I’ve been knocking around town since I left my buddy Tuan this morning. It’s now four in the afternoon. I’m starved and it’s time to make some life decisions. I know Kibby’s Hamburgers is hiring, but nobody works long at Kibby’s. Their last burger-flipper, who sat next to me in biology, filled me in on the night manager—who grew hands whenever she was alone with him. That picture I get in my mind makes me shiver. So I’ll check out Stan’s Café. They hire a lot.
When I get to the café, there isn’t a Help Wanted sign in the window. I walk inside anyway. Stan’s fries are still fifty cents—within my budget—and I order one grease-soaked box of limp potatoes. With a plop of ketchup for color, I’m in heaven. Today’s newspaper is on an empty table, so with my lunch or dinner—I haven’t decided which one—I shuffle through the pages to the help wanted ads.
“Wanted:
Part-time fry cook. Experience Required.”
I can fry stuff.
$8.00/hr. Midnight to four A.M. Pete’s Dugout.
That’s down on Pioneer. Not where I want to work.
Housekeeping $6.50/hr. Motel Escondido.
Hmmm. Toilets. Maybe not.
I’m down to my last fry and still hungry. That hundred Mom left has to last until I land a job or . . . I pull the note out and read it again. “Your granma lives in a place called sweet river.”
What are my options? Stay here, quit school, and get a job cleaning toilets or call the number on the back of Mom’s note. I lay my head on the grease-flecked newspaper and listen to the paper crinkle under my ear. Wanted: under-educated sixteen-year-old to scrape crud off the floor. Experience Required.
My stomach growls.
“You sick or somethin’?”
I jerk upright to face the guy standing over me.
“Ahh, no. Just tired.”
“Go sleep someplace else. This is a restaurant, not a flophouse.”
“You could’a fooled me.” I grab my paper bag off the table and head for the door. He is one big scowl and I’m not going toe to toe with a greasy grump. Outside, I poke my head back in, flip him off, and yell, “I’m going to the emergency room. Your grease is rancid, Pedro!”
He’s after me in a shot, and around the corner I slip into the nearest store before he can see me. He does a fast waddle past the window while I peek from behind a dress rack.
“May I help you?” A sales girl peers over a 25% off sign at the end of the clothes rack.
Gee, sure, yes. Please help me find my mother, okay? She’s somewhere in New Jersey at a crap table. There’ll be a sleazy guy with blond hair next to her. “I don’t think so.”
“Are you looking for anything special?”
Actually, I am. Some answers would be nice for a start. Maybe a life if you got one of those in here. “No.” I clutch my paper bag and the pills rattle inside their plastic bottle. “Just looking.” Just searching for a way out.
She smiles and moves to another customer.
My stomach is flipping pancakes, and I feel like hurling. I squint my eyes and swallow. Maybe the grease was rancid after all. Or maybe that part of my anatomy can’t stand the idea I’ve got circulating through my brain: A place called Sweet River.
“Are you okay?” It’s the chirpy sales girl again, her face curious and a bit worried.
When I look past her into the mirror I can see why she’s looking at me that way. I’ve turned the color of paste. “I think I got some bad food.”
Now her face is more than worried. She’s already seeing a big mess, one she’ll get stuck having to clean up.
The greasy grump walks past, back to his “restaurant.” He could have been my next employer. Oh man. I make my decision. I’m trying the granny package.
After breaking the hundred for change, I step into the bus depot phone booth. I pick up the receiver and punch in the first ten numbers. But when I get to the last digit, my finger freezes midair. What if—I glance at the name again—Kay Stone doesn’t answer? I know my job options in this town, and I can’t go back to Tuan’s, that’s for sure. He’s already changed the locks by now, and anything I left is in Tuan’s back room. It’ll sit there until some poor desperate sap needs something like our aluminum pot and pays him five bucks for it like we did. I punch the last number on the phone pad and wait.
One ring.
Two.
“Hello.” A woman’s voice is on the other end of the phone, but it doesn’t sound like a grandmother. It isn’t creaky or wispy. It sounds like it belongs to someone a lot younger. Oh, no. Mom gave me a wrong number.
“Uhh. Is . . . uh . . . this Kay Stone?”
“Yes.”
“Well—” I hadn’t thought exactly how I’d say this next part, but now there isn’t any time to choose my words. “My name’s Shawna, and my mom says you’re my grandmother.”
The phone goes silent.
“Are you there?” I can’t risk her hanging up because all I have is Sweetheart’s hundred, and I’m using a chunk of it on this call.
I can barely hear her breathing. I hope she isn’t having a heart attack.
“Yes.” Finally. A reply all the way from Sweet River.
“Well, here’s the deal. My mom’s split and she left me this ticket to Sacramento. She said to call you and let you know.” I wait through another long dead silence. “I hate to rush you, but I’m running out of money on this call and—”
“What’s your mother’s name?”
“Jackie.”
“Your father?”
Oh damn. Mom told me once, but she’d been in her “I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it” mood, so even though I hadn’t been sure what she’d said, I’d dropped it.
“I think it was Nic or Rick. He’s dead.” I hear her swallow. Is she drinking something? I don’t think she’s buying that I’m telling the truth. ”Hello?”
“When does your bus arrive in Sacramento?”
I check the schedule I’d picked up. “About ten tomorrow morning.”
Another long silence. These pauses are killing me.
“What do you look like, so I can find you at the station?” she finally asks.
I almost say, “Dorky,” but instead I say, “I’ve got black hair and brown eyes. I’m about five-four, and I’m wearing a T-shirt with—” I pull the shirt front out and check to see which one I have on, “Bad Ass Attitude,” I say.
She clears her throat. “I’ll meet you at the bus station. . . Shawna.”
I hang up knowing that at least she remembered my name.
The phone booth smells like pee, and I’m glad to escape into the bus terminal where Lysol rules.
“That went well, don’t you think?” I say to no one, just to reassure myself.
A scruffy guy sleeping on a bench opens his eyes to slits and peers up at me.
“I’m not talking to you.”
“Then put an egg in your shoe and beat it,” he slurs through yellow teeth.
I have an hour before the bus leaves and I’m hungry, so I grab a hot dog and smear it with mustard and ketchup. It’s a long trip to Sacramento, and I need more in my stomach than French fries before I get on the bus. I stash a handful of ketchup packets in my paper bag too. Mom and I lived on ketchup soup for a week once, before she came up with our lost kid act. Call me crazy, but once in a while I crave some good old homemade ketchup soup.
As I stuff the last of the hot dog into my mouth, it occurs to me that I should have asked Kay Stone one question. Was she Jackie’s mother or my father’s?
Chapter 3
Kay
Kay dropped the phone onto the cradle and stared out the kitchen window. Everything outside looked just as it had a few minutes ago. The horses grazed on the hillside. Kenny leaned into the gray mare and held her hoof in his knobby hand while he scraped thrush from under her shoe. Buster was doing canine yoga, rooting out the burrs from his bushy tail and scratching behind his ears for the fleas that even sheep dip couldn’t kill.
But now nothing was
the same.
As Kay sank onto the chair, she grasped the corner of the kitchen table. Once settled, she cradled her head in her hands.
Sixteen years. Such a long time, and no time at all.
The voice on the phone sounded so young—and so . . . hard. Could she believe what the girl had said? There were scams all the time to dupe the unsuspecting out of their money. She’d worked too hard to lose everything to some con artist. By the end of the year, she figured, she’d be out of debt—if none of the boarders left, if none of her horses got colicky, if, if, if. . . .
By now her coffee was cold. She walked to the sink and poured it out. By tomorrow she had to decide what to do. That wasn’t very much time. She needed to talk to Kenny.
She pushed open the screen door, walked down the porch steps, and strode toward the barn. How many times had she traveled this distance, calling to Kenny Fargo? More than she cared to count. He’d always been there—in a stall, gentling a horse under his hands; in the tack room, putting things to order; or in his trailer. He’d been the one constant in her life, and kept her going when everyone else vanished.
So once again she was trudging out to talk to the man who knew horses and good whisky, and so very much more. As Kenny led her gray mare into the barn, she caught up and stroked her favorite horse’s neck. The gray turned to nuzzle her hair. Even as upside-down as she felt following that phone call, the warm animal breath made her feel calm.
“Something’s happened,” she said.
Kenny closed the mare’s stall door and faced her. “From your look this is going to take some time.” He pulled a plug of tobacco from his shirt pocket and sat on the bench alongside the wall. He heard her out, as usual staying quiet while she spoke.
“She sounded . . . scared. Why is she calling me now, after so many years, after I’d finally stopped trying to find her? What’s Jackie up to this time?” Kay shook her head. “I don’t know if I can believe she’s who she says she is. She is the right age, if she’s telling the truth about that. But what if it’s a scam? What if she got my name from a . . . a mailing label in the garbage or—” Kay didn’t know where con artists stole information about their victims, but this could be what was going on. But if that were it, then how would she know Jackie’s name?” Kay turned on her heels in sudden anger. “Then again, why wouldn’t she know her own father’s name?”
“Seems you’re asking a lot of questions,” Kenny said, biting off a chunk of tobacco. He chewed slowly and let silence hang between them. The horses shuffled in their stalls, and Buster circled until he found just the right spot that fit his body, then he curled head to fluffy tail. “Also seems like you’re bent on finding the answers.”
He was right. She already knew she had to meet the bus in the morning. She had to see this girl. Talk to her. Why had she doubted that she would? She’d had no choice from the minute she’d heard the words, “You’re my grandmother.”
The Princess of Las Pulgas Page 26
