The Last Days of California: A Novel (8 page)

“It’s not dead, it’s ringing,” I said.

“Well, try again.”

It went straight to voicemail.

My father sat at the table. “I need a pen,” he said, holding out his arm to my mother. She couldn’t find one and his arm stayed there, outstretched with his hand waving, while my mother dug around in her purse.

He looked at the prayer needs for a long time before circling one. I wondered which one. I didn’t like that our needs were going to get all mixed up, or that he knew I’d circled all of them. He left it on the table and took his robe into the bathroom, came out a few seconds later with it on.

“Turn it to the news,” he said, getting into bed.

My movie was almost over—Big Russ getting test-zapped by the machine—but I flipped around until I came to the news, the weatherman giving tomorrow’s forecast.

“I kinda miss that ole fat boy,” he said, which is what he called Brett Barry, the weatherman at home.

I plugged my phone into the charger and looked at my mother. I knew we were both thinking about last summer, in Destin, Florida, when Elise left the condo and didn’t come in until three o’clock in the morning. She’d come back to us so drunk she couldn’t stand or speak, and my mother had undressed her and put her in the bathtub.

We slipped on our shoes and went outside.

“Let’s pray real quick.” She took my hands, bowed her head, and closed her eyes. She asked for His protection and compassion and guidance. She asked Him to watch over us and keep us safe. “Mother Mary—” she said.

“Mom?”

She kept her head bowed, a tight grip on my hands. She was quiet for a moment. “Elise is too beautiful and naïve, Lord,” she said, and then she squeezed my hands once hard before releasing them. I wanted to be too beautiful and naïve. No one would ever apologize for me because I was too beautiful and naïve.

We walked slowly across the parking lot. It was quiet and the few lit-up rooms somehow felt lonelier than the dark ones.

Before entering the bar, my mother turned to me. I thought about the bottle of whiskey and how I’d put too much water in it. How I’d done it on purpose. My father would take one sip and ask what she’d done to his drink.

She opened the door and we stepped inside. The place was small, with a couple of video games on one side and a pool table on the other. I stood in the light of the cigarette machine and watched my mother approach the bartender. There were a dozen men, leaning and sitting around the bar, the kind of big, sad men who told a lot of jokes. There was only one other female in the place, a skinny woman playing pool with a short, tattooed guy. While taking aim, the guy met my eyes and I crossed my arms in front of my chest. I’d forgotten to put my bra back on. He took his shot, balls knocking into the pockets.

Though everyone else had noticed us, the bartender pretended not to. He was doing something below the bar I couldn’t see, washing glasses or drying them. When he finally acknowledged my mother, they spoke a few words and then she walked back over and stood next to me.

“She was in here, but she’s gone,” she said.

“Where’d she go?”

“She left with someone. He doesn’t know him.”

“I bet he knows him,” I said. “I bet they all know each other.”

“Maybe he’s just passing through.”

We went outside and looked up and down the street. I felt sorry for my mother. She probably wished she was still Catholic, that she didn’t have to kneel on prayer rugs or talk about the end of the world all the time.

I sat on the curb and stretched out my legs. I hadn’t shaved since we’d left Montgomery, and my legs were hairy, especially around the knees and ankles, spots I always missed.

“The barstools were toilets,” she said.

“Toilets?”

“Raised up on a little platform.”

“I didn’t notice,” I said.

The door opened and we were joined by the couple that had been playing pool. I was conscious of my breasts again. I had large breasts for my frame, which I found humiliating because the boys in my class had decided large breasts weren’t attractive, that
more than a mouthful’s a waste.
The man lit two cigarettes and handed one to the woman. She had terrible skin, her hair in a sad ponytail.

“We’re looking for my daughter,” my mother said, stepping toward them.

“Good-lookin’ girl?” the man said, but then he seemed embarrassed.

“About five-foot-seven, I think her hair was in a ponytail. Was it in a ponytail?” my mother asked me.

“She had it down. She was wearing a tank top with candy canes on it,” I said, thinking about how pretty she looked in her tiny shorts and tiny shirt, her long arms and legs.

“She was here,” he said.

“Do you know where she went?” my mother asked.

“She left with Jimmy,” the woman said.

“Who’s Jimmy?” I asked.

There was a pause and she said, “What do you want to know about him?”

“They should be back any minute,” the man said. I looked at his arms, which were littered with tattoos—small, individual drawings like someone had doodled them in the margins of a notebook. I wanted to sit with him, have him go through them one by one. I was sure each of them meant something. Trashy people had tattoos that meant things.

“The bartender wouldn’t serve her,” the woman said.

“Why didn’t they get beer there?” I asked, pointing to the gas station. The woman shrugged. I fake yawned, hoping she’d catch it, but she didn’t. It worked best if you yawned just as you were passing someone, if the person hardly noticed you at all. I liked the idea that I could pass it to someone and they would pass it to someone else and my yawn could travel, cross state lines.

My mother started breathing heavily, like she was going to hyperventilate, and I thought I should go get my father, that he’d know what to do, but he hadn’t known what to do. He’d just gotten in bed and opted out of the whole thing. She kept getting more and more upset, and the man tried to comfort her, calling her “ma’am,” reassuring her that Elise would be back any minute. He told her he knew Jimmy and Jimmy was a fine guy, a good guy.

“Sit down, Mom,” I said, taking her hand and pulling her down. She sat next to me, so close her legs and arms touched mine. She was unhappy with us and I wanted to do everything I could to make her stay, to keep her. There was a part of me that had always been afraid she would leave. If I behaved badly, if I wasn’t good enough, she might decide we weren’t worth the trouble. I felt like I had to compensate for my father and sister’s behavior. I didn’t know why this burden had fallen to me, why I was the one who was unable to be herself, but it had always been this way.

The couple eyed us as they smoked their cigarettes and talked about a woman named Tammy. We learned all about Tammy. Tammy had two kids and two boyfriends: one bad, one good. She’d been in rehab, prison, and, most recently, the mental hospital. Now she was out and the cycle was repeating itself. She was with the bad boyfriend, wasn’t answering their calls. Her kids were going to be taken away for good. I’d always thought that bad luck turned, but some peoples’ lives seemed to be one bad-luck story after another with no turn. I picked up my mother’s hand. I didn’t know what to do with it once I had it, so I examined it for signs of aging. It didn’t look too old. The bones felt nice under the skin. I turned it over and traced her head line, her heart line; her life line was weak, tapering off mid-palm.

“Do you miss being Catholic?” I asked.

“God doesn’t care where you worship him as long as you go to church.”

“But Catholics are different.”

“They’re Christians,” she said, “same as us.”

“Dad doesn’t think so.”

“I know,” she said, putting her arm around me.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said. We said “I love you” a lot, and it hadn’t seemed like a big deal until my mother told me she’d grown up in a family that never said it. When her father died, she hadn’t heard those words come out of his mouth.

I was about to go get my father when we saw the car. We watched the headlights come closer and closer and then Jimmy pulled up right in front of us and my sister got out. The man looked at us through the windshield. He was old, at least forty, and didn’t look like anyone Elise would have voluntarily gone off with.

While our mother stood there with her hands at her sides, my sister dragged me into the bar; she led me to the bathroom and locked the door. The bathroom was one room with two toilets and no dividers between them. There was writing all over the walls: sketches of women’s faces, penises and liquor bottles, cats and rainbows and balloons. A sentence in blue marker caught my eye:
IF YOU’RE READING THIS, YOU SHOULD GO HOME NOW.
And then, underneath it in big block letters,
LOVE ONE ANOTHER
. This struck me as hugely profound—
love one another
. It seemed so simple. I was hardly ever even nice to people because I was afraid of them. It seemed ridiculous that people might need or want my love.

A red lightbulb over the sink gave the room a creepy feel, like we were being filmed, the camera’s eye turning slowly to follow our movements. It reminded me of a TV show I’d seen where seven people had been kidnapped and drugged. They awoke in separate hotel rooms on the same floor and couldn’t get out of their rooms until they’d found their keys, which were taped inside their Bibles. They had to kill the other six people in order to survive.

“I just wanted to see how pissed mom is,” she said.

“She’s really pissed,” I said. “She’s really upset. Why do you have to do stuff like this?”

She pulled down her shorts and sat on one of the toilets. “Like what?”

“You’re being an idiot.”

“Don’t call me an idiot,” she said. “I’m not an idiot.
You’re
an idiot.”

“Mom was crying in front of those people,” I said.

She was so drunk her face was taking on different shapes, the muscles bunching and flattening beneath the skin. As soon as she’d gotten her shorts up, I opened the door. The bartender was standing there with our mother behind him.

“Get out,” he said, and Elise started screaming that we were leaving.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“What are you sorry for?” Elise said. “You’re always apologizing for things that have nothing to do with you. Nothing has anything to do with you.”

Our mother grabbed her by the arm and jerked her around, hair flying. Everyone was looking at us. They were still and quiet except for the jukebox, which was loud. It was weird, all of these trashy people looking at us like we were the trashy ones. We were solidly middle class. Our parents were college-educated.

The bartender hustled us out the door and we stood there for a second before our mother started walking. We trailed behind her like little ducks, Elise carrying her flip-flops in one hand. There was a lot of glass in the parking lot, but I didn’t tell her to put her flip-flops back on. It was car-window glass, the pieces small and shimmery blue, and probably wouldn’t cut her.

Elise tripped over a hunk of concrete and I linked my arm through hers. She had her face to the sky, mouth open. She pointed up at something while I dragged her along, my eyes searching out the curved and shiny glass of beer bottles. The temperature had fallen and there was a breeze. It was so nice out that I wished we were driving at night and sleeping during the day. There was nothing to say we couldn’t, there were enough 24-hour gas stations to see us through, but of course my father wouldn’t go for it. He didn’t go for anything out of the ordinary. He liked for things to be the way they were supposed to be.

“I want that ID,” my mother said.

Elise handed it over without protest and my mother slipped it in her pocket. I scanned the motel to see if any lights were on: two rooms. What were the people in those rooms doing? Watching TV? Having sex? Somehow, it was more interesting to think about what people were doing when the options had been narrowed so drastically, like I might guess correctly.

Our father was asleep, his robe in a pile on the floor and the covers at the foot of the bed. His stomach was hard and tight, like a pregnant woman’s belly. Our mother sighed as she took off her shoes and shorts and replaced the covers. Elise went to the sink and guzzled water out of her hand. Then she went to the bathroom, coughed a few times, and was quiet. I got in bed and waited. After a while, I went over and put my hand on the bathroom door, leaned in. She was crying. Like our mother, she would cry if she was sad and didn’t care who saw or heard her. The last time we watched
Forrest Gump
, she’d bawled shamelessly throughout the entire movie and I’d had to go upstairs and finish it in my room.

“Elise,” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“Elise.”

“Go away.”

I got back in bed. A few minutes later, she crawled in next to me and put her face close to mine. I liked to sleep on my left side and she preferred her right.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I hate it when you cry. It makes me sad.”

“There’s an angel looking out for me,” she said. She was so close that she could only look into one of my eyes at a time.

“What?” I asked.

“I saw my angel tonight.” She waited for me to say something but I didn’t want our mother to hear us. Our mother believed in angels but you weren’t actually supposed to see them. It was like the prayer-rug Jesus opening his eyes. He wasn’t going to and anyone who claimed he had was lying or dangerous.

“Tell me about it tomorrow,” I said.

She turned her back to me. As kids we used to fight to be the one who got to sleep on their preferred side, with their leg slung over the other’s hip, but that was a long time ago. I put the extra pillow between us and thought,
love one another
. It was so simple. How was I always forgetting something so simple? If Jesus’s message had to be reduced to one thing, that would be it.

Soon everyone was asleep and I was awake, listening to the steady, slightly ragged breaths of my sister, the snores of my mother and father. I liked to be the last one to fall asleep, the last one to see the last thing to happen in the day.