Dark Water - Laura McNeal [46]
I washed my face. I brushed my teeth. I glumly followed my uncle to the Packrat, where Robby was sitting with his eyes closed. He dutifully extracted himself from the cab so I could take my seat in the middle. “Bonjour le you,” he said. “Bonjour le donuts.”
Sunday mornings always felt so much cleaner, as if the windows of the world had been washed. Mission Road was empty, and just ahead of us a coyote appeared, its coat all rumpled and thick like a German shepherd’s, its eyes, as it turned to regard us, both haunted and indifferent.
“So, Robby,” my uncle Hoyt began. “Your mother said you went on some sort of date last night, huh?”
“Yep,” Robby said. He nodded. I studied the olive trees on one side of the road. Nobody ever harvested olives, not even my uncle, and yet they grew everywhere in Fallbrook. I made a mental note not to point out this untapped market to my mother.
“Nice girl?” my uncle prodded.
“Yep,” Robby said.
“Someone from school, I guess?”
“Older,” Robby said.
“What’s her name?”
“Mary.”
“Mary. Okay. What’d you do?”
We reached the crest of a hill and I could see the place on the horizon called the Sleeping Indian, a huge land formation that looked, once you’d heard the name, exactly like an earthen man stretched out on his back. Beyond his body, on clear mornings like this one, you could see the line of blue that was the ocean.
“I gave her a tour of unknown Fallbrook,” Robby said. He was looking out the window as we passed Willow Glen, and part of me leaped out of the car and started walking north.
“Sounds good,” Hoyt said. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“First we took a little walk,” Robby said, nibbling a little at the edge of his thumb.
“You took a walk at night?”
“Downtown. I took her along the promenade.”
I knew this was something Hoyt would be glad to hear about. He was a big one for civic projects, and his name was on the plaque honoring the men and women who’d donated time and money to the promenade, a half-finished path that led from the library to Fallbrook Street. For three blocks, you could stroll along a path of wood chips, maples, sycamores, and oaks. The landscape committee had planted hibiscus, too, and passionflowers and fortnight lilies and bougainvillea. They had installed trash cans and informative signs and benches that vandals beat with what appeared to be iron crowbars in the middle of the night. On one side of the newly planted trees, the land dropped away into a creek bobbing with trash left by teenagers who wrote unpronounceable gang signs in black spray paint on the concrete, but you could also see white egrets and the occasional duck. On the far side of the creek, little stucco houses that looked like they’d been in Fallbrook back when it was just a bunch of lemon farms stood in the shade of far older trees, and in the tiny yards, prickly pear cactus plants made fences for goats, chickens, and, in one yard, a pig. Unfortunately, most of the people who used the promenade in the daytime were scary men in possession of liquor bottles, so I hadn’t walked there in a while.
“She’d never seen the promenade?” Hoyt asked.
“Nope,” Robby said.
“I thought you said there were three things,” I said to Robby.
“Right,” Robby said. We were approaching town now. The truck idled between El Toro Market and Gilberto’s taco shop and M & M liquor store with its signs for phone cards to Mexico and Western Union and Corona beer and strange Mexican candies flavored with chili and tamarind. Sunlight made everything look new and hopeful. “Number two was the bridge to poverty,” Robby said.
“The what?” my uncle asked, turning left with the green arrow that sent us slowly along Main Street, past the Got Holes tattoo parlor and piercing gallery, the Mexican clothing stores that displayed dresses on transparent torsos hung outside the doors, the panadería that sold menudo on Wednesdays and every day sold sugar-sanded cookies as thick as cinnamon rolls. After the panadería, the Mexican businesses just stopped and the places