T. Parker: California Girl

Nick listened to their voices through the open window of the Studebaker, but he couldn’t make out much. His father gestured back to the car, canting his head inquisitively. Then Mr. Vonn disappeared and Mrs. Vonn turned and watched. She brought her hand to her collar. A minute later the three Vonn boys came single file onto the porch-Lenny, then Casey, then Ethan. Casey’s eyebrows and cheeks were covered by white tape.

“Oh my gosh, boys-what did you do to that poor Ethan?”

“That’s Casey,” said 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.

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. It was almost Thanksgiving, sunny and warm.

“I’ll come by after work if you want. We can go to Oscar’s.”

“Okay,” said Meredith.

“After that, there’s a meteor shower,” said Andy. “We can watch it from our spot.”

“Sounds fun.”

Andy downshifted and made the left onto Skyline. Meredith had removed her hand from his leg but he could still feel it there, warm and soft and a little damp. He was preposterously aroused now, as he was every time he drove her home. Every time he sat in a car with her. Held her hand. Thought about her. Dreamed about her. Smelled the sweater she had let him borrow-Heaven Sent perfume mixed with Meredith. She was sweet and bright and the most beautiful girl Andy had ever seen.

Lemon Heights was where the rich people lived. The heights were rolling foothills with eucalyptus and avocado and sycamores, even a few lemon trees from the old days. The houses were big and each one was different, not like the tracts expanding below, where two or three floor plans repeated themselves up one street and down the next. Some had swimming pools and tennis courts. There were horse stables and garages big enough for two cars. A color television set in every house, and Andy had heard that the Boardmans had two.

He pulled into the Thorntons ’ driveway. It was a large semicircle lined with sycamore trees that were just starting to turn yellow with fall. The house was brick, low and large, with white trim and the window glass darkened for the Southern California sun. The driveway circled around a knoll of deep green dichondra. In the center stood a thirty-foot flagpole. Dr. Thornton flew the stars and stripes every day except when it rained.

“No one’s home,” she said. “Would you like to come in?”

They stood in the cool shadowed kitchen and kissed. The swimming pool threw wobbling crescents of light through the sliding glass door to the walls.

He grasped her wrist and tried to pull her hand down but she broke it loose with a soft laugh and put her arm back around his neck.

“No,” she said. “I more than like you but I’m not ready.”

“I know. I understand.”

Andy did understand, and the decision was hers. They kissed for a few more minutes. She pulled her lips away from him just as the warm slick issued into his briefs.

“I have to use the bathroom,” he said.

THE TUSTIN TIMES office was back across town, by the high school. Andy sat at the editor’s desk and used the big black Royal to write the obits for the week.

Joe Cannon, Former Engineer and School District Trustee Dead at 77

Early Tustin Needlepoint Artist Remembered-Lacemaker Commissioned by Eleanor Roosevelt

Dr. Richard Riley Healed Congolese Every Easter

Beth Stevens sat at the Arts and Culture editor’s desk across from Andy. She stared at the paper in her machine, tapping her fingers on the keys but not hard enough to engage them. Like him, she was a high school senior hired for eight hours a week, after school was out. She was tall and freckled and moved quickly.

“What’s another word for blue?” she asked.

“What shade?” he asked back.

“No, blue as in unhappy.”

“Melancholy.”

“I already thought of that.”