The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(97)

“I had no idea it would lead to this,” I said with a shrug. It hadn’t occurred to me simply because I didn’t know what it was like to have a father like Anderson Baker, who would have sacrificed anything to keep his son safe.

“Either way, thank you, Jeremy.”

I gave a quick nod of acknowledgment. Still, the sound of my name on her lips brought fresh pain. Go, I thought. Go. Make it quick. The doorbell rang again. Relieved at the interruption, I went to answer. It was Joe, the delivery guy. I’d been ordering from the Indian place two or three times a week, and there were days when Joe was the only person I talked to that I wasn’t working with or trying to put in jail. “Hey, man,” he said cheerfully, handing me the paper bag with the receipt stapled to it, the total highlighted in yellow marker. “It’s $21 even. Samosas were half off tonight.”

I took the bills from my wallet again and quickly counted out $25.

“Is that your girlfriend?” he asked, glancing over my shoulder.

“What?”

Joe broke into a smile. “Your girlfriend? She’s cute.”

I handed him the money and took the brown bag, kicking the door closed with one leg. The smell of warm naan and garlic and lamb wafted from the bag, but I didn’t feel hungry anymore. I set the food on the kitchen counter, and when I turned around, I found Nora in the doorway. To be this close to her was unbearable. A knot formed in my throat and I had to swallow hard before I could speak. My words came out halfway between a cry and a question. “You just left.”

She came to stand against the counter, across from me. “I thought everything that happened before was going to happen again. Only with me, instead of my dad.”

“I told you, I would never let Fierro hurt you.”

“That’s not something you can promise.”

“So you leave? You don’t call, you don’t write, you just disappear. It’s like I meant nothing to you, like I was just a crutch you got rid of when you didn’t need it anymore. You just moved on.”

“I didn’t. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I’m just as broken as before.”

All I’d wanted was to take care of her, and somehow I had managed to do the opposite. “I fucked up,” I said. “I know I fucked up.”

She touched my arm, and in that instant the memories came back in a flood. How she’d leaned into me the first time I’d kissed her, out there in the desert. How she’d pressed her lips against my skin when I’d told her about Fletcher. The Neruda poem she’d slipped into the pocket of my jeans while I was in the shower one morning and that I’d found when I was fumbling for my keys later, in the parking lot of the Stater Brothers. I’d stood beside my car with the ten-pound ice bag I’d just bought melting in the sun, and read it again and again. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries / the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself. It was the closest she’d ever come to telling me she loved me. The few weeks I’d had with her were the barometer against which the rest of my life was measured. A moment earlier, I’d been so angry with her I’d wanted her to leave, and now I felt light-headed with longing. “I miss you,” I whispered.

“I miss you, too,” she said.

Love was made of echoes like this, and now that I could hear them, I knew we could figure it out, find a way forward together. I opened my arms and she stepped into them, her body fitting so perfectly against mine it was as if she had never left. All we needed to do was to keep talking.





Nora




We left Oakland on a drizzly morning in September. The lock on the back of the U-Haul truck rattled as we drove down the narrow streets of my neighborhood, but the sound was drowned out once we reached the freeway. I had done this drive many times before, though never at the wheel of a truck and never with my mother, who had a mortal fear of accidents and frequently asked me to slow down. In the glove compartment, she found a map of California, candy wrappers, an old magazine—things left behind by strangers. She leafed idly through the magazine, then put it back and looked out of the window. We passed vineyards, citrus groves, industrial feedlots whose smell lasted for miles, signs that blamed Congress for the drought, billboards that advertised restaurants at the next exit. Sometime in the afternoon, my mother pulled out the magazine again and started reading me clues from the crossword puzzle in the back. Haunting spirit, five letters. Elephant’s strong suit, six letters.

Late at night, we finally reached the desert. As soon as we took the exit for the 62, my mother turned on the radio and looked for KDGL on the dial. “Claudia Corbett is about to start,” she said, raising the volume. An elderly man was calling to say that he was worried about his son, who had a well-paying job with a mortgage company in Denver, but was always struggling with money. “No matter how much he makes,” the caller said, “he always spends more. I don’t get it.” I expected Claudia to suggest that the son cut up his credit cards and go on a strict debt-payment plan, but instead she began to ask questions about his childhood and upbringing, confident that the root of his financial problems would be found there. My mother listened raptly. She loved this talk show, and it came to me that there was a voyeuristic element to it: this show broke open the door between public and private, a door she kept scrupulously closed in her own life. I waited until the episode had ended before I turned off the radio. “I need to tell you something, Mom,” I said. “About Dad.”