At 6:43 a.m. Sabre found a parking spot in front of Clara’s Kitchen, her favorite breakfast spot. Bob would arrive any minute. His son, Corey, had to be at school at 6:30 on Thursdays for band practice, so Bob would drop him off. He and Sabre met at Clara’s Kitchen for breakfast every Thursday before court.
It was a little, family-owned restaurant where the locals ate. The building, an old, two-story house, had once been a bed and breakfast. Clara Johnson, the original owner, began renting out rooms after her husband passed away. Her seven children were mostly grown by then and several of them had moved out, leaving empty bedrooms. Eventually, she stopped renting out the rooms and converted the entire downstairs into a restaurant. Clara continued to live on the second floor with her granddaughter, Maggie, who had come to live with her after the child’s parents had been killed in a car accident when she was three years old. She grew up in Clara’s Kitchen and learned all her secret recipes, recipes Clara shared with no one else. Maggie, twenty-four-years old when Clara passed away, loved the Kitchen as much as her grandmother had and worked hard to keep it going in her honor.
Sabre walked in and sat at her usual table by the window so she could see Grandma Clara’s flower garden. She had a standing reservation. Instead of calling in each week, she only called when she couldn’t make it.
When the waitress came over to her table, Sabre exchanged pleasantries with her and ordered a black coffee for Bob and a decaf for herself. “Fill the cup one-third of the way with the coffee and then fill it up with warm, non-fat milk, please.” The waitress laid the menus on the table and left to get the coffee. Sabre knew the menu by heart so she seldom looked at it anymore. Instead, she gazed out the window at the rows of snapdragons in yellow, pink, purple, and white, the bright pink petunias, the pansies of every color, and a beautiful patch of blue flowers she couldn’t identify, about six inches high and two feet in diameter, surrounded on three sides by rose bushes that seemed to bloom all year long. Lost in the sea of color, she didn’t notice Bob until he took a seat across from her.
“Good morning, Mr. Clark. I was just admiring the flowers. They seem particularly bright this morning,” Sabre said in her best Katherine Hepburn voice. “Did you get Corey off to school okay?”
“Sure did.” Bob took a sip of the coffee. He tipped his cup slightly in her direction, “Thanks,” he said. She smiled and nodded. Bob continued on his favorite subject, his son. “Corey really enjoys the band. He’s decided he wants to play the saxophone. This is the first thing that has held his interest for any length of time, so I try to encourage him. He has already decided what sax he wants, a Yamaha Professional, but he’s not getting it. At least not right now. After he has played for a year, if he’s still interested and practicing, we’ll get him a good sax, maybe even the Yamaha.”
Ahh . . . the sax. Sabre slipped back in time to her childhood and her first encounter with Victor Spanoli, her little saxophone-playing friend, the memory of their meeting as vivid to her as the flowers in Clara’s garden.
It was Sabre’s sixth birthday. After the gifts had been opened, she and her twin cousins carried them to her room to play with her new toys. They had just started playing a game of “Chutes and Ladders” when Ron burst into the room. “Sabre, come see. We have new neighbors.”
The children ran to the porch to see who was taking the place of “Old Man Meridian,” the grumpy old goose who yelled at them every time they got close to his yard. They stood out front and watched the new family unload the truck taking up their entire driveway. Sabre climbed up on the edge of the white wooden porch and stretched her neck to see around her brother. “Do they have kids?”
“Yeah, there’s an older girl and a little boy, about your age, a mother and father and a dog,” Ron replied, as if he already knew them. “And they’re Italian.” Ron repeated something he had heard his mother say.
“What’s an Italian?”
“Mom met the parents the other day. She said their names are Lois and Salvatore Spanoli. They just moved here from New York,” Ron said, ignoring her question.
“What’s an Italian?” Sabre asked again.
Ron, unsure himself, explained, “It means they eat spaghetti and pizza.”
“We eat spaghetti and pizza. Are we Italian?”
“No, dopey, we’re Catholic!” Ron pointed toward the truck and a golden retriever. “Look, there’s the boy. And look at that great dog! I wish we had a dog.”
They watched the new neighbors for a while, but soon got bored with them going in and out of the house carrying boxes. All four of them marched to the backyard to re-join the party just in time to catch Aunt Sallie drag her long, gray pigtail through the punch bowl. The party continued throughout the day and into the evening. The twins and their parents even stayed the night to avoid the long drive back to Bakersfield. Sabre’s party was perfect, and she had lots of toys and some new clothes to wear to school.
On Monday morning, as Sabre skipped off to school, she felt special in her new pink blouse and Winnie the Pooh overalls. She spent the day telling her classmates about her party. At 2:25 p.m., just like every other day, Ron waited outside her classroom. He walked her home, dropped her at the front door, then ran off to play with his friends.
Sabre took her jump rope and went out in the front yard to try and see the new neighbors. She peeked into their yard as she skipped around the driveway. When she didn’t see anything, she sat on the front porch and played with her jacks, in case anyone came out.
She spotted the skinny boy with black, wavy hair as he came out of his front door carrying something shiny. It threw off flashes of bright light as the sun hit it. He looked straight at her, but just as she stood up to go say “hello” he disappeared into his backyard. A few minutes later he returned. With his head down, he walked across her lawn towards her with his saxophone in one hand and the other hand behind his back. About three feet from her he stopped, pulled his hand from behind his back, handed her a small bunch of dandelions, and said, “I’m Victor.”
“I’m Sabre.” But before she could say anything else he raised his saxophone to his lips and tooted a few notes sounding a little like “Hot Cross Buns,” and turned and ran home. Sabre smiled. She saw his beautiful, dark eyes sparkle when he blew his horn.
She jumped up, ran inside, and placed the dandelions in a vase with some water, as she had helped her mother do many times with their roses. Then she ran to her room and picked up the little red notebook Ron had given her for her birthday. She was going to put all her wishes in it, and she wanted to get started. She went to the desk in the den, found a red pen, and sat down at the kitchen table while her mother fixed dinner. She picked up the pen and said, “Mom, how do you spell marry?”
“That depends, is it the name Mary, or the wedding kind of marry?”
“The wedding kind.”
“M-a-r-r-y.”
Sabre wrote each letter in her notebook as her mother said them. “How do you spell Victor?”
“Who’s Victor?”
“The boy next door. I just met him. He brought me flowers and he plays music.”
Her mother chuckled as she spelled Victor and then Spanoli for her daughter.
Victor and Sabre played together everyday. They walked home from school together, with Ron teasing them most of the way. They had their afternoon snack together, sometimes at her house and sometimes at his. Then Sabre would go to her room, do her homework, wait for Victor to finish practicing his sax, and they would play together until dinner.
One Sunday afternoon, a couple years later, Sabre and Victor were walking home from a skating party. A few blocks before they reached their street, a fire truck sped past with its siren blaring. They ran to keep up with it. They couldn’t see any smoke, but they saw the truck turn up the street toward their homes.
Out of breath, they arrived at Victor’s house and saw the fire truck parked in his driveway. An ambulance, with its lights flashing and siren blasting, pulled up next to it. Neighbors came out of their homes and people crowded around. Men in uniforms ran in and out of the front door.
Sabre’s mom met them at the sidewalk and tried to talk to Victor, but he ran past her into the house. As Sabre and others watched, the paramedics carried Victor’s father out on a stretcher, placed him in the ambulance, and rushed off with the sirens still screaming.
“He died before they arrived at the hospital,” her mother said at the dinner table.
Sabre didn’t see Victor again until the funeral. She tried to speak with him, but he wouldn’t leave his mother’s side. She wanted to do something for him, but she didn’t know what to do. Everyone there was crying, except Victor, but the sparkle was gone from his eyes.
Following the service, everyone gathered at the Spanoli’s home for lunch. Victor went out in the backyard and she followed him out. “You look sad,” she said, “but you don’t cry. How come?”
“I’m the man of the family now.” Then he ran off to be alone, but not before Sabre saw his wet eyes.
A few days later, Victor came to her house to tell her they were moving to a place called Chicago where Mrs. Spanoli’s family lived. Sabre had never heard of Chicago and had no idea how far away it was. She just knew he wouldn’t be next door, and it made her sad.
The following Saturday afternoon he came to say good-bye. He handed her the only three dandelions he could find in his yard. Sabre wanted to tell him how much she would miss him, but the tears filled her eyes and no words came out. She heard Mrs. Spanoli yell at Victor to get in the car. Before Victor left, he said, “Don’t worry, Sabre. I’ll be back to get you.”
She stared at the car as it drove onto the street, with a saxophone sticking out the side. Victor had rolled his window down and played her his last tune. She never saw or heard from him again.
Ron walked over to her, put his arm around her, gave her a good squeeze, and said, “Hey, Sunshine, you still have me. I won’t ever leave you.” It made her feel better to know she still had her brother. Even though he teased her a lot, he did a lot of really sweet things, too. Whenever she got mad at him, her mom would tell the story about when she came home from the hospital and how Ron would go into the nursery first thing every morning and kiss his baby sister on the cheek. He continued to do that as long as they both lived at home. Even if he had a friend stay the night, he would still go to her, but she didn’t get the kiss; instead, she got a flick on the head.
“Sobs? You in there?”
“Sorry, just thinking about someone.”
“Is it Ron?”
“It’s always Ron.” She sighed, took a sip of coffee, and forced a smile.
Bob patted her hand and made a funny face at her. “So, you have the Haley Murdock detention this morning. I hear old Gaylord is doing everything the social worker asks him to do. Tom Gilley said he hasn’t missed a drug test, he’s taking his parenting and anger-management classes, and he got a job as a loan officer. His methamphetamine, gazelle girlfriend may have been lying about him ever hitting her. You can’t blame the guy for being upset with her for using drugs while she was pregnant.”
“Yeah, he sure is doing everything by the book, and he’s very pleasant. He hasn’t ticked anyone off like our perps usually do, either,” Sabre said.
“I know this new baby can’t go home with him until paternity is established, but what about Alexis? Do you think she’ll go home at the next hearing?”
“I don’t know. I have a lot of puzzle pieces that don’t fit together, but if something doesn’t break soon, I won’t have any basis for keeping her out of the home. I’d really like to think he’d protect Alexis, but something in my gut tells me otherwise. By the way, what’s the story with your client, Jamie’s father?”
“Well, as you know, he’s in an institution in Atlanta. It’s reported he took some bad drugs a few years ago and fried his brain. I spoke to him on the phone, but we couldn’t have a coherent conversation. The guy doesn’t even know his own name. He thinks he’s Mr. Rogers, and he goes around singing, ‘It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.’ The damage he did to himself is permanent, so there’s no chance of him as a placement for Jamie.”
The waitress came back to the table and took their orders. Sabre liked nearly everything on the menu and ordered depending on her mood, but Bob ordered the same thing every time. The waitress didn’t bother to ask anymore. Sometimes she would say, “The usual?” Most of the time, she just brought his order out when she brought Sabre’s.
While they ate their breakfast, Bob spoke about Corey’s progress in school and the new kitten they had acquired. They talked about how the stock market had been dropping and gave each other advice on cases. They discussed the strange things happening at Sabre’s office, and they laughed and joked about some of the bizarre things that occur every day at juvenile court.
“I guess we better get to court if we want a parking spot,” Bob said.
“Yup, it’s time.” They each paid for their own breakfast as they always did, except on their birthdays; then the other one would pick up the check. They left the restaurant and drove to court in their separate cars.