The Owl & Moon Cafe: A Novel (No Series) (3 page)

Mariah knew firsthand how that fudge made for a moment of pleasure no one could take from you. When had her life come down to settling for moments? Why did she live at the beach when she had no time to swim, or sunbathe, or even take a walk? So eager to make a career, she’d spent the early years of her daughter’s life reading student papers so late into the night that Lindsay had learned to put herself to bed.

Around two-thirty there was a lull, and Mariah noticed Gammy was limping. “Go sit down,” she told her.

Gammy chose the same stool Mr. Tea-and-scones had inhabited. “Gammy,” she said, wiping down the counter with their bleach-smelling cleaner, “who was the Scottish guy this morning?”

Her grandmother grinned. “Oh, you mean the one who looks like a movie star?”

“I really didn’t notice.”

“Careful, Pinocchio. Your nose is growing.”

Mariah scrubbed hard at a stain. “Never mind.”

Gammy clasped her hands to her chest. “Maybe he came all the way from Scotland to fall desperately in love with you and give me more great-grandchildren to spoil and Lindsay some siblings to play with.”

“Stop it,” Mariah said.

“A girl can hope.”

“Gammy, the last thing I need in my life right now is a man.”

Her grandmother untied her stained apron. As she brushed off crumbs, she said, “Dating wouldn’t kill you. You could try that internet dating service. Who knows? You might make a friend. If you ever want to—”

“I lost my job!” Mariah blurted out, and there she stood, her last customers of the day sipping coffee with no idea that their waitress was on the verge of tears.

For a moment or two, Gammy’s face looked every one of its sixty-eight years. Her snow-white hair was teased and sprayed into a proper old-lady helmet hairdo, but no amount of product could hide the baby-pink scalp peeking out.

“Go give that fellow his check,” Gammy said, as if her granddaughter had told her nothing more important than the mail had arrived. “Go on, now. I’ll make us some cocoa. Then we’ll talk. You can tell me all about it.”

Mariah composed herself, looking out the window as the fog started to roll in, erasing the sunny day that had begun so promisingly. There was a screech of brakes and a narrowly missed fender-bender that probably involved a protected deer with a mouthful of flowers, and someone started cussing. And then, just like she did at the end of every business day, Allegra started singing, “Come on people now, smile—” But she never finished the verse, because she fainted dead away behind the counter.

W
EDNESDAYS WERE
L
INDSAY
Moon’s favorite day of the week because Wednesdays meant three whole uninterrupted hours of science. However, as Gammy Bess always said, anything you love is going to cost at least two days’ tips, which in this case meant two hours of art, at which she hopelessly, terminally sucked. Standing on the school steps, she weighed her options. If she pleaded a stomachache, the school nurse would let her lie down for the time it took for art to be over. But would she buy it when Lindsay suddenly recovered in time for science? Lindsay got stomachaches a lot. This was only the fifth week of school and already she’d been to the nurse for a real stomachache. Would today’s be the one that prompted the nurse to call her mother? Her mother would know if she was faking. She’d tell the nurse to send her back to art, or worse, make a doctor’s appointment. Lindsay hated going to the doctor. The first thing they did was weigh you, and then they measured your height. She was so far behind in both categories that they made a huge deal out of it, and what was she supposed to do? Stretch herself on a rack? Eat Crisco out of the can?

You need art to become a fully rounded human being, her mother said when Lindsay begged her to drop the class. Art requires imagination. Think of it as exercise for your right frontal lobe.

Art was stupid. All the good art had been done hundreds of years ago. Lindsay could recognize Rembrandt, Picasso, and Van Gogh. Wasn’t that enough? She could not paint. Every clay animal she sculpted looked like a dying snail. Her current project, a papier-mâché pelagic fish, looked like newsprint wrapped around a balloon. How did failing make her or anyone anything but sad?

She had just started up the steps when the fight broke out.

“Everybody look out!” Taylor Foster yelled as she stood on the grassy quad that led into Country Day Academy for Girls. “Here comes the Jolly Brown Giant!”

By giant, she meant Sally DeThomas, the girl who had won first prize in the previous year’s Science Fair. Lindsay had come in second. Last year Taylor and Sally had been best friends, always giggling and whispering. This year they were mortal enemies. From the first day of school Taylor had been giving Sally the silent treatment. Soon after, all the Taylor clones started ignoring Sally. Now this.

“Shut up, Taylor,” Sally said.

“You shut up,” Taylor said back.

“You’re a racist!”

“I am
so not
a racist! Can I help it if you’re brown? What are you now, six-foot-twelve?”

Sally sighed, and shrugged the strap of her backpack up her shoulder. Lindsay could tell she didn’t want to fight. “I’m five feet seven inches. You want to make something of it?”

The Taylor clones gathered round. “Taller is one thing, but you’re freak-show tall. What did you do all summer? Climb Japanese skyscrapers?”

The lemmings waited until Taylor laughed, and then they laughed, too. Ha, ha, ha. The fake kind of laughing that felt like arrows in your face.

Lindsay watched Sally DeThomas, former leader of the popular kids, plant her feet like a gladiator. “Taylor, you think you’re so great, but really you’re not. Who beat you in the horse show? Ahem, I believe it was me.”

“At least I’m not a dirty farm girl,” Taylor said. “At least I have clean fingernails and don’t smell like horse manure every day of my pathetic life.”

Sally balled her hands into fists. “I’m Grand Champion Reserve Equestrian of this year’s Strides and Tides, Taylor! Look ‘champion’ up in the dictionary, loser.”

By now most of the other Country Day Academy girls were watching. Lindsay retreated to the school’s oldest cypress tree, a gray giant that she particularly loved. The tree kept her company while she ate her lunch every day, except when it was raining. On rainy days teachers made everyone stay inside and eat at the table together, and play horrible, boring word games like hangman and Boggle.

“So what?” Taylor said. “It’s just a piece of ribbon.”

“It’s a
gold
ribbon. What happened, Tay-tay? Couldn’t your parents afford to buy you a decent horse? That old nag you ride is a bucket of glue waiting to happen.”

Taylor blushed bright red. Lindsay’s stomach clenched. She hoped a teacher would come out and make them stop before someone got hurt. Lindsay hated it when the students made fun of her, but truthfully, for a change, it was a relief having someone else in the crosshairs.

“At least I have normal teeth,” Taylor continued. “How’d you break yours? Chewing on trees? God! Even poor people can afford porcelain veneers!”

Sally put her hand to her mouth, then quickly drew it away, but it was too late. Now everyone knew that mocking her teeth was a way to get to her.

Lindsay hoped Sally wouldn’t cry. Taylor’s real father—not the one her mom was currently married to—was a restorative dentist. Once he came to class and tried to get everyone excited about his career. Lindsay took a deep breath and walked past Taylor to Sally. “Um, Sally? Can you come inside for a second? I want to show you something.” Summoning courage, she took hold of Sally’s arm.

Sally looked at her arm like a bug had landed there. “What?”

“I can’t describe it. You have to come inside to see. Please. It’s really great.”

“Fine, I’m coming.” She looked back at Taylor. “Watch your mouth, Taylor.”

“Ooh, I’m scared! Help, somebody call nine-one-one! Get animal control out here! Tell them to bring a truck for Queen Kong!”

As soon as they cleared the steps, Lindsay let go of her arm and said, “I lied. I hope you’re not mad. It’s not worth getting in trouble when you have the best grades in the class. Like my great-grandmother always says, ‘In the eyes of the Lord everyone is naked and afraid and should be.’ ”

“Huh?”

“Basically it means everyone’s equal, and you should never give people like Taylor Foster the satisfaction of seeing you cry.”

“I wasn’t going to
cry,
” Sally said, her jaw trembling. “I was going to kick Taylor Foster’s stupid ass from here to Modesto.”

Lindsay nodded. “She deserves it, but not if it means you get expelled.”

Sally smiled, revealing her chipped front teeth. She touched them with her tongue. “I did a back flip on this diving board at our vacation hotel and smacked them on the way down. I passed out and everything. The lifeguard had to save me. My stepdad called the paramedics.”

“Wow, that must have hurt.”

First bell rang, and girls from age six to thirteen began to pour down the corridor toward lockers and classrooms. Lindsay and Sally made their way to the eighth-grade lockers, which were painted apricot, a color that reminded Lindsay of a foul-tasting medicine she once had to take for bronchitis.

“I don’t even remember it happening,” Sally said. “They gave me a shot and pills to take after. I have to wait until I stop growing to get them capped. If Taylor wasn’t so stupid she’d know porcelain veneers aren’t permanent.”

Lindsay wished she had been there. If Sally was her friend, and such an accident happened, Lindsay could have performed CPR or the Heimlich maneuver, or even R.I.C.E., which stood for rest, ice, compress, and elevate. She had her YWCA certification in first aid, a little white pin with a red cross on it, and a card to carry in her wallet, but who would ever call on someone four feet five inches tall for help? “Did you go to Taylor’s dad?”

Sally made a face as she jostled her sticky locker door. “Are you serious? I made my mom find a dentist in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Considering how much it costs to live there, you know the dentists have to be the best.”

“That makes sense,” Lindsay said. Just the thought of exposed nerves made her stomach turn over. “Did you have root canals and titanium pins, or pulpectomies?”

Sally looked at her, surprised. “I had one root canal. They’re supposed to hurt really bad but the dentist made me sniff laughing gas. It’s a totally bogus name. It doesn’t make you laugh at all. It kind of feels like dreaming.”

Laughing gas sounded worrisome to Lindsay. Since reading
The Diary of Anne Frank
over the summer—it was on the Country Day Academy’s summer reading list—she worried about gas. Take carbon monoxide. You couldn’t see it, but if you didn’t have an alarm, it could put you to sleep forever. The concentration camp stories stayed with her. And factor in the terrible true-life events, like anti-Semitism, yellow stars for Jews, pink triangles for homosexuals, all the families separated, people starving and put to death just because one man had megalomania. Stuff like that could happen again and you might not even see it coming until it was too late.

Sally pounded her locker door. “I don’t even know why I bother with this lame ass thing,” she said. “I spend half my freaking life trying to make it open or shut. I should just tear the freaking door off.”

“You can put your stuff in my locker,” Lindsay said. “I’ve never even had a filling. Sometimes I surf the net, though, just to look at medical stuff.”

“No way! Me, too! There are so many cool surgery websites. No live feed, though. I would kill to watch a real live operation up close. Hey, have you ever been to my mom’s website? Here, let me write down the address. You have to see it. There’s a picture of me on my horse, Soul Man. With my gold ribbon, ha ha. Stick out your hand.”

Lindsay held her hand out and Sally wrote the web address on it with a purple gel pen. “Thanks,” Lindsay said, not quite believing that a girl like Sally was actually speaking to her without calling her Smurf or Munchkin or Thumbelina, thanks to the stupid folktales they had to read for Mrs. Potter’s language arts class.

Second bell rang, and the girls bobbed their way through the sea of camel-colored blazers, crisp white blouses, and plaid skirts. At the door of Mrs. Shiasaka’s classroom, their homeroom, Sally said, “You’re all right, Lindsay. Here, have a pack of the cinnamon gum my dad brought back from Mexico. It’s totally insane. If you put five pieces in your mouth at the same time, it gives you blisters.”

The minute homeroom ended, Lindsay headed to the nurse’s office. Her stomach actually did kind of hurt, not because of the gum—she was saving it—but the tension of watching Sally and Taylor fight had turned it sour. She let the nurse give her some Tums—orange flavor—and lay down on the cot, watching
Good Morning America
on the tiny television while the nurse knitted a purple scarf that had flecks of gold in it.

Dr. Ritchie stood at the whiteboard with her colored markers in her hand, going on and on about the first time ever Siemens Westinghouse award for middle school science projects.

“I realize this is short notice, it being September, and our projects are to be presented in December, but I want you girls to know what’s at stake. If a student applies herself, goes the extra mile on a science project, this award is within reach. Awards accrue on a student’s transcript. Consequently, by the time this student is a senior in high school, she just might win an academic scholarship that pays for everything.”

“What do you mean by everything?” Sally asked.

“Not only tuition, but also textbooks, Bunsen burners, meals, and housing.”

It sounded impossible to Lindsay, but she had to try for it. More than anything she wanted to go to a college with a first-rate science department, and she knew her mother wouldn’t be able to pay for it all.

“This is why you girls need to take this year’s Science Fair very seriously,” Dr. Ritchie said, and turned to write potential topics on the board in her beautiful backhand script. Every girl at Country Day had tried to copy the elegant, spidery handwriting at one time or another. Lindsay was no exception. Dr. Ritchie was left-handed. Lindsay was right-handed. She knew for a fact that being left-handed automatically made you special.

Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, and Albert Schweitzer were all left-handed. Of course, no believable scientific theory could rest on such a small group of people. When Lindsay probed further, however, more proof emerged. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, M. C. Escher, Mark Twain, Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, H. G. Wells, Eudora Welty, and Jessamyn West—all lefties. The lack of women in her research had initially bothered her until she mentioned it to Allegra. “Chalk that up to male chauvinism,” she said. “Lots of left-handed women were geniuses. Janis Joplin was. All it means is that the macho-man researchers didn’t bother asking.”

“Do you think Dr. Ritchie wears granny undies?” Sally whispered to Lindsay.

Dr. Ritchie immediately looked their way. Lindsay, who had never gotten in trouble, looked back, smiling at her favorite teacher. Dr. Ritchie would stay after school if you needed help, but if you talked in her class during a lecture, it made her go postal. Stop it, she mouthed to Sally when Dr. Ritchie had turned around again.

“In addition,” Dr. Ritchie enunciated sharply, “I’m pleased to announce that the NIH—National Institutes of Health—has allocated to California schools a stipend for studying science vis-à-vis…”

Vis-à-vis.
In relation to, face-to-face, concerning, Lindsay thought. What a great term. She would try to use it in her lab notebook. If she ever got a B from Dr. Ritchie, she would throw herself off the Bixby Bridge.