Monica Ramos was glad that her father couldn’t read her thoughts. She leaned forward in the passenger seat of the gray BMW and glanced at him. Apparently intent on the traffic ahead on Dennison Boulevard, he sat hunched over the steering wheel. The sun struggled to push through the overcast skies of a June morning in Los Angeles. Monica cleared her throat—she didn’t want her voice to give any of her glum thoughts away—and said, “We’re not there yet, are we?”
“Close,” he said. “Another mile or so.” Her father was a tall man in his late forties, olive-skinned, dark-eyed, handsome. His face was long and thin; he didn’t look at all like her. Her face was oval; her eyes light brown, almost hazel; and her shoulder-length hair was light brown, too. She turned away, staring uneasily at the small shabby buildings that lined the street.
When they passed Grace’s Café, the aroma of burgers and french fries reached her, reminding her that it was almost lunch time and that she was hungry. But not for food from Grace’s, she thought with a little shake of her head. Even the windows look greasy. Next to Grace’s was The Bright Hope Thrift Shop, showing in its display window a turquoise wool suit on a headless mannequin and a row of well-polished women’s shoes. When they stopped at a street called Bell Avenue, she saw that one corner of the intersection was taken up by a furniture store that displayed a banner shouting, ¡Venta! Sale! in bold red letters. The other three corners were filled by a beauty shop called La Princesa, García’s Drug and Sundries, and Mónica’s Boutique. Monica. With an accent. If my name ever had an accent, she thought, it doesn’t now and I like it that way.
Her father was looking around, too. He shook his head and said, “My god, it’s been at least ten years, and nothing’s changed.”
Monica stared at him. “You mean you knew the neighborhood was going to be like this?” What she thought and didn’t say was, this is a barrio.
“More or less.”
“And you still chose to come here?” She had visions of gangs and guns and nights of terror.
“Choice had nothing to do with it, Monica. Luck did. We’re lucky the tenants cleared out because this little house of your mother’s is all we own in the world now.”
“You mean we’re going to be here all summer?”
“It looks that way.”
“And longer?”
“Yes, Monica, probably longer.”
“What’ll I do about school then?”
Her father sighed. “The worst that can happen is that you’ll go to the same high school your mother went to, Talbot High. Things have changed, Monica. You’ve got to begin to understand that.”
“I’m trying to,” Monica said and turned to look out of the window. Yes, I’m trying, she thought, but it’s hard to understand when your world has been yanked out from under you. She had expected to have a shiny new car of her own this summer, and not getting it was just the beginning of her disappointments. She sat silently, thinking once again of all that had happened in the last year.
It had started that awful morning at her boarding school in Fairmount, Virginia. She had been dozing, half-listening to the morning sounds of Raeburn School when her roommate Courtney pulled open their bedroom door, tossed a newspaper onto her bed, and said, “Your dad has resigned. If he wasn’t guilty, why would he do that?”
She had wondered the same thing even after her father had explained two or three times that an investigation would embarrass his superiors—and probably would do no good.
“But you’re innocent,” she argued.
“Yes,” he said, “too innocent. That was the trouble. I was too naïve, too eager, easy prey for the buzzards that hover over our capital city. Things might have been different if your mother was alive; she might have seen what I didn’t. I know I didn’t mishandle those funds. Politics,” he added with a shrug, “is a tough game.”
“I don’t care,” Monica insisted. “It isn’t fair.”
“Monica,” he had said finally in that reasoning tone that drove her crazy, “everything isn’t always fair. All I can tell you now is that it took every penny I had to pay my legal fees. Somebody was bound to go.”
So her father, Eduardo Ramos, had resigned from his highly placed government job and returned to California, leaving her to finish her already-paid-for year at school.
From that day on, Raeburn wasn’t the same. No more limos came to take her to special events with her dad. No more resourceful reporters sought her. There was no more envy in the glances of her schoolmates. Some of their glances held disdain; others, pity. Day by miserable day, the last two months of the semester dragged by. Finally, June came, and she flew to Los Angeles to start a new life with her father. All in all, she had looked forward to that. Of course, Washington and a fancy boarding school like Raeburn were exciting, but she hadn’t seen her dad enough, and she missed the closeness they had always had. Still, she hadn’t expected her new life to start in this kind of a neighborhood. Before her dad’s appointment, they had lived in a two-story house in Los Angeles on a street called Parkview Place that had lovely gardens and tall trees. They hadn’t been rich, she knew that, but her father’s law practice had provided everything they needed, including Rosa, who had come to care for her and the house after her mother’s death.
She was jolted out of her thoughts when the car made a sudden sharp turn onto a side street. “This is Lucia Street,” her dad said. “Almost missed it. There used to be a guitar shop on the corner.”
“There still is,” Monica said, glancing over her shoulder. “A tiny one-story place.”
“With a huge black-and-gold guitar on the roof?”
“No. Nothing. Just a sign over the windows that says, Salcedo and Sons.”
“So they’re still there,” he said with a smile. “Wonder what happened to the guitar?”
“Maybe an earthquake,” Monica said. Or maybe, she thought, they got good sense and took it down.
“Maybe,” her father answered, and they were silent.
Lucia was a narrow street lined with small houses fronted by dry patches of lawn. Old pepper trees, whose branches hung limply over the scattered red berries below them, grew alongside the curbs. On a dusty driveway two teenage boys in grease-spotted T-shirts were working on a torn-down car. They shot glances in their direction.
Monica shrank into the black leather of the bucket seat. She wanted to hide. But why? She took a deep breath, sat up, and forced herself to look around again.
The morning mist was completely gone. The sun was strong and bright, intensifying the color of a row of potted marigolds on the front porch of one of the houses. A dog squeezed through a broken picket fence out onto the street, interrupting the ball game of four small boys. When the boys caught sight of the car, they scrambled toward the curb, where they stared at them with obvious curiosity. Monica waved and the smallest of the four, a thin, brown-skinned boy with a red baseball cap pulled backwards behind large ears, grinned and waved back.
Her dad made an abrupt U-turn and pulled over to the curb. “Here we are,” he said.
The house they stopped at was gray—or was it a dirty tan?—with four or five steps that led to a narrow front porch. On the wall beyond the porch a faded green shutter hung crookedly beside a large window. The house was small and much like the other houses on the block except in one respect: Where all the other houses had driveways that extended from the street along the side of the house and into the garage, this driveway was filled halfway by a long, narrow addition to the garage. The front of this addition looked like a child’s drawing of a house. There was a grape-colored door in the center, two windows on either side of the door, and below each window, a neatly painted turquoise-colored bench. Stepping stones led from the purple door to the sidewalk through a garden of low-growing flowers.
Monica looked from the colorful little plot to the dingy house next to it, then turned and said, “Yes, here we are, but where? Which of the two is ours?”
“Two? Oh, you mean the studio. No, that’s not for us. That’s where Mr. Mead, El Pintor, lives.”
“You mean somebody rents that little building?”
“No. I mean somebody lives there without paying rent. And he can for as long as he wants. That’s the agreement your mother’s family made with him. Your mother respected that. And we will, too.”
“Okay, okay, Dad. You don’t have to be so preachy. I didn’t say you should evict him.”
Her father grinned. “Was I sermonizing? Sorry about that. Come on, let’s go see what the house is like.”
When she got out of the car, Monica paused and said, “El Pintor, h-m-m. The painter. Why didn’t he paint our house, too?”
“He’s not that kind of a painter,” her father said. “He’s an artist. He paints on canvas.”
Monica shrugged, and they went up the short walkway and the porch steps. “Those chairs,” she said, pointing to a pair of woven plastic chairs on the porch. “They’re just like the ones we had by the fish pond on Parkview.”
“They are, aren’t they?” he said and unlocked the door. He held the door for her, and she went inside.
There was no entry hall. She had stepped directly into the living room. As she looked around the room, tears pushed into her eyes. “Oh, Dad,” she said with a smile, “you took our things out of storage.”
“Not everything,” he said. “This house is too small.”
She nodded. This room was furnished with the rattan furniture from their old den. And the adjoining dining room had the breakfast room table and chairs. She was secretly glad; she never had liked the ornate dining room chairs that everyone claimed were so priceless. When she found her bedroom, she stopped at the door and drew in her breath. The room was filled with all her things, up to and including the mound of cushions on her bed and the curtains on the windows.
“This is great!” she cried. “Dad, how did you ever find the time?”
“I didn’t,” her father said. He put the suitcases he was carrying by the bedroom door. “I did arrange with Tim Lacy, our old handyman, to paint the inside of the house, but as for all this, the answer is Rosa. When the business I had in Florida held me up, I called Rosa and asked if she could be here when they delivered our things last Saturday.” He paused and shook his head. “And this is the result.”
“She must’ve spent the whole weekend here.”
“I’m sure.”
“Do you suppose the refrigerator’s running? And do you suppose there’s some food in it? I’m starving.”
“Let’s find out.”
The refrigerator was running, and there was food. “There’s enough stuff here for a month,” Monica said. “Even some of Rosa’s great vegetable soup.” Her dad was shaking his head again, and she added, “Can we pay her for all this?”
He gave her a quick hug and said, “I’ve had a few good commissions here and there across the country. Don’t you worry about that. Come on, let’s eat before we start unpacking.”
It took a couple of hours for Monica to empty her two suitcases and distribute their contents in the chest of drawers and the tiny closet. When she was done, she held open the closet door and looked with dismay at the almost-filled rod that held her clothes. Where would she put the rest of her clothes when they arrived? For that matter, where would she put her TV? Her boom box? She closed the closet door abruptly and sat on the floor, her back against the side of the bed. Everything’s changed so much, she thought. I knew it would be different. But not this different. She sat another few minutes staring at the opposite wall, then got up and wandered through the rest of the house.
Beyond the kitchen there was a screen porch where a washing machine and dryer waited to be installed. Her father was at the hardware store hoping to find the right fittings to complete the job. She went into the kitchen and sat down at a small, plastic-topped table that was pushed against the wall. Here in this very room, maybe in this very corner, her mother had spent many hours. Monica stared at the kitchen window and at the sunlight that angled through it to the sink. How many times had her mother stood there, looking out that window? Being in this house, Monica had thought she would have a sense of her, a feeling of what she was like, but there was nothing yet. She knew so little about her. Four years old was not old enough to remember much, and that’s what she’d been when her mother died. But she did have one memory, and that memory was as sweet as birthday cake. She closed her eyes, and the incident played through her mind in clear, bright images. A radiant summer day. A gentle ocean breeze. Wind chimes tinkling by the patio door. Her mother in a flowered skirt and a pretty white top hurrying across the grass of the backyard with a gray kitten held tenderly in her hands. “Mira, mira, mi’jita, mira lo que tengo aquí.” Look, look, little daughter, look what I have here. Six months later her mother was dead, but the gray cat Willy had lived for many years.
Monica sighed. The sun had moved from the window, and the room felt cold and forlorn. She rose and went through the house to the front porch. There she walked to the edge of the steps and, leaning against the porch pillar, glanced up and down the street. Everything she saw seemed dingy. Even the sunshine had a dusty edge. The ball game was over and the players were now on the sidewalk racing on noisy skateboards. A pair of scruffy little dogs ran back and forth after them, barking loudly. The teenage boys with the torn-down car were no longer alone. Two girls in skintight jeans and halter tops leaned against the car. As Monica watched, the girls squealed and ran to the center of the street, and the boy who had been threatening them with greasy hands, followed them to the curb and laughed.
“Come on back,” he called. “This ain’t bad grease. No worse than that stuff on your faces.”
The girls shrugged and giggled and said something that Monica couldn’t hear because someone close by called, “Hey, you! I’m talking to you!” Standing by the steps below her was the little ball player with the red cap.
“I’m sorry,” Monica said. “I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”
“Did you bring El Pintor?”
“Did we what?”
“El Pintor. Did you bring him?”
“El Pintor? You mean the man who lives over there?” She indicated the little house on the driveway. When the boy nodded, she shook her head and added, “No, we didn’t bring him. Why should we?”
“Well, when is he gonna come back then?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about him.”
“Man!” the boy said with a disgusted frown. He yanked the cap off his head and threw it on the ground. “Man,” he repeated, “nobody knows nothing!”
“Sorry,” Monica said. “I’ve got to go in now.” She paused by the screen door and watched the boy cross the street. When he reached the opposite curb, he turned, looked at her, and gave a sad little shrug. Funny kid, she thought as she pulled open the screen door. I hope he’s not going to be a pest. Inside, she walked straight through the house to the back door and out into the backyard.
At the bottom of the wooden steps she stopped and looked around. If there had been grass in the rectangular yard at one time, it had long despaired of growing; only a brownish stubble covered the ground. A white wooden fence, its paint peeling, ran along the right side of the yard. On the ground along the fence, leggy geraniums struggled to bloom, and in a rear corner of the yard, a glossy-leafed lemon tree dotted with fruit glistened in the sunlight. Straggling geraniums grew also at the side of the garage. Monica walked to them, bent over, and picked two of the blood-red blooms. She was surprised to discover that the garage was not connected to the “studio,” as her dad had called it. Rather, there was a six-foot space between the two buildings, allowing the garage doors room in which to swing open. The studio was about a story-and-a-half-high, with a row of small windows near the roof line along its side and across the back. Below the windows on the back wall, a door stood open.
A girl clad in white shorts and a sleeveless blue shirt backed out of the door. She was making a murmuring sound like a lullaby as she moved, bent over, through the opening. Monica started to say something, but instead took a step back, as if to give the newcomer more room. At her movement, the girl in the door straightened up and whirled around.
Monica stared at her. She had an interesting face, sharply chiseled under a cap of curly black hair. She looks about my age, Monica thought.
For an instant the girl stared back, her jaw slack. Then her eyes widened, and her face grew pale beneath her coppery tan. “You! Why, you’re … you’re ‘Springtime!’” she said breathlessly.