The Hollywood Cafe was on Maine Avenue, a four-block strip of boarded-up storefronts, a hardware store and a tack shop, a derelict movie theater and assorted short-term businesses: a hair-and-nail salon, a shop selling secondhand paperbacks. There were a few people on the sidewalks. The men wore Levi’s, boots, and cowboy hats; the women were broad in the hips and high in the hair.
Maine Avenue, Lakeside, had been a great place to grow up in the days when everyone knew Lana and Mars, everyone knew Stella, everyone knew the Hollywood Cafe.
But only Stella knew how she had come to own the cafe and the cottage next door. It was the house to which Mars had been taken as a newborn, the house where, for a time, Lana had a father. But how she got the money to buy it . . . Stella never would say and Mars and Lana had stopped asking.
Lana said, “Did I tell you I heard from my Dad?”
One hundred dollars and a note in a Christmas card written in a deep backhand that said about the same thing as all the others Norman Coates had sent over the decades since Lana had last seen him. “Buy yourself something pretty in the New Year, Sweetheart.”
Sweetheart. Lana wondered if he had forgotten her name.
Norman Coates and Stella had been married just long enough for Lana to get his name and put away a few blurred memories of a man with a bandido moustache, a ponytail, and a big laugh that made people turn around and stare and Lana feel shy. She hid behind him, peering out around his long legs while she gripped his belt studded with silver and turquoise. Jack had called her a cowboy’s daughter, and she supposed this was true.
The invariably ratty yearly envelope and the frequent changes of address she had noted over time made Lana believe her father’s hundred dollars was a hardship for him, and she wished he would not send it. Her thank-you notes were as cryptic as his messages. “Thank you for your generous gift. I am well and happy.” Things she did not say: my husband is dead and my family is falling apart.
Slight though their connection was, she did not want to let it go. For reasons she did not understand, she kept the cards in their envelopes in a manila envelope in the bottom of her dresser. The way Norman Coates moved around, he would not be easy to find. Not that she wanted to. What would they say to each other after hello?
“Why don’t you surprise him this year?” Mars asked as Lana turned into the parking lot between the cottage and the Hollywood Cafe. “Call him up or write him a real letter. Hey, I’ll take care of the girls. You can go see him.”
Lana felt a fizz of impatience with her sister, the way she felt when she had drunk too much coffee and there were still a dozen chores left on her list.
“What are you afraid of?”
“What about you? Why don’t you go find your father?”
Mars grinned and tossed her head and her auburn kinks and curls bounced. “Alas, C.B. DeMille went to his reward some years ago.”
“Ask Mom.”
“Why bother? I’ve asked her a thousand times and she won’t budge. By now I’m used to not knowing. And anyway, it’s not the same thing as having a living, breathing father in Colorado.”
“If he wants to see me he can find me himself. He’s the father.”
“So what are you saying? It’s like dancing and he’s got to lead? That’s a stupid reason to cut yourself off from your own flesh and blood. Shit, Lana, you might like him. He might be a great guy.”
“And then again,” Lana said, “he might be a drunk or an excon.”
“Is that what scares you? He’ll be someone unsuitable?”
“This isn’t about fear.” And why, Lana thought, are we sitting in the car arguing about this right now? “Let’s go see Dora.”
“No, wait a minute.” Mars put her hand on Lana’s arm. She felt the weight of her sister’s big jewelry—a wide turquoise bracelet, several silver rings. “Sure, it’s about fear. You don’t want to find out who—or what—he is because then you’ll be stuck with it.”
“Since when did you get to be such a fucking fount of wisdom? And what brought this on anyway?”
Mars shrugged and looked out the window, across the dusty parking lot to the cottage they had once lived in. A rag-leafed sycamore stood in the front yard, up to its knees in a lawn that was more weed than grass. But the house and shutters and the trim around the edge of the roof were freshly painted white and barn-red.
Mars said, “I liked your dad.”
“So I gather.”
“Mom was better off with him than Stan.”
“That’s not saying much.”
“Do you remember when he used to take us out to the Gold Bar Ranch?” Norman Coates had been the manager of a thoroughbred breeding farm on the way to Julian. “I used to sit on his lap and steer the feed truck.”
“If you’re so crazy about him, you go find him.”
Mars had an uncharacteristically misty look in her eyes that made Lana slightly uneasy. She wanted Mars as she normally was: quick and sharp and unromantic. “He and Ma could really fight. Not as bad as with Stan, not mean like that—”
“Nothing was as bad as that.”
“But he got under her skin and I think he liked to do it. Once he brought an old porch swing home from the Gold Bar. Do you remember it?”
Lana did remember that swing with its torn awning. “It squeaked so loud you could hear it across the street.”
“Ma ripped into him when he brought it home, said it looked like it came off some sharecropper’s porch. All the joints or bearings or whatever had rusted and your dad kept saying he’d oil them, only he never did.” Mars laughed. “I think he left it that way to get a rise out of Ma. One day she hired someone to haul it off.”
Mars pushed her sunglasses up into her thick hair. “Ma was a tyrant, wasn’t she? Remember how she used to make me dust those damn venetian blinds every day of the year, rain or shine?”
The powdery valley dust entered the house on their clothes and shoes and in their hair, came in under the door and through the mesh of the window screens and coated everything in the house with a dull, sticky patina. Lana remembered being very small, holding her father’s hand, kicking up dust with the hard, brown toes of her Buster Browns.
“I can’t go see him, Mars. Or write him. Not now.” The words were out before she thought them through. “I can barely manage the family I’ve got. I don’t need anyone else.”
“Lanny, you’re doing great. You love the girls, they love you.”
“I’m beginning to think love isn’t enough. There’s something else I’m missing.”
“The trouble with you is, you want a storybook family—you always have. You’ve got an idea of the way things should be and nothing less will satisfy.”
Lana’s eyes filled with tears. “I had perfection.”
“Bullshit.” Mars leaned across the gearbox and kissed her cheek. “It wasn’t perfection. Jack was a great guy but he could be a pain in the ass like any man. You guys had fights. You didn’t always agree. He drove you crazy sometimes. Remember?”
Barely.
“Don’t get like Ma. She’s turned Stan into a saint.”
Lana wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “But life was good, Mars. Maybe not perfect, but it was very good.”
“It’ll be good again, Sweet Pea. Give it time.”
The interior of the Hollywood Cafe looked much as it always had. Six large booths still lined one wall; five smaller ones and a desk for the cash register were on the other side. Dark blue vinyl had replaced the cracked, old brown leatherette upholstery on the booths and the seats of the hubcap-sized stools at the counter dividing the dining room from the kitchen. In the middle of the room, at three Formica-topped metal tables pushed end to end, a high school-aged waitress in pedal pushers and tank top, with plates lined up along her arm, dealt out hamburgers and home fries to a noisy crowd. The cafe walls were lined, as they had always been, with movie posters and pictures of movie stars. Dora had added new faces over the years but Jeff Chandler and Pier Angeli,
Jane Russell, Robert Taylor, and Gregory Peck and a couple of dozen other actors from the fifties were still up there, smiling down as they had when Lana thought they were all friends of her mother. Why else would they have signed their photos with love?
Lana and Mars sat in a booth next to the window with Dora, a big-boned blonde in her forties. She was upset when Lana told her that Stella did not want to renew her five-year lease.
“Is she selling?”
Lana laughed. “No way.”
“If she thinks she can get someone else to pay her more, she better think twice. There’s lots needs fixing—”
“Dora, she isn’t looking for anyone else, I can promise you that. You’re a great tenant. Just sign the year’s lease for now. I’ll fix it for the five. Trust me.”
A few moments later, as they walked to the car, Mars said, “You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“She does want to sell it.”
Lana’s heart dipped. “She can’t. She needs the income.”
“She thinks she’s got it all figured out.”
Lana slammed the car door and squealed the brakes as she turned out onto the street. Neither she nor Mars spoke until they were on the freeway again. The stop-and-start lights of the oncoming traffic were like the eyes of sea creatures swimming at her in the late afternoon twilight. It got chilly and Lana closed the moon roof.
“Where does she think she’s going to move?”
Mars raised her eyebrows.
Lana hit her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Wait, don’t tell me. The beach. Right? Somewhere with an ocean view.”
An ocean view meant money and the good life.
“I won’t let her do it,” Lana said.
“Oh-ho-ho, listen to you.”
“I mean it. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in the last twenty-four hours.”
Mars started to speak and then stopped. “Suit yourself, little sister.” She put her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. “And when you finish taking care of Ma and Dora and Kathryn and Micki and Beth and the job you can come over to my place, okay? I’m not in such good shape myself.”
Chapter Nine
Micki cut across the strip of grass between Arcadia School and the Unitarian Church parking lot, through a hedge of oleander and into the alley going west. Behind her she heard yelling from the soccer field where she was supposed to be. No problem. Ms. Calvello hardly ever took attendance.
It was already the middle of January and Micki was still ragging over New Year’s Eve. She still had not heard from her Aunt Kathryn.
She stopped walking and put down her book bag so she could pull off the navy blue vee-necked sweater that was part of the Arcadia School winter uniform. January was being very weird this year. Rain and then no rain and now clear and cold and so dry and windy the inside of her nose felt plastered.
She blamed her mother for the New Year’s mess. Maybe she should not have pushed Beth and maybe it was wrong to yell all that stuff about being adopted, but the whole thing would not have gotten started if her mother hadn’t got so torqued about the guy in the Jag. Did she really think Micki was so totally lame-ass dumb she’d get in a car with a complete stranger? He was in the neighborhood so she assumed he had been visiting someone. And all he wanted was directions, how to get to Old Town. Everyone who’d lived in San Diego more than twenty minutes knew how easy it was to get lost in all the cul-de-sacs and canyons. What was she supposed to say, “Oh, no, I can’t help you without my mommy watching over me?” Fuck. She’d been standing right in front of her very own house with her grandmother in the living room watching TV and her family and friends coming up the road any minute. So what was the big deal? He asked a question and she told him. BFD.
It was a weird coincidence that his car had been over by the school a couple of times, but coincidences happen—everyone knew that. Maybe he knew one of the teachers or someone at the Unitarian Church. There could be lots of explanations.
But no way was he a perv. Micki knew what a perv looked like. Tiff lived next door to a guy who kept tropical birds in cages, and his backyard looked like a jungle with palms and ferns taller than she was. It smelled like bird shit so bad Tiff’s parents had to call Animal Control and complain. She and Tiff sneaked in once when the guy was at work, and the birds looked all forlorn and downcast. They squawked like crazy and Micki knew they were begging to be set free. Now she wished she had opened their cages. Wouldn’t it be cool to look up in the sky and see a macaw sitting on the phone pole? The guy who kept birds wore polyester shorts with elastic at the sides and Hawaiian shirts made of slinky nylon and the way he looked at Micki, he was absolutely and without a doubt criminally creepy.
The stranger in the Jag wasn’t like that. He was just ordinary except that he wore his sunglasses even at night. She didn’t know what brand they were but they wrapped around and looked like they cost about five hundred dollars.
But maybe she was wrong. That’s what her mother would say. He might be a very cunning serial killer or molester who knew how to look like an okay guy. One of the girls Micki ate lunch with had passed around an article about Colombian drug lords who kidnapped blond teenagers and used drugs to turn them into sex slaves. When Micki considered this, fear overcame her curiosity; she hoped the man in the Jaguar was gone for good.
Besides, she had enough to worry about already without adding him to the mix. Even if his car was radically to die for.
She liked walking the alleys. Though the houses in Mission Hills were expensive, the lanes between them were unpaved and smelled of the deep dust her shoes kicked up so that when she closed her ears to the noise of traffic on the cross and parallel streets, it was easy to imagine she lived in a Tom Sawyerish kind of town; she would come to the end of a lane and see a horse and buggy going up the street. She would like to have lived in the olden days. For sure life was easier back then. No car accidents. No school sororities or strange guys hanging around, maybe watching you. She was pretty sure families had been simpler back then, too, but she was not sure in what way. Maybe they were just happier.
Along the alley a few of the yards had chain link at the back but most had tall wood fences or walls of cement block. Even so, there was almost always a way to sneak a peek. She could tell a lot about people by their backyards. Some houses looked great from the street but were like the Mojave out back, rickety plastic furniture and sorry-looking dogs in cement runs, even in Mission Hills which was supposed to be so upscale. Others were plain on the front but green and gorgeous in the rear. A house near the corner of Hawk was nothing but vegetable garden out back, winter and summer; in front there was just Pepto Bismol-colored gravel from stoop to sidewalk. You couldn’t tell anything about a family by looking at the front yard alone.
Front and back, the Porter house on Triesta Way looked really good, like a happy family lived there. It was painted pale yellow, and every spring an old guy who’d been painting houses for a hundred years gave the doors and trim a fresh coat of white. In spring clumps of daffodils and ranunculus shot up in the front and her mother planted dozens of giant snapdragons, bright yellow. When she was a little kid Micki had helped her; it had been fun then to know the names of plants, and speaking the Latin names made her feel important. The spring after her dad died there had been no flowers, but by summer her mother had put in daisies and zinnias and marigolds, like she wasn’t going to waste a minute of good planting time. Strangers driving by sometimes slowed their cars to look at the house and garden; once Micki saw someone with Minnesota plates stop to take a photo.
If they only knew.
Micki stopped under a pepper tree and dug deep in her pack for her cigarettes. She lit one and sat down in a weedy patch of green and leaned against the pepper’s rough, spicy-smelling trunk.
She didn’t want to go home. She never wanted to go home anymore.
Her mother tried to behave as if everything was okay now, with a fake smile on her face a
nd so many “good ideas” Micki thought she’d puke from hearing them. Beth, Miss Bouncy-Bouncy Perfect Daughter, was just as bad. Neither one of them fooled Micki, though. Maybe her mother wasn’t hanging out in bed anymore but she was still miserable. And she was so busy pretending she wasn’t, she barely even noticed there was something going on with Beth. She had secrets now and she never did before. She was telling lies, just little ones about where she’d been and who with, but for Beth to lie about anything was weird.
Lately Micki thought she was the only person who knew what was really going on, and she did not like being alone with the truth. Why couldn’t they all just admit how much they missed him and halfway wished they’d died with him? Or maybe her mother and sister did not feel the loss of him as she did. Maybe they had recovered already. Was there something wrong with her because she was still sad a lot of the time?
Tiff’s grandmother told Micki that when her husband died after they’d been married almost forty years, his spirit hung around reminding her to do things, telling her it was Tuesday and she had to put the garbage out or it was April, time to register the car, and kind of making a pest of himself until she plain told him to leave and he finally did and then she missed him. It sounded a lot like nagging to Micki; still, she knew if she heard her father telling her to turn off the TV and do her math, she’d get right up and do it.
When Micki wasn’t thinking about her father or the man in the Jaguar, she thought about The Fives. Actually, when she was at school, The Fives were practically all she thought of.
Officially, sororities were banned at Arcadia School, but that didn’t stop The Fives; it just made them more exclusive and enticing. On December first a list of seventeen girls being considered for bidding had appeared on the door of the art room. Of this number, only five would be asked to join. That was the way it was every year—five new members drawn from the tenth-grade class. Micki’s name had been third from the top which she thought was a pretty good sign. Tiff’s was way down at the bottom. Since then the list was all she and her friends talked about. It would be boring if it were not so important.
The Edge Of The Sky Page 8