The Last Days of California: A Novel

by Miller, Mary

  DEDICATION

  For my parents,

  Dolores and Curt

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  WEDNESDAY

  THURSDAY

  FRIDAY

  SATURDAY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  WEDNESDAY

  It was Wednesday and we hadn’t even made it to Texas yet. We’d been sleeping late, swimming during daylight hours, but we were going to have to move if we wanted to make it to California in time.

  In a shitty little town in Louisiana, which was full of shitty little towns, we stopped at a Waffle House and sat at the counter. My father liked to sit at counters because he liked to be among the people—you couldn’t just ask if they’d been saved, you had to win them over first, had to make them like you—but there was no time left for niceties. He had brought along a bundle of tracts that said “All Suffering SOON TO END!”

  When the waitress asked how we were doing, he handed her one.

  “The world is passing away,” he said, “but those who do the will of God will remain forever.”

  In response, she set a tiny napkin in front of him with a knife and fork on top. Then she moved down the line: my sister, Elise, and my mother and me.

  I watched my father, who was looking around pleasantly to see if there was anyone who might be willing to talk to him. There wasn’t. There hardly ever was. He was either preaching to the choir or trying to convert the unconvertible, but it didn’t stop him from going through the motions—the futility of it was central, necessary. He didn’t really want all 7 billion people on the planet to be saved. We wouldn’t be special then. We wouldn’t be the chosen ones.

  I set my elbows on the counter. It was sticky with syrup, and I liked that this Waffle House was like every other Waffle House I’d ever been to. I knew where the bathroom was and what I wanted to eat and what it would taste like.

  I peeled my elbows off the counter and looked at them.

  “Excuse me, miss,” my mother said, too quietly for the waitress to hear her. “Excuse me,” she said again, louder.

  The waitress came over and stood in front of us. She was tall and hulking and had a missing tooth, or maybe it was just a large gap—the space didn’t seem quite big enough for a tooth. I stared at her openly. She was ugly and I wasn’t afraid of ugly people.

  “This counter is sticky,” my mother said, touching it with her finger.

  The waitress left and came back, wiped it off with a dirty-looking rag.

  Elise dug around in her purse and pulled out her lip gloss. She smeared it on her bottom lip and top lip and pressed them together. It was almost obscene, watching her put on makeup. Boys frequently told me she was a knockout and then waited expectantly for my response. Of course there was nothing to do but agree. She was a knockout and I wasn’t. What was there to say about it?

  “Why don’t y’all go clean up?” our mother asked. Neither Elise nor I said anything. We didn’t respond to suggestions, only direct orders.

  I brought my hands to my face. “Clean as a whistle,” I said.

  “I wonder where that saying comes from,” my sister said. “Whistles aren’t clean, they’re full of spit.” She got out her phone and Googled it, and I watched her face as she read, the dents at the tops of her eyebrows. “ ‘One possibility is that the old simile describes the whistling sound of a sword as it swishes through the air to decapitate someone, and an early nineteenth-century quotation suggests this connection: a first-rate shot, his head taken off as clean as a whistle.’ ”

  She hopped off her stool and I turned to watch her go, ponytail and hips swinging. It was how she walked down the halls of our high school. She never looked at anybody and made people call her name again and again before turning. She was wearing her King Jesus Returns! t-shirt with a pair of shorts that were so short you couldn’t tell she was wearing them. I saw a man watching her, too, a mean-looking little man with a girl on his lap. The girl was skinny with big joints and glasses, one arm choking a ratty stuffed animal. He pulled her thumb out of her mouth and she put it back and he pulled it out and she put it back in again. I looked around at the other diners: they were all hideous. I could live easily in a town like this.

  The man’s food came and he scooted the girl off of his lap and dug in. She reached for a triangle of toast and he slapped her hand.

  “Ask first,” he said, but she didn’t ask and he didn’t give it to her. I imagined a scenario in which the girl had been kidnapped years ago. She’d been with him so long that she had forgotten any other life ever existed.

  My mother reached over me to get a packet of Sweet’n Low and I leaned back in an exaggerated manner. She smelled bad, like a wounded animal. She had gotten her period as soon as we’d left Montgomery, and it reminded me that I hadn’t showered in days. I’d gone swimming last night, though, had stayed in the pool for hours listening to Elise talk to a boy who was selling magazines across the country. Every morning, the boy woke up early and drove to a different town. He didn’t have time to see anything or do anything and he ate fast food off dollar menus to save money. He wanted to go home, but he had barely made anything after his expenses—he might even end up owing them. It was modern-day indentured servitude, he’d said. I’d been waiting for Elise to one-up him with her pregnancy, or to tell him that our father was driving us twenty-five hundred miles so that we would be among the last people in the Continental U.S. to witness the coming of Our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, but she didn’t say anything except that we were going to see the Pacific Ocean.

  Elise sat back down and poured two creamers into her coffee, stirred it with a fork. She drank coffee every morning now; she’d drink cup after cup and hold up her hand so I could watch it shake.

  When the waitress returned, my father ordered a T-bone and my sister ordered a waffle and my mother ordered a Fiesta Omelet and I ordered a hamburger. Elise had stopped eating meat six months ago, but I’d catch her stealing glances at our pulled pork sandwiches, our sausage-filled side of the pizza. She had a whole spiel about animal rights and the environment and the nutritional requirements of the human body and our father had his own spiel—he said if people stopped eating meat, animals would overrun our cities and wreak havoc and the economy would crash. He said if meat weren’t available, people would turn to cannibalism.

  My father searched his pockets and went outside, came back and divvied up a thin newspaper. He handed me the entertainment section, and I read my horoscope and checked to see what was coming on TV later. I hoped my sister and I would have our own room again so we could watch whatever we wanted.

  “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is on at eight,” I said, leaning over my mother to show Elise. We loved movies from the 1980s, the ridiculous clothes and graphics, the clunky phones and boom boxes. We liked The Last Starfighter, Sixteen Candles, The Goonies. We liked anything with Andrew McCarthy and Judd Nelson, who were so old now. If they were raptured, they’d be restored to their former beauty. I liked Andrew McCarthy best in Less Than Zero, Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club. Molly Ringwald was never pretty enough to be a leading lady, but the eighties were a dream world in which the captain of the football team would leave the homecoming queen for an awkward red-haired girl who made her own clothes.

  I watched the cook break my patty off a stack and place it on the grill. He seasoned the steak and cracked eggs into a bowl, moving so fast he seemed to be doing all of these things at once. He wore a little paper hat to distinguish himself. It was a nice touch, old-timey. I picked up the entertainment section again and read Elise’s horosc
ope. I wanted to tell her what it said, but our parents thought horoscopes were evil because the only one who knew what was going to happen was God. Elise’s advised against extended travel, which she would have found amusing. Mine said I was on an information-gathering mission of sorts—I was to keep my questions unstructured and people were going to tell me the most unusual facts about themselves and the world. I liked the sound of this, particularly the “of sorts” part. My mission could be whatever I wanted.

  I passed Elise the entertainment section and my father passed me the front page and my mother was stuck with the sports. Like all mothers everywhere, she had no use for sports. I read about the drought in Louisiana. We were passing through a red zone labeled “exceptional drought.”

  “I think the end times have already begun,” I said, showing them a picture of a woman standing on the ashes of her house. She had her face in her hands, a couple of smudged children in the background.

  “This is nothing compared to what’s coming,” our father said. “It’ll be like nothing we could even imagine. There’ll be three 9/11s in a day—tornadoes in places that have never seen tornadoes and earthquakes where there are no fault lines. The sun’ll turn red as blood and bodies’ll be piled up everywhere. Thank God we won’t be around to see it.” He always sounded so excited when he talked about the tribulations. He liked the idea of all the sinners getting what was coming to them while we were rewarded with eternal life.

  “These things have always happened,” Elise said, pouring another creamer into her coffee.

  “They seem to be happening a lot more now,” I said.

  “They’re just reporting on them more, or they come in cycles we’re too young to remember,” she said. “I’ll tweet Anderson Cooper for some hard stats, it’s probably just global warming.”

  “It seems like everything’s global warming.” I wasn’t sure what global warming was, exactly, but it felt disappointing. Our father didn’t believe in it. He said it had been made up by the Left for political gain. I could see him wanting to say something, but our food came and he picked up his napkin and set it on one knee. Then we all bowed our heads.

  “Thank you, Lord,” he said. I kept my eyes open and watched the cook’s legs move, the slight bulge in his pants. “These are simple words, but they come from simple hearts that overflow with the realization of your goodness. We ask you to bless us as we eat, bless this food and bless the hands that prepared it. May the words of our lips spring forth from hearts of gratitude and may we bless others as we fellowship today.”

  As soon as he said “Amen,” Elise was typing on her phone, thumbs moving fast over the keyboard. She stopped and reread it to herself before reading it aloud so I could tell her it sounded good. She loved Anderson Cooper, thought of him as a personal friend. He was gay, though—never before had there been so many homosexuals: “If a man also lie with mankind, they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

  While the rest of us ate, Elise drank coffee and paged through the paper. She checked her fingers to see if they were ink-smudged, picked up her phone and set it back down. She was about to cut into her waffle when her phone signaled the arrival of a text message. She smiled and shook her head, so it must have been Dan, the boy who had done this to her, only he didn’t know it yet, and maybe never would. She wasn’t like the girls from 16 and Pregnant whose boyfriends left them to raise the baby alone, frazzled and post-baby fat, studying for the GED.

  When the last of my burger began to fall apart, I pushed my plate away.

  “Do you want my waffle?” Elise asked.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You aren’t going to eat anything?” our father asked. He didn’t like it when we didn’t eat. It made him angry.

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  “You need to eat something. You hardly had any dinner last night.”

  She slid her plate over to me and I scraped butter into the holes, filled them with syrup. Elise was sick with the baby and the driving and she’d always had a weak stomach, like our father. She was the delicate sister, she liked to tell me, which wasn’t true, but I’d found there was no use in telling people what they were like.

  The waitress wedged the check between the napkin holder and saltshaker and my father picked it up and went over it carefully, running his finger down the column. He had a number 3 in black ink on the back of his right hand. Every morning he scrubbed it clean and wrote a new number—tomorrow would be 2 and then 1 and then 0. At zero, we would be in California, listening to the rapture on the radio or watching it on TV. I still didn’t understand why he thought it was important for us to be among the last; it was something he had gotten into his head.

  Elise took the check from him and looked it over. “It’s right, Dad,” she said.

  He paid with cash, counting out the bills carefully and probably leaving a bad tip, and led me to the door with a warm hand on my back. “My girl,” he said, patting. Whenever he put a hand on my body, it went up and down and up and down like it was difficult for him to touch me for more than a second at a time.

  In the trees, birds made sounds like dogs whimpering. They flew down to pick through a patch of fresh dirt.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “White-winged doves,” he said.

  “Like the kind you hunt?”

  “Cousins.”

  “They sure are fat,” I said, looking up at him, my eyes landing momentarily on the sun. He hunted doves every fall, brought them home by the sack for our mother to soak in Wish-Bone and wrap in bacon, and I was always scared I was going to bite into a pellet but I never did.

  My father unlocked the Taurus and we got in. He was about to back up when he noticed the rearview mirror had fallen off. Our mother picked it up off the floorboard and handed it to him without comment. She had become suddenly, suspiciously quiet. I didn’t know what was going on with her. I hadn’t asked. She took her clip-on sunglasses out of the glove box and cleaned them with her shirt. They were blue-tinted and held onto her regular glasses by a magnet.

  My father swore as he tried to stick the mirror back on, and then he handed it to my mother and started backing up.

  “Is there anything behind me?” he asked, already out of the parking spot.

  Elise and I collected wrappers and bottles and handed them up to our mother, stacked the magazines and placed them on the hump between us. Elise moved the bag of snacks to her side of the floorboard. It was full of things we’d never buy at home: Cheddar & Bacon Potato Skins, peanut butter wrapped in pretzels, squares of fudge that appeared homemade but had probably been made in a factory like everything else. I wasn’t going to look in the bag because I was sure the fudge had leaked out of its plastic and made a mess of everything. I liked having these snacks—they felt like protection against something. I could conjure up all sorts of scenarios in which they might save our lives.

  Our father rolled to a stop at a red light, and I watched a one-legged woman hobble down the concrete median. She was slim and youngish with shoulder-length hair and a sign that said ON MY LAST LEG. I socked Elise in the arm and she pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of her purse and handed it to me. I pushed the button on the door; my window went down, stopping not even halfway.

  “What are you doing?” my father asked. He didn’t like it when anybody rolled down the window. He hit the door-lock button.

  “We’re giving the woman some money,” Elise said.

  “She’ll just use it to buy drugs,” he said.

  “It’s possible.”

  “There are services for homeless people,” my mother said. “They don’t have to stand out here in the heat all day begging.” She looked at my father and I studied her profile. My mother was a plain woman who didn’t do much in the way of improving herself. She wore very little makeup and black or khaki pants with oversized shirts. She dyed her hair, but only the flat medium brown that was her usual shade, which she hid from my father as if he wouldn
’t be able to go on loving her if he found out. She reminded me of Marcie from Peanuts, compact and nondescript with round glasses that hid her eyes. I wanted her to be more like some of my friends’ mothers, who wore jewelry and nice dresses with heels; even the fat ones seemed regal, proud.

  “Give her a tract, Jess,” my father said, his arm swinging back and forth at my legs. He got a weak hold on my ankle and I yanked it away.

  The woman hobbled over on her crutch and took the bill.

  “God bless you,” she said, shoving it into the good-leg pocket of her jeans. It reminded me of the times homeless people had said this to me when I hadn’t given them anything, how nasty it could sound. The woman looked almost normal close-up, her face dry and brown but pretty.

  My father cracked his window. “It doesn’t take God any time at all to save someone,” he said. “In the last hour of a terribly sinful life, the thief on the cross was saved by Christ.” She gave him the finger. The car behind us honked.

  “Go,” my mother said, leaning forward.

  My father stepped on the gas and the car jerked into motion. He viewed the bad reactions as a spiritual test. Otherwise, he wouldn’t compare a woman he didn’t know to the thief on the cross, he wouldn’t be such an asshole. He followed the line of cars merging onto the interstate and I wondered if anyone missed the woman and wanted her to come home. I didn’t know how people survived if there was no one to miss them.

  “ ‘And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom,’ ” our father continued. “ ‘And Jesus said unto him, verily I say unto thee, today thou shalt be with me in paradise.’ ” He repeated “paradise.” In paradise, he wouldn’t have to work or worry about money. In paradise, he wouldn’t have to take insulin shots, pinching the fat on his stomach and stabbing himself before meals. Half the time he didn’t do it and we didn’t remind him. He had an Asian doctor he called Woo who always sent him home with pamphlets about diet and exercise, which only pissed him off—he ate more ice cream and drank more Coke now than ever. He had also started drinking alcohol, which wasn’t something he would have ever done before. It seemed to represent a terrible shift: a complete resignation, all hell breaking loose.