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He laughs. “Good for you. You sell people places to be happy.”
“Maybe. After they sign the contract, it’s up to them.”
“So your family’s still here?”
“Yes…well, my dad.” And for the first time this morning, I realize that’s all the family I have.
“Married?”
“No. Never.”
“Is that, No you never have married or you never will?”
I laugh at his slight insanity. “It’s I’ve never been married and since I’m going on forty-three, it’s not very likely.”
“Anything’s possible. Remember that.” He leans his head back a little. “Life is all about believing.” He looks around the room, then back to me. “I hardly ever come in here, but this morning I had this weird feeling, like I needed to be here.”
And for a moment, I’m back in a high school classroom with its chalky haze, and Adam is sitting, slouched in his chair, his eyes half closed, giving the teacher a bunch of crap.
CHAPTER 4
I’m standing on the porch, looking through the living room window. My father is sitting in his chair, holding my mother’s picture, and his expression is so despondent, it hurts to look at him.
My plan, after I left the café, was to come home, borrow Dad’s car and go Christmas shopping. But then, a moment ago, as I was crossing the porch, I noticed Dad through the living room window.
He glances up, sees me. I smile and give him a little wave. He walks over to the fireplace and puts her picture back on the mantel.
“How was your walk?” he asks, coming out onto the porch.
“Okay, until I went to the park. It reminded me of Mom, so I left and went over to the café and drank too much coffee.”
He doesn’t say anything, just looks at me. Were our conversations always this stilted or did I just never notice when Mom was around?
“Maybe it was seeing the lighthouse, too, not just the park,” I say. “You know how Mom loved the…” The anguish in his eyes stops the rest of what I was going to say. I want to tell him that everything—the house with all of her things still out, the park, even the air—reminds me of her. But I don’t. He looks like he’s hurting, plus we don’t have the kind of relationship where I can bare my soul.
“Hey, I ran into someone I knew in high school at the café. We talked a little.”
“That’s good.” Dad looks out past the front porch to the lawn.
“You were holding Mom’s picture?” I gesture toward the window.
His gaze comes back to me. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about her a lot.”
“I have, too.”
He rubs his lips. “Her two big things in December were trying to get you to come home and putting me in the Christmas spirit.”
My heart pounds. I cross the porch, place my hand on his forearm. “Mom knew us pretty well. Sometimes I had to work, so did you. You two were together a long time. She understood.”
“At times…”
I wait for him to finish, then realize he’s not going to.
“At times?” I urge, then pat his arm, feel the warmth under his shirt.
He shakes his head. “Nothing.”
“Dad, Mom…” It feels good talking to someone who knew my mother, who loved her. I miss that in Tucson. Yet the way my father looks, I think this talk might upset him.
“Your mother what?” he asks.
“She wouldn’t want you to be sad. She wasn’t like that. Maybe you should think about the good times. That’s what I try to do.” This isn’t true. My memories come at will, dodge in and out, like sunlight in between the trees on a windy day.
“It’s not that easy. I keep thinking there are things I should have done.”
“I know. Me, too.”
He looks at me, squints. “What do you know?”
“Mom called me the night before her accident, and I didn’t call her back. How…stupid was that? I regret that.”
“She always called you. Worried when you didn’t call back. You should have been more responsible when it came to your mother.”
“I know,” I say, and my chest starts to ache.
He turns, studies the yard again, and I wish our lives were the way they used to be—my mother standing between us, keeping my father and me apart.
“She wanted you to go to college, get a good education,” he says quietly.
I think about how my mother used to send me money when I was job-hopping, little notes about how I should go out and buy something fun. She probably never told Dad.
I walk to where he can see me. “No, that was you who wanted that. And I think I’ve done pretty well for myself. It just took some time.”
“I wanted you to be something.”
I try not to feel angry, but it’s impossible with old hurts surfacing. “I am something! At least Mom thought so.”
I wait for an answer, but his eyes hold so much loneliness I have to look away. Before I can say another word, he goes inside.
“Hi,” Sandra says. “I was hoping you’d come by.” She leans against the front doorjamb and smiles. “It’s good to see you.”
I’m standing on Sandra’s porch. She looks the same—long red hair, creamy skin, sweet expression.
“Good to see you, too,” I say.
“You look great.” Her smile widens.
“Thanks, so do you.”
“Oh, I do not. I’m as big as a horse, but I don’t care.” She pats her stomach and laughs. “I’ve been on every diet known to womankind and none of them work. I’ve just decided I’m going to be fat.”
“You aren’t fat.”
“Right, now if you add You’re just a big-boned girl, you’ll sound just like your mother.”
She laughs again and I start to, but something happens inside me. I look down, study the porch floor, feel like I’m going to start crying, but I manage to swallow back the tears, look up and smile.
“Tine, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Well, come inside. It’s been so long since you’ve even been over to the house. Get in here.” Sandra draws me into the house, and we stand in the middle of her parents’ familiar living room. More nostalgic feelings rush through me. The house is the same, homey as ever. Sandra’s mother, Josephine, loved antiques, deep burgundies and dark wood, the opposite of my mother’s taste, yet just as pretty.
“Are you having a nice visit?”
“I am,” I say, still feeling like an idiot for almost breaking down in front of her. I certainly don’t need to lay my problems on her. She has enough of her own.
“I’m glad. I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas. Where has the time gone? Let’s go into the kitchen.”
We walk in the kitchen, and Sandra extends her hand as if presenting a grand prize on a game show. “Still the same old place. I haven’t changed much, haven’t had time. Sit right here.” She pats the 1940s café booth her parents found in an alley behind a restaurant years ago. “You want a drink?”
I laugh. “It’s not even two.”
“So? It’s 5:00 p.m. somewhere. Let’s have a drink to celebrate you being home and actually coming over to see me.”
“I don’t think I can handle a drink right now. Too early.”
“How about some hot chocolate?”
“Sure.” When we were little, Sandra’s mother used to let us practice our cooking skills on Saturday afternoons in her crazy warm kitchen. When Sandra’s grandfather passed away, we made a gloppy mess of chocolate syrup, milk and maraschino cherries for Josephine, brought it to her while she was sitting on the couch looking out the window. She smiled, hugged us both. That was the day she taught us to make hot chocolate from scratch.
“I still make it like Mama did.” Sandra turns from the stove, milk in hand. “Remember?”
“Of course. How could I forget that?”
“You look great. I swear you never change.”
“Oh, God, I look like hell. Last week I worked fourteen-hour days so I could come home for the holidays, so I’m worn out.”
“That’s a lot of hours. You must really like your job.”
“Oh, yeah. Love it. I’m the top-selling Realtor in my office.”
“I’m the top receptionist in my office, but I’m the only one so it was easy to be first.” She smiles wider. Sandra is big in every way. Always has been. She is three inches taller than I am. Even her hair is big—curly red, four inches past her shoulders and wild.
She turns the heat under the milk down low. “Do you really want hot chocolate or were you just being nice?”
I shake my head. “I’ve had about a million cups of coffee this morning.”
“Then you certainly don’t need any more liquid.” She snaps off the burner, takes the saucepan and shoves it in the refrigerator. “We’ll have it later.”
She walks over to the booth that is wedged in the bay window and sits across from me. “Since I’ve moved back home, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of you. Just the other night I was thinking about how we used truth serum to tell all our secrets. Remember that?”
“How could I forget?” I laugh. She was sixteen-and-a-half. I was thirteen. Friday nights were truth-serum nights if Sandra didn’t have a date. We’d pour Coke in a juice glass, add five teaspoons of sugar, drink it down in one gulp. And then we’d laugh our butts off, probably from the sugar high.
She’d tell me secrets about the kids she went to school with, the boy she might be dating.
“Remember what you told your mother one time about Tommy Bradford?”
I shake my head, try to remember, then suddenly the memory comes pouring in. I told my mother Sandra let her boyfriend touch her breasts.
“Will you ever forgive me?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “My mother wouldn’t let me date him again.”
“Whatever happened to him?”
“Tommy’s selling shoes at the Del Amo Shopping Center. Been married and divorced three times, has four kids, and last I heard, but this is from a not reputable source—read, Tiffany Brown—he was living at the Torrance YMCA.”
“Maybe I did you a favor.”
“Oh, yeah, thanks. My mother put me on restriction for a month. You know how long a month is to a sixteen-year-old?”
My mother was tucking me in bed. I was a late developer and she was explaining that soon I’d need a training bra. I whispered that Sandra’s boyfriend touched her titties. Her blue eyes widened, but she didn’t say a word.
“Okay, speaking of dating, are you? I promise I won’t tell Jake any of the details.” Sandra grins.
“No. I don’t date, I work. And Dad doesn’t seem to care what I do. We had a small blowout on the front porch a little while ago.” This slips out, and I shake my head.
“About what?”
“I’m not sure how it started, but it got around to how he wanted me to go to college years ago. I got angry.”
“Oh, that’s just him.” She waves her hand toward our house. “He was always that way.”
“True, but it doesn’t make it any easier.”
“Did you end on an okay note?”
“He walked into the house, and I walked over here. Do you mind if we talk about something else?” I don’t want to think about my father’s sad face, or the anger I couldn’t hold back.
“Of course not. So you aren’t dating anyone?”
“I haven’t had a date in probably a year. I’m too busy. How about you?”
“How are you defining a date?” She grins.
“Drinks, maybe dinner,” I say.
