Shrimp (17 page)

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lips moving but I don't see anyone near you or your cell phone in your hand."

I took his free hand, cold and wrinkled from the water. "Never mind. Wanna go back to your place?" I licked his ear, then whispered into it, "To your room?" Not that I wouldn't be agreeable to fooling around on the beach in broad daylight, I guess, but the thought of cold sand on my ass and transient loonies cheering us on from behind the beach dunes was less than hot.

"The time isn't right," Shrimp said.

I actually stomped my foot. "It is!" I said. "It is!" Why can't he be your basic horn-dog male, WHY? My mistake, trying to entice him just after he'd scored with his first true love--the ocean--and was too Zen surfed out to care about scoring another form of action
avec moi.

His lips covered mine for a brief kiss, just long enough to shut me up. Then he said, "Iris and Billy are probably at the house--they wouldn't care, but I would. And the two of us haven't decided one way or another whether we want to get back together. When we do make that decision it shouldn't be like this, when you're upset, when it's about escaping instead of about us. That's just lamé. When it happens, if it happens, don't you want it to be special? Isn't this great just now, you and me, the ocean, the sand, the beach almost all to ourselves?"

"What are you?" I asked. 'A girl?"

What if we've waited so long that now we can never do it again, because there never will be a right time? What if neither of us ever at the same time feels the right measure of trust and lust that allows us to cross this invisible "just friends" barrier?

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We saw Iris in the distance as we headed up toward the highway. She was walking their new dog, Aloha, a mutt she and Billy adopted from the pound. It's weird that two people who still haven't decided where they are going to live permanently now that they're back in the U.S. of A. would adopt a dog before they knew they had a real home for it, but Wallace didn't seem to mind, probably because Aloha kept Iris too occupied to intrude in the last stages of wedding planning. The eager dog was walking Iris more than she it, though, and she almost ran past us without noticing us. Her mane of brown-gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but the strong wind was spraying pieces across her face so she didn't see us until we were directly in front of her.

"Hi!" she said, startled, when she noticed us standing in front of her. She let Aloha loose from the leash and threw a stick for the dog to fetch. If Nancy had been standing before us (and not recovering from a fight earlier that morning), Shrimp and I would have gotten chewed out for skipping school, but on Iris time, who knows if she even made the connection that she was bumping into us on the beach in the late morning of a school day? "Want to take a walk with me?"

Shrimp said, "I need to go change out of this wet suit, but why don't you two go for a walk, then meet me back at the house in half an hour and I will make you ladies lunch? The Shrimp Blue Plate Special: Velveeta mac and cheese." He looked at his mom. "No bacon chunks," he added, and Iris chuckled.

Iris took my hand and we walked back toward the beach. Iris is easier when her family isn't around; she relaxes and she's more a person and less a pseudomom/wife

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bossing everyone around. Billy is a complete mystery to me; a fellow of few words who doesn't appear to want anyone to get to know him besides Iris. I will say that when his eyes aren't glazed over from being baked, the primary times his face registers emotion is when his sons are around him. He may not be much of a stick-around dad but he loves Wallace and Shrimp, though it's Iris who rules his world. The key to the mystery that is Billy may be that he's no mystery at all, that after decades of smoking herb like some people smoke cigarettes, there's simply not much there to him anymore.

Iris said, "You seem tense. Everything all right, darlin'?"

"Yeah, just a little spat with my mom. She's trying to make me go see her dying mother at Christmas instead of go to Wallace and Dee's wedding."

"Well, don't you want to see your grandmother before she passes?"

"She's an old bat I've only seen a few times in my life. I haven't seen her enough to care, and from what I have gotten to know of her, I've never liked. She's not a very nice person, and I can't just all of a sudden pretend to care about her just because she's sick--that's so fake. I mean, if I had some terminal disease and she came into town like, 'Oh, my beloved grandchild, the years we've lost, let me pretend to care now that you're about to kick it,' I would just projectile vomit or something. Anyway I think I'm old enough to make this decision about what's more important for myself."

Iris said, "I think you're right. What do you think Shrimp would choose, between moving away with Billy and me or staying here with Wallace and Dee?"

Of course I wanted to say,
Shrimp would choose a Cyd

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Charisse commune where friends are outlawed and sex rules morning, noon, and night and no way will his mother be allowed to take Shrimp away from me now that I've found him again,
but I didn't. I said, "Why?"

"Well, it's a choice he's going to have to make eventually. And I'm curious what the girl who knows him best thinks he'll choose." It would be easy to think of Iris as just some crazy hippie throwback who cares more about shoving her political opinions down everyone's throats than she cares about the welfare of her own kids, but what elevates Iris from annoying to special is how deeply she cares, when she cares. I could feel in the tense clench of her hand that she was more than worried about whom Shrimp would choose; whether worried that he would reject her or worried that he wouldn't let her go, I don't know.

Nancy ringing my cell phone again allowed me to pry my hand loose from Iris's death grip. Nancy didn't bother saying hello or letting me speak, she just jumped right in: "I'll offer you a trade, a one-time-only, non-negotiable offer. Alexei stays in Fernando's apartment while we're all gone so there's at least one adult on the premises, and you agree to choose two colleges and fill out those applications during the Christmas break. Alexei will be there if you need help with the college applications. Under these terms, you can stay home in San Francisco and go to the wedding, if that's what you choose. Deal?"

"Deal," I said.

Nancy added, 'And don't you ever raise your voice at me or lock your door in my face again like you did this morning. We're finished with that. If you want to be treated like an adult, act like one." This time she clicked me off.

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*** Chapter 21

The Chairman of
the Board's birthday was certainly not being celebrated at Java the Hut late that afternoon, as witnessed by the obscene level of crank in the coffeehouse.

Helen sat in a corner of the café, violently drawing in her sketch pad. When I glanced at the work, her Ball Hunter comic hero guy appeared to be getting chased by an army of golf-cart-riding Wonder Woman look-alikes, all shaking their fists at him, sunlight beaming off their gold bracelets. "Poor Ball Hunter man," I said to Helen. "What did he do?"

She crouched over her notebook so I couldn't look at it, and she glared at me. "I'm trying to work in private," she snapped. 'And I looked for you at school today because I needed your help with something, but now it's too late. What, you're too cool to show up at school now?"

Urn, okay, Helen. Need some Midol?

I walked over to where Autumn was bent over, lifting a tray of dirty glasses to take into the kitchen to be washed. When she stood up I saw that she'd cut off her dreads, and was left with a head full of short chunks of hair in search of direction. Autumn has that gorgeous rainbow-coalition face so she can pretty much pull off any hairstyle, but the new look was a complete surprise and I let out an involuntary gasp when I first saw it. While Autumn can pull off any hairstyle, that doesn't mean the new 'do was all that flattering.

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"Don't say anything about my hair," Autumn hissed. "I didn't get early admission to Cal and I was freaking out and just started cutting, and now I look horrible."

"You don't look horrible at all...," I started to say, but she breezed past me toward the kitchen. She went through the wrong-side door and got slammed in the face by Delia coming through from the other side. Autumn dropped the tray of glasses onto the floor, splashing water and coffee remnants on the ground. She held her nose while tears surrounded her eyes. 'Autumn, I'm so sorry!" Delia said. 'Are you okay? Do you need an ice pack? How many times does this have to happen to you for you to remember which door is which, anyway?"

I may have accepted Helen's challenge to become Autumn's friend, but I am not blind to Autumn's faults, the worst of which, I'm proud to proclaim, is the one I suspected to be true about her before I'd even met her: She is the worst waitress/barista ever. She always remembers customers' orders wrong, as if it's that hard to distinguish between skim or whole milk or a latte versus a cappuccino. She has no concept that the cleaning towel is there to fulfill its destiny to wipe spilled coffee, sugar granules, and cocoa powder off the counter at regular intervals, and she could easily send Java the Hut to bankruptcy court from all the glasses she's broken and machines she's permanently damaged. Shrimp says Wallace and Delia won't fire her because Autumn needs the job to save for college, but I think they keep her on because she's so pretty that she keeps a steady stream of surfer dudes coming into the shop, regardless of her barista talents (or sexuality).

The surfer most falsely enamored of Autumn, Arran

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a.k.a. Aryan, ran over from the computer terminal, where he had been looking at the Victoria's Secret catalog on-line, to help Autumn clean up the mess she'd spilled. Delia couldn't help Autumn anyway, or tend to her wounded nose, because a tourist bus had pulled up outside the store, probably sucked over to Ocean Beach by the rare day of sun, and a sizable stream of customers had flowed to the front counter demanding caffeination.

Delia ran over to me with an apron in her hand. "Please?" she said. "Can you help me out here?"

Despite the many months since I'd worked the counter at Java the Hut, I said, "Sure." Churning out rapid-fire brews is like riding a bike or performing certain sexual favors--a skill that once you've developed, you never lose. The time working at Lord Empress Kari's restaurant must have spoiled me, though, because back behind that counter I couldn't help but notice how poorly organized the station was or that it was a good thing the health inspector hadn't come by today because the cleanliness situation was not the tip-top shape Kari demands and gets. Lord Empress Kari has her restaurant running like a well-oiled machine, and Java the Hut could have used some of her whip cracking to get it moving like a tight-ship business instead of a café that ran out of small bills to give customers change and needed its expiration dates checked on the stale sandwiches.

Maybe I am not an Orange in a land of Apples, after all. Maybe I thought I belonged working at a place like Java the Hut, but after all the time away JtH felt different. It's still a great hangout but, like, maybe I am not all about the grunge mellow factor anymore. Which isn't to say I have any idea

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what I am about these days, but I was surprised at how different the Java the Hut coffeehouse felt to me now: part of the past, over
,finito.
Also, truth be told, I've had better coffee.

After we'd taken care of the onslaught of customers, Delia tucked behind her ear a strand of her frizzy red hair that had fallen from the bun at the back of her head, and she wiped some sweat from her brow. "Bless you," she said to me, right as Iris burst through the front door of the café. Iris saw Delia at the front counter, then turned around and walked back out of the door, away down the street. "What was that about?" I asked Delia.

Delia's voice went on the down low. "Get this. Billy had some, let's say 'transactions,' he was handling here at the store, and when Wallace and I realized what was going on we asked him not to conduct business here. Billy was okay with it--you know Wallace walks on water to him--but now Iris is pissed because she says how are she and Billy supposed to afford moving out to their own place if we are obstructing him from making a living? Those two, I swear, if we make it through the next few weeks to the wedding, it will be a miracle."

I don't know what happened in the corner of the café, but we heard shouting and looked up to see Helen slam her notebook shut and storm out of the café, leaving Autumn and Aryan standing next to where Helen had been sitting, stunned looks on their faces. "What's her problem?" Aryan said. He, too, walked out of the store, grabbing his surfboard from the surf rack outside the window, and he headed in the direction of the beach, his long board at his hip.

Delia shrugged. "I have no idea what's going on there, but please can you do me one more favor? The wedding

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planner is meeting me here in half an hour to go over the last-minute details, and Autumn still has a few hours left on her shift and I really need her help, for what that's worth. Please go talk to her and just get her in a mood so she can help me out here. Pretty please, my darling could-be-my-sister-in-law one day?" Delia whimpered like a puppy dog; she was almost as cute as Aloha.

"Just-friends-in-law," I corrected Delia. I took off the apron and handed it back to her. "I'll go talk to her, but don't expect any miracles. I don't know what I'm doing." What am I, Dear Abby now? It was enough of a battle just to like the Autumn wench, now I have to talk to her about whatever is bothering her? This girls-as-friends business should come with a how-to manual.

Autumn sat at the back of the coffeehouse on the beat-up old sofa with the red sheet covering it. She pulled a book from the shelf, but the Dalai Lama's wisdom about the art of happiness must not have interested her because she flipped through random pages without reading a word or noticing that there were customers milling around who might have liked to sit on the sofa. I sat down next to her. "What the fuck?" I said. Was that a bad approach? What would Oprah have said?

Autumn rubbed her swollen nose, then placed her head in her hands. "Grrrrrrr...," she groaned. "Can we just erase this day from the calendar?"

"Erase Frank Day! Never!" I sputtered, horrified. Then again, Frank Day might not be a priority on her agenda. "What happened?" I asked her. I tried to pat her back, but I must have patted too hard because she flinched and said, "Ow!"