by Yvonne Prinz
“Hi,” he says. His eyes dart quickly around and I realize that his mom, or maybe even his stepdad, must be somewhere in the crowd.
I smile and offer him an apricot. He smells it and then drops it into his book bag.
“Not in there, it’ll get smooshed.”
He digs around and retrieves it but he holds it awkwardly in his hand.
“Eat it,” I encourage him. “It’s food. Surely they have it on your planet?” I weigh a bag of fava beans and take three dollars from a woman.
He looks extremely uncomfortable. “Hey, um. I know this is weird but I wanted to tell you how sorry I am about that woman.” He’s still holding the apricot in midair.
“Sylvia. Her name was Sylvia.”
“Right. Sylvia. I know you were there and I’m sorry about it all.” He lets the hand with the apricot drop to his side.
“Sure.” I feel a pang of guilt. My dad would flip if he saw me fraternizing with the enemy, let alone flirting, if that’s what I’m doing. I don’t know what’s wrong with me but I can’t help myself. I wish my hair wasn’t tied back with a rubber band meant for bunching asparagus. I wish I wasn’t wearing my dad’s shirt. I wish I’d at least bothered with mascara. I look every bit the person I’ve been trying to avoid for two years. I look like a farmer’s daughter. I could die. Steve glances over at me and I give him a “don’t tell my dad” look. One he’s all too familiar with. He nods quickly.
I change the subject. “Hey, was that you at the swimming hole yesterday?” I immediately regret using the phrase “swimming hole.” That’s hardly what it is and I sound like a total local yokel. I may as well be wearing overalls and pigtails and sporting a blacked-out front tooth.
“Yeah. I saw you there too. I hope I didn’t creep you out. I wanted to let you know I was there but then it was too late.”
I shrug. “No, it was cool. You didn’t have to leave.”
He smiles a little and then he just stares at me. I brush my hand over my face quickly. It’s entirely possible that I have food lodged somewhere.
“What?” I’m desperate to know what he’s staring at.
“Oh, um, nothing. I was just looking at your eyes. They just turned the most amazing shade of blue.” He blushes.
My eyes change color? I’m quite certain that they don’t, and while we’re on the topic of amazing eyes? Right back at ya, buddy. Out loud I say, “Thanks.”
“Oh, honey, there you are! I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” Suddenly his mother appears out of nowhere, her torpedo boobs leading the way. Forest’s sea-glass eyes narrow slightly. Our moment is abruptly over. He moves away from our stall with a nervous glance in my direction. Steve is watching us and he puts two and two together. His gentle face clouds over.
“Man, someone’s got a lotta nerve coming around here.”
Forest’s mom seems to have made a speedy recovery. She has a tiny bandage above her perfectly shaped right eyebrow, and one of her eyes is a little purple underneath but she’s got so much makeup on it that you can barely notice it. In fact her whole face looks fresh from a cosmetics counter makeover. Her eye shadow perfectly matches her aqua velour tracksuit. The effect is a sort of desperate Heather Locklear look. Seeing her, I feel rage rising up in me, like I could close my hands around her throat and squeeze until she stops breathing. She hustles Forest away. He’s still holding the apricot in his right hand. I feel cheated. I crave more of him. After they disappear into the crowd I have to wonder what Connie Gilwood would want with a farmers’ market when she seems hell-bent on trying to kill every farmer she comes in contact with.
Steve and I get seriously caught up in the business of selling vegetables because as the two p.m. closing time approaches, every pound we sell is a pound we don’t have to load back on the truck. We end up having a good day, selling out of almost everything, which hardly ever happens.
On the drive home Steve starts firing off questions at me about Forest. He wants to know “what’s up with that guy,” in a protective big brother sort of way.
“Nothing,” I say. And that’s the truth. There’s nothing to tell. Steve’s got some crappy noisy garage band CD playing on the stereo. These days it just seems way too easy for anyone out there with a guitar to make a CD. I tolerated it on the way to the market but now I’m tired and dirty and hating myself for not wearing mascara and hating myself more for caring about mascara. I’m also, for the first time ever, thinking that eight dollars an hour doesn’t seem like nearly enough for what I do.
“Hey, can we take this crap off? It’s giving me a headache.”
“C’mon, Roar, it’s great.”
I press the eject button on the stereo and when the CD slides out I grab it and hold it out my open window.
“I’m dropping it.”
“Don’t, Roar, it’s my only copy.”
With my free hand I flip through my dad’s CD case on the seat between us.
“Bob Dylan?” I ask.
Steve sighs. “Which one?”
“Nashville Skyline or Blood on the Tracks.”
“Blood on the Tracks.”
I pull his crappy CD back into the cab and put it on the seat. I take the Dylan CD out of my dad’s case and put it into the player. Steve grins at me.
“Well, aren’t we in a mood today.”
I pull the rubber asparagus band out of my tangled hair and hang my head out the open window, letting the wind take hold of it.
When we arrive back at the farm, my dad, the farmer, actually appears to be doing farmwork. He and Miguel are out in the field working on a fallen fence. Steve goes out to join them. In a couple of hours he’ll head to Berkeley to visit Jane. He’s off on Sundays and he usually spends them with her.
I walk heavily up the stairs to my bedroom and pull off my dirty clothes, leaving them in a heap on the floor. Rufus joins me, curling up on the rag rug next to my bed. I slide between the cool sheets and think about Forest. He wanted me to know that he was sorry about Sylvia. What does that mean? Does it mean that he wants me to know that he understands that what his mom did was horrible? I’m pretty sure that the story she must have told him isn’t the whole truth, but by now he must have heard several versions of it. There isn’t anyone in a fifty-mile radius of this place who doesn’t know a version of it. He’s probably drawn his own conclusions. I think about this until I eventually drift off to sleep.
I wake to the sound of my dad speaking Spanish on the phone downstairs in the kitchen. I look at my bedside clock. I’ve been asleep for a little over an hour. From what little Spanish I know, I figure out that he’s talking to Sylvia’s sister, Wanda. His tone goes from hushed to insistent and back to hushed. He says good-bye to her the way you do when the person on the other end suddenly has to hang up because someone walked into the room who isn’t supposed to hear. I know that my dad’s not done with her, though.
When I appear in the doorway of the kitchen he smiles at me strangely.
“What?”
“You look more like your mother every day.” He looks at me with a combination of sadness and pride.
“I do?” I ask, as though I don’t already know this. I have her thick black hair and her blue eyes and even her lips. I see her in my face every time I look in the mirror.
“How’d the market go?”
“Good.” I scratch my head and yawn. “Didn’t Steve tell you?” I pull the lemonade out of the fridge.
“Yeah. I guess.” He looks distracted. “Hey, I was just talking to Sylvia’s sister, Wanda, and I think I’m going to give Sylvia’s husband, Tomás, a job here on the farm. Steve’s back at school in September and I think we’ve got enough work for an extra man year-round now.”
I shrug. “Sure, okay.” I hardly give it a thought, but then it occurs to me that if Tomás is actually here working on the property it would be easier for my dad to badger him into filing a civil suit against Connie Gilwood. Hmm. I smell a rat.
“Hey, it’s just about the work, right
? You’re not going to get all lawyery on him, are you?”
“Nah, not at all. I just think he’ll be happier here and I’ll pay him what he’s worth. It’s the right thing to do.” He looks away as he says this.
I think about Forest and I feel my own pang of guilt. I take my lemonade out to the back porch and sit in the rocker. The sun is dipping low in the sky and a soft cool breeze has just come up, ruffling the leaves on the big oak above me. Steve drives by in his Jeep on his way to Berkeley. He toots his horn and waves. He holds up a CD for me to see, the crappy garage band CD, I assume. He grins mischievously. I glare at him and he blows me a kiss. He looks like a guy who’s about to have a lot of sex. Rufus escorts him to the gate and then trots back to the porch, where he lays down with a sigh at my feet.
Chapter 5
Storm dips a fry into a puddle of ketchup that almost exactly matches the open-wound shade of her long fingernails. The sun through the diner window bounces off a ruby ring on her middle finger the size of the Hope Diamond. It’s a family heirloom. Her great-great-grandmother brought it over from the old country (is there really just one “old country”?). Storm stole it from her mother’s jewelry box this morning. She wears the key to that box on a silver chain around her neck. She had it copied at the hardware store several months ago and then she put the original back in its hiding spot under her mom’s modest collection of lingerie. Now she has free access to the family jewels, which, she maintains, is her birthright.
My own fingernails, I notice, as I cut into a grilled cheese sandwich, are raggedly cut with overgrown cuticles and dirt underneath them. I try to remember the exact moment I stopped caring about them. The truth is, I never cared about them like Storm cares about hers. My mom and I used to paint our fingernails together but we could never seem to stick with one color and we ended up with hands that looked like a box of crayons. Storm’s fingernails are sharpened into perfect points that she uses to punctuate her sentences. They’re like her exclamation marks.
I’m telling her about my encounter with Forest.
“Listen, Roar, we don’t live in Manhattan. There aren’t a thousand Starbucks, a million gyms, and a dry cleaner on every corner. We don’t go ‘clubbing’ all the time.” She punctuates “clubbing” with finger quotes.
I don’t bother telling her that even if we did live in Manhattan, I wouldn’t be caught dead in any of those places.
“So, what’s your point?”
“I’m getting to it. There’s dick-all to do around here, okay?” She tabulates our town out on her fingers. “There are three restaurants, one of them serves edible food and you’re looking at it. There’s a post office, a hardware store, a library, a grocery store, a beauty salon, a gas station, a car dealership, a feed store, and . . .” Storm starts a staring contest with a little girl dressed in her Sunday best sitting with her family in the booth across from us. The little girl loses. Her curiosity may have been piqued by Storm’s Sunday best: a pair of striped kneesocks that stop at midthigh, a thrift-store sequined mini in pale blue, cut off unevenly with a pair of scissors, and four-inch platform sandals. Her hair is pulled back into a single braid and her mouth is a slash of deep red. She’s wearing colored contact lenses that make her eyes look lavender like Elizabeth Taylor’s.
“. . . don’t forget Red’s Recovery Room,” I add. Red’s is our infamous town bar, especially popular on Thursdays for karaoke night.
“Right. And you’re surprised that he turned up at the farmers’ market? It’s the social event of the week around here. It’s not like your planets aligned or something.” She waves a fry matter-of-factly, dashing any hopes I may have that Forest may actually have been looking for me. I’m not sure I understand why she won’t give me this; I mean, would it kill her? She leans back, satisfied. “That’s my point.”
Millie stops by our booth with a fresh pot of coffee and fills our cups. Millie’s diner used to be the busiest place around for Sunday brunch. She uses fresh local ingredients that she buys directly from the farmers. She often buys eggs and seasonal vegetables from us. She used to run a farm with her husband till the marriage went up in smoke. She moved into town and started the diner. The farmer she used to be still lingers on her face. Her skin is tan and her cheeks are ruddy. She has strong sinewy arms and a wide, easy smile. She’s the real deal. Her diner is an extension of her personality. I like the bottles of real maple syrup on the tables and the little cow-shaped pitchers of cream for the coffee. The place reminds me of a diner out of a fifties movie where everyone is deliriously happy and oblivious to the real world. There’s even an old jukebox with the original vinyl 45’s in it. About a year ago, they built a Denny’s about five miles away in a brand-new strip mall off the interstate and a lot of the after-church crowd started going over there for Grand Slam breakfasts. Millie still gets her fair share of the locals, though, and now she has more time to get out of the kitchen and talk to customers.
“Damn shame about Sylvia,” she says, shaking her head. “How’s your dad, Roar?”
“He’s okay. He’s trying to help out with her family, maybe get a lawsuit together.”
Millie looks around quickly. “Some folks around here have been saying that your dad’s stirring up a hornet’s nest, but I say we should do right by those people. A woman is dead, a mother no less. Why should it make a difference if she’s legal or not?” She puts a hand on her hip and juts out her chin. I automatically move my hand to my camera on the seat next to me but I know that Millie would never stand for a photo. Whenever I see a face that moves me, I go for the camera; it’s like I’ve got an itchy trigger finger.
The little girl’s father lowers his menu and watches us. I know him. Everyone does. He’s the ne’er-do-well son of the biggest landowner in the county, Samuel Burk. His name is Brody. His dad used to run cattle but he recently got tired of it. He somehow got his land rezoned, sold off all the livestock, and now Brody is selling the land off like pieces of a patchwork quilt for development into crappy tract homes. He ran for congressman of our district in the last election and lost. He’s still smarting from that. My dad calls him “Big Hat, No Cattle” in reference to the black cowboy hat Brody wears around town. He’s anti-farm, pro-development, and he’s very vocal about his wish to run every migrant farmworker out of here. When the ranch was still running, Brody’s dad, Sam, was forced to hire Mexican ranch hands. Ranch work had lost its appeal to the kids growing up around here. Brody was still working for his dad even though it’s rumored that they never got along. Apparently, Sam used to get blind drunk and knock the crap out of Brody. He ended up in the hospital with a broken collarbone once after Sam threw him down a flight of stairs. Brody took it out on the Mexicans. He refused to learn any Spanish; he taunted them and called them stupid. There was a rumor floating around here that he and his “good ol’ boy” idiot friends got drunk and took a couple of Mexican ranch hands out in his truck, allegedly to work on some water wells. The Mexicans were never heard from again. No one looked for them very hard. Mexicans disappear from around here all the time, and since they don’t technically exist, no one cares too much.
I look right through Brody and he raises his menu again. His long-suffering wife, a former beauty queen who won Miss Something Or Other a decade ago, blots at a puddle of soda with a stack of napkins. The kid who created it, one of a set of twins, dumps more soda on the table and watches his mom defiantly while the other twin laughs.
Two Hispanic men sitting on stools at the counter look over their shoulders at us and exchange glances with the short-order cook, Juan, who’s from El Salvador. Millie is oblivious. When you’re in her diner, you’re in her country and she says what she thinks.
“Can I get you girls anything else?” she asks.
“Nah. Just the bill.” I smile at her.
“You say hi to your dad for me, okay?” she says, dropping the bill on the table.
“I will, Millie, thanks.”
Just as I’m digging around in the pocke
t of my jeans for my half of the bill, the bell on the front door of the diner tinkles and Storm looks up, amused.
“Well, it looks like your boyfriend found the only edible food in town.” She looks smug. Her point has been made.
I look over my shoulder. Forest makes his way over to a stool at the counter and orders a coffee to go from Millie. He makes eye contact with Storm and nods. When he sees me, he gets up off the stool and walks over to our booth. His book bag is on his shoulder and he’s wearing the Misfits T-shirt again. Millie watches all this with some interest as she puts his coffee near the register and wipes down the counters.
Now he’s standing in front of our booth looking slightly uncomfortable.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey,” we both say. I scramble for topics.
Storm, a conversational magician, jumps in. “I was just telling Roar here how you’re from L.A. How do you like country life?”
He shrugs. “It’s pretty minimal but it’s okay, I guess. The open space is good for the head.”
It appears I’ve become mute. I rifle through my brain files for L.A. stories. The only one I come up with is the time I threw up on my shoes at Disneyland. No, that’s no good.
“Yeah, I suppose,” says Storm, nudging me with her platform sandal. “I guess I know what you mean, but then I always say it’s a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live here.”
Forest stuffs his hands into the front pockets of his jeans and laughs. He glances at me. I offer up a thin smile. God, I wish I had some fruit to give him. I’m so much better at this when I’m standing behind a bunch of zucchini. It gives me a purpose, something to do with my hands, which are now nervously playing with my hair.
“Well, you must miss your girlfriend. You do have a girlfriend, don’t you?” asks Storm.
