* * *
By the time I found my way back to the I-5, it was after seven on the east coast. Jay was either home, resting up for another early morning of soccer camp, or at the bar around the corner from our apartment, drinking off eight hours of cocky teenage boys. I decided to take my chances.
“Hey, babe,” he answered on the fourth ring. Jay had never called me babe. Sometimes he called me M or Mimi after he heard Dad’s nickname for me. Never babe or hon or dear, endearments manufactured for the masses.
“Hey yourself,” I said.
“I just finished cleaning the kitchen. It will still be to your standards when you return.” The apartment had taken on new levels of cleanliness when I’d moved in. OCD clean, Jay called it, a habit drilled into me by Mom, who believed company-ready should be the natural state of any household.
Jay sighed as he flopped audibly onto the couch. I heard the television turn on, and bit my tongue before starting in on that fight again. Jay did everything with the television set to soccer, or when there wasn’t a match, to football, baseball, basketball, even hockey if he was so desperate. The only time he didn’t have sports on was when we were having sex.
“This a bad time?” I asked coldly.
If Jay intuited that I was annoyed, he decided to play dumb. The television blared in all its glory. “Trevor was out sick today, so I was on my own. Who gets sick on their second day of work? I want to get him a job as my assistant coach. With this bullshit, no way the school’s going to hire him.”
I didn’t want to talk about Jay’s friend Trevor.
“As long as you keep putting out a winning team, they’ll do what you want to make you happy.” I slowed down again when I reached downtown, about a half mile from the entrance to the 10. I shouldn’t have called. Jay was in his I-want-to-chill-at-the-end-of-a-long-day mode, which barely included me when I was home and not at all when I was a phone call away. It was something we were working on, breaking him of his single habits and me of mine, although most of mine were stored in a warehouse somewhere in South Philadelphia.
“Sorry, I’m being a jackass. The funeral was today, right?”
“Just coming from it. I didn’t know anyone there.”
“Did you expect to?”
“No. It still upset me that I didn’t.”
“Well, there’s no reason why you would have known anyone. That shouldn’t make you upset,” he said. Soccer fans screamed through the car’s Bluetooth.
“Turns out I was right, though. My uncle left me something in his will.”
“So I guess this means you won’t be coming home tomorrow?”
“Who said I was coming home tomorrow?” I shook the steering wheel as though it might make traffic move, but I was trapped on the freeway, hostage to our conversation.
“I figured after the funeral you’d come home.”
“Didn’t you tell me not to rush back?”
“Was that me?”
“I believe your exact words were ‘take the time you need.’”
“For which you called me a sentimentalist,” he retorted.
“Touché,” I said, and Jay laughed. “A few more days. Billy’s lawyer will give me the next clue. I’ll figure out what Billy wants to tell me about him and Mom, and I’ll be home before you can even miss me.”
“I already miss you.”
“Well, then, before you can go back on your word to keep the apartment in tiptop shape. The end of the week at the latest,” I promised.
* * *
Mom insisted on going with me to meet Elijah.
“I can go alone,” I said as she handed me a French omelet. I’d told her that Billy had left me something in his will, not that he’d already given me a clue, nor about the hunt that lay ahead. “If it’s going to be difficult for you, I’m happy to go on my own.”
“I’m coming with you,” she said. “End of discussion.”
She took off her apron and disappeared upstairs to get ready. I watched her go, feeling like a teenager about to get caught for going to a party or getting a clandestine tattoo. Jay was right. I should have told Mom about the clue before I came home, before Billy became something I kept from her.
Elijah worked on Larchmont, so Mom and I sat in I-10 traffic, crawling our way east. I watched her eyes shift between the rearview and side mirrors to the congested road ahead. She rubbed her cheek the way she did during suspenseful scenes in movies.
“Miranda, please stop staring at me like that. Really, I’m okay.”
I continued to watch her more furtively, sneaking sideways glances that she likely saw. Despite her best efforts, she wasn’t okay. I didn’t understand why she wanted to hide her feelings. I braved a lingering look at her and thought, not for the first time, that I didn’t really understand my mother at all.
Mom exited the highway and headed north on La Brea past furniture stores and lighting warehouses.
“The funeral was pretty weird yesterday,” I said, realizing she hadn’t asked me about it.
“Billy always was a bit eccentric,” she said distractedly.
“I keep remembering things about him.” I circled my way toward the conversation I wanted to have with her. I needed to tell her about The Tempest before we got to Elijah’s office and he did the job for me. “Remember the time he built a simulator in our backyard to teach me about hurricanes? Or when he set up the sprinklers to create a rainbow?”
“He was always good with you,” she said almost forlornly, almost like she missed him.
“We were so close, then we just stopped seeing him.”
“We were close.” Mom paused to collect her thoughts. The massive storefronts narrowed to boutiques, cafés and frozen yogurt shops. When she stopped at a light, she added, “But Billy was unreliable. He was always running off. I wouldn’t know if he was alive or dead, if he was coming to dinner, if he’d left the country. I was worried all the time. It got to be too much.”
“What does that mean, ‘it got to be too much?’”
Mom leaned over me to read the names of the streets that ran perpendicular to Larchmont. “Keep an eye out for Rosewood.”
I wanted to tell Mom that she couldn’t weasel her way out of the conversation that easily, to remind her of Prospero’s words—You must now know farther—to let her know that Billy was intent on revealing the past to me, and I wanted to hear it from her first. Mom never responded to anything that smelled remotely of a threat. If she didn’t want to talk to me about what had torn them apart, nothing I could say would change her mind, not even if I told her that Billy had planned something for me.
A few blocks later, we found Rosewood and parked outside the law offices of Elijah Greenberg. June Gloom sat heavy in the sky, dreary and somber. Throughout June in Los Angeles, the morning’s haze promised an overcast day, but without fail, it burned off, and when the afternoon became sunny, it was all the more spectacular for the bleak morning. Today, however, as I studied the sky, I didn’t see a hint of a beautiful day to come.
Elijah guided us into his office where we sat in firm leather chairs as we waited for him to find the right file among a large pile of files on his desk. Mom absentmindedly tapped her foot, shaking her leg so violently