Dark Water - Laura McNeal [21]
“Gracias,” I said.
He turned his head slightly, waved, and kept riding slowly in the direction of a dirt road that curved away from the trail and around an aloe field. I still couldn’t see how that road would lead toward the houses north of us, but I was desperate to read his note, which for a while made walking up Willow Glen feel like floating:
Below the question that I hoped was What is your favorite food? he’d written in a curiously foreign printing, cangrejos.
After Where did you learn to juggle? he’d just written, México.
How did you lose your voice? was followed by: Tuve un accidente.
What kind of accident? In a car? For at least five minutes the fact that he’d written back to me at all kept my mind off the walk, but the road went on and on and up and up. Like most roads in Fallbrook, it led mostly to no-trespassing signs and electric gates and watchful dogs and fruit trees. I gave up hope of walking all the way home and turned on my little black phone, which held four increasingly irate messages from my mother. When I called her, she said she’d pick me up so that she could personally kill me. I said those were terms I could accept.
After all, I had in my pocket a conversation with Amiel.
Fifteen
Cangrejo means “crab,” my Spanish dictionary informed me. I would eagerly and promptly have told Amiel how much I, too, like crabmeat, but I had no way to reach him and I was grounded. My mother didn’t find my father’s phone call much of an excuse, as it turned out. The second I got in the car, she said, “Where did I go this morning?”
“The high school.”
“And the day before that?”
I wasn’t positive where she’d been subbing the day before. “Potter?” I said.
“And the day before that?”
“I don’t remember, Mom. I don’t remember every school you went to in the past week.”
“Work,” she said. “I went to work. I didn’t go to the river or the mall or the movies or the beach because I was depressed and didn’t want to face people.”
“Okay.”
For cutting school and not answering my phone and wandering loose among mountain lions and would-be rapists (“did you know there are squatters camps out there?” my mother asked, so I didn’t mention the hammock), she grounded me and took away my phone. The next morning, she refused to make Icelandic pancakes, which were the sacred centerpiece of our Saturday mornings.
“Tell Robby I said joyeux anniversaire,” I told my mother when the catering trucks began to arrive at ten, filling Hoyt’s driveway and the patio with white-shirted men and women. My aunt Agnès was throwing a party for Robby’s seventeenth birthday, and I could hear her voice as she told people where to set up chairs and where to chill the Perrier.
My mother appeared to be thinking it over. “You can go to the party,” she said, “because I’ll be there.”
I hoped hopelessly that my uncle might have hired Amiel to do some of the work. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”
My mother and I walked through the grove in our new summer dresses, my mother’s hair pulled into a bun, her mouth similarly tightened, at six. We braced ourselves because a party thrown by Agnès was so elegant that you could only enjoy it if you were, say, invisible and yet able to eat. I was always charmed, at first, by the food and the flowers and the little sparkling lights, her handsomeness, and the waiters with trays. Agnès stood at the far edge of the patio, holding a champagne flute, her dark hair curling up just a little at the back of her ageless neck. I saw immediately that the summer dresses my mother and I had chosen were frowsy and countrified and that we would always and forever be that kind of people. Agnès had that effect on me. The evening sky was periwinkle, and white roses glowed at the edges of a world that smelled of grilled meat and caramelized sugar, where heaps of impossibly perfect strawberries cascaded over one another on silver platters and arrangements of incandescent lilies floated in the center of each round table. The pool water flowed over its vanishing edge, one I had approached from within too many times to be taken in