Jay lay back down and stared up at the ceiling. They were quiet for a moment and Jay knew Hud was still considering it. When Hud didn’t speak up, Jay knew it was final.
“It was awesome, though,” Jay said.
“I bet we looked so cool,” Hud added, his head on his pillow.
“Yeah,” Jay said, smiling. “We totally did.”
The two of them fell asleep soundly, both hoping and planning.
Kit, meanwhile, had drifted off to sleep the moment her head hit the pillow, dreaming all through the night of the four of them surfing together on their own boards.
But it was Nina who was consumed by it, living the experience in her body. Her chest could feel where the board had been. Her arms ached from the resistance of the water. Her legs felt like rubber from the force with which she had slammed them down, used them to propel herself forward. She could feel both the ocean and its absence across her skin.
She wanted to go back. Right then and there. To try again. She wanted to stand up on the board like Jay had. She was determined now. She remembered a photo she’d seen in a magazine a few months ago, a guy on a surfboard somewhere in Europe. Was it Portugal? She wondered if she could be that sort of person when she grew up. A real surfer. Who went places just for the waves.
She tried to make herself fall asleep. But well after ten, still wide awake, she walked down to the kitchen and saw her mother sitting in the living room, sipping vodka right out of the bottle while watching the Saturday Night movie in her pajamas.
When June saw her elder daughter, she moved the vodka onto the floor, sliding it behind the sofa’s arm with her foot.
“Can’t sleep, honey?” June said as she put her arm out, inviting Nina onto the sofa with her.
Nina nodded and curled into the side of her mother’s body, the cradle that often felt like it was hers and hers alone. Her mother smelled like Shalimar and sea salt.
“Can I get a job working at the restaurant?” Nina asked.
June looked at her. “What do you mean?”
“Well, maybe I could earn money,” she said. “And buy us all surfboards.”
“Oh, honey,” June said, as she rubbed her daughter’s arm, pulled her closer. “I will get you all surfboards, OK? I promise.”
“You don’t have to, that’s not what I meant.”
“Let me get you surfboards. Let that be my job.”
Nina smiled at her and put her head back on June’s shoulder.
It was not easy, being a parent. It was not easy raising your four children on your own. But what made June the most frustrated at her husband—her twice ex-husband—was that she had no one to swoon over her children with.
Her mother would listen, obviously. Christina loved them. But June wanted someone on the couch next to her at night, to smile with her when they thought of the kids. She wanted someone who would laugh with her about Kit’s attitude, and commiserate with her about Jay’s stubbornness, who would know how to teach Hud to stand up for himself a bit more, and teach Nina to relax. She, especially, wanted someone to light up along with her on a day like this, when her kids had found a sense of wonder and joy in the middle of her chaos.
Oh, what Mick was missing, wherever he was.
He did not know how good it felt for your eleven-year-old daughter to want nothing more than to lay her head against your shoulder. He did not know how good it felt to love like this.
She knew that when it came to the two of them—she here with these kids and he out there somewhere with God knows who—she had the better end of the deal. She would choose to be here with these four kids over anything in the world.
But she hated that, even in this blissful quiet moment, she was still thinking of him.
Nina fell asleep in her mother’s arms and when she did, June picked the bottle of vodka back up. She needed that bottle to go to sleep, but she rarely drank past the invisible line she had in her head of where to stop for the night.
The next day, the surfboard was gone. And the kids went back to bodysurfing, trying to hide their frowns.
• • •
A few months later, on Christmas morning, Nina, Jay, Hud, and Kit woke up to see the tree they had decorated was gone.
“Where’s the Christmas tree?” June asked, in mock confusion. “You don’t think it just up and walked away, do you?”
The kids all looked at one another, cautiously excited for something they could not even guess.
“Maybe we should check by the water,” June said.
The kids ripped open the door and ran down the steps to the beach. They shrieked when they saw it.
There, stuck lopsided in the sand, was their Christmas tree.
And beside it were four surfboards lined up in a row. Yellow, red, orange, and blue.
3:00 P.M.
Hud’s hair was barely dry when he parked his car in front of the art studio at Pepperdine University. He grabbed his camera from the front seat and walked in despite the fact that, formally speaking, he wasn’t supposed to be there. He wasn’t a student.
But Hud had found that one of the nice things about spending his entire life in a small town was that he knew people. The cashier at the market, the guy who took the ticket stubs, the assistant to the head of photography at Pepperdine, Hud loved talking to them all. He liked to ask them questions about themselves and hear how they were doing. He liked to make jokes with the guy behind the register at the soft-serve stand about chocolate ice cream with extra whipped cream being “low-calorie.”
He loved small talk. A quality he knew was in low supply. It certainly wasn’t a trait he shared with any of his siblings or his mother. They, especially Jay and Kit, were always rushing him from one thing to the next. Sometimes, Hud wondered if he got it from Mick, but that seemed unlikely. Which led Hud to wonder if it came from his birth mother, Carol.
Carol was a mystery to Hud. He did not know anything about her other than what she had named him and where she had left him. All he could do was imagine what she might be like, wonder if there were things about himself that he’d recognize in her, things in her that would make him recognize himself.
A few years earlier, Hud had seen a photo of Mick in a magazine where Mick was looking directly at the camera and smiling. The headline said THE MAIN MAN IS BACK, and the article was about Mick topping the charts again after all these years. But Hud barely noticed any of that. He kept staring at Mick’s right eyebrow, the way it was raised just the tiniest bit, the same way Hud raised his when he smiled.
Hud had felt as if the world was closing in on him. If he had Mick’s eyebrow, what else of his did he have? Was Hud capable of what Mick was capable of? Did Mick’s callousness live dormant inside him, choosing its moment to reveal that Hud, too, was capable of caring for no one but himself? That Hud, too, could leave the people he loved on the side of the road?
Our parents live inside us, whether they stick around or not, Hud thought. They express themselves through us in the way we hold a pen or shrug our shoulders, in the way we raise our eyebrow. Our heritage lingers in our blood. The idea of it scared the shit out of him.
He knew that Carol must live in him, too. Most likely in some way he could not see. And so he prayed it was something like this, the way he loved to speak to people. His tenderness. Let it be that he inherited that from her, or her laugh, or her gait. Anything but her cowardice.
“Hey,” Hud said to the guy behind the front desk as he pulled his shades off his face and threaded them over the edge of his collar.
“Hey, man,” Ricky Esposito said. Ricky was in charge of opening and closing the darkroom every day and he would let Hud use the facility whenever it was free.
Ricky had been two years behind Hud and Jay in school and thought of them as the very pinnacle of cool. Handsome brothers, surfers, sons of a famous singer. To the scrawny, acne-scarred Ricky Esposito, it was hard to believe Hud and Jay Riva had any problems at all.
“Mind if I …” Hud lifted his camera e
ver so slightly to indicate his intentions.
Ricky nodded toward the darkroom. “Have at it, buddy,” he said. “Party on for tonight?”
Hud smiled. He’d been unaware that Ricky knew of the party. Jay would have said that Ricky Esposito was not cool enough to attend. In fact, many people would have said this. But Hud maintained that if you were cool enough to know about the party, you were cool enough to come to the party. Those were the rules. And Ricky knew about the party.
“Yeah, for sure,” Hud said. “You coming?”
Ricky nodded coolly, but Hud saw that Ricky’s hands were shaking ever so slightly. “You know it. Can I bring anything?”
Hud shook his head. “Just yourself.”
“All right,” Ricky said. “You got it.”
Hud slipped through the door and into the darkroom. He had been thinking about the photos all morning. Ashley.
If he had to, would he screw up his relationship with Jay for her? Was he capable of it? Both possible answers scared him.
He shut the door tight and he got to work.
1971
June drank Screwdrivers in the morning like other people drank orange juice. She drank Cape Codders at lunch in the break room.
She had sea breezes with dinner, she and the kids sitting around the table eating meatloaf or a roast chicken. The cups on the table were always the same. Milk for Kit, soda for Jay and Hud, water for Nina, and a highball filled with vodka cut with the coral hue of ruby red grapefruit juice and cranberry cocktail poured over ice for Mom.
Nina had begun to notice the alcohol after they had to evacuate the year before. There were fires in the canyons, people’s homes were burning, and you could smell the smoke in the air.
June woke them up early in the morning and calmly but firmly told them to each grab the things they absolutely could not live without.
Each one of the kids asked to strap the surfboards to the car roof. Kit brought her stuffed animals. Jay and Hud brought their comics and baseball cards. Nina brought her favorite jeans and a few records. June packed up the family albums. But then, as they all got in the car, Nina noticed June had grabbed the vodka, too.
Days later, when they returned to their home, unscathed except for some soot covering the countertops, Nina noticed that there was a new, fuller bottle of vodka in her mother’s purse. Nina watched as June snuck it into the freezer, the very first thing she unpacked.
These days, June had started falling asleep on the couch in her nightgown, hair in curlers. She never quite made it to her bedroom after spending her nights in front of the TV with that bottle.
But she still kept her charm and wits about her. She kept her smile. She got the kids to school on time, showed up for every single one of their plays and games. She made their Halloween costumes by hand. She ran the restaurant with diligence and honor, paying her kitchen and service staff well.
It was the beginning of a lesson her children would learn by heart: Alcoholism is a disease with many faces, and some of them look beautiful.
• • •
Christina died of a stroke in the fall of 1971, at the age of sixty-one.
June watched the nurses take her mother’s body away. Standing there in the hospital, June felt like she’d been caught in an undertow. How had she ended up here? One woman, all alone, with four kids, and a restaurant she had never wanted.
The day after the funeral, June took the kids to school. She dropped Kit off at the elementary building and then drove Nina, Jay, and Hud to junior high.
When they pulled into the drop-off circle, Jay and Hud took off. But Nina turned back, put her hand on the door handle, and looked at her mother.
“Are you sure you’re OK?” Nina asked. “I could stay home. Help you at the restaurant.”
“No, honey,” June said, taking her daughter’s hand. “If you feel up for going to school, then that’s where you should be.”
“OK,” Nina said. “But if you need me, come get me.”
“How about we think of it the other way around?” June said, smiling. “If you need me, have the office call me.”
Nina smiled. “OK.”
June felt herself about to cry and so she put her sunglasses over her eyes and pulled out of the parking lot. She drove, with the window down, to Pacific Fish. She pulled in and put on the parking brake. She took a deep breath. She got out of the car and stood there, staring up at the restaurant with a sense of all she had inherited. It was hers now, whatever that meant.
She lit a cigarette.
That goddamn restaurant had claimed her from the day she was born and now she understood that she would never outrun it.
Some of the lights on the sign were broken. The whole exterior needed a power washing. That was solely up to her now. She was all this restaurant had left. Maybe it was all she had left, too.
June rested against the hood of her car, crossed her arms, and continued smoking, taking stock of the new shape of her life.
She was overworked and overtired and lonely. She missed the parents who had never truly understood her, missed the man who had never truly loved her, missed the future she thought she had been building for herself, missed the young girl she used to be.
But then she thought of her children. Her exhausting, sparkling children. She must have done something right if life had brought her the four of them. That much seemed crystal clear.
Maybe she had done something with her life after all. Maybe she could make something of what she had left.
June put out her cigarette on the ground, crushing it with the toe of her black flat. And then, as she looked up at the Pacific Fish sign, June Riva got a wild idea. She’d earned her name through heartbreak and consequences—wasn’t it her right to do with it anything she wanted?
Two weeks later, three men came to put up the new sign. Bright red cursive: RIVA’S SEAFOOD.
When it was done, June stood by the front door and looked at it. She was drinking vodka out of a soda cup. She smiled, satisfied.
It was going to bring in a lot more customers. It might even get her some press. But more important, when Mick finally came back, he was going to love it. June was sure of that.
• • •
Soon, Jay and Hud also began to understand that she was an alcoholic—even if they didn’t know the word for it or didn’t know it was something with a word at all.
Their mom always made more sense first thing in the morning, tired and sluggish but lucid. She made less and less sense as the day went on. Jay once whispered to Hud, after June told him to “go bath and shower,” that “Mom starts acting nuts after dinner.”
It got so that by 6:00 P.M., the kids all knew to ignore her. But they also tried to keep her home, lest she embarrass them in public.
Nina had even started pretending to love the idea of driving at the young age of fourteen. She would ask her mom if she could drive them all to the store, if she could take the boys to the movie theater instead of June dropping them all off, if she could chauffeur Kit and Vanessa to the ice cream stand so June could stay home.
Nina was actually terrified of driving. It felt overwhelming and nerve-racking, trying to merge onto PCH with all of those cars flying by. She would white-knuckle the steering wheel the whole way, her heart racing, her confusion rising as she tried to time her turns. When she eventually got them all to the chosen destination and got out of the car, she could feel the tension she’d been holding in between her shoulder blades and behind her knees.
But as afraid as Nina was of driving, she was more afraid of her mother behind the wheel after lunch. Nina sometimes couldn’t fall asleep at night, tallying June’s surging number of near hits, her slow reactions, the missed turns.
It was easier, despite how hard it was, for Nina to drive them all herself. And soon it started to feel to Nina that it was not just easier but rather crucial that she prevent what felt like an inevitable calamity.
“You really like driving,” June said, handing over the keys one
evening, after June realized they were out of milk. “I don’t get it. I never liked it.”
“Yeah, I want to be a limo driver one day,” Nina said, immediately regretting the pathetic lie. Surely she could have come up with something better than that.
Hud caught Nina’s eye when he heard her. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “To get the milk.”
“Me, too,” Jay added.
As the three of them headed out, June lit a cigarette and closed her eyes on the couch. Kit was playing with Legos in front of the TV. June’s arm relaxed as she stretched out, the tip of her lit cigarette grazing Kit’s hair. Nina gasped. Jay’s eyes went wide.
“Kit, you’re coming with us,” Hud said. “You need more toothpaste. For your … teeth.”
Kit looked at them quizzically, but then shrugged and got up off the shag rug.
“What’s going on?” Kit asked when they got to the car.
“Don’t worry about it,” Hud said as he opened the door for her.
“Everything’s fine,” Nina told her as she got in the front seat.
“You never tell me anything,” Kit said. “But I know something’s up.”
Jay got in the passenger seat. “Then you don’t need us to tell you. Now, who wants to buy the cheapest jug of milk and spend the rest on a pack of Rolos?”
“I want at least a fourth of the pack!” Kit said. “You always take more than your share.”
“You can have my share, Kit,” Nina said, putting the gear in reverse.
“Everyone be quiet now. Nina needs to concentrate,” Hud called out.
As Nina slowly backed the car out of the driveway and did a three-point turn onto the road, Kit looked out the window and wondered what it was that her brothers and sister wouldn’t tell her, what it was that she already knew.
In the end, it was the TV that gave her the words.
• • •
About a year later, when Kit was ten, she was with June on the couch, watching a TV show. In the scene, two brothers were confronting each other about a murder. And Kit saw one brother take a whiskey bottle out of the other’s hand and call him a “drunk.” “You’re a drunk,” he said. “And you’re killing yourself with this stuff.”
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