The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(55)

It was dark by the time we returned to the cabin. The crickets had begun to sing. Under the pale halo of the porch light, one of the turtledoves was feeding its chicks. We watched it drop seeds into one hungry mouth, while the other called out for its share. The moonlight glinted off the wind chime that hung from the eaves. I kissed the back of her neck and took out the pins one by one from her hair, letting it fall about her shoulders.

I woke late the next morning, so late that for a minute I didn’t know where I was. Then I saw her curled up beside me and closed my eyes again. It was a Friday; I had the day off. Ordinarily, I would have gone to the gym, done my laundry, run some errands, but now I lay next to her, in rumpled sheets that still smelled of sex, and waited until she stirred and seemed about to wake. In the kitchen I started the coffee and picked out a mug—YUCCA VALLEY LIBRARY, it said in yellow lettering. My family had once owned a set of these; my mom had bought them at a fundraiser.

“Morning,” Nora said. She went to the swamp cooler and turned the dial up. “I can’t believe how stuffy it feels already.”

I added a drop of milk to the coffee I’d just poured myself and gave it to her, then pulled another mug from the cupboard. “It’s not that hot,” I said. “You just need new filter pads on that cooler.” I sipped from my coffee and watched her. She was in a yellow tank top and black shorts, stretching and muffling a yawn. It still didn’t seem real, us together like this. Like something I might have dreamed up when I was a kid. Even the order of things was different. “I can change them for you,” I said after a minute.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“It’s easy. It takes, like, thirty minutes.”

“I’m sure you have better things to do.”

“I really don’t mind.”

While she showered, I drove to the store to pick up new filter pads. It was a simple chore, I’d done it many times before. But this swamp cooler was a little more difficult because I had to work around the turtledove’s nest, all while she—or was it he?—hovered worriedly around me. I unscrewed the panels and pulled out the pads; they were filled with dust, sand, and pollen. The metal braces that held them in place were old and rusty, but I managed to ease out the pads. By then the sun was fully out; I could feel beads of sweat traveling down my spine. With a brush I cleaned the trays, leaving a trail of dirt on the ground. Then I slid the new pads into place, the braces closing around them with a satisfying click.

I called to her to turn the cooler on and was glad to hear the motor starting with a roar. After tossing the old pads in the trash bins, I went back inside. I found her standing across from the vent, eyes closed and arms wide open, enjoying the cool air. “I might not move from this spot,” she said. Her hair was down on her shoulders, the way I liked it, and under her white shirt her nipples looked brown and hard. In three quick steps I reached her and, with my hands still dark with dirt, drew her to me.





A.J.




Running a bowling alley means having to worry about two things. There’s the mechanical part—the pinsetter machines, the sweeping bars, the ball returns—and then there’s the people part. By far the hardest part of the job is dealing with people. I don’t mean the staff. We had some good employees at Desert Arcade, including one guy who’d been with us since my dad opened for business in the 1970s. I mean the customers: parents who allowed their kids to wander down the lanes, idiots who pitched a second ball when the first one didn’t come back, league bowlers who threw a fit when they didn’t score a perfect game. The challenge was dealing with all of them without losing my temper or my smile. It was a struggle sometimes. But I had to help out my dad, who was seventy-eight years old and had trouble keeping up with his business.

Both of my parents were old. In fact, they’d given up trying to have a baby by the time I was born. My mom was forty-four when she had me, my dad forty-nine. It was a miracle, they said, having their prayers answered after so many years. Every miracle has a cost, though, that’s what I’ve come to learn, and it’s not always paid by those who owe it. When I was a little boy, people would stop my dad and me at the community park or the grocery store just to tell him how cute his grandson looked. “Look at those blond curls,” they’d marvel. He would always correct them. “That’s my son,” he would say. At some point, he got tired of it. He stopped holding my hand when we went out, so it wouldn’t invite questions or comments from total strangers. It was easier for him, I guess. Not for me.

My mom, on the other hand, she never cared what other people thought. Even though her age kept her out of the PTA’s social circles, she volunteered in the school cafeteria at lunch and helped organize the Halloween carnival every year. We spent a lot of time together, especially on weekends when my dad was at the bowling alley for fourteen hours straight. I get my love of dogs from her. She’s always had dogs, sometimes four or five at a time, all of them sable-and-white rough collies. They’re a fantastic breed—smart, trainable, extremely devoted. When I was in middle school, my mom started breeding them and entering them in dog shows all over California. She and I would drive hundreds of miles to compete with one of them, and I got to see a lot of the state that way.

You’d think that spending so much time with my mom would have made it easier for me to talk to girls, but it didn’t. My mom was old and plain and agreeable, and the girls at my school were young and pretty and looking for trouble. Whenever I tried to impress them, it backfired. They’d roll their eyes or laugh. Do you know what it does to a boy when a girl laughs at him? Every time it happened, I tried to think of something clever to say, but that only made it worse. And I really hated that everyone called me A.J., which wasn’t my name, it was just a nickname that a teacher had given me in kindergarten, and somehow it stuck, even with my family. I spent most of my time with my dogs. They were less complicated than people.