The Nakeds Read Free Page A

outside on my lunch break and eat a sandwich. I point my face toward the sun—it’s a good feeling.”
    “It’s your chest that’s tan,” she said.
    He was adamant in his denial, claiming only a mild interest in what he called California culture . “It’s good to know what’s going on. We’re not in Philly anymore. We need to acclimate.”
    He said that his interest had to do with work, that many of his young patients who needed fillings or root canals were surfers, and that he wanted to be able to talk to them, distract them from the pain he was about to inflict with his knowledge of waves and barrels and slabs, paddling out, taking off, and the ride . He said it was important that he know the difference between long boards and short boards, the waves that broke in Huntington Beach versus the waves that broke in Newport or Laguna, before he came at a nervous surfer with his needle or noisy drill.
    But then there was sand, and sand was harder to deny, each bit a tiny but very tangible thing left behind. Grainy in their bed, in their sheets, visible in his hair, wet, gray puddles of sand in the shower, and, she was sure, itchy sand in the crack of his ass.
    And now, just an hour before her unconscious daughter, Hannah, would ride in an ambulance to the nearest hospital emergency room, Nina’s denial smacked her in the face—there, on the dresser, the receipts Asher purposefully left out for her, among them one from a new restaurant in San Diego she had heard was good and told him she wanted to try, suggesting a weekend in La Jolla for the three of them, and another from a Huntington Beach Surf Shop, where he’d purchased for his girlfriend an expensive board, a year’s worth of surf wax, and a fancy pink leash. This was how Nina became a woman who knew, a woman reaching into the sink and snatching the glass streaked with cranberry juice and throwing it at a philanderer’s cheek—the gesture, the glass itself, as much about collision and breaking apart as the car that hit her daughter.

4
    BEHIND THE wheel of his now dented Chevy Nova, Martin Kettle hollered and sobbed. Too afraid to come out and see what had become of the girl, he frantically locked the car doors, as if she were capable of rising from the street to give him a beating, as if she were not an injured girl at all but a monster with great strength.
    He leaned over the stick shift, the seatbelt cutting into him, and stretched his fingers to reach the passenger-side lock. Clumsily, he tried to unclasp the belt, unsuccessful the first time and then finally getting it, cursing himself, and then turned around, flopped between the two bucket seats like a man without bones, and stretched to the back locks. Finally he situated himself again in the front seat and pounded on the lock closest to him. He wanted to die. He wished he’d run into one of the fat trees that lined the street and only hurt himself. He put his hands over his ears, his face to the steering wheel, and made his decision.
    A year ago, on this very street, Martin hit a cat. He remembered the smack, the animal in the air and then landing on its feet very much alive. He remembered the cat had hissed at the car before limping off. And six months later he’d hit a dog. It was after midnight and the dog was a big puppy, a lanky Great Dane. After Martin hit him, he pulled over to the curb while having a panic attack, which he believed to be an actual heart attack—and a young man dying inside a car had every excuse to stay right where he was, in the front seat, tearing at his shirt’s collar. There was little he could do for the puppy anyway, who probably would have taken a chunk out of his hand had Martin been a mentally healthier young man, a young man who might have been able to open the car door and soothe the animal during his last moments. Instead Martin sat in the car, wide-eyed and gasping. And the puppy barked and squealed and whimpered until he was quiet.
    Unlike the cat, the dog and