“And my return?” I asked again.
“I could have been hurt!”
“But you’re not.”
“I should have gone to Susan for sympathy,” he said. He held out a matted, dripping clot of paper. IRS forms are essentially newsprint, and they don’t hold up under liquid.
“My God, Ricardo!” I said, grabbing the paper. It ripped as I took it from him. It began to come apart in my hands.
“I was holding it and then, well, couldn’t you hear? I had to protect myself.”
“With a piece of paper?” I spread the remains out on my desk. Half of the page had either been pulled off or had disintegrated. It was hard to tell which.
“Everyone knows that newsprint is just a weak mix of waste-paper pulps. You can’t expect it to maintain any tensile strength when wet. The fibers are way too short.”
Ricardo blinked at me, water still dripping off of him. “Not everyone knows that. Just geeks like you. Believe it or not, that isn’t what went through my mind when the pipe exploded.”
“Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.
“I’m not going back up there,” Ricardo said.
The soggy remains on my desk looked like the beginnings of an unpromising papier-mâché effort. And I had a sinking feeling that I was in possession of the healthiest remnant. “That was the original. I’m going to have to request a replacement.”
“So call Mr. Bean Man. Mr. Funny Dead Chickens.”
“And tell him what?”
Ricardo shrugged. “I don’t know. Mention the tensile strength of newsprint. What man wouldn’t swoon?”
Chapter Six
WHEN I WAS FIVE AND KURT WAS EIGHT, OUR FAMILY moved from the outskirts of Roanoke, Virginia, to Piedmont, California. That was back before Blake, back when “family” meant just four of us—Mom, Dad, Kurt and me. Leaving Virginia was a huge deal. My father’s family had been there for six generations, and Dad had planned to follow suit and put down roots, his and ours, in the Old Dominion after finishing his accounting degree at the university in Charlottesville.
My mother, on the other hand, was from California. She’d gone east on scholarship to Sweet Briar, which she left after three years in order to be by my father’s side at the outset of his career. In the earliest years of their marriage, my mother had agreed to adopt Virginia as her own. But during the winter I turned five, the plan changed. I have this vivid memory of Kurt walking me home from kindergarten, the door to our house swinging open, the hallway inside stacked with boxes—giant cardboard containers, some taller than I was, kraft brown and sturdy. They were the sort of boxes you might lose yourself inside, the perfect makings for a clubhouse or tunneled fort. But as soon as my mother came around the corner, I saw something in the crimp of her mouth, and I knew without a word spoken that those boxes weren’t for play. Two weeks later, we lived in California.
My mother had insisted on the move, explaining to us that kids in California were nicer than kids in Virginia. I was five. How would I know? Soon enough, though, I would realize that our cross-country move had more to do with turbulence in my parents’ marriage. My father had been given a choice: Virginia or his wife and kids.
Sometimes I wondered what would have happened had he stayed behind, but I guess I’m glad he chose us, packing things up and shuttering his fledgling accountancy. He even found a house in Piedmont, a town my mother had long loved, though it was a stretch for them financially. And instead of growing up in Virginia, I became a girl from California, which brings with it a different set of expectations.
A part of me had always sensed that I’d missed out on something to have left Virginia so early. My scattered memories of the place were consistently tinged with the green of its thick, hot summers, its dense forests and its slow, fishy river. My recollections of the move itself are hazy, a pastiche of unrelated images, like puzzle pieces from opposite corners. The purple flower and the blue bird may be part of the same puzzle, but they don’t fit easily together. A long plane ride. Kurt crying. Untouched trays of food left outside a hotel-room door. Neighbors that smelled of cigarettes. My old sheets on a new bed.
Three years older, Kurt probably remembered that stretch of time better than I did, but he didn’t like to talk about it, except to say how scared he’d been to restart third grade in a new school of strangers, even if Mom had promised that they’d be nicer. I didn’t notice that they were any nicer than the kids back in Roanoke.
My parents lived in that first Piedmont house for a few years, then moved to a bigger one, and eventually landed in the four-bedroom traditional on Banner Hill, where I spent my middle and high-school years. Each time we moved, my father would grouse for months about costs and bills and how the hell was he expected to afford it, what with pottery lessons and soccer uniforms and college tuitions for two and then three kids. But my mother had grown up knowing want (her family was from Hayward, down the east bay between nothing and nowhere). As a child, she had dreamed of living in a house with a three-car garage and a pool in Piedmont, a tony little town totally surrounded by the much larger city of Oakland. The Banner Hill house had both the garage and the pool. It was where she felt she had been meant to live, where she deserved to live. And it was where my parents would celebrate their thirty-fifth anniversary.
I arrived at the house at the same time as the Maselins, long-time neighbors from down the block. Mrs. Maselin I barely knew. She was painfully shy and seemed rarely to speak. Their son, Brian, was nice enough and had been friends with Kurt since both boys had been in their teens. And then there was Mr. Maselin.
My own father wasn’t easy to get along with, often coming across as aloof and angry at the same time. But at least he didn’t hit on every woman in a thirty-foot radius. That was Mr. Maselin’s calling card, as was his reference, usually within the first minute of conversation, to whatever he’d most recently acquired—the biggest car on the block, the loudest stereo, the longest wet bar. He was a man of unwelcome superlatives.
I didn’t know whether he had ever actually been unfaithful to his wife, Ellen, but he acted as though he wanted to be and as though he would be, should the opportunity present itself. I didn’t like feeling that he was constantly seeking an opportunity. And I’d always hated the way his eyes combed over my mother.
The Maselins had pulled up to my parents’ house just before I did. They lived four houses down, but they had driven to the party. If I followed them through the front door, I knew I would have to smile politely and hear what new gadget Ian had just bought. Instead, I wound past the side of the garage, back toward the pool. Maybe I couldn’t avoid an exchange of pleasantries with Ian Maselin, but I could down a drink first.
My mother had spent months planning the anniversary party, meaning that she paid a party planner and remained available to make hard choices like, yes Stilton, no Muenster. From the looks of the place, the planner had earned her money. In the light of tiki torches, the back patio was washed a golden magical. Someone had trimmed the hedges and scrubbed down the deck. Fresh flowers floated across the pool. There were two bars and three bartenders and a good-looking wait-staff circulated with trays of buttery treats in puffs and crusts.
I grabbed a beer and gazed around the patio, trying to spot Kurt or Blake or Uncle Ed, my mother’s older brother. Instead my eyes landed on my ex-boyfriend Gene. Before he could see me, I ducked inside the house and tracked my mother’s voice to the kitchen.
“Gene’s here,” I said.
She looked up from where she stood, hovering over a caterer as he tried to arrange a tray of fruit and cheese. “Sasha! You made it. And don’t you look, well, androgynously festive!” She held out her hand and gave me a squeeze.
My mother was wearing the diamond necklace my father had given her for their thirtieth anniversary and the diamond bracelet she had bought for herself “just because.” I’d