Like Family

by Paula McLain

  To Bub, fear — of change or failure or disappointment — wasn’t a reason not to dream. He wanted us girls to plan big — the bigger and broader and less ordinary, the better. Like the time I was filthy rich with diamonds for a day. I found them down by the water tank where Bub had started building a fort for us a few months before. It was going to have real walls and a roof and a rope ladder, but he’d only finished the first stage — a structure that surrounded the well, flat on top, and looked from the house like an odd wooden hat for the water tank’s silver head. Littered with scrap lumber and bent nails, the head of a broken hammer, the ground around the water tank waited patiently for Bub’s attention.

  I went down to the tank to make my own fort, one that needed only to last the afternoon: several two-by-fours set against the tank in a partial tepee. I lay down in the zebra stripes of shade and looked out at the toast-colored grasshoppers sticking to the toast-colored grass. The sun was shrapnel. It glinted hard off the long grass and beetle shells and flecks of mica. Then I saw something else, a nugget the size of a ragged pea shot through with light. I picked it up and felt it sear into the center of my palm like money. It was a diamond; it had to be. I spent the next hour raking through the packed dirt around the tank with the sun boring into the top of my head. In the end, I had a pile of diamonds the size and weight of a robin’s egg. I wrapped them in a corner of my T-shirt and carried them up to the house, where I dribbled them into the toe of one of my dress socks, liking the way it reminded me of the pouches of gold that dangled from prospectors’ belts in Paint Your Wagon. Did staking your claim require a verbal declaration or something in writing? or maybe a flag planted there, like astronauts colonizing the moon?

  I decided to say nothing until Bub arrived home from work. After he’d taken off his work boots and washed his hands and face and sat, finally, in his chair, I held the sock up, emptying the diamonds into my palm. “Look,” I said. “Look what I found.”

  He didn’t laugh. He didn’t ruffle my hair and say, “Those are just quartz, silly.” He whistled low through his teeth and asked, “What are you going to do with all your riches?”

  SAILING AROUND THE WORLD was going to take some skill, so we practiced on Bounty, a superfast racing-class sailboat called a Thistle, which Bub had sold a few of the horses to purchase. We joined the Fresno Yacht Club, took lessons on ’eight-foot Flippers, learning to find the wind, trim a sail, tack without getting hammered by the boom. We were still too young to crew on Bounty, so Bub trained Hilde and Cousin Vicky. While they sailed, we sat on the bank, fished off the dock, pulled up sticker bushes and threw them at one another. There were a handful of Yacht Club boys around during this time, but none like Mike Stebbins. When Mike sailed by in his Flipper, life jacket on but untied, long legs kicked over the side so his Bass deck shoes dangled casually, he had every girl in a half-mile radius nearly falling overboard to check her hair in the reflection of the flat lake. Although Mike Stebbins always protected his nose with a slather of zinc oxide that looked a lot like toothpaste, it didn’t matter; he could have spit bogies or burped his way through the alphabet and he still would have been a stone fox.

  Unfortunately, Mike took no more notice of my sisters and me than he would a burr stuck to his shoelace, so we were stuck with the second string: Tony Harlan, Pete and Danny Berringer, Todd Olson — boys who did spit bogies and burp the alphabet, to no great effect. We were happy enough to have these boys around, though. With all of our parents out in the middle of the lake, well out of earshot and engaged for hours, we were free to get into whatever trouble we could collectively cook up. Sometimes we settled for a floating-dock version of King of the Mountain; sometimes we used our life jackets as sleds and flung ourselves down the side of a canyon made of a pinkish clay that was startlingly slick and only hurt when you slid off your life jacket and had to scrape along the rest of the way with your shorts riding up to give you a world-class wedgie.

  On a particularly scorching summer day, a bunch of us climbed a hundred-foot sand hill that sloped gradually down to the lake. One third of the way up, a dirt road was cut into the hill, upon which several cars were parked.

  “See that space between the red car and that station wagon?” Pete Berringer said to no one in particular, pointing. “1’11 bet you can’t roll this rock down the hill, through that gap and into the lake.”

  We all looked down at the rock he had in mind, a boulder the size of a medicine ball, and then most of us looked away, chicken, which is what Pete had been banking on. Even Teresa had her hands firmly in her pockets and was kicking sand.

  “Oh, all right, you sissies. Watch.” He squatted to dislodge the rock, then shoved it over a few feet. He knelt down, eyeballing a path as if he was shooting marbles, then sent the rock with a push. It skittered down the hill, gave a few bounces that had us cringing and biting our lips, and then flew right through the gap, landing in the lake with a belly-flop-sounding splash. Pete puffed out his scrawny chest and said, “Hah!”

  Hating to be outdone by a boy half her size, Tina stepped up. She put her hands on her jean-shorted hips, leaned all of her weight on one dirty bare foot and said, “You think that’s something?” She looked up the hill and spied a boulder that was double the size of Pete’s rock, squashed flat on one side. She headed right for it, and we followed. This was getting interesting. By the time we got there, Tina was digging like a dog under the rock, throwing up sand. It started to fall before she was ready, but she gave it a shove anyway, and we all watched with our mouths open as the boulder flew on a diagonal toward the red car and missed it by a hair. “HAH!” Tina said, and blew up at her damp bangs.

  After that, Pete and Tina were unstoppable; they threw every rock down that hill they could get their hands on, softball-size or bowling-ball-size, it didn’t matter. Danny, who was only eight to Pete’s ten, got nervous and tried to stop them by saying he could see the parents sailing back into the harbor, but no one was listening. Pete had his eye on a gigantic specimen near the top of the hill. It was an extraordinary rock, truly, half the size of the red sedan they were half aiming at. Although it should have taken all of us shoving to get it going down the hill, all of us weren’t willing to bank on the angle of its fall, and so we watched as Pete and Tina huffed and puffed, sweat staining the armpits of their T-shirts. It wasn’t budging.

  “C’mon,” Pete said to Danny and Tony Harlan. “Get over here, you pussies.” Just then, the rock shifted, and shifted again, so that Tina had to skitter over to the side to get out of the way. The descent was spectacular. It took the hill like an elephant on roller skates, veered left for no reason we could see, and blind-sided the sedan with enough force to make it shudder.

  Tina gave a chipmunk shriek and looked to Pete. We all did. He wasn’t the oldest there, but he was the oldest boy. He would know what to feel, what to do, what came next. “Huh,” Pete said, shrugging his bony shoulders. “I didn’t think it would do that.”

  A long hour later, when the race was over and all the boats were docked, Bub, Hilde and Pete and Danny’s parents stood around the red sedan, clucking and shaking their heads. We thought Pete and Tina were in for a real creaming, but Mr. and Mrs. Berringer were sensible people who believed in “life lessons.” Pete and Tina’s punishment would be waiting for the owners of the car to arrive and telling them exactly what had happened. That was part A. Part B was that they would spend the next several years paying off the damage with their allowances. Pete and Tina sat down in the sand and waited for the owners, looking positively green. Two years without allowance meant no Mad magazines, no pinball, no Saturday matinees, no popping into a corner store for a bottle of grape soda and an Abba-Zabba bar. Life lessons were expensive. Was it too late to ask for the creaming?

  MOST SAILBOAT RACES WERE held at Millerton Lake, some twenty miles from our house, but we also took Bounty to regattas all over California, Redding to Tamales Bay to San Diego. Our favorite was the Mile-High Regatta at Huntington Lake, where there were
always tons of kids on the beach and where the grownups stayed up late singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky” and “Sloop John B.” around a campfire. Every year, something terrible happened before or during the trip to Huntington. It was tradition. The first year, Tina ran into a tree and split her head open while we were playing yard games in the dark near the Yacht Club. The second year, our truck blew a rod on the Grade, a section of mountain highway so steep you could see it from our property, cut into the Sierras like a firebreak, like an arched white eyebrow. There was a loud pling when the rod blew; then the truck shuddered and stopped dead as a road-killed toad. In time, a nice family came along and offered to drive Bub up to the next town so he could call a tow truck, and fortunately he stopped saying goddamnitshithellshit long enough to accept.

  Another time, we got all the way to Shaver before disaster struck, an engine fire this time. Bub saw smoke threading from the hood and pulled the truck over. Leaving the engine running, he got out to raise the hood, and my sisters and I moved up in the camper to look through the cab window. The flames were a foot high, popping and curling. When Bub yelled for us to get out of the camper, my sisters and I fell over one another trying to get through the small door. So much for keeping our cool in emergencies. Bub was hollering and Hilde was hollering. We weren’t carrying a fire extinguisher, so Bub shook up several cans of Dr Pepper and shot the carbonated, squiggling streams at the fire.

  “The puppies!” Penny screamed suddenly, and we realized we’d left our eight-week-old Saint Bernard / Lab mixes, Ben and Barry, in a cardboard box inside the camper. If the truck exploded, they were goners; we had to save them. Bub was busy with the Dr Pepper and Hilde was busy with her nervous breakdown, so it was up to us girls to rescue them. This was no time for fear. I lunged back through the door like the Bionic Woman, grabbed the big cardboard box holding the puppies and tried to push it through the door. It was too big, though, even when I squished down the sides. I shoved and shoved, whimpering like the puppies. We were doomed. The puppies and I were going to die in the volcano of the camper while Bub screamed goddamnit over and over to the fire and my sisters hopped up and down and yelled … what? Take the puppies out of the box? My brain turned on like a refrigerator light — out of the box! — and I handed the puppies through the door just as Bub stopped swearing. The fire was out, the emergency over, and we were saved, all of us. Even if I turned out to be more like Laverne or Shirley than the Bionic Woman, even if Bub was more like, well, Bub, than the cavalry, we were delivered.

  AMBER SWENSON MARCHED ACROSS the street and up our dirt driveway and rapped three times fast on the jamb of our open front door. “Yoo-hoo!” she hollered. “Anybody home?”

  It was Saturday. Tina and my sisters had gone to the grocery store with Hilde; Bub was out back, swearing under the hood of the Subaru, something to do with a fan belt; I was in the living room watching Land of the Lost in my bathing suit. It was 105 degrees, standard fare for a Fresno summer. I got up to see who it was, and my mouth fell clean open.

  We hadn’t seen much of Amber or her brothers since the star-thistle episode. Throughout the school year, Amber had been in the third-grade classroom next to my fourth-grade one at Jefferson Elementary, but she was easy enough to avoid. She and her brothers rode a different bus than we did, and if I saw Amber in the halls or at recess, I ducked and hightailed it the other way, needing no reminder that the last time I had tried to make friends I’d nearly croaked from blood poisoning. Now she stood in our doorway in white Ditto shorts and a tight-fitting pink T-shirt with kittens batting at a ball of string.

  “Hi,” she said brightly. “You’re Paula, right? I’m Amber.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Hi.” She wasn’t packing any obvious ammunition. She didn’t have her mean brothers with her. She looked harmless, really, more than harmless with two honey-colored ponytails sticking out from right above her ears. Her shoulders and hips were broad, her waist doughy. Both of my legs together were smaller than one of hers, but Amber didn’t seem to be self-conscious of her size. When I invited her into the house, she bounced in like a Superball.

  “So,” Amber said, looking around at the yarn explosion that was our kitchen; everything but the stove and refrigerator was covered with something Hilde had crocheted. “Do you have any bread?”

  “Uh, sure. Yeah.” I walked over to the counter and picked up the loaf of Wonder. “Is this okay?”

  Every square inch of Amber’s face brightened when she saw the red-and-yellow-dotted plastic bag. She sat down at Bub’s place at the table. “More than okay.” Disposing of the twist tie in a nanosecond, she pulled a slice out and methodically began to tear the crust off, keeping it whole, like an apple peel. Then she crushed the white square in her hands and began working it like a snowball, smaller and rounder. When it was walnut-size, she ate it, popped the whole thing in and chewed happily.

  Three slices had been scarfed this way before Amber took a breather. “Okay,” she said, leaning back in Bub’s chair, “that’s yummy. The parents never let us have bread, not the good kind anyway. They say it has too much sugar or something stupid.”

  “The parents?” It was odd, her putting it that way; not “my mom and dad,” not “my parents” but “the” (like Bub’s one ocean), as if the world wasn’t littered with, lousy with parents.

  She lifted her big shoulders toward her ears, lowered them again. “Yeah, the parents. The rents, the parental units.”

  “Right.”

  She fished back in the bag and started dismantling another slice. “So, what are you doing tonight?”

  “Um, nothing, I guess. Watching TV.”

  “Why don’t you come over to my house for a sleepover?”

  My mouth fell open for a second time, but I caught it, closed it and said, “Sure,” as casually as I could, considering I was the Superball now. Amber Swenson wasn’t a sticker-bush girl at all, but a doughy bread girl, and she had just invited me to my very first sleepover.

  “Ask if you want. You can let me know later.” She dug a fat, felt-tipped pen from her shorts pocket and wrote her phone number on my palm. As she walked down our driveway toward home, I stood in the doorway, blowing on the numbers, hoping they didn’t blur with sweat before Hilde got home.

  AMBER WALKED OVER TO get me after dinner, even offered to carry my Raggedy Ann sleeping bag. I knew already that her house was nicer than ours, bigger and better maintained. The Swensons’ yard was green and plush, while ours was a singed, weedy thing. They had hired men to come and dig a thirty-foot-long, eight-foot-deep pond in front of their house, with a dock and mature willow trees. Our pond had been one of Bub’s projects, self-mixed concrete set with rocks and only big enough for the dogs to sit in there side by side.

  The minute Amber led me through the back door, I realized the inside of their house was considerably nicer as well. There were plants everywhere, not sickly yellow avocado shoots, but real plants flourishing in terra-cotta pots. There was art in frames, a glass coffee table perched on a giant, gnarled piece of driftwood, and two fireplaces. Amber’s mom was in the kitchen loading the dishwasher. She wore tiny jean shorts, a scoop-neck white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up and leather sandals. “Hi there,” she said, turning around. “I’m Valerie. Welcome.” Her shoulder-length brown hair was held back from her face with tortoiseshell combs, and as she readjusted them, I saw that her hands and face were tanned the same coppery brown as her hair.

  “We’re going to my room,” Amber said, ushering me quickly down the hall. She shut her bedroom door behind us and plopped down on one of the two twin beds, both of which were covered with a satiny apricot-colored spread. The walls were papered floor to ceiling with a pattern of dogs and cats standing on their back paws, peering over a wooden fence.

  “Your mom sure is pretty,” I said, sitting lightly on the edge of the second bed.

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  Before I could insist, one of Amber’s brothers flung the door open and shouted, “Hey!
” He was tall and wiry with a tumble of hair a shade darker than Amber’s. Dark eyes, a sharp nose and thin, pale lips crowded the center of his narrow face, making him look like some kind of bird.

  Amber huffed and rolled her eyes. “What do you want, creep?”

  “Nothing, supercreep. I just wanted to see what you dragged home.” He gave me the once-over, Keds to bangs. When I forced myself to meet his eyes, he barked, “What are you looking at?” and stormed out again. The door shuddered.

  “That was Ross. Don’t worry, he’s always like that.”

  It was hot in Amber’s room, so we went outside. Sitting at a wooden table on the patio were Valerie and Amber’s dad, Dean. They were sifting through a flat of raisins, plucking out the stems and those that hadn’t fully dried yet, talking softly; behind them, the sun, beginning to set, was gauzed over with orangy-pink clouds.

  “Hiya, princess,” Dean said, waving us over. He was easily twice as large as Valerie, and his voice was gruff, like a sailor’s. In fact, he looked a bit like a sailor, a merchant marine, somewhere in between Popeye and Bluto. Like his wife, he was deeply tan, but his features were coarser. His lips were fleshy, and pores were visible on his thick nose. “Who’s our guest?” he asked Amber, reaching to the far corner of the table for a highball glass that held some kind of brown liquor on ice.

  “This is Paula. She lives across the street with the Lindberghs, but she’s not their daughter. She’s a foster kid.”