Her mother had driven them here because she was fried from what had happened in that parent meeting that went bad. That’s what she’d said.
I’m fried.
Do this for me.
I never ask you for anything, hon.
Summer was almost over and in another week, she and her mom would pass this same gas station on their way home. Laugh again, about what a fiasco their little experiment in retreating had been.
And everything would go back to normal.
* * *
It was well after one in the morning by the time they arrived. There was someone snoring in the hammock on the porch, another body passed out in the front hall.
“Friends,” he explained in a considerate whisper, leading them through the dark house to the kitchen. “I’m a softy; everyone crashes here when they move to California.”
Something about the musician made her want to lie. Or maybe it wasn’t him; maybe it was camp. The months of forced good behavior bursting into rebellion, making her into a person she didn’t recognize.
She’d lied and said she was seventeen.
When he’d asked what her favorite drink was, as the truck rattled down the hill, she’d lied and said it was rum and Coke.
When rum and Coke was the only drink she knew, and she was no more seventeen than he was a real Christian. He’d been a last-minute replacement at Three Pines. He’d said the regular guitarist had backed out to can salmon in Alaska. His sweet singing in chapel and at meals, his smiles at Miss Veach and Miss Cooke and the rest. It was all an act.
They sat on the kitchen floor, the radio on low. The guitar player held out her rum and Coke in a chipped mug. When she reached for it he didn’t let go right away.
“Seventeen, huh?” He smiled, not buying it. “Well. Guess you’re entitled.”
She took a too-big swallow, sputtering at the unexpected burn. Embarrassed, wiping her watering eyes, she said the first thing that came to mind. “How old are you, Sandy?”
“Sandy?” He laughed. “Who’s Sandy?”
“I only go by that around church people,” her cabinmate said. “My real name’s Alexandra.”
“Sandy,” he said. “I like it.” He stood and fiddled with the radio on the kitchen counter. “Sandy isn’t allowed to listen to the radio at home.”
Sandy/Alexandra sipped her drink, closed her eyes.
“What about you?” he said. “Your folks as religious as hers? Or do they let you play devil music?”
“Yes. I mean, no. They’re not religious. And yes, I can play anything I want.”
He turned the dial until crackles gave way to organ chords, a low, robotic drone she recognized instantly.
“Name that tune,” he said, settling on the pale yellow linoleum between them, leaning against the oven. “Ah. Too old for you two, I’m sure.”
Alexandra shook her head. “Not a clue.”
“The Doors,” she said. “‘Riders on the Storm.’”
“Gold star,” he said, grinning. Impressed.
Her mom’s ex, Tim, had played The Doors over and over when they’d painted her room last summer. Tim was a good guy. He’d laughed when she’d complained that the songs all sounded like a haunted house.
Her mom had laughed, too, had reached down from the ladder to daub yellow paint on her nose. The color was Banana Cream Pie; they’d chosen it together.
She sipped her drink, and each time a new song came on she got another gold star. She was relieved that this was all they seemed to expect of her.
After her fifth gold star the song “Daniel” came on, by Elton John, and he didn’t quiz them. He closed his eyes and sang along, picking chords out on the leg of his jeans. He looked younger with his eyes closed. He sang in a jokey way, exaggerating the emotion in the long vowels, but he was unable to mask the sweet timbre of his voice, and she remembered why she’d watched him all summer, why he’d sent a warm tickle down her spine when he’d first spoken to her, out of all the girls, behind the craft cabin.
When the next song started he didn’t sing along. He opened his eyes and took a long swig of rum. “That’s freaky. This song is about someone named Daniel, too.”
Except it wasn’t. “Only the Good Die Young” was about a girl named Virginia; everybody knew that. She and her friends had analyzed it. Virginia the virgin.
“Swear you didn’t call the request line to mess with me, Al?” She couldn’t tell by his expression if he was serious or not.
“It’s just a dumb coincidence, Daniel,” Alexandra said.
He reached up and swirled the dial aimlessly, landing on a fuzzy country station. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “That song just gets to me.”
They were speaking in code. She glanced from him to Alexandra, waiting for one of them to explain, to give a name to the new frequency in the room.
“Oh, Al,” he said. “I got you that gum you wanted. On my dresser.”
“Thanks.” Alexandra stood up.
She was alone with him now. Daniel, like the song—she could hardly forget his name now. Daniel, who closed his eyes to Elton John but couldn’t bear Billy Joel.
“Is this your first time at Camp Jesus?” He said it in Spanish, mocking. Hay-zoos.
She nodded.
“You’re having a tough time.” Not a question. “Are you from San Francisco like her?”
“Yeah.”
“Miss it?”
“I miss my mom.”
“Of course you do,” he said, his eyes softening. “You poor kid. I’ve got some Ghirardelli chocolate around here. Might make you less homesick. What, you think I’m teasing?”
“Yes.”
“Not at all. This woman threw it in my case when I was playing the cable car turnaround. You wouldn’t believe what people throw in. Doughnuts, beef jerky. Apples with a bite out. I got a potato once.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. A big old raw potato long as my hand.” He grinned. “I took it home and baked it. Right here.” He knocked on the oven door. “I baked that thing at 400 degrees for an hour, got sour cream, some bacon, some chives... You have a nice laugh. Darn. Called attention to it. Made you stop. Anyway. They mean well. They think I’m homeless.”
“You own this house?”
“Sure do. So now you’re wondering why I play on the street.”
“I wasn’t—”
“It’s all right. I’m not sure I know myself.”
* * *
It was after four by the time they left. They drove through dark streets, passing the gas station, cutting over the hill on the logging road.
When the truck coasted to a stop and she slid toward the door he touched her wrist lightly. Just touched it, but she froze as if he had cuffed her.
“Hey. I forgot to thank you in person.” He reached across her for the driftwood. “This is something special. Something worth holding on to.” He tossed it up a few inches, caught it, then brushed it tenderly. He looked up and smiled. “No, really,” he said more softly, no more teasing edge in his voice. “It was kind of you. You’re a sweet girl.”
When she got out he called, “Careful, now! Stay on the trail!”
They spoke quietly on the walk down the hill, staying close within the flashlight’s wobbling oval of light. It was cold, and the crackling sounds outside the oval made them walk quickly.
“He was in a weird mood,” Alexandra said. “He gets like that sometimes. He’s okay, though. He bought me a cupcake for my thirteenth.”
“This summer?”
“No...my birthday’s in May. I see him in the city sometimes. When I can get away.”
“What was that Billy Joel stuff about?”
“Billy Joel?”
“‘Only the Good Die Young.’”
“Oh. His older brothers both died young
. And his favorite cousin or something. Sad, huh?”
“That is sad.”
“So your parents,” said Alexandra. “You get along with them?”
“Yeah.”
“But you said they’re not religious.”
She shook her head.
“Then why’d they stick you here?” She pointed the flashlight down the trail toward camp. The dim glow of the overnight cabin lanterns was still visible against the gray light.
“My mom needed a rest. Three Pines is what she could afford. Her friend told us about it.”
“Are your folks doing the adult retreat this month?”
“Yeah. Since July.”
“They must be rich, to take off work so long.”
“My mom’s a teacher. She gets all summer.”
She didn’t volunteer that it was only her and her mom. Her father sent her birthday cards and Christmas presents, but it had been ten years since she’d seen him so she could only remember that he’d had a silky brown beard, that he’d let her play with his pile of change on the front table.
They crept across pine needles past the craft lodge toward the circle of cabins. It was getting light; it had to be after five. They’d cut it close, but still had half an hour before the early risers would stir.
She wanted to ask Alexandra about the name thing. Why had she decided to be Sandy at church? “Hey, Alexandra,” she whispered.
“What?” Alexandra whispered back.
“You girls are up early.”
They turned. It was Miss Cooke, their beach chaperone. She was on the trail from the parking lot. Smiling and looking snappy in a yellow turtleneck under a stiff plaid coat, her brown hair scraped into a bun. She carried a wide pan draped in foil.
Alexandra met Miss Cooke’s broad smile with her own. “We hiked up to see the sunrise. From the clearing. It was incredible.” A lie so effortless, so Eddie Haskell brazen, it seemed she must have rehearsed it. “Do you need help with that? Smells good.”
Miss Cooke raised one thin eyebrow.
She thought they were busted.
But after a second Miss Cooke’s disapproving expression gave way to that unnerving smile. She gestured with the pan, flipping a corner of foil up to indicate they should help themselves. “For the deacons. But take a couple. I won’t tell.”
27
Women’s Retreat
Late August, 1998
Summer before senior year
My mother would be gone for a whole week.
I looked forward to her church retreat at Three Pines as much as any kid ever anticipated Christmas. For months I’d been counting down the days until the gifts arrived. These were the gifts: time alone with my dad, seven days free of my mother’s looks and clucks and hmphs, a household schedule that would go beautifully loosey-goosey the second her friend Barbara Macon’s sagging brown Buick carried her out of our driveway.
There had been a frightening moment, the afternoon she left, when she asked me to come. I was at the table helping my dad finish the Times puzzle. She was carrying a stack of freshly ironed Land’s End button-downs to my parents’ bedroom, where her suitcase, toiletries, and pants were laid out on the bed. She paused halfway across the living room rug, as if the idea had just occurred to her. “You could come along, Laura, you’re old enough now. There’s still space. Barbara would love it. You know how fond she is of you.”
Not I’d love it. Barbara.
It must have cost her a lot to ask me.
Since I’d met Casey I’d trimmed my commitments at church to the bare minimum. I still sat between my parents during 9:30 service every Sunday, holding the red-and-gold hymnbook, turning to the page numbers that someone posted on the oak board in front of the sanctuary. (Though I knew most of the page numbers by heart: “Softly and Tenderly” on seventeen, “How Great Thou Art” on fifty-six).
I still helped with bake sales in the narthex every other week, selling Blue Moon cakes and peach streusel pie and waxed paper bundles of divinity to raise money for things like oak hymn boards. But I’d quit choir. I hadn’t helped at vacation bible camp in four years.
I was supposed to feel a special connection with Mrs. Macon because she’d helped arrange for my private adoption. She’d heard I was “available” through a charity for mothers with drug-affected infants where she volunteered. All my mother’s church friends knew about it, and Barbara always said modestly that it was nothing, that she’d only made a phone call, knowing my parents were looking to adopt.
But she loved it when they called her “the stork.” The whole thing made me want to slap her across her ancient, powdered, pious face.
This was a final appeal. My mother knew it. I knew it.
“I told Mrs. Cooper I’d babysit Kit this week.”
“Well. See she pays you what you’re owed.” She shuffled into the bedroom.
“Next summer, maybe,” I called.
My dad and I worked the crossword. We got 11-across (Aesop) and 18-down (centennial) before he spoke.
He said quietly, “That true, the babysitting?”
“Hmm?”
“Funny thing is, I heard Mrs. Cooper telling Ollie the Coopers were off to Yosemite Monday. She was in the store buying a tarp.”
“Oh.”
“Shouldn’t lie, Laura. I think better of you.”
“I know,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. It’s just, a whole week with her church people. I couldn’t stand it. And it’s the only time you and I ever get to hang out, just us, and...”
“Still. Shouldn’t lie.”
“I know.”
Silently, he worked the puzzle. 8-across, 11-down, 19-down, 19-across. He filled in four more answers without speaking. I thought I’d ruined our week.
But as he wrote in 22-across (quotidian) he winked. “Ah well, mothers and daughters. You’ll be best friends one of these days, I’m told. People change, if you let them.”
“She won’t.”
“You both will. You’ll go on all kinds of trips together.”
“Maybe, Daddy.”
“Just you wait,” he said. “All kinds of trips.”
* * *
I kissed my mother on her cheek when she left. “Well,” she said. “See that your father takes his blood pressure pills.”
“I will.”
She patted my back clumsily. “Casseroles in the fridge.”
I smiled at Barb Macon, who was powdering her nose in the driver’s seat. She wore a white blouse and yellow polyester slacks. White hair, black old-lady wraparound sunglasses, pointy little nose; she even looked like a stork.
After she’d tucked her compact into her yellow handbag she said sweetly, “Shame you’re too busy to come, dear.” She might as well have said, I help find you a good home and this is how you repay me?
My dad struggled down the gravel driveway with my mother’s heavy blue suitcase. I didn’t hear what he said as he helped her into the passenger seat, but he leaned close, and I guessed his goodbye included the word love.
After the stork’s Buick disappeared from sight we went inside to check out the casseroles. They were stacked up as always, towers of red Tupperwares so high they blocked the refrigerator light.
“She went to a lot of trouble,” I said, pulling a few out and setting them on the counter.
“Very wholesome assortment. Very healthy.” He took the lid off a container labeled “Porcupine Meatballs—350 for 30 mins.” “How about these tonight?”
My mother was an excellent baker. Her stew was tasty, too. But porcupine meatballs were horrible little spheres of ground beef studded with rice that never cooked through.
“Yum,” I said. “I’m hungry now. I’ll preheat the oven if you get out the timer.”
My dad pulled out the red KitchenAid timer, actually turned it. We le
aned over the counter and stared at it, listening to it tick.
We got better at this game of chicken every year. So a whole minute went by before my dad cracked. His eyes crinkled up. “Pepperoni or sausage?”
“Pepperoni.”
“I’ll call Josefina’s.”
* * *
After our early dinner—pizza on the dock with paper towels as plates; my mother would have gone catatonic—he handed me a piece of folded-up graph paper. “This year’s project, if you’re up for it.”
I opened it. My dad had sketched the back of the house with his mechanical pencil. For years, he’d been saying he wanted to fix up the deck.
“We’ll push it out a bit there—” he ran his fingertip along dotted lines “—and here. Shore it up, broaden the steps.”
“It’ll be perfect, Daddy.”
“It’s a big project.” He folded the graph paper and slipped it into his back pocket.
“Casey’ll be back from her swim meet Wednesday, she’ll help.”
“Ollie recommended that young man who used to deliver for the hardware store. He’s home from school for a couple of weeks and trying to earn some extra cash. He’s bringing the cedar in his truck tomorrow.”
Merry Christmas to me.
28
Whistle While You Work
Monday
High of 87
“Up already?” my dad said over his paper. “I thought you teenagers all slept ’til noon.”
I wasn’t sure I’d slept at all. I’d been dressed since five. My hair had been in and out of a ponytail twice already. I’d put on lipstick, rubbed it off with a tissue, put it on again, then rubbed two-thirds of it off so I’d still look like a girl who was going to spend the day expanding a deck with her father.
All summer, I’d hoped to see J.B. I’d even dropped into the hardware store in June, when I knew UCLA was out for summer break. But he wasn’t working there, or at the rink. And I was crushed when Casey found out a few weeks later that he had an internship in LA.
The Summer List Page 19
