The moon shimmered on the water. The answer was very simple. She would just have to be very, very nice to them, and hope they remembered just how much they loved her.
In a few weeks, when people started dying, she would look back on this thought in stark horror.
* * *
For breakfast, she made goat cheese omelets, sliced cantaloupe, and cappuccino brewed with beans she'd brought back for herself from San Francisco.
Her dad gave her a look. "Is this supposed to redeem the $200,000 of room, board, and tuition we've spent in the last four years?"
"It might once you try it."
He seated himself and allowed himself to be served. He cut off the smallest corner of omelet, as if he were wholly prepared to pitch the rest in the trash, and chewed skeptically.
"This is a $200 omelet," he conceded. "Which leaves a mere $199,800 to go. Not counting, of course, whatever living expenses you incur today."
"Sharecropping is illegal in this country, Dad."
"Then it's a good thing it's still perfectly legal to exploit your children."
With nothing else to do until Alden's kung fu lesson that afternoon, she spent the morning reading. For fun. After four years of assignments that left her with no time for leisure reading during the semester and no desire for it during the summer, it was a revelation just to read some good ol' fashioned garbage, as well as an engrossing way to totally ignore Pete's texts massing on her phone.
Twenty minutes before they were supposed to be at his lesson, Alden came to the foyer in jeans, t-shirt, and tennis shoes.
"That's your uniform?" she said.
Alden cocked his head at the exact angle their dad did. "Sifu says he likes to practice in the same clothes he'd be wearing in a street fight."
"Is that so? How many brawls have you been in since you began your training?"
"Tristan, we're not supposed to use it on anyone."
She stepped out the front door into the afternoon light. "Then why do you learn it at all? To impress girls?"
"No, come on," Alden said. Was he blushing? "At first I just thought it would be cool, but it's really fun."
The lawn smelled like fresh clippings; Ernesto had been there this morning. She wound her way out of the subdivision. When they'd moved in twelve years ago, three-quarters of the lots had been vacant, yellow weeds in gray dirt. Now they were boxed in by McMansions. Not long ago, Tristan had considered their brickwork, floodlights, and scalloped roofs stately, but after four years on and around campus, surrounded on all sides by proper cities, they now struck her as gauche, hopelessly, hideously tasteless. Now, every fourth house had a "FOR SALE" sign on the front lawn. Two were accompanied by pictures of her mother's perfect, eager face.
"Dad says you expect life to be handed to you on a platter."
Tristan laughed. "What did you just say?"
Alden rolled down the window to let in the cool mountain air. "He says you'd rather hold out your hand than get it dirty."
She sat at the stop sign a moment, stunned and stung, then turned out of the subdivision. "What do you think?"
"That you don't want to work? Sounds pretty lazy to me."
"It's not that I don't want to work. It's that I was promised something more than what's out there."
"Who promised you that?"
She thought a moment. "Everyone. Mom and Dad. Teachers. Politicians. The movies. They all said if you work hard in school, you won't have to suffer some shit job all your life." She glanced at him. "Sorry."
Alden gave her the side-eye. "Dude, I'm thirteen."
"Fine. Just don't swear in front of Mom and Dad."
"So you're saying I shouldn't work hard in school."
"No!" She swerved into the turn lane at the last moment. She'd lived in Redding all her life and was already starting to forget how to get from one end to the other. "Look, if you bomb out in school, you guarantee yourself a shit job. I shouldn't complain. But Mom and Dad have money. Several monies. I don't see why they can't help me out for just a little longer."
He slumped down in his seat, gazing out the window at the blue-green mountains and their white crowns. "Dude, you're crazy. I can't wait to move out from them."
She frowned. He pointed the dojo out to her, a long, barn-like building between a gas station and an AA center. She pulled into the gravel lot.
He opened the door and leaned back inside. "Class lasts until seven, so I guess you can just pick me up then."
"I'm coming inside. I want to watch you kick ass."
The mortification on his teenage face would be worth the two straight hours of boredom. It also didn't hurt that it gave her an excuse to be out of the house if Pete called or dropped by. She hadn't given much thought to what the instructor would look like—a small Chinese man with a wise smile, assumedly—but found, to her racist embarrassment, a middle-aged white guy with a substantial gut and long, curly hair that wouldn't have been out of place on a Fraggle. He tried to talk her into joining the handful of students on the dojo floor, but she laughed and shook her head.
"Maybe if I lived in Oakland."
Pete texted again before class was over. He was beginning to be a worry. On the mats, Alden glanced at Tristan every time he stumbled or the instructor gently corrected him; she hurriedly looked down at her phone, pretending to text. Otherwise, her brother grinned a lot. That was good. Despite Tristan's increasingly sporadic replies, her mom's weekly emails had grown worried about him. Probably having a hard time adjusting to the fact he was a teenager now, just a year away from high school, and the little blond boy who hugged her first thing every morning was gone, never to return.
When they got home, their dad was unloading scallions and organic chicken breasts from his green canvas grocery bag.
"Well, look at that," he said. "You drove your brother there and back and somehow didn't drop dead from exhaustion."
Tristan popped open the fridge. "Is this your plan to convince me I'd rather be a grownup in the big city?"
"Is it working?"
"Like a dream."
After dinner, as she racked the dishes into the washer, her phone rang. She glanced at its face, ready to deny the call, but it was Laura. Twenty minutes later, they were seated together at the Hoof & Tanner, a tourist-sucking drinking hole that was patterned, for totally arbitrary reasons, after a quaint English pub. But Laura worked there, which meant that as long as her manager was out, Laura didn't pay for drinks and her friends got doubles at the price of singles. Strictly speaking, Tristan should have been saving every penny in her pocket, but drunk at half price struck her as a pretty good deal right then.
Laura was a born bartender: pretty, tough, able to let the most offensive statements slide by without a blink. While Tristan had found herself shockingly unsentimental about losing touch with the rest of their high school friends, Laura was the one person she genuinely missed even in the deepest throes of city and school. Whenever she got back to Redding, their conversation resumed without missing a beat, as if Laura had been off in the bathroom for five minutes rather than away in Berkeley for the last six weeks.
"I want to tell you something," Tristan said after her third screwdriver. "But it's going to sound totally entitled and awful."
Laura's expression didn't budge. "You think that makes me want to hear it less?"
"My parents want me to get a job."
"The horror."
"Any job. When I want to work in music."
Laura snorted. "So does everyone. That's why they start off giving it away on the street corner. Speaking of, what's your plan B?"
"Move back here. With my parents."
"I feel like this is the part in the Katherine Heigl movie where the friend who's not quite as pretty tells Heigl to get over herself, get out there, and find what she wants before it's too late."
"First—no." Tristan stirred her drink. "Second, I don't want to hear what Sarcastic Sidekick thinks. I want to hear what you think."
Laura no
dded. "Get over yourself, get out there, and find what you want before it's too late."
She laughed. "Come on."
"If you really need another year or whatever to figure shit out, then move back home. All the cool kids are doing it. Me? I think you've got a much better shot landing anything remotely connected to the playing of consecutive, melodic notes if you're down in San Francisco."
"Berkeley."
"Whatever." Laura waved her hand. "It doesn't matter. You're not going to drop dead if you make a decision now and regret it a year later. We've got so much time, Tristan."
Tristan sipped her drink. The vodka bit beneath the sour surface of the orange juice. "Well, as long as we're getting my life in order."
"Is this going to be about Zeke?"
"Yeah."
Laura leaned nearer, conspiratorial. "Is his name really Zeke?"
"A guy can't be named Zeke?"
"Not unless he's about to take you up to the hayloft."
Tristan finished her screwdriver. "Again, I have two points. One, I cleaned the hay out weeks ago. And two, I took him."
"Does Pete know?"
"That I appear to have a thing for guys with two e's in their name? Did you get Pod Personed?"
Laura rolled her eyes. "You get that you don't even like Pete at this point, right? He's yesterday's lunch. He is the soggy Styrofoam that once contained yesterday's lunch. Throw him away."
"Okay," Tristan said.
"Okay? I was expecting much more fight. Great. Can we move on to my problems now?"
Tristan laughed. Once she was home—Laura's friend had driven them, Tristan would pick up the Lexus in the morning—she went to the back deck to watch the stars. She resolved to call Pete the next morning.
Three days later, they still hadn't spoken. With plans to drive back to Berkeley that Sunday, she hadn't even texted him. Her failure just made her feel worse. It wasn't that Pete was even bad. He just wasn't...for her. Not the Tristan who was about to finish college. He was a relic, a walking photograph of a younger woman, one charmed by the tall boy's comfort in his own skin. In high school, where they'd met, that had been a rare thing. By the end of college, it was as common in the Berkeley men as open shoes and stupid haircuts.
That's what made her disinterest so hard to explain to anyone who wasn't Laura. From the outside looking in, she and Pete were storybook. She'd been a sophomore in high school, he'd been a junior. She'd been his third, he'd been her second. They weren't the prom king and queen, nor the high school couple you felt certain would wind up with eight kids together, but they just seemed well matched: equally handsome (weird to self-apply the term, but if she were being honest, it was true), equally competent—she in a career-woman way, he in a handy, sturdy way that would find work as a carpenter or ski instructor or manager of an a local auto mechanic.
Yet she no longer wanted that from a partner. She hadn't wanted that for a long time. Still, even when she left for college while he stayed in town to work in one of the lodges in the mountains, she had remained faithful—and as far as she knew, so had he—for three and a half years.
And then Zeke. If Pete & Tristan were a story, she was ready for it to end.
She felt more guilty about not telling Pete about her drifting feelings for him than she did for cheating on him. In a way, that was worst of all, because the guilt only made it that much easier to keep putting off her confession. To wait on the chance, however slim, for Pete to hear about her indiscretion from someone besides herself. Or for Pete to get so frustrated with the growing distance between them that he'd break up with her. Put plainly, her reticence to speak was stupid and it was selfish.
And knowing that didn't help one bit. She was frozen, stuck mid-stride, waiting for the world to rise to meet her feet.
* * *
In the mornings, she made her family breakfast, then retired to the deck overlooking the sloped back yard to read from her mom's sci-fi collection, a down comforter cloaking her shoulders to nullify the mountain chill, a cup of coffee steaming on the granite end table. In the afternoons, she browsed the SF Bay Area Craigslist for music work, including unpaid internships; she figured her dad might spring for another six months of rent if she had a foot in the door. Proof of her dedication and work ethic. Not that she'd floated the idea of taking an internship to him. She hadn't heard back from anyone yet, and didn't particularly expect to. No sense descending into another foolish argument over something that wasn't even on her radar.
She burned her afternoons in Redding driving around, either on family errands, or simply cruising the back roads. If she did snag a job in the next eight weeks, she might not see much in the way of forests for a while. Anyway, she just had to avoid Pete for another few days, and then there would once more be two hundred blessed miles between them.
When she got back from her drives, she helped prep dinner, or acted as a living dummy for Alden to practice his kung fu on, which he did every day. He was a skinny little kid and she outweighed him by more than a few pounds, but he could unbalance her at will just by grabbing her wrist and dropping his weight in a sudden, foot-tromping jerk. Except when she resisted. Then he screwed up his baby-smooth face (which showed no sign of acne yet, though his sweat stank like a boy who'd begun puberty), yanked on her wrist, and told her she was cheating. She laughed and let him try again.
After that came dinner, and after dinner came TV or a movie, and soon enough it was time for bed. It was all pleasant enough, but she soon began to miss the rhythm of the city, the ability to go to the coffee shop at any time of day and find her friends there writing screenplays on their laptops or arguing about Lacan and Foucault. She no longer belonged here. To visit was nice, but to stay was wearying.
That Saturday, the day before she was scheduled to return, she asked Alden if he wouldn't rather practice his kung fu at the park instead.
He dropped his gaze to the carpet. "Nah."
"Come on. Fresh air. You can karate chop a pigeon."
"It's not karate."
"You can kung fu chop a pigeon."
He glanced at the front window. "They have salmonella."
"Come on, it'll be way more fun." She squinted at him, then grinned. "Are you afraid of being seen?"
"No."
"But you're way good!"
He glanced up, a spark of pride in his eyes, then grew guarded again. "A true master of kung fu doesn't engage in prideful displays."
Tristan laughed. "Nobody's going to see. And if you don't come with, I'll post the clips I've been taking of you on YouTube."
His jaw dropped. "You've been filming me?"
"Only always."
He ran to get his shoes. She drove them across the river and swung down Victor. It wasn't much of a park—isolated pines, grass, bathrooms, the requisite gazebo—but it was a sunny day and the grounds were busier than she'd anticipated. A car followed her into the turn and parked down the lot. On the soccer field, a squad of eight-year-olds was holding a pickup game, turf flying from their sneakers. A couple about Tristan's age was lodged in the tall grass, the girl's head resting on the man's lap. Tristan led Alden past a pair of middle school girls giggling at the couple from beneath the safety of a tree, then came to a stop at an isolated patch of grass on the north end of the park. Small white bugs fluttered clumsily from the grass.
Alden stared off at the girls. Tristan waved a hand in front of his face. "Well? Let's get awesome."
He scowled at her, then began his stretching process, an eight-part routine he claimed was traditional in China and included symbolic gestures like drawing a bow and pouring a bowl of water over one's own head. To help him feel less like an idiot, Tristan joined him. By the end of the routine, she was ready to peel off her sweater and he was ready to begin his forms no matter who might be watching.
While he was punching, kicking, and mangling the air, Tristan gestured to the two middle school girls, who'd been watching them the last five minutes. They laughed behind their hands and con
ferred. Tristan gestured again. After another, lengthier conference, the pair walked across the grass and stopped in front of Alden, who quit his form mid palm strike and blushed furiously.
"What are you doing?" the dark-haired girl asked. "Karate?"
"Kung fu," Alden mumbled.
"Like in the movies?"
"All the good ones," Tristan said. She socked Alden on the shoulder. "Come on, don't quit. They want to watch."
"Yeah, that was cool," said the other girl, a short-haired blond who hadn't quite grown into her height. "I liked how you were twirling your wrist."
Alden shot Tristan such a helpless look of embarrassment and wrath she burst out laughing. "You've done this a million times. Consider this the next step in your training—it's time to step out of the temple."
He froze, gazing toward her car with naked longing until Tristan feared he might actually make a run for it. Then he snapped his eyes forward, let out a long breath through his nostrils, and picked up exactly where he'd let off. The girls clapped. When he finished his form, they gave him a proper round of applause.
Alden gave her another look, then. One close to gratitude, at least as much as a thirteen-year-old can feel for his older sister. She winked.
"Do you know anything cool?" the dark-haired girl asked.
"Well, I know a pretty good trap," he said. "Here, give me a slow punch at the chest, followed by one with your other hand."
She punched. He intercepted. She struck with her other fist and he blocked again, tangling their arms. The blond girl laughed. "He's so smooth!"
"You're a tough lady to find," a man called from behind.
Tristan whirled. "Pete? Why are you here?"
He grinned, gazing up at her from beneath his eyelashes, mock-shy. He had veiny arms she'd once admired and a goatee she'd always despised. After the last few minutes looming over the thirteen-year-olds, Pete made her feel very short.
The Breakers Series: Books 1-3 Page 34