10

The University Heights neighborhood announced itself in a giant, red, trolley-shaped billboard. On its main street, an alternative medicine shop and yoga studio faced a liquor store that might have been built in the seventies. You could get your hair styled at a hair salon or nip to the other corner to a little market with a psychedelic-yet-Disneyesque mural on its wall. The restaurants offered California food alternatives—Mexican vegetarian, gluten-free pizza, Thai, and even West Coast Abyssinian. But the queen of the restaurants was the Haven. The whole community hung out there to discuss local ordinances or to soak up cocktails while watching sports on TV. Dinner could be vegetarian, but pork was not a dirty word. The Haven celebrated the kind of California tolerance that the rest of the country mocked. Their baseball team was called the Switch Hitters.

My sister’s pickup was parked outside the restaurant. I couldn’t see anything through the white half-curtains and the stained-glass iguanas and donkeys on the window. I pushed open the front door. My children sat at a table near the kitchen. Frieda talked to a waitress wearing a baseball jersey, her hair spiked into a bleached-blonde hatchet blade. On the other side of the table, Garth puckered his lips and sounded the jets as his spaceship took off. I’d known from my telephone call that my children were safe. I still felt relief.

Frieda saw me and pointed to her teacup and a cookie on a flowered plate. “We’re having a gluten-free tea party,” she said.

“Caffeine-free too,” the waitress said. She nodded and her bladed hair cut the air. Her skateboard leaned against the chair next to them.

“It’s a fabuloso party,” Frieda said. She was soaking up Spanish words almost as fast as numbers.

Garth’s voice made an explosion. His ship took off from the lines of knives and forks. Next to him, a cook in a tight muscle shirt flew a plastic superhero from a pile of coffee mugs to Garth’s mother ship. Is there a more wonderful place than a seven-year-old’s imagination? Until my father was arrested, I’d also lived in that world of pretend.

Polly’s restaurant welcomed families, particularly those with children. A padded floor in the corner was surrounded by a plastic barrier. Inside its confines, wooden boxes brimmed with coloring books and crayons. She thought that outlawing tips would further heighten the family atmosphere. Sharing the 18 percent service fee with the kitchen would improve the cooking and transform the waiters and waitresses into “food ambassadors.” Instead, her staff grew most animated when they played with the kids or talked about art, local politics, or the Padres. Getting the food out was a low priority.

Thin arms encircled me from behind. I turned to give my sister a peck on the cheek. She’d bleached a fringe of her hair blonde and it looked like a single bright flame.

“Staying late to count all the bank’s money?” she asked. When I didn’t answer, her smile froze.

I followed Polly. Her running shoes padded through the swinging door into the kitchen. We passed the great stoves with their sixteen burners, then the scrubbed counters filled with chopped vegetables and blocks of cheese. The draining boards for curing bacon stood near the back door opposite the walk-in fridge. She heaved open the big steel portal and closed it behind us. The fridge was the only private place in her restaurant. Racks ran along each of its four sides and slabs of ham and beef hung down from the ceiling in the back. She draped paper towels over the cold metal of two empty shelves. We sat next to bins of butter, sauces, and dressings.

“Tell me what happened,” she said.

I retold what had happened the night before, then showed her the photograph of the Budweiser can my stalker had sent to the bank. I didn’t mention that the dish drainer in the photo was the one in our kitchen. As soon as she learned that, she’d be camping out at our house with a loaded pistol.

Polly shivered. She fingered the double-bladed axe of her labrys necklace, her symbol of strength. “The beer can photo must be a copy of his,” she said.

“Pop’s?”

“Don’t call him that.”

“What do I call him then?”

“Asshole. Cocksucker. Satan. Look, some nutcase dug up one of his pictures from some perverted website.”

But the composition was all wrong, the lighting amateurish. I kept quiet.

She rose and hugged herself. Her wrinkled hands seemed to have become old overnight. She turned and her head sank to one of the metal shelves. But she didn’t cry. I hadn’t seen my sister weep since she was thirteen.

I stood up and gave her a hug. She pushed me away and the old guilt rushed through me. My whole life, I’d never been able to protect my big sister from what our father did.

Even now, the memory floods over me—Polly about twelve watching Star Trek beside Pop, his hand enveloping the peanut butter jar, their two spoons inside. Three kittens meow on the porch. Pop fetches a dish and pours some milk out of a half carton from the fridge. Opening the screen, he kneels in his dungarees on the stoop. His bull shoulders are as high as I am. He coos in his high voice. As the kittens slurp the milk, he raises a burlap bag from outside the door.

Pop thrusts the kittens into the bag. They wail and thrash inside. Now he’s standing, huge and grinning, a hank of blond hair flopped over his forehead. Polly and I are yelling. “But they’ll be happier at the park,” he says. His amber eyes are as unblinking as a dog’s. Walking away, he pulls a red apple from his pocket and takes a crunching bite.

Years later, Polly told me what happened—and that Mama had refused to believe it. Polly circled back to secretly follow Pop. He carried the kittens out behind his photography shed and dumped the bag into a barrel. When he lit it, they screamed like children.

“I can still smell the gasoline,” Polly told me.