California Girl Read Free

Clay.
    “Don’t confuse the issue, Clay.”
    “They started it, Mom,” he said.
    She snapped around and caught his face in her big hand. When she was angry her voice went to a throaty hiss and her lips pulled back around her big straight teeth and Nick thought she was scarier than his dad. “You started it, Clay. You started it with the baseball cap and your arrogant attitude. Don’t you lie to me.”
    “No, ma’am, no.”
    “Someday someone’s going to rain on your parade in a big way, Clay. That, I guarantee. And when it happens we’ll see how tough you are.”
    Then Max Becker turned to wave them out of the car.
    Monika locked eyes with each of them in turn. “Do not disappoint me, boys. Do exactly what we talked about.”
    They stood behind their father on the porch, spread in the pool of light. The Vonn boys faced them from a few feet away. Nick saw that Casey’s face was swollen badly and Lenny’s nose was huge and red. Their big ears were backlit pink by the porch light. He saw that Mrs. Vonn’s knuckles were big where she held her collar and stared at him with shiny black eyes.
    Clay apologized unconvincingly but handed Casey a dollar to cover the baseball cap. Said to give him the change at school.
    Max Becker cleared his throat.
    David and Andy said they were sorry.
    When it was Nick’s turn he was looking not at the Vonns but beyond them, into the living room behind the open door, at the peeling walls and sagging brown sofa and the floor lamp with the dented shade and the fraying braided rug and the cheap lighted china hutch with nothing inside it but a few coffee mugs and votive candles and a collector’s plate with the face of the Virgin Mary on it displayed upright in the flickering light.
    He had never seen such failure before. And he understood in one instant that it could be his someday.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. He meant it for Lenny but couldn’t take his eyes off the room.
    The Vonn boys didn’t say a word. Nick figured they were thinking revenge.
    Just then the Vonn daughters hustled into his vision, the older one still in her dirty pink blouse, holding a cob of corn and glaring at him. Then Janelle Vonn, changed into a white dancer’s tutu that hung almost to her knees, clunked across the floor in her cowboy boots with a small guitar slung over one shoulder. She had the same inquisitive look she’d had out in the orange grove, and one eye swollen shut and blackening.
    “I’m sorry,” Nick said again.
    Mrs. Vonn turned back into the house and the girls scattered away like chicks. The door slammed.
    His parents said nothing on the drive back home. Nick could tell that a new worry had taken ahold of them. Not the rumble. That was over now. Their dad had locked their shotguns in the gun cabinet and told them there’d be no bird hunting this year. Said that boys who couldn’t control their fists couldn’t be trusted with firearms. Pretty goddamned simple. Backhanded Clay hard above one ear, sent him spinning. Would have taken a belt to them like the old days, but even Andy was too big for that now.
    No, the new worry was Janelle, and how she’d gotten her eye closed. Nick was pretty sure it was connected to him hitting Lenny. And Clay hitting Casey. And Ethan hitting David. Maybe even his father hitting Clay. Each hit causing the next one until there was no one left to hit but a little girl with a tutu and a guitar.

4
    1960
    ANDY STEERED THE SUBMARINE up Red Hill Avenue, into Lemon Heights. Meredith sat close beside him, her hand on his knee. Through his jeans he could feel the exact shape of her palm and thumb and each finger. He tried to open his leg a little, invite her hand to go farther up, but he had an accelerator to work and she’d never moved much north of his knee anyway. Wasn’t going to in the middle of the day, heading home from school. That was for sure.
    “Lots of homework?” he asked.
    “Not really.” She wore a pleated skirt and a sleeveless white blouse.