THIRTY-EIGHT

Jenny and I make out in the back of the Jeep before we hit the road. I try to be gentle with her, not ask for too much, but that’s easier said than done when she’s the one pushing me against the seat, crawling on top of me, pinning me down with her hips and her heat. I can tell she likes knowing how she drives me crazy, but when she fingers the button of my jeans, that’s when I pull back. Her boldness sets off my worrying thing. It’s dumb, but I can’t help it. I start thinking maybe she’s done this before. With some other guy. Or maybe other guys want to do this with her and I won’t be good enough at it to keep her interest. Or maybe she needs me to be the strong one. I’m not Cate and I won’t let her be. It’d be easy to get carried away, it really would, but this is too fast. Too soon. It feels dangerous. I mean, we’re in the school parking lot, of all places.

My head’s still spinning when I sit up. Jenny stares at me, chest heaving, hair all in her face, and it’s like my pulling away’s the last thing she expects. Or wants.

I know better than to tell her what it is I’m thinking, so I cup her chin in my hand and kiss her quickly on the lips.

“We should get going,” I say. “Before there’s too much, you know, traffic.”

Jenny laughs. It’s a strong sound, like a ringing bell.

It grounds me.

 

 

The drive to Richmond’s a long one, almost an hour, and I’ve already explained where we’re going. And why. Jenny sits and plays with the music on my phone. She’s looking for something to listen to. My shoulders, which felt loose and relaxed when I first slid behind the wheel, grow tighter with each passing mile. I squeeze my hands open and shut to release tension.

“Ugh,” Jenny says.

“Ugh, what?”

“Your music. It’s all angsty boy stuff.”

This gets me to smile. “What’d you expect? Happy girl stuff?”

“I don’t know. You’re a musician. I expected something good.”

“Put Jobim on,” I tell her. “You’ll like it.”

“That’s jazz, isn’t it?”

“Latin jazz. Just put it on.”

She does. Warm guitar chords fill the car, and a rush of painful longing fills my chest. Jenny wasn’t wrong about the angsty thing.

“Your car reeks, you know,” she says. “Like an ashtray.”

“That’s the cost of having chain-smoking mechanics work on it.” I flip on the air and pray Jenny doesn’t ask why I took the Jeep to the shop in the first place.

“God, it’s so terrible about your mom.” She stares out the window as she says this. The hills on both sides of us are green, lush. Grateful for the rain. “I had no idea about any of that.”

I shrug.

“I didn’t even know you were adopted. I think that’s pretty interesting. Adoption.”

“Interesting?”

“Yeah, sure. Who doesn’t fantasize about not being related to their parents? Parents are everyone’s worst nightmare. They wear Crocs. They refer to Chipotle as ‘Cha-pottle.’ They think having ‘Me So Horny’ as their ringtone makes them cool.”

I can’t help but laugh. “Things could be a lot worse, believe me.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I love my parents. I do. It’s just, no one wants to look at them and feel like they’re looking into the future, you know?”

Well, no, I don’t know. But I do like that she’s telling me. “I’ll take your word for it.”

Soon the green hills are gone and the traffic slows. On the right, out Jenny’s window, the San Francisco Bay is visible, but the tall smokestacks of an oil refinery blight the view. We’ve entered Richmond city limits. Jenny leans back against her seat and gazes up at an enormous roadside billboard advertising a cemetery whose main selling point appears to be its proximity to an auto mall.

“So where’s your mom buried?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You don’t know?”

“Nope.” I try to sound casual, but we’ve just passed the sign for the exit I want, only a quarter mile more, and it’s suddenly hard for me to breathe. I rub at my chest, pressing down on the space between my ribs.

I feel Jenny looking at me.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You look upset. Shit. I shouldn’t have asked that. I swear, I lack some sort of sensitivity gene. I do realize this.”

“Nah, it’s fine. I’m good. Really.”

Jenny nods, relaxing, and it’s like last week when my parents told me that Cate had been set free—I’m relying on the fact that it’s what I say that counts.

Not what I’m thinking.

This is all too much for me.

Any more stress and I’m going to lose my damn mind.…

 

 

The deeper we get into Richmond, the more I regret bringing Jenny along. No, she doesn’t need my rescuing, but that doesn’t mean I want to be the one to put her in danger. And this place is downright scary. It’s a type of poverty and ruin I’ve never seen before.

Except, you know, I have.

Making the whole experience exponentially worse is the fact that this grungy, industrial city is impossible to navigate by car. None of the streets run at right angles and GPS is no help. I keep crossing over train tracks, turning down dead ends, and every time I have to back the Jeep up, I spy clumps of people loitering on every corner, even in the rain. They watch us with a cool sort of curiosity and a cruel sort of resentment. My arms start to itch under the weight of their gaze. Is this who I would’ve become if my mother hadn’t died? I don’t have an answer to that question. Or hell, I guess I do. Because growing up in Danville with the Henrys I’ve always understood that when you’re adopted, your successes are chalked up to nurture. But the bad stuff, like arson and assault charges, well, those things are all nature, baby.

In other words, sometimes fate is what other people make of it.

I don’t like that. At all.

“You want me to ask for directions?” Jenny points to a corner store with a handwritten sign that reads: JUG LIQUOR: NOW OPEN! “What’s a Jug Liquor?”

Oh, Lord. I slow down, squinting through the thwap thwap of the windshield wipers. “Are those bullet holes in the wall?”

“I don’t know.” Jenny fingers the door handle. “Let me out.”

“You stay in the car,” I say quickly. “I’ll go ask.”

She crosses her arms. “I’m capable of asking for directions, you know.”

“I know that! But just … stay, all right?”

“Fine.”

 

 

I walk into the liquor store, rain rolling down my nose and cheeks, and the musty scent of corn nuts and wet dog hits me all at once. The slumbering form of a German shepherd in the corner solves part of that mystery and I breathe a sigh of relief that I haven’t stepped into the middle of an armed robbery or something. There’s still time, I suppose, but everything looks pretty normal. Customers swarm all over the place.

Anxiety still sky-high, I sneak a glance at the front counter. A tall black man in a Santa hat and navy peacoat is staring right back at me, arms folded, thin lips pressed tight in disapproval. Damn it. I duck out of sight and quickly grab a can of soda and a bag of Circus Peanuts even though I’m not hungry. I swear, something about me arouses suspicion wherever I go. I’d told Cate that once and she was wholly unsympathetic.

“You’re just paranoid,” she said. “It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

I go up to the counter to pay. The tall man keeps staring. Despite my self-fulfilling whatever, I wonder if it’s my whiteness that sticks out here. I don’t doubt it. Cate’s never understood stuff like that—the fact that perception and perspective can be stronger forces than reality. When we were younger, we used to lie side by side in the grass beneath the Danville summer sun. She’d hold her tanned arm up to my paler one and fantasize about her absent father, wondering aloud whether she had the blood of an African prince or a Mayan warrior running through her veins. I always thought that was dumb and told her so. Whatever she was or wasn’t on the inside didn’t matter. She was white enough on the outside to believe being anything else might make her life more interesting.

“Um, can you tell me where Barrett Street is?” I ask the Santa hat man.

“You sure you don’t mean Barrett Avenue?”

I pull out my mom’s death certificate to check. “It says street.”

He frowns even more, and I wonder if he knows what kind of document I’m holding. Finally he reaches under the counter and pulls out a map, not on his phone, but a paper one that’s tattered and faded. We spend a few moments staring at it together. Barrett Street appears to run adjacent to the oil refinery. The one with the blight-making smokestacks.

“What’re you going there for, kid?” he asks.

“I—I used to live there.”

The lines in his face smooth out. He looks almost sad. “You lived there?”

“Yeah.”

He nods out the smudged-up window. “And now you got that nice Jeep out there and a fine little girl with you?”

A flush of shame-heat washes over me, like I’ve been caught trying to be someone or something I’m not. “Yeah,” I say again.

He shakes his head. “Then why the hell would you ever want to go back?”