Home Free

by Sonnjea Blackwell

  Damn straight. “Angry? About what?”

  He sighed. “That I left.”

  “Jeez, Salazar, we were kids. Things that seem so important when you’re seventeen aren’t even a blip on the radar when you’re twenty-nine. Don’t sweat it. I’m not losing any sleep over you.”

  He kind of looked like he’d been kicked in the stomach, which was my goal but didn’t make me feel as good as I’d thought it would. He nodded slowly and stood to leave. His eyes looked tired, and I thought about stopping him, apologizing and starting the whole conversation over. I reached for his arm. A key turned in the lock, the front door opened and Jack Murphy’s voice boomed into the living room.

  “Hi honey, I’m home!”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Unfuckingbelievable. I dropped my head into my hands and squeezed my eyes closed.

  The guys did the macho hand shaking, back slapping thing and Danny left without another glance at me. Jack sensed that there was something going on but couldn’t figure out what and since I didn’t know myself, he cheerily went about measuring and writing numbers on a piece of paper. I drank a glass of water to drown the butterflies in my stomach, contemplated a belt of something stronger before I had to face the family, decided against it, then yelled goodbye to Jack, locked up the house as I left and got in the car.

  My neighborhood used to be called Gregory Estates. Even when the homes were new, estates was gross hyperbole. Over the years, as the area decayed, the name fell out of use. The houses, like most of the houses in Minter, are one-story ranch style tract homes. My street, Shasta Drive, used to be a dead-end, which made it nice for kids playing in the street and worked to keep the property values up slightly. About fifteen years ago, they had extended the street out to meet the next crossroad, and traffic got heavier, families moved out and it became more of a rental neighborhood. There was a meth lab a few houses down that had been busted a number of times. I was hoping it wouldn’t explode, as meth labs are prone to, and take my house with it. The place across from me had two rusted-out Camaro bodies in the driveway and housed a man who evidently owned no shirts. But some of the houses had been bought, like mine, by younger professionals or young families, and the street was starting to show signs of new life. My next door neighbor, who had come over with some cookies the first day I moved in, was a single woman named Debbie who worked at the post office, had a few too many cats and liked to decorate her yard to the point of the ridiculous. Now that Independence Day had passed, I was waiting to see what she would do. I couldn’t think of a holiday between July fourth and Halloween, but what did I know? She was removing the red, white and blue whirly-gigs from her lawn as I pulled out. I honked, and she smiled and waved a little American flag at me.

  My parents’ house was about a mile and a half from mine, in an older but nicer part of town. Twenty-second Street was an old, wide, tree-lined avenue filled with families when I was growing up. A few months ago Kevin had finally moved out, the last of my generation to leave the street, but a lot of the same parents still lived there. It was a middle-class neighborhood of modest means, old-fashioned family values and a desire to keep up with the Jones’s. People parked in the driveways or on the streets because garages were used as workshops, craft areas or places for the husbands to hang out and smoke cigars without incurring the wrath of their wives. If someone in the neighborhood bought a fancy new car and parked it inside their garage, they would be shunned for being too big for their britches.

  I pulled up to my parents’ house a little after two o’clock and looked around the street. I was sure Brian was here because he would never be late, but I didn’t know what car to look for. I spied a hulking silver Minteres M-class SUV with vanity plates that read MM MBL. Either Mabel was tasty, or it was a Mom Mobile, which sounded like the clever sort of thinking Brian was famous for. Kevin’s black Harley Softail Deuce was in the driveway, along with my mom’s silver Camry and my dad’s black Chevy Silverado. Black and silver seemed to be the family colors. I parked my metallic orange Element on the street, glanced in the mirror to check my makeup and peeled myself out of the car. I was wearing denim Bermuda shorts, a yellow tank-top style shirt with spaghetti straps and built-in bra thingy and red flip-flops. As close to naked as the law and respectability would allow, and still I started to sweat as soon as I opened the door. It was one hundred and eleven degrees already. The asphalt shimmered and I choked on the smell of melted road tar. A layer of smog hung over the horizon, held hostage by the inversion layer. Another perfect summer day in central California.

  I trudged up the driveway to the back gate. That’s what you did in Minter in the summertime. No one went to the front door because no one would answer. Everyone was in their backyards, swimming and barbecuing and drinking beer.

  “Well here you are,” my mother said as I walked into the yard. Everyone was in his place. Brian’s wife (still can’t remember her name) was supervising their spawn in the pool, Brian and my father were engaged in a Serious Conversation at the patio table, Kevin was drinking a beer and manning the barbecue, which meant we were having burgers and hotdogs because if we were having steak or ribs, only Brian would be allowed to do the grilling, and my mom was setting out side dishes and fanning herself.

  “Hey.”

  Everyone looked up expectantly. I walked over to the ice chest and dug around for the rare regular Coke amongst all of the diet sodas and beer. I popped the can, sat down with a thud on one of the wooden patio chairs and chugged half the soda. I looked around at my family and burped. My mother gave me a look.

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “Are you seeing Doctor Hennessy?” my mother asked.

  I found that question odd, since all the rumors that had gotten back to me suggested I was screwing Jack pretty regularly and I wondered when I’d have time to squeeze in anybody else. Plus, Doctor Hennessy was about sixty-five, and I had never been one of those sugar-daddy types. Gossip moves in mysterious ways, I guess.

  “That’s just gross. Haven’t you heard about me and Murphy in Bardini’s orchard?”

  “Alexis! Your father and I are worried sick about your brain tumor, and you have to make tasteless remarks about your inappropriate affair? Are you ever going to grow up?”

  I looked at my dad, who didn’t look worried sick to me. He was gazing longingly at his hammock and I guessed he hadn’t put much stock in the brain tumor and kinky sex rumors, and I was grateful somebody in my family had some sense. I realized this was going to be one hell of a long afternoon. I took a very deep breath.

  “I don’t have a brain tumor, Mom. And I’m not screwing Jack -- ”

  “Alex! Watch your language in front of the boys,” Brian admonished me. Right, I thought. I’m dying of a fucking brain tumor, and he’s worried that I might corrupt the devil progeny.

  “Oh, it was Jack Murphy,” Kevin said from his perch near the grill. “I heard it was one of the Murphy boys, but I wasn’t sure which one.”

  “Well, at least it was only one,” I offered.

  “At a time, anyway,” Kevin countered.

  “Kevin and Alexis, that is enough!” I figured I was pretty close to being sent to my room, so I stuck my tongue out at Kevin for getting me yelled at and proceeded to answer my mother’s questions like the dutiful daughter she’d always wished she’d had.

  After everyone had had their fill of burgers, hot dogs and the epic tale of how I’d come to be living amongst them again when I’d always sworn I’d poke my own eyes out with chopsticks before I moved back to this godforsaken town, I decided it was my turn to get some information. I turned to my mother.

  “How come you never told me that Danny Salazar was back in Minter?”

  She shook her head, confused. “I don’t know. He’s been here,” she looked over at my dad, “what is it Al, a couple of years?” Dad grunted from his hammock and mom turned back to me. “Why would I mention it?”

  “Why?” I looked at her incredulously, then caught sig
ht of Kevin out of the corner of my eye. He was looking at me and shaking his head no. Duh. Why indeed.

  The Salazars lived in the house directly behind us, our back yards sharing a fence. Miguel “Mike” Salazar owned Salazar’s Sand & Gravel, and his two younger brothers, Alejandro, or Alex, and Louie worked for him. Technically, I should say Mike ran Salazar’s because although he may have owned the business, the mob owned him. Minter is not a big mafia town, but there are a few bookies and loan sharks that are reportedly connected. According to popular legend, Mike Salazar was into them for a lot of money. Rather than break his kneecaps, the mob made a different deal. They would use Salazar’s for laundering money, they would use Mike and his brothers as enforcers, and they would use the gravel pits for whatever they needed them for. Mike was a mean drunk. He didn’t necessarily drink often, but when he did he would come home and beat the crap out of whichever family member he met first. When his sons were small, that usually meant his wife, Rose. Rose O’Reilly was a redhaired, fair skinned beauty who had fallen for Mike’s good looks and charming lines. She had two sons with him, Mike Junior and Danny, and she stayed with him after he started drinking and cheating, I supposed because she always hoped he’d stop and things would go back to the way they were before. As the boys got older, they were frequently the targets for their father’s rage, more often than not because they tried to protect Rose. Supposedly Mike Junior was just like his father, hard and mean. I didn’t know him. He was five years older than me, and when I was still in junior high he had gone to prison for killing a man in a bar fight. It was just before his eighteenth birthday, but they had tried him as an adult, convicting him of second degree murder, and he had been sentenced to fifteen years in the state penitentiary at Lompoc.

  Danny was different. Being half Latin and half Irish, it would have been an affront to stereotypes everywhere if he hadn’t had a temper. But he didn’t have the same reputation for meanness. Nevertheless, he was a Salazar and there was a burden associated with that. People didn’t want their kids to play at his house or become too friendly, and if it hadn’t been for baseball, he probably would have been alone a lot. As it was, he was the best player Minter had seen in decades, not to mention the best looking, and consequently he was always popular, with both the boys and the girls. Like Mike and Mikey, Danny had a reputation for being a charmer and a womanizer, and I suspected it was well-deserved. He was never without a girl by his side, and whoever she was, she was always pretty, usually blond and tended toward the vapid. My brother played baseball, too, and so I had known Danny peripherally my whole life, although I didn’t actually know him. He, like Kevin, was a year ahead of me in school and traveled in different circles. In fact, if I had to guess, I would have said he didn’t know my name, and I was fairly certain we’d never had a conversation. This was not a problem for me, since I had never given him a second thought.

  About a week before the end of my junior year, there was this big street festival thing in the high school gym after school. There were booths for games and booths for food, and carnival rides outside. The temperature was blistering, school was almost out, hormones were raging. Pauline and I, dressed for the occasion in shorts and orange and black Minter High School Bears t-shirts, were making our way through the food booths. Derek was out of town at a track meet, and Pauline was temporarily without a boyfriend.

  “Are you sure you haven’t had one? Maybe you just couldn’t tell.”

  “I would know. I’ve done it myself plenty of times. I don’t know why Derek can’t seem to figure it out.”

  “Have you told him what to do? I read in Cosmo that a girl should be direct about telling a guy what she wants.”

  I thought that what I wanted was for it to be something other than two and a half minutes of grunting and grabbing, but I wasn’t sure how to tell Derek that. I wasn’t in love with him, but he was nice so I didn’t want to be mean about it. Derek wasn’t my first boyfriend, but he was the first one I’d slept with and so far, I wasn’t impressed. Pauline didn’t have sex. She was saving herself for marriage. She changed her mind the next year when she started dating Jack Murphy. I certainly couldn’t blame her.

  We had just finished eating a couple of churros and were approaching the varsity baseball team’s booth. Expecting to find more food, we wandered up. The hand painted banner read KISSING BOOTH $1, and there were a couple girls getting their money’s worth. Pauline started into her feminist routine.

  “Hunh. I guess I don’t need to pay some boy to kiss me. Women aren’t objects, you know.”

  “Uh, Paul, I think the guys are the objects in this scenario.” I was fishing a single out of my pocket. Don’t ask me why. It was like my body was completely detached from my brain and I was watching myself do things, like an out-of-body experience or a split personality or one of those things I’d read about instead of doing my homework. Danny Salazar was in front of the booth, leaning against the counter, talking to a teammate, and I suddenly found him utterly irresistible. I stared and checked for drool.

  Pauline shrugged. “Well, I don’t care. I think it’s disgusting.”

  Yeah, me too. Disgusting.

  I handed Danny the dollar.

  He took it without looking up and said, “I’m on a break.” Then he glanced over at me, shrugged and said, “Oh, what the hell.” I have that effect on men a lot.

  He barely leaned forward and kissed me, a proper kissing-booth kind of kiss on the lips, no tongue, no hands. And I swear to God, I forgot my name. I guessed it was okay for him too, because it seemed to last a little longer than it should have, and then he straightened up and looked at me kind of funny. He whispered, “Jesus, Lex.” Then he kissed me again, for real this time. He had his hand on the back of my neck, his fingers tangled in my hair, and his other hand through the belt loop on the front of my shorts pulling me into him. I felt his tongue touch mine, and everything went sort of blurry. It started out tentative but turned confident and intimate and hot. Eventually, I became aware of someone speaking.

  “...supposed to be a kissing booth, not a goddamn live-sex show. Jesus Christ, is that my sister?” Danny pulled back as Kevin approached. Our eyes locked.

  “Dude, I hope she paid you for that.”

  Pauline was making gagging noises in her throat and tugging at my arm. Sherry Henderson, Danny’s girlfriend, walked up and threw a derisive look my way.

  “Jeez, Danny, do you have to kiss all the geeks?”

  I smiled. “Hey, Sherry. How’s the rash?” I let Pauline pull me away, Danny half-smiling, watching us go.

  I was in my room doing homework when someone rang the doorbell around five o’clock that night. My mom was at the hospital and my dad was at a teachers’ meeting. Kevin was at his after school job at the motorcycle shop downtown. Pauline had gotten herself a date for the evening after all, and I was probably the only loser in town, and maybe even the entire state, studying on Friday night the week before school let out. I could have been having crappy sex with my stupid boyfriend, but Derek wasn’t due back until Sunday afternoon. I was in a bad mood. I stomped to the front door, flipped the deadbolt and flung the door open without checking the peephole, something my mother was constantly warning me about.

  “What?”

  Danny Salazar smiled and pushed past me into the entryway. This was exactly the kind of thing my mom said would happen if I opened the door without checking first. He closed it behind him. We stood there for a minute, staring at each other. Then Danny looked around.

  “Your brother here?”

  I shook my head no, and he nodded.

  “So. I have a girlfriend.”

  “Yeah, me too. Well, I mean, a boyfriend.”

  “Right. That track kid. Anyway, I have varsity championships this week, and then I have city league ball all summer plus working at the gravel yard, and then I’m going to Michigan on a scholarship in the fall.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know where he was going with this. It was like he was read
ing me his to-do list or something.

  “So I can’t get involved with...” he shrugged, “anything else right now.” He looked me in the eyes, and it was the first time I ever really noticed his. They were dark and warm and seemed uncertain to me.

  “Okay.” I meant it. The kiss earlier, as outstanding as it had been, had scared the hell out of me. This was a guy who wouldn’t need me to tell him what to do, if we did anything, and if we did, I was plenty sure it would last longer than a couple of minutes. Danny wasn’t the kind of guy I could date. There’d be too much pressure. He was popular. He had experience. And he was a Salazar, so my father would never allow it. It was fine for his son to play ball with Danny, but it would be a whole other thing for his daughter to date him.

  “Okay.” He smiled a slow, wicked smile. “So. What do you think would have happened in the gym today if your brother hadn’t walked up?” He was looking in my eyes again, and I was thinking maybe I’d been too hasty before. My dad was a reasonable man.

  “And we weren’t at school, surrounded by people?”

  He reached behind me and threw the deadbolt, never taking his eyes off mine. “Yeah.” God, that voice.

  I tilted my head up and flashed him what I hoped was my most irresistible smile. “What do you think would have happened?” Did I mention I was easy?

  Two hours later, I was enjoying the coolness of the tile floor on my back when I heard a car door slam.

  “Shit, that’s my dad!” I jumped to my feet, scooping up clothing and running to my room.

  Danny tugged on his jeans, stuffed his underwear in his pocket, threw his shirt on over his head and sauntered over to the couch in the living room, sitting down with a calmness that suggested he’d done this before. I was in my room hyperventilating and trying, for the third time, to get the buttons on my shirt to line up right when I heard the front door open and close.

  “Hi, Mr. Jordan.”