by Larry Brill
Mt. Hamilton High was typical of the single-story campuses built by the school district in a mad dash to keep up with the wave of baby boomers in the sixties. It was ninety-eight percent dense concrete and two percent character. California prisons had more charm. The library sat in the middle of the campus, a concrete box of a building inside a square. Classrooms faced the library on each side, long and low, like walls that shielded the campus from the outside world. Only the east side of the library had any charm, gussied up by a tile pool not more than a foot high—square, of course—that gurgled with water from a small fountain in the middle.
Carla leaned into Julie as they skirted the fountain. “Speak of the devil.” She stopped and dropped her book bag on a metal bench.
A large black tuba case made its way along a wall on the far side of the quadrangle, weaving like a drunk trying to stay inside the boundaries of the walkway. Seth Naylor had it wrapped in his arms and peered over the top. Then he raised the case and dropped his bald head to the side to confirm he was still in his lane of traffic on the path.
Carla said, “Options. In case Russell turns out to be just another failed experiment, and I’m still not feeling the love in spite of your rosy outlook, you need a Plan B. Everybody should have a Plan B. At the very least, Seth could be your Plan B.”
“Plan B?”
“Here’s my theory,” Carla explained. “Everybody should have a backup for their relationship. Someone who is Plan B in case, in case... Well, let’s say that Larry gets crushed by a runaway ice cream truck tomorrow. I mean, I love him and I’d be crushed, too. I wouldn’t bring a date to the funeral, but it’s comforting to know that sooner or later I could turn to the guy who’s my Plan B.”
“Carla. That is so cold.”
“If you had a Plan B in place when James died, you wouldn’t have spent all these years raising kids on your own. And you wouldn’t be starting over at this stage.”
“Right,” Julie said, unconvinced. “So if Larry is your Plan A, who’s your Plan B?”
Carla waited until a cluster of kids passed and then put her hand on Julie’s shoulder. She stretched up to get close to Julie’s ear. “George Clooney.”
Carla rocked back on her heels, laughing until Julie rapped her knuckle on the top of her vertically challenged head. “Hey.” And then she started laughing again.
Julie asked, “How come you get George Clooney for Plan B, and I get Seth Naylor?”
“Because I’ve got Larry. For better or worse, you know? He’s a good Plan A, but get real. Until you get our Mr. Festerhaven to commit, you don’t have a Plan A yet. Start small and who knows? You might have Brad Pitt for your Plan B some day.”
“Ladies.” Seth set his tuba on the sidewalk in front of him. It wasn’t lost on Julie that he acknowledged Carla with a nod and her with a thin, shy smile. “Mrs. Finch.” Julie could have elbowed Carla for the look she gave her.
He reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and handed them both a single sheet flier. “Just a little reminder about the holiday concert on Friday. It should be a fun time. It would be nice if we had a good turnout.”
“Sorry to hear about your grandma,” Julie said. “I mean, the song. I heard Mr. Festerhaven put the kibosh on playing the ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’ song.”
Seth sighed. “Yes, well, I guess it wasn’t quite appropriate. Especially after how upset he got when we wrapped up the halftime show at the game against Oak Grove with ‘Tears in Heaven.’”
Poor Seth. He had really struggled to regain his footing since breast cancer stole his wife from him, and the music department’s performances had taken on a decidedly darker tone. It made Julie appreciate all the more what a rare marriage Carla had. She liked to think she and James would have had one of those lifetime marriages too, but she gave up thinking about what might have been long ago.
Carla picked up her bag and said brightly, “Great. Julie, let’s catch up at lunch. Come on Seth, we’re both headed this way.”
Seth struggled to balance the tuba, and as they turned away, Julie heard Carla say in a loud voice, “So, Mr. Naylor. Have you ever thought about having a Plan B?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Julie’s Plan B
The Wednesday before Christmas, Julie turned up the collar on her wool coat, shivering while she stood in front of the Happy Yen Mini Mart and Texas Barbecue store. The Weather Channel had forecast that morning the high temperature would be two degrees warmer in Fairbanks, Alaska. Brrr.
She had her hands deep in the pockets of her coat as she swiveled her head, waiting for inspiration. With her right hand, she fingered the piece of paper that could hold the key to her future. Or not. She considered the license plate number of the car parked two spaces over in front of the store. It didn’t sing to her. Neither did the price of gas on the digital sign out front. She pulled the scrap from her pocket.
Ten? She made note of that on her walk to the store. The house at 1010 Bailey Avenue had the prettiest Christmas light display in the neighborhood. It was an omen.
One? Easy, that was her birthday a few weeks back. She could play that number until New Year’s Day.
Over coffee that morning, Carla had mentioned she had spent most of Sunday organizing her closet and came up with thirty-one shoes. Not pairs of shoes. Carla’s inventory included seven different orphans with no mate. Thirty-one shoes seemed too odd to ignore.
The final score of Sunday night’s Forty-Niners’ game provided two numbers, thirty-five to twenty-eight. The Niners won, for a change. It would be bad luck to use the numbers when your team loses, though Carla had been rooting for Dallas because their quarterback had become this week’s Plan B if her husband, Larry, developed a fatal case of gingivitis. Now Julie needed just one more lucky number. She sighed. Inspiration was not stalking her outside the Mini Mart.
“Evening, lady. I’m feeling lucky for you tonight. Thirteen million. It is a very lucky number.”
Julie stopped. She waved a finger at the short, weathered Vietnamese owner behind the counter. “Mr. Nguyen, you think every night is my night.”
“You see. One day I will be right. Go on. Try lucky thirteen.”
Julie went straight to the California Lottery kiosk at the rear of the store. Shelves there were neglected and held an odd assortment of items collecting dust. A yellow bottle of Pennzoil reminded Julie she had gotten an email from her mechanic. Her Ford was due for its regular oil change and service. She would ask Matt at the garage about the pesky ping the car had started making. She drew a breath, pulled her lucky pen from her purse and filled in the circles on a lottery slip, pausing when she needed the final number of the six picks. She scanned the store until her eyes came back to the bottle of oil. 10-40? She already had the ten. Pennzoil was talking to her. She filled in the number forty bubble.
“No number thirteen,” Mr. Nguyen said when she handed him the ticket. He tsk-tsked her as he fed the slip into the lottery machine.
God, no. Number thirteen was never going to make it on Julie’s lottery ticket. Her husband, James Finch, proposed on a Friday the thirteenth after she learned she was pregnant. She’d been nineteen and working a summer internship at her father’s accounting firm. James was the junior-most associate, a paper pusher at the company there, six years older than Julie, who never did enough to earn a promotion. He had an air of life experience as if he had already done it all and there was nothing left that would shape him, and he doted on her in a way no boy—no man—ever had. He did the honest thing when they learned she was pregnant, and they were married. Four years and two babies later, on a thirteenth of June, James Finch was whapped to death at the Suds Up! Self Car Wash.
James and three friends were returning from a bachelor party that involved bottles and bottles of Coors Light, shots of tequila, and naked women at a bar in Sunnyvale. On the way home, they decided to wash five years of caked mud from the groom-to-be’s Bronco in order not to embarrass the bride-to-be on their wedding getaway.
So they pulled the Bronco into the bay at the car wash around two in the morning. The spray of the water hitting the windshield during the pre-soak mode triggered something in James’ bladder. By the time the mechanical arms of the wash spewed soap all over the vehicle, James’ kidneys were crying in pain, so he tried to escape from the passenger seat intent on watering the first bush he could find in the shadows. When his shoes hit the soapy floor of the wash bay, James slipped, fell to his knees, and was assaulted by the huge water-spitting, spinning ball of bristles and cloth strips that pinned him to the body of the SUV. The coroner recorded it as a drowning death. The killer brush slipped off its track, impeded by the victim, and stopped moving while continuing to spin and beat him senseless. They told Julie the pummeling lasted almost an hour while the rest of the party dozed in the cab of the Bronco. Before removing the body from the scene, the medical examiner commented to police on the extraordinary hygiene of the scrubbed corpse.
The number thirteen might be modestly unlucky for most people, but it rejoiced in tormenting Julie every chance it got. Nope, it wasn’t going to make her lottery ticket in this life or in that great auto wash in the sky.
“If that doesn’t do it, Mr. Nguyen, I don’t know what will,” Julie said.
“I miss you when you win and no need me anymore. Usual tonight?”
Julie nodded. “Yum.”
He went to a stainless steel warming oven at the far corner behind the counter and beyond the deli case full of chicken wings, warmed-over brisket, pizza slices, burritos and rollers of fossilized hot dogs beneath heat lamps. Mr. Nguyen saved the fresh, choice meats in his oven for his best customers.
That was Julie’s Wednesday routine, one lottery ticket and half a roast chicken. It was also her Saturday routine. One ticket with a side of chicken. If she really wanted to splurge, she might get some potato salad, too. She had been playing the game as long as she could remember. It was an indulgence, and reckless when she’d been a single mother counting pennies and juggling bills to make ends meet each month. Money was no longer the problem it had been when the kids were growing up, but she hadn’t lost that sense of guilty pleasure that came with setting aside a few dollars each week for herself. How many times had she ignored the better, more practical ways she could spend that dollar? Julie was nothing if not practical in most aspects of life. But that was the point. Carla thought it was a pathetically amusing way of Julie letting her hair down. “This is wild and crazy?” she teased. “Hold me back.”
Julie liked to rationalize each dollar invested could win—after all, somebody was going to win, it might as well be her—but she never told her friend that the lottery was as much Julie’s Plan B as any fantasy that George Clooney or an NFL quarterback might ride to Carla’s rescue. And at only a gazillion-to-one, Julie figured her odds were better.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nate’s Fifteen Minutes of Fame
The video of Nate’s plunge and near demise was an overnight YouTube sensation. Woody pissed him off by pointing out that more people had seen the video in the last three weeks than any movie project Nate had, or was likely to, produce. That was the beauty of their relationship. Whenever Nate was down and out, he could count on Woody to kick dirt in his face.
TV Star Survives Deadly Fall.
That was the headline on the YouTube page, and they weren’t talking about Nate. His leap had interrupted Mary Grant and Ruffles in the middle of their television interview for Entertainment X-S. All the cameras set up for the segment had been recording and captured the scene. Nate hit the canopy of the media tent, and it billowed inward, breaking his fall before a seam gave way and he dropped the final six feet with a thud. He landed on Ruffles.
“This is a major hoot,” Woody said. “We’re getting close to two million views.”
He tapped the screen of Nate’s new iPad. After he survived the leap, Nate spent Christmas recovering at his older brother’s house. David was an insurance agent in La Jolla, and the tablet was David’s present to him. For three weeks, he vegged out in front of the television and binged on It’s a Wonderful Life in an effort to heal his spirit. Now it was almost New Years Day; it was time to move on.
“Remind me to kill you later,” Nate said.
Nate and Woody leaned against the bumper of a U-Haul rental truck parked next to the battered shell of his mobile home. They were taking a break from packing up everything that had survived Bombing Day. Progress was slow because Nate had one arm in a sling to help his broken collarbone. There wasn’t much to pack. Even though he’d rented the smallest truck, his belongings wouldn’t fill half of it. The mobile home, rusted and ratty to begin with, appeared to Nate as if it had been beaten into submission and begged to be put out of its misery. Since he had only been renting the trailer, the landlord would get the lion’s share of any settlement with the government, and even most of the furniture had been there when Nate moved in. There was little to call his own.
Nate tugged on the collar of a coat he had borrowed from Woody. The air was thick with ocean fog and mist, colder than a politician’s heart, and it compounded the stiffness in every part of his body. He lost his balance and fell back against the bumper.
“Forget what I said about killing you later. Let me do it now and put you out of my misery.” He took a swipe at Woody with his good arm. The contusions deep in his chest made it nearly impossible to breathe.
“I told you I was sorry. Dammit. How was I to know you’d have that kind of reaction to the X? I was just trying to get you feeling happy again, but you heard what the doctor said. Who could have known, right?”
The doctor gave him a royal holier-than-thou lecture when he delivered toxicology results that came back positive for Ecstasy. Nate had to lie and say he didn’t know where the drug had come from—it was a big party with a lot of people he didn’t know. He said he hadn’t intentionally swallowed anything stronger than alcohol. He didn’t think the doctor bought it and was surprised when he asked if Nate had been suffering from depression or anxiety.
“How’s your life right now?” He said suicidal thoughts were common in depressed people, and while Ecstasy was known for enhancing positive emotions, it could also exacerbate all the negative ones that came with being down.
“Right now, I couldn’t get any lower,” Nate had told the doctor. “But I’ve never had a suicidal impulse. Ever.” Woody, who was sitting in a chair in a corner of the hospital room at the time, vouched for him.
“That boy ain’t wired for suicide, Doc. Trust me.”
Now, Woody avoided looking at Nate and said, “Sorry. I didn’t know that thing about how it might mess with someone as messed up as you were that night.”
Nate was hunched over trying to catch his breath. He nodded to the trailer. “What? You didn’t think I might be suffering a little bit of stress that day?”
“I was just trying to pick you up after that big guy beat the crap out of you at the bar.”
With a new year coming, the black cloud that covered him was unlikely to dissolve with the simple turn of the calendar page in a couple of days, but he knew he had to escape. He was desperate for a place to curl up in a fetal-like ball and hide until it was safe to show his face again. For the past three years, his life had been like a Whack-a-Mole carnival game, someone or something always waiting to bop him when he poked his head out of the mole hole. Enough of that. He was going to run away. Back to the last place where he felt good about himself. And he wasn’t going to come out until he could feel that again.
“Two million views, huh?” He took the tablet from Woody. Nate had to admit it was a finely edited twenty seconds of movie. He had scripted a couple of never-produced commercials that didn’t have all the storytelling elements in this one bit of YouTubeosity.
Cue ominous music.
Wide shot of hero dog and Spinster Detective sidekick.
Chaos. Sound of ripping canvas dubbed over.
Zoom in on hero’s face. Slow motion he looks up, confused.<
br />
Unidentified Falling Body obscures view of scene.
Ominous music swells to a doom-like crescendo.
Cut to a closeup of the body on the floor and from beneath it, a furry dog’s paw reaches toward the camera, straining and twitching before going limp.
Dissolve to paramedics pushing a gurney carrying the hero through the grief-stricken crowd and into the ambulance.
Closing shot: Ambulance drives away, headed for the Happy Hound Veterinary Hospital. The camera stays on shot until the emergency lights are a fading blur in the night.
Whoever edited it from the Entertainment X-S video did a good job. His own ambulance ride to the hospital made only the local TV newscasts and had a shelf life of twenty-four hours. Coverage of the Ruffles’ hospital vigil, with the crowds placing candles and sympathy cards on the sidewalk, singing prayers, providing breathless reporters with quotes about how Ruffles had impacted their lives and wishing him a speedy recovery, lasted three days longer until the doctors could assure everyone that Ruffles was out of danger. They doubted, however, that he would ever act again.
Nate attempted a smile. “It’s not everybody who gets to watch their life flash before their eyes over and over. And over again. It’s like sitting through reruns of a really bad sitcom.”
Woody chuckled. “A rerun of something you probably wrote.” Then he held up both palms. “I know. I promise. I’ll remind you to kill me later.”
Nate ordered him to pack up the cardboard boxes with stuff they had salvaged from his bedroom and tuck them in with the other boxes in the back of the truck. He went to its open rear and surveyed what they had already packed. He could have hitched a trailer to his car easily enough but had to sell the Honda to pay the medical bills. Then he went to the shed in search of any remaining items he might want to take with him. He walked gingerly and stumbled over a dumbbell next to the workout bench next to the door. He wouldn’t need that, for sure. The shed stank of dust, mold and neglect. He went to the corner and rummaged in the clutter there, pulling a backpack from his camping gear. His baseball glove was there, lovingly oiled to protect it from age and the elements. He held the leather to his nose. The greatest smell in the world. As a kid, he’d slept with his baseball glove and still had trouble passing by the sporting goods section of a Target or Big-5 store without stopping to sniff the mitts. Now that would be a good point in life to return to if he could ever invent his fantasy time machine and get the do-over he longed for. The scent of cowhide took him back and brought a smile. Julie Cooper would laugh at him if she walked in and caught him. She’d laughed when he’d revealed his mitt fetish to her one day as they sat in the bleachers after a high school ballgame. He glanced over his shoulder, just in case she showed up. That made him smile, too.