April Smith - North of Montana

“I’m surprised it’s still standing.”

“Who lived in the little white place next door?”

“Swedish family. Everyone in the neighborhood was German or Swede. What I remember about them is I was working nights and they had a dog that barked its head off all day long so I couldn’t get any sleep.”

Alone, I sit on a curb with my arms around my knees. I am getting a headache from the gummy pizzas and the saccharine cake and too much wine and I really don’t like it in the parking lot anymore. Although the sky is jammed with glittering stars, down here it is very, very dark and the lights spotting the parked cars are too weak. A constant dry wind rakes the palm fronds, rattling them with a sound like the snapping of cellophane. I am wearing cutoffs and a sleeveless denim top and I feel vulnerable. My gun is in my bag upstairs. Just around the corner from these last silent buildings is open desert. Black space.

My heart is beating fast. I keep hearing dogs. No, now I can identify them as coyotes, laughing like a bunch of lunatics out there in the darkness. The parking lot looks strange. Did that fat asshole put LSD in my drink? I am walking home with Juanita Flores. She is wearing a sleeveless lilac-colored cotton dress trimmed with red rickrack and she is older than I am, maybe eight years old. She has stolen a tablet of white paper from school for the novel she is writing about a pair of sisters who live in a haunted house and she is asking me to steal some stamps from my mother’s bureau drawer so she can send it in to be published. She seems to be lonely and never supervised and I don’t know where she lives. We met in the playground at Roosevelt Elementary School and she drew me into her vivid world of fantasy, often wandering up to Twelfth Street on her own to find me and continue our games.

In this memory I am seeing in the black and white of the park ing lot, a mongrel named Wilson gets out of the yard of the brick house next door and confronts us in the middle of the street, snarling and snapping. We are terrified to go on. Juanita begins to whimper. I know I must save her. I drag her back to my house.

“Wilson’s out! Juanita can’t go home!”

My policeman grandfather will take care of this. He comes out of the bathroom holding a rolled newspaper, big, blocking what little light there is in the narrow corridor to the kitchen.

“She can’t stay here.”

“But Wilson—”

“I don’t want a little spic girl in my house.”

I watch dumbly as he escorts my friend to the front door and out. Parting the white lace curtains that cover the narrow windows on either side of the door I see Juanita Flores alone, immobilized by humiliation and fear. The barking dog is ahead. A closed door is behind. Slowly a yellow stream trickles from beneath the lilac dress, puddling on our doorstep.

But I am safe. I am not thrown out. Even though I have heard the boy who was my father referred to as “the Mexican,” that was far away and doesn’t count and I am not a little spic girl like Juanita Flores. In the cool darkness I look up at my grandfather, grateful for his love. From that moment on, I want to be just like him.

IT IS KYLE VERNON’S IDEA for everyone to contribute to a potluck lunch once a month. A serious student of French cooking and connoisseur of fine wines, Kyle once conned three of us from the office into taking a class in pizza making in the private kitchen of some schmancy chef up in the Hollywood Hills. I sat on a bamboo stool and drank the free Chianti Classico and made wise-ass remarks. Kyle was in ecstasy. He just didn’t want the excitement to end. The Brentwood housewives went home with special pizza baking stones and dried oregano still on the vine; I went home with no illusions about rolling out the dough for the man in my life.

This month Kyle shows off with a couple of French apple pies for which the apples have been cut so thin he must have used a razor. The slices are arranged in perfect concentric circles on a layer of custard and covered with a coating of orange jelly that he identifies as apricot glaze.

“Geez, Kyle,” I say, “why didn’t you just go to a bakery? You could have saved a lot of work.”

“Ana, it’s people like you who wrecked the Pietà.”

“Pietà,” I muse just to get him going, “isn’t that some kind of a Middle East sandwich?”

Barbara baked lasagne and Rosalind brought a tuna casserole. Duane Carter’s contribution, needless to say, is Texas chili so bitter and hot it makes you sweat. Frank Chang’s mother made Chinese raviolis and I plunk down a family-size container of Chicken Mc-Nuggets.

Kyle looks pained. “I’m not even sure we should allow that semi-food product on this beautiful table.”

“Hey, I don’t have a wife to go shopping for me.”

“Who’s talking wives? I went to Ranch Market and personally inspected each and every piece of fruit that went into those tarts.”

“That’s because you’re a compulsive maniac who should be treated.”

“What about Barbara? What about Rosalind?” Kyle goes on. “Do they have wives? Or do they put their best effort forward for their squad?”

“He has a wife.” I point dramatically to Donnato, who looks up from prying the lid off a giant blue plastic bowl filled with lettuce and topped off with slices of carrots and radishes that are in turn carefully overlaid with rings of red onion and green pepper to create a virtual kaleidoscope of vegetables.

“Admit it, Donnato. Your wife made that salad.”

“The evidence is compelling. I’ve never known a man who could use Tupperware,” Barbara remarks in her dry way. “The airlock seal is beyond them.”

Donnato unscrews the lid from a fresh bottle of blue cheese dressing and dumps the entire thing in a pile into the bowl. “Guilty as charged. Chain me to the wall and beat me.”

“Very tempting,” I whisper, reaching past him for the Chinese raviolis, which I know from experience are the best thing out there.

At first he doesn’t seem to react. His eyes are on the black plastic tongs he is using to toss the salad; the tongs from the utility drawer in the harvest gold kitchen in the tract house in the Simi Valley, where the daisy pot holders match the daisy towels and the metal canisters lined up by size are lettered Sugar, Spice, Everything Nice.

Finally, after giving it a lot of thought, Donnato calls my bluff: “If you’re into that sort of thing I know a leather bar up on the Strip.”

“And I bet you’re a regular customer.”

Still deadpan: “We’ve been partners for three years but how much do you really know about me, Ana?”

I laugh. “I can see you in a lot of things, Donnato, but somehow leather is not one of them.”

“What’s so funny?” Barbara wants to know.

“Donnato in a black leather girdle.”

Donnato’s mouth has taken on a funny pull, a hint of a smile beneath the beard.

“I can see you,” he says. “Annie Oakley in black lace.”

Barbara elbows my ribs conspicuously and fires something back at him which I am not hearing. His eyes touch mine for half a moment— Annie Oakley in black lace? — then he turns away and I find myself unexpectedly flushed from the groin like a teenager.

Back in the bullpen a phone is ringing.

“I’ll get it.” Rosalind automatically puts her plate down.

“No — it’s mine.” I can see the light flashing on my desk across the room.

The moment I hear Mrs. Gutierrez’s voice the sexy little high evaporates as my stomach contracts into an anxious knot.

“Everybody is sick,” she is telling me. “All the children have the runny nose and Cristóbal is hot.”