by Paul Clayton
Allen realized there were no longer any sounds of Reynaldo digging nearby. He looked up. Reynaldo was gone! Allen’s heart started pounding as he scanned the beach. He spotted Reynaldo about a hundred feet away in the surf up to his knees.
Allen got quickly to his feet. “Reynaldo!”
Reynaldo waved, then turned away and waded further into the sea.
“Reynaldo!” Allen raced after him. “God damn it!” he said under his breath. Stories of bathers being swept out to sea by rogue waves filled his head. There were warning signs about such occurrences at all the entrances to the beach.
As Allen drew near, Reynaldo squealed happily and ran back out of the surf. Wet up to his chest, his pants drooped with the weight of the water.
“Reynaldo!” said Allen. “I told you not to get wet!” Allen shook his head in incredulity. Relief rolled over him, but how was he going to hide this from Tina?
Reynaldo’s smile disappeared as he studied Allen’s face cautiously. “I’m sorry, Daddy. The wave was big.”
Allen looked at his watch. It was almost four. They would be getting home around the same time as Tina. Shit! He could hear her screaming already, “God damn it! You make so much work for me!”
Allen wondered if the episode could bring Reynaldo’s cold back. “C’mon, Reynaldo,” he said. “We have to get ready to go home.”
“Aw, Daddy. Can’t I play in the water some more?”
“Damn it, Reynaldo,” said Allen, angry exasperation flashing through him.
Reynaldo’s eyes grew large and frightened and Allen immediately tamped down his anger. It was Tina who deserved his anger, he thought, not Reynaldo. Why the hell couldn’t she just let Reynaldo be a boy? Let him play and get dirty like Allen and his brother had when they were growing up. It was what all boys did. Why the hell couldn’t she see that?
Allen softened his tone. “It’s okay Reynaldo. Just come with Daddy.”
They walked back to their spot. Allen knelt to fold his paper. “Reynaldo,” he said without looking at the boy, “we have to get you dry before we go home.”
“Okay, Daddy.”
Allen stood and turned. Reynaldo was sitting in the dry sand, digging. The white sand coated his body and clothing.
“Jesus, Reynaldo! Stand up.”
Allen dusted him off as best he could. As they walked toward the parking lot he doubted that Reynaldo’s clothes would dry in time. They wouldn’t be able to run the clothes dryer without Tina becoming suspicious. “Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath. There’d be hysterics tonight. Then Allen had a thought. Perhaps if he put the heater in the car on high for the ride home Reynaldo’s clothes would dry out.
Before they got in the car, Allen had Reynaldo take off his shoes and socks. He wrung them out as best he could and laid them on the back seat. Later, after he exited the freeway, Allen pulled the car over to the curb and checked the shoes and socks. They were still cold and wet. He placed them on the dash of the car over the defroster vents and turned the blower and temperature up to the maximum. He got back on the freeway. Maybe if he drove around for another twenty minutes or so they would dry. Then he could tell Tina they had gotten caught in a traffic jam.
Luckily Allen managed to get home before Tina. He had Reynaldo quickly strip off his clothes. He shoved them in the washing machine, threw in a cup of soap and cranked the knob to Normal. Later that night Tina called to him from the garage. “Why is there sand in the drier?”
“Oh,” he lied, “I took a quick jog on the beach. I washed and dried my running shoes in there.”
He waited expectantly, wondering if she’d buy it. Then the drier lid clanged shut. He relaxed. It would be okay this time.
Chapter 13
Tawny smiled a greeting to Vince Rinaldi, the salesman from Circuit City, as he walked into KoolKuts. Vince’s parents had left him a big house in San Bruno and he lived rent free. He often complained to Tawny about the taxes he had to pay on his house. It was a struggle for Tawny not to roll her eyes at his stealthy bragging. What Vince paid in taxes was nowhere near what she and Rad paid in rent, and Vince was renting out one of his rooms, providing him further income. The last time he was in he’d bragged to Tawny about his plan to convert his house into two apartments.
Vince was about ten years older than Tawny and one of her regular customers. He was always hitting on her, despite her having told him several times that she had a boyfriend. Cocksure that his good looks, charm, and financial prowess would win her over eventually, he never gave up. Actually, Tawny didn’t mind. Vince held no great attraction for her and she enjoyed the attention and he tipped well.
Vince smiled and sat down to wait. The other stylist, Flo, was outside in the mall on her break and Tawny had Grace, an older lady, leaned way back in the chair for her monthly dye job. Grace was one of Tawny’s neediest customers. Sometimes she wore Tawny out with her depressing talk of her dead husband or the son that never came to visit her, or her dreams of death and dying. But she was well off and tipped well, always ten dollars exactly, no matter how much or how little Tawny worked on her. But she took a toll, leaving Tawny drained of spirit. Tawny shrugged. A cup of coffee would help bring her back to life. And besides, it was all in a day’s work.
Tawny watched the pedestrian traffic in the mall as she washed Grace’s hair and prepared her tint. Putting on her gloves, she worked quickly and soon she was nodding over at Vince to take a seat in her chair. He got to his feet and walked over gracefully. Sitting down, he carefully checked himself out in the mirror and then looked at Tawny.
“How’s it goin’, Babe?” he said.
“Goin’ good,” she said. “How’s it goin’ for you?”
He nodded and smiled aggressively. “Good, real good. You still hooked up with the skater boy?”
Tawny nodded. She didn’t like the name that Vince had tagged Rad with, but that was partly her fault. One day she had been in an overly chatty mood and had told Vince that her boyfriend was a skateboarder who might be in the upcoming X Games in San Francisco. Forever after Vince disparagingly referred to Rad as ‘the skater boy.’ Tawny put up with it because he was a good customer.
“I just bought a place up at Clear Lake,” Vince said. “Real nice, with a deck in the back that looks down on the water. Maybe you and the skater boy could drop by some time.”
Tawny smiled as she went to work on Vince’s locks. “Maybe,” she said as she pulled the comb through his hair. The comb moved easily through his crown, too easily. She frowned. That was too bad. He’d probably have a bald spot there before he was forty. But he didn’t know that yet. As Tawny moved about the chair, several times she had to lean her butt out in order not to lean against him. She’d made that mistake once and felt him moving beneath the cloth, trying to feel her up. He’d acted innocent enough, pulling out a Kleenex to wipe his nose, but he was a real player. Tawny smiled. He was incorrigible. She pulled the comb through his thinning crown. Well, let him have his fun now. He’d need a hairpiece later if he was going to stay in the race.
As Tawny took her clippers out of the drawer, she thought of hers and Rad’s life together. It was okay. They had their own place, friends, each other, everything they needed. But the mention of Vince’s new place at Clear Lake loosened up feelings of dissatisfaction in Tawny. She thought of all her hard work to get her license to style hair, one thousand and six hundred hours of classroom instruction, driving up to Sacramento to take the test. She wanted her own salon someday. And she wanted her and Rad to own their own place too. Maybe a condo, but definitely not a rental like where they were now. And she’d like to go on weekend trips too. She and Rad hadn’t been anywhere in a long time, not since that time two winters ago when they went to Lake Tahoe. She smiled at the memory of it. She and Rad had come out of a nightclub, flush from the glow of a bottle of champagne consumed slowly in front of an aromatic wood fire. They were walking back to their cabin along a small road when it started snowing. It came down all of a sud
den, thick and heavy as if some heavenly stagehand had opened up a valve high above to highlight their love scene, to make it like one of those Currier and Ives scenes in Christmas cards. They’d had a little snowball fight and then had gone into the cabin and made crazy, passionate love. Rad had a good heart. He was kind and funny. And once he figured out what he wanted in life he’d go after it. She knew that for sure. His zeal for boarding was proof. But what about her?
Every now and then Tawny had a sense of time slipping by. She thought again about opening up her own shop. She pictured it—polished mirrors, leather and chrome waiting chairs, a carafe of coffee—a modern, professional place with one chair, appointments only. There would be a nice stereo, no TV. It would be the kind of place her dad would never have gone to. He had been more the Joe the barber type. But he would have come in and sat in the chair anyway because it was her place and he would have been proud of her. Thoughts of her dad got her to thinking of her mother. Her mother hadn’t called, of course. Tawny thought she should make the call. It was hard to sometimes. Her mother didn’t approve of Rad, didn’t approve of what he did for a living. She didn’t approve of Tawny’s piercings, her hair, and her nail color, and never let up on any of it. It had been that way since Tawny turned fifteen. Sometimes she thought her dad had had his heart attack just to get the hell out of the house and away from the shrew his wife had become. Thanks Dad, for leaving me alone with mom. Tawny winced involuntarily. Sorry, Dad. Didn’t mean that.
Tawny finished with Vince and went back to Grace. Grace smiled up at Tawny with her little wrinkled face. Despite Grace’s negativity, she was a nice old lady. She just needed someone to talk to. Tawny wondered briefly what it would have been like having her as her mother. Who could say? Maybe she’d been an over-lording bitch to her own children. Maybe right now Tawny’s own mother was having her hair done in a chair somewhere, and some other stylist was wondering the same thing.
A half-hour later Tawny was on the SamTrans bus headed up El Camino Real to home. As she passed the National Cemetery she said a silent hello to her dad who was buried there. Although he’d been in Vietnam, he’d come home in once piece, having, as he often said, lucked out and fought the war behind a typewriter as a clerk in Battalion Headquarters. He died fifty years after returning, but his status as a war vet got him a place at the National Cemetery.
Tawny got off the bus at Chestnut and walked the six or so blocks to their place. Rad was not home and she took some ground beef from the freezer for spaghetti. As she straightened up the living room she picked up a Thrasher magazine that had ended up under the couch. For skaters, it was full of pictures of guys schussing down half pipes and along handrails. She hadn’t seen Rad looking at one in over a month. She remembered when he’d told her about not being chosen for the X Games and she marveled at how well he’d taken his disappointment, turning his zeal for skateboarding into something else. She warmed at the thought of him; he was her steady man.
Tawny thought she heard voices in front of the house and parted the curtains. A car was double parked, a girl at the wheel. There was another big, blonde girl in the passenger seat who was kind of ‘country’ looking. The back door opened and Rad got out. The driver was pretty, Asian. Rad started toward the house and the driver said something. He turned and walked back, leaning into the car to talk to her. Frowning, Tawny let the curtain close.
“Hey, Tawn,” Rad called when he came inside.
She looked over at him. “Hey, Babe. Who’re the chicks?”
“Oh. They volunteer at The Mountain too. They were going this way and offered me a ride.”
Tawny nodded as she smoothed a cushion on the couch. “Spaghetti tonight. How’s that?”
“Cool. How was your day, Babe?”
Tawny nodded. “Good. Thirty in tips.” She sensed something in Rad that bothered her. It had something to do with those two girls. She forced herself to smile.
Chapter 14
Allen Collins half-listened to the talk radio station as he kept up with the flow of traffic on the 280 freeway. He had missed work the day before, taking Reynaldo to the doctor’s. Today he’d dropped him off at daycare and he would soon be in his cubical at work. On Allen’s right, ghostly gobs of morning fog hung over the canyons of the verdant Santa Cruz Mountains, dripping cold condensation onto the pines and redwoods beneath. As Allen returned his gaze to the road ahead he could not stop thinking about things at home. Poor Reynaldo! He was not a bad kid. But Tina had been in a foul temper lately and Reynaldo seemed to come in for more than his share of the blame. Allen wondered how and when she had started to feel so sad and angry, and what he could do to make things right again. He thought longingly of their early, childless days. They had been married for five years before they’d adopted, and most of that period had been good, at least for him. In the beginning he had assumed that Tina had been okay with their inability to conceive, but eventually it became apparent that she was not. Her concerns morphed into increasing bouts of moodiness and irritability. There had been several trips to the doctor’s office. Allen remembered staring in awe at the wild thrashing of his own sperm under a microscope. The doctor smiled at him when he looked up. “They’re in great shape, frisky and raring to go.” The doctor’s tone became serious and he said that he suspected the reason they couldn’t have a child was inside Tina’s uterus. Evidently an earlier surgery had left a lot of scar tissue there. And so Tina and Allen had stopped hoping and given up. A grieving period followed. After that passed, Tina was still unhappy so Allen had suggested adoption. At first Tina was not interested and so he stopped discussing it. But after a while she brought the subject up. The more they looked into it, the more interested she seemed to become. They signed up for the County’s 6-month Foster Adoption program. Her mood brightened and things got better. They would adopt.
Allen remembered the telephone call. Robert, the social worker for the county, said there was a boy available for adoption. He was what they called special needs, because he’d been born premature and spent much of his first year in a hospital. The mother, an illegal immigrant, had given birth to him and then inexplicably walked away, never even going back into the hospital to hold him or look at him. “We’re calling you and Tina,” Robert had explained to Allen, “because the boy is Hispanic and so is Tina.” Allen had had to smile. Tina was Hispanic, but almost in name only. Her parents had emigrated from Mexico when she was a young child, and there was a lot of Castilian or Celtic blood in the family. With Tina’s straw colored hair, she looked more Northern Italian than she did Mexican. And other than an occasional taste for Mexican food, she had almost nothing to do with her parents’ culture. Robert, the social worker, had gone on to explain that most of the couples looking to adopt were holding out for Caucasian kids and were not interested in this one.
Allen remembered the look of interest on Tina’s face the night the call came. She had listened eagerly to Robert’s description of Reynaldo, and Allen hadn’t had to coax her to go down to the agency to see him. Those were exciting and happy times.
Getting Reynaldo had been not unlike courtship. There were three visits to the foster home where he lived. Lorry, the foster mom who ran the place, was a nurse, and an angel too. On the first visit Allen watched Reynaldo crawl around the playroom floor, pushing a little car, trailing behind a clear plastic tube which delivered the oxygen he needed to his little button nose via a cannula secured around his head. In the corner, the six-year-old twins, both retarded, leaned into a toy box as they dug out brightly colored plastic building blocks. Against the far wall, a severely disabled fourteen-year-old boy lay moaning in his crib, waiting to have his diaper changed.
Reynaldo was a nice brown color, with handsome features. He was a little smaller than usual, but the doctor’s report indicated that he was developing normally, except for some pulmonary problems that were common among preemies. Allen had attempted to bond with Reynaldo in the beginning. He remembered sitting down on the floor with him and bein
g flattered by Reynaldo’s little acknowledgments of his presence.
They had simply visited with Reynaldo that first day, playing on the floor with him, periodically chatting with Lorry about his medical history. On the next visit they had taken Reynaldo to a nearby park where he played in the sandbox. Then they took him out for lunch. Allen remembered marveling at how light the little guy was as he hoisted him up and lowered him into his highchair, as if his bones were hollow like a bird’s. They ate their meal of burgers and fries, amazed by Reynaldo’s smiles and his appetite.
A couple months later they met Reynaldo’s mother. An Indian from Guatemala, she was very young, only eighteen. She had cinnamon skin and a round birth mark like a coin, high on her cheek. Allen had had to consciously keep himself from staring at her; she was that beautiful.
The mother’s caseworker, an older woman named Doris, said when they entered her office and saw the mother sitting demurely in her chair, “This is Maria. She doesn’t speak English.”
“Oh, Spanish,” said Allen.
Doris shook her head. “No. She speaks only her native language, Cakchiquel. We have only one interpreter in all of Northern California, and he’s out of town.”
Allen raised his eyebrows and allowed himself a look at the brown Madonna.
“But,” Doris went on, “the interpreter spoke to her before he left. He said she agrees to everything, but she wanted to meet you both.”
Allen and Tina looked over at the mother.
“Well,” said Doris, “she won’t understand a word you’re saying, but why don’t you just tell her you’ll take good care of Reynaldo. We’ll just have to hope that she gets something out of that.”