her freedom.
The girls stood behind Cheryl expectantly. She motioned to bring them forward. “Andrew, I’d like you to meet some friends of mine.”
A young woman with ebony hair, bronze skin, and the blackest eyes and thickest lashes Andrew had ever seen held out her hand. “Maria Ramos,” she said, beating Cheryl to the introduction. “I understand you have a nursery and might be looking for help.”
“I do–and I’m always looking for good help,” he told her, wondering what the hell was going on.
“Thanks for letting me work into it gradually, Maria,” Cheryl said.
“I couldn’t see no sense in putting it off,” she said. “I told you, I don’t mind being here, but I can’t be sitting around on my butt all day.”
Cheryl reached back and brought a second girl forward. “This is Karen Devlin, and–” She glanced around and spotted the third girl still at the van. “And Deanna Riparetti.”
Andrew shook each of the girl’s hands. Karen had blond hair bleached almost white, with half an inch of dark roots showing. One ear was lined in gold hoops from the lobe to around the arched top, the other had a single diamond stud. A small gold ball sat on the side of her nose. A tatoo of a protruding tongue, Mick Jagger style, was on one shoulder, Tweety Bird on the other.
Deanna had fire engine red hair, earrings circling both ears, a barbed wire tatoo around one arm, and a cobweb without a spider on the side of her neck.
“Pleased to meet you,” Andrew said. The unspoken question–what are you doing here–hung heavy in the air.
“Hold on a minute while I let them in,” Cheryl said to Andrew. She opened the front door to the house and the back door of the van. The girls unloaded their suitcases and disappeared inside.
Cheryl gave Andrew a sheepish smile and put her hands up in surrender. “Surprise.”
He waited.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Where to begin? “Friends of yours, I take it?”
“Yes, in a way.”
“And they’ll be staying how long?”
“August.”
“The entire month?”
She nodded.
“I see …”
“No, I don’t think you do. Well, maybe you see, but I doubt you understand.” She came forward and touched his arm. “Believe it or not, this is a good thing, Andrew. I’m letting you know that I’m ready to take the next step. These kids are part of who I am. This is what I do. I want you to see me the way I am, what’s important to me, what I could never give up.”
He couldn’t tell whether he was more annoyed with Cheryl for not telling him the girls were coming or curious about what she would say next. “So it’s ‘love me, love my friends'?”
“You don’t have to love them–but you do have to understand. I’ve found something to do with my life that makes a difference. For the most part, these girls have never been outside their neighborhoods. They’ve grown up believing what they have is all they can ever have, all they have a right to expect. Maria even thinks it’s all she deserves. I want to show them they have options. I couldn’t let this opportunity pass.”
“What options does a girl with a spiderweb tatoo have?”
Cheryl instantly went on the defensive. “A turtleneck sweater. If that’s what it takes to get past someone blinded by prejudice.”
“Okay, I can see I’m on dangerous ground here. Why don’t I let you get settled, and we can talk later?”
“You’re angry.”
He thought about it. “Disappointed.”
For two weeks Cheryl had fought a mental battle over telling him about the girls. The coward in her won every time. If Andrew insisted she come alone, she couldn’t face a battle where they would both come away losers. “I can handle that. If I were in your position, I’d be disappointed, too.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
He’d undoubtedly made plans, lots of them–plans that didn’t include three eighteen-year-old girls. “Remember when you told me you would do whatever was necessary to prove that we could make it this time?”
Despite an obvious effort to keep a smile from forming, one did. “I had a feeling that might come back to haunt me.”
“I can promise these girls are not your worst nightmare. You’re going to like them, a lot, when you get to know them.” Especially when he came to see how much they had in common with him. Deanna had lived in almost as many foster homes as Andrew, and Karen had the same hunger to see the world. Maria had his dreams and drive to succeed, but was held back by a sense of obligation to her family. She was determined to keep her younger brother and three younger sisters in school and away from the gang influence that had put her older brother in prison for being in the car during a drive-by shooting.
“Was Maria serious about coming to work for me?”
“Regrettably, yes. Promising her a job here was the only way I could get her to leave the one she had in Oakland. Her mother can’t make it through the month without Maria’s paycheck.”
“I don’t pay unskilled beginners much above minimum wage,” he warned. “But I guess I could make an exception.”
“You don’t have to do that. Maria isn’t expecting it.”
“I’ll see how she does.”
Deanna came to the door. “What do you want us to do with your stuff?”
“I’ll take care of it. You can unpack the groceries.”
When Deanna was back in the house, Andrew said, “So you’re here officially, I take it? Taking care of these girls is part of your job.”
“Not exactly,” she equivocated. “The agency is watching to see how our month turns out, and if it’s successful, they’ll come on board next year. They did request that I only bring girls who were eighteen or older, and I agreed.”
“Seems to me you’re taking quite a chance.”
“They’re worth it.”
He shoved his hands in his back pockets again. “Okay–what can I do to help?”
She wasn’t surprised, this was the Andrew she’d expected, the man she’d loved in flesh and memory. Still, her heart skipped a beat as hope nudged the wariness of whether they could make their way back to each other.
“HE’S GOING TO KISS HER,” MARIA SAID, peering through the blinds of the living room window.
“How do you know?” Deanna countered, looking over her shoulder.
“See that look on his face? He’s got it bad.” Maria tucked a long strand of black hair behind her ear. She recognized what was going through
Andrew’s mind because she’d seen the same expression on Carlos’s face when he was trying to talk her into doing it with him in the backseat of his brother’s car. After weeks of trying, he’d grown impatient
, decided blondes were more fun, and taken off with one.
“What are you two doing?” Karen asked, coming into the room from the hallway, scratching the tattooed tongue on her shoulder.
“Spying,” Deanna said.
“Get a life–there ain’t nothin’ those two are going to do out there that’s worth gettin’ caught watching.” Still, Karen joined them at the window.
“He’s kinda cute,” Deanna said.
“For someone old,” Karen added. She continued moving her fingernails over the protruding tongue on her shoulder. “Damn this thing. I think I’m getting allergic or something.”
Maria moved to make room for Karen. “How old do you think he is?”
“Forty,” Karen guessed.
Deanna shook her head. “Thirty-five tops. Look how flat his stomach is. No forty-year-old guy has a gut like that.”
“The ass ain’t bad, either.” Karen made an exaggerated show of licking her lips. “Yum.”
Maria studied Andrew. Cheryl had told them she had a friend who lived next door to the house where they would be staying, but she’d figured anyone who grew orchids for a living wasn’t boyfriend material. At least not the girlfriend/boyfriend kind. Plainly she’d been wrong. “How old do you think Cheryl is?”
Deanna answered. “Same age.”
“What–thirty-five or forty?” Karen asked.
“Didn’t she just go to her twenty-year high school reunion?” Maria asked. “That would make her thirty-eight, maybe thirty-nine.”
Karen looked closer. “You really think she’s that old?”
“Unless she graduated early like that weirdo, Sandy.” Bored, Deanna turned away. “I’m gonna see what there is to eat.”
“What’s with you lately?” Karen asked. “You’re always stuffing something in your mouth.”
Maria prepared for the explosion. Deanna had always been on the heavy side of normal, but she’d really been packing it on lately.
Ignoring Karen, Deanna went into the kitchen and came out a few minutes later with a bag of chips and a Coke and headed for her bedroom.
Karen ran her hand through her hair, then glanced down at the blond strands that had broken off. She brushed them onto the floor. “We gotta find a way to keep her out of the food, or we’re going to need a trailer to haul her home.”
Karen was obsessed about her weight and could recite the calorie content of everything on the menu at every fast-food restaurant in the city. Maria couldn’t remember ever seeing her eat more than a few bites of anything. Push her, and she’d tell you she’d eaten earlier or had plans for later.
Push too hard, and she’d tell you to fuck off, that what she did or didn’t eat was no one’s business.
Maria figured if Karen was lucky, she would wake up hungry one morning and realize that no matter how long she starved herself, she would never look like the women in the magazines she was always reading. If she was unlucky, she’d wind up anorexic and in a hospital somewhere. If talking made any difference to her or Deanna, Karen would be eating and Deanna wouldn’t.
Deanna’s appetite forgotten for the moment, Karen sat sideways in the overstuffed chair beside the fireplace. “You really going to get a job while we’re here?”
Maria sat on the sofa and propped her feet up on the coffee table. “Sitting around doing nothing drives me nuts.”
“Yeah? Just wait till you’ve been lyin’ under the sun a couple of days with me and Deanna. You’ll come around.”
“I’m already as brown as I want to be. I don’t need that skin cancer shit to look good the way you white people do.” She sat up and looked around. “You see a CD player around here? Or a radio? It’s too quiet.”
“Deanna said she was gonna bring hers.”
“You think she’d mind if I borrowed it?” Maria asked.
“Toss her a candy bar and you could take everything she owns and she wouldn’t care.”
“That’s mean.”
“Am I wrong?” Karen countered.
Cheryl interrupted the conversation when she came inside. “Everything put away?”
Maria nodded.
“Which bedroom did you leave for me?”
Maria and Karen exchanged glances. “We thought we each got our own,” Karen said. “Isn’t that why we’re here–to see how the rich kids live?”
“Actually, you’re here to wait on me hand and foot and be on call at all hours of the day and night.”
Maria laughed. “For minimum wage, no doubt.”
“Who said anything about getting paid? Now, which room did you leave me?”
“The first one on the right,” Karen said. “Me and Deanna took the one in the back. We let Maria have a room by herself ‘cause we didn’t want her waking us up in the morning getting ready for work. This is our va-cay-shun and we’re sleepin’ in.”
“Not tomorrow,” Cheryl said. “We’re going to get on the road early before we lose Maria to her job.”
“When do I start,” Maria asked. “And how do I get there?”
“Andrew said he would talk to Paul about giving you a ride.”
“Who’s Paul?”
“I don’t know anything about him except that he’s one of the guys who works at the nursery and he lives around here.”
Maria got up and went into the kitchen to get a bottled water. She came back and leaned a shoulder into the doorframe. “Am I going to be the only woman working there?”
“I wouldn’t think so, but I don’t know for sure.” The question puzzled Cheryl. It had never occurred to her that the employee mix would make a difference.
“I thought you were checking out this job for me.” She opened the water and took a long drink.
“If you don’t think you’ll like working at the nursery, we can look somewhere else.”
She twisted the top off the water and rolled the cap in her hand. “I just don’t want to put up with a lot of guys hittin’ on me. I get enough of that at home.”
“Yeah,” Karen chimed in. “I see them followin’ you home from the Taco Bell every night. The line’s gotta be half a mile long.”
“Shut up, Karen,” Maria said flatly.
“Are the groceries put away?” Cheryl asked.
Maria took a drink of water before she answered. “Deanna took care of it.”
“Probably sampled everything before she did,” Karen added.
“Cut it out, Karen.” Cheryl was as concerned about Deanna as they were, but determined to let whatever was going on with her come out when she was ready. She’d learned a long time ago that when pushed for information, girls this age only dug their heels in harder.
Karen dropped her voice to a whisper. “Someone’s got to say something. Those pants she has on are so tight someone could get killed if she sneezes and they let go.”
“Criticizing her isn’t going to help. She gets enough of that from Jake. We’re going to make sure she knows she’s liked no matter what size she is.” Cheryl looked from Karen to Maria. “Aren’t we?”
Maria shrugged. “I ain’t gonna say nothin'.”
“You mean you expect us to watch her stuff herself and not say anything about it?” Karen’s tone made her feelings clear. Given the opportunity, she would parcel out Deanna’s food. “What kind of friend wouldn’t say nothin'?”
“The kind of friend who cares more for what’s inside a person than what’s outside.” Cheryl was used to the magazine-fed culture of the teens she worked with. Although they didn’t have the resources to have plastic surgeons correct their perceived imperfections the way their counterparts in the suburbs did, they had remarkable skills with cheap drugstore-brand makeup, could starve themselves with frightening ease, and could put together outfits from thrift shop racks that left designers scrambling to catch up.
“You have some really strange ideas, Miz Walden,” Karen said. “There ain’t nobody I know who thinks the way you do.”
Deanna came down the hall. She’d put on her swimming suit with he
r flannel bathrobe as a cover-up. “I’m going to the beach. Anyone want to come with me?”
“Yeah,” Karen said. “Give me a minute to get in my suit.” She started down the hall. “Wait till you see it. I got it on sale at that new place that opened up next to Rico’s, and it’s hot.”
“What about you, Maria?” Deanna asked.
“I might come down later.”
“Do you have a towel?” Cheryl asked Deanna. “I brought extras in case someone forgot.”
“I was gonna use my bathrobe to sit on, but maybe a towel would be better.”
Cheryl went into the bedroom and dug through her duffel bag for the oversize towels she’d picked up at Walmart, knowing the girls were unlikely to have their own. Normally she refrained from buying them things. Her job was to be their friend and mentor, not their fairy godmother.
Money wasn’t something she talked about with them. They had no idea whether she had any or was living from paycheck to paycheck the way their parents did.
As far as they knew, the beach house had been an unexpected, last-minute gift from a friend who’d encouraged her to share the month with them. That was stretching the truth a bit, but it created only a small pang of guilt. The girls being there provided an opportunity to see a world outside their neighborhood, something Cheryl would have compromised more than the truth to attain. For her and Andrew, the month would pull them out of the emotional cloud their reunion had put them in and solidly ground them in the reality of her day-to-day life. If they could survive the abrupt change, they just might have a chance, something she found herself wanting more and fearing less.
She found the towels and the gift Maria’s mother, Juanita, had quietly slipped to her the day before she and the girls left Oakland. She’d asked Cheryl to keep it a secret until they were settled and then to give it to Maria when they were alone.
Cheryl slipped the small package under the bed pillow and crossed mental fingers that whatever Maria’s mother had sent would encourage her daughter to spend at least part of one summer being a real kid.
2
MARIA STOOD ON THE BED TO SEE HERself in the mirror that hung over her dresser. She turned sideways and then to the back, twisting to see how much of her rear end hung out of the bright red suit. Just enough.
Another Summer Page 19
