The Princess of Las Pulgas (40 page)

“
Good morning, Tuan.” I
smile and smooth my hair in his mirror like I’m in no hurry to go
anyplace. His eyes don’t blink. He’s kinda snaky that
way.

“
Not good,” he
grumbles.

He jerks his door closed behind him and
stomps outside. I follow and watch while he swipes gray paint over
the red-and-black stucco art.

“
Las Vegas!” He spits into
the gutter. “Hoodlums do this. All time.”

While he dunks his brush
into the paint I slip past him. I want to run, but I make myself
walk the way the girls do on the street when they’re working. “Look
at us” they say. “We’re not doing anything wrong, just
walking.”
Come on, Tuan, watch me leave
like I’m coming back, like this is the same as any day since I
moved into your dump
. I almost make the
corner when he yells.

“
You betta tell her rent
due at noon or you both out!” He flings his arm, and
paint

flies like gray raindrops onto the
sidewalk.

I wave and smile.

When I reach the corner, I can still feel
his snaky eyes on my back.

Chapter 2

Shawna

There are lots of good
things about Las Vegas, but the best thing is it never shuts down.
If I steer clear of the old section of town and the back alleys,
moving from casino to casino, looking bored like I’m waiting for my
parents, I can stay pretty safe around the clock. The trick is to
avoid crossing paths with the same security guards too often. I’m
thinking that if I hang around Vegas, I can make it on my own. Have
before.
Yeah. Sure I can.

I’ve been knocking around town since I left
my buddy Tuan this morning. It’s now four in the afternoon. I’m
starved and it’s time to make some life decisions. I know Kibby’s
Hamburgers is hiring, but nobody works long at Kibby’s. Their last
burger-flipper, who sat next to me in biology, filled me in on the
night manager—who grew hands whenever she was alone with him. That
picture I get in my mind makes me shiver. So I’ll check out Stan’s
Café. They hire a lot.

When I get to the café, there isn’t a Help
Wanted sign in the window. I walk inside anyway. Stan’s fries are
still fifty cents—within my budget—and I order one grease-soaked
box of limp potatoes. With a plop of ketchup for color, I’m in
heaven. Today’s newspaper is on an empty table, so with my lunch or
dinner—I haven’t decided which one—I shuffle through the pages to
the help wanted ads.

“
Wanted:

Part-time fry cook. Experience
Required.”

I can fry stuff.

$8.00/hr. Midnight to
four
A
.
M
. Pete’s
Dugout
.

That’s down on Pioneer. Not where I want to
work.

Housekeeping $6.50/hr. Motel Escondido.

Hmmm. Toilets. Maybe not.

I’m down to my last fry and still hungry.
That hundred Mom left has to last until I land a job or . . . I
pull the note out and read it again. “Your granma lives in a place
called sweet river.”

What are my options? Stay
here, quit school, and get a job cleaning toilets or call the
number on the back of Mom’s note
. I lay my
head on the grease-flecked newspaper and listen to the paper
crinkle under my ear.
Wanted:
under-educated sixteen-year-old to scrape crud off the
floor.
Experience Required.

My stomach growls.

“
You sick or
somethin’?”

I jerk upright to face the guy standing over
me.

“
Ahh, no. Just
tired.”

“
Go sleep someplace else.
This is a restaurant, not a flophouse.”

“
You could’a fooled me.” I
grab my paper bag off the table and head for the door. He is one
big scowl and I’m not going toe to toe with a greasy grump.
Outside, I poke my head back in, flip him off, and yell, “I’m going
to the emergency room. Your grease is rancid, Pedro!”

He’s after me in a shot, and around the
corner I slip into the nearest store before he can see me. He does
a fast waddle past the window while I peek from behind a dress
rack.

“
May I help you?” A sales
girl peers over a 25% off sign at the end of the clothes
rack.

Gee, sure, yes. Please
help me find my mother, okay? She’s somewhere in New Jersey at a
crap table. There’ll be a sleazy guy with blond hair next to
her
. “I don’t think so.”

“
Are you looking for
anything special?”

Actually, I am. Some
answers would be nice for a start. Maybe a life if you got one of
those in here
. “No.” I clutch my paper bag
and the pills rattle inside their plastic bottle. “Just
looking.”
Just searching for a way
out.

She smiles and moves to another
customer.

My stomach is flipping pancakes, and I feel
like hurling. I squint my eyes and swallow. Maybe the grease was
rancid after all. Or maybe that part of my anatomy can’t stand the
idea I’ve got circulating through my brain: A place called Sweet
River.

“
Are you okay?” It’s the
chirpy sales girl again, her face curious and a bit
worried.

When I look past her into the mirror I can
see why she’s looking at me that way. I’ve turned the color of
paste. “I think I got some bad food.”

Now her face is more than worried. She’s
already seeing a big mess, one she’ll get stuck having to clean
up.

The greasy grump walks past, back to his
“restaurant.” He could have been my next employer. Oh man. I make
my decision. I’m trying the granny package.

After breaking the hundred for change, I
step into the bus depot phone booth. I pick up the receiver and
punch in the first ten numbers. But when I get to the last digit,
my finger freezes midair. What if—I glance at the name again—Kay
Stone doesn’t answer? I know my job options in this town, and I
can’t go back to Tuan’s, that’s for sure. He’s already changed the
locks by now, and anything I left is in Tuan’s back room. It’ll sit
there until some poor desperate sap needs something like our
aluminum pot and pays him five bucks for it like we did. I punch
the last number on the phone pad and wait.

One ring.

Two.

“
Hello.” A woman’s voice
is on the other end of the phone, but it doesn’t sound like a
grandmother. It isn’t creaky or wispy. It sounds like it belongs to
someone a lot younger.
Oh, no. Mom gave me
a wrong number
.

“
Uhh. Is . . . uh . . .
this Kay Stone?”

“
Yes.”

“
Well—” I hadn’t thought
exactly how I’d say this next part, but now there isn’t any time to
choose my words. “My name’s Shawna, and my mom says you’re my
grandmother.”

The phone goes silent.

“
Are you there?” I can’t
risk her hanging up because all I have is Sweetheart’s hundred, and
I’m using a chunk of it on this call.

I can barely hear her
breathing. I hope she isn’t having a heart
attack
.

“
Yes.” Finally. A reply
all the way from Sweet River.

“
Well, here’s the deal. My
mom’s split and she left me this ticket to Sacramento. She said to
call you and let you know.” I wait through another long dead
silence. “I hate to rush you, but I’m running out of money on this
call and—”

“
What’s your mother’s
name?”

“
Jackie.”

“
Your father?”

Oh damn.
Mom told me once, but she’d been in her
“I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it” mood, so even though I hadn’t been
sure what she’d said, I’d dropped it.

“
I think it was Nic or
Rick. He’s dead.” I hear her swallow. Is she drinking something? I
don’t think she’s buying that I’m telling the truth.
”Hello?”

“
When does your bus arrive
in Sacramento?”

I check the schedule I’d picked up. “About
ten tomorrow morning.”

Another long
silence.
These pauses are killing
me
.

“
What do you look like, so
I can find you at the station?” she finally asks.

I almost say, “Dorky,” but
instead I say, “I’ve got black hair and brown eyes. I’m about
five-four, and I’m wearing a T-shirt with—” I pull the shirt front
out and check to see which one I have on, “
Bad Ass Attitude,”
I say.

She clears her throat. “I’ll meet you at the
bus station. . . Shawna.”

I hang up knowing that at least she
remembered my name.

The phone booth smells like pee, and I’m
glad to escape into the bus terminal where Lysol rules.

“
That went well, don’t you
think?” I say to no one, just to reassure myself.

A scruffy guy sleeping on a bench opens his
eyes to slits and peers up at me.

“
I’m not talking to
you.”

“
Then put an egg in your
shoe and beat it,” he slurs through yellow teeth.

I have an hour before the bus leaves and I’m
hungry, so I grab a hot dog and smear it with mustard and ketchup.
It’s a long trip to Sacramento, and I need more in my stomach than
French fries before I get on the bus. I stash a handful of ketchup
packets in my paper bag too. Mom and I lived on ketchup soup for a
week once, before she came up with our lost kid act. Call me crazy,
but once in a while I crave some good old homemade ketchup
soup.

As I stuff the last of the hot dog into my
mouth, it occurs to me that I should have asked Kay Stone one
question. Was she Jackie’s mother or my father’s?

Chapter 3

Kay

Kay dropped the phone onto the cradle and
stared out the kitchen window. Everything outside looked just as it
had a few minutes ago. The horses grazed on the hillside. Kenny
leaned into the gray mare and held her hoof in his knobby hand
while he scraped thrush from under her shoe. Buster was doing
canine yoga, rooting out the burrs from his bushy tail and
scratching behind his ears for the fleas that even sheep dip
couldn’t kill.

But now nothing was the same.

As Kay sank onto the chair, she grasped the
corner of the kitchen table. Once settled, she cradled her head in
her hands.

Sixteen years. Such a long
time, and no time at all
.

The voice on the phone
sounded so young—and so . . . hard. Could she believe what the girl
had said? There were scams all the time to dupe the unsuspecting
out of their money. She’d worked too hard to lose everything to
some con artist. By the end of the year, she figured, she’d be out
of debt—if none of the boarders left, if none of her horses got
colicky
,
if, if,
if. . . .

By now her coffee was cold. She walked to
the sink and poured it out. By tomorrow she had to decide what to
do. That wasn’t very much time. She needed to talk to Kenny.

She pushed open the screen door, walked down
the porch steps, and strode toward the barn. How many times had she
traveled this distance, calling to Kenny Fargo? More than she cared
to count. He’d always been there—in a stall, gentling a horse under
his hands; in the tack room, putting things to order; or in his
trailer. He’d been the one constant in her life, and kept her going
when everyone else vanished.

So once again she was trudging out to talk
to the man who knew horses and good whisky, and so very much more.
As Kenny led her gray mare into the barn, she caught up and stroked
her favorite horse’s neck. The gray turned to nuzzle her hair. Even
as upside-down as she felt following that phone call, the warm
animal breath made her feel calm.

“
Something’s happened,”
she said.

Kenny closed the mare’s stall door and faced
her. “From your look this is going to take some time.” He pulled a
plug of tobacco from his shirt pocket and sat on the bench
alongside the wall. He heard her out, as usual staying quiet while
she spoke.

“
She sounded . . . scared.
Why is she calling me now, after so many years, after I’d finally
stopped trying to find her? What’s Jackie up to this time?” Kay
shook her head. “I don’t know if I can believe she’s who she says
she is. She
is
the right age, if she’s telling the truth about that. But
what if it’s a scam? What if she got my name from a . . . a mailing
label in the garbage or—” Kay didn’t know where con artists stole
information about their victims, but this could be what was going
on. But if that were it, then how would she know Jackie’s name?”
Kay turned on her heels in sudden anger. “Then again, why wouldn’t
she know her own father’s name?”

“
Seems you’re asking a lot
of questions,” Kenny said, biting off a chunk of tobacco. He chewed
slowly and let silence hang between them. The horses shuffled in
their stalls, and Buster circled until he found just the right spot
that fit his body, then he curled head to fluffy tail. “Also seems
like you’re bent on finding the answers.”

He was right. She already knew she had to
meet the bus in the morning. She had to see this girl. Talk to her.
Why had she doubted that she would? She’d had no choice from the
minute she’d heard the words, “You’re my grandmother.”