A Small Favor
It started so casually. An afterthought, it seemed.
“Hey, could you girls do me a small favor?” Graham said by the picnic tables, one windy day after lunch. “That kid who came today. Can you play with her this afternoon? Her folks’re exhausted.” He meant Dylan, the daughter of his session pianist. She and her mom, Serena, had come up to surprise her father.
A couple days after, Graham asked if we would mind “entertaining the wild things,” since we’d been so good with Dylan. He handed Willa some bills so we could take a group of kids for custard. I hadn’t technically agreed to do it, but who could say no, when he needed us, and put it so nicely?
Before custard, we took them to Glass Beach. Dylan wouldn’t wade out to the tide pool, a rite of passage an older, much bigger kid had come up with, since it was no challenge for him.
“The important thing about Dylan is she needs to feel proud of something,” I said to Willa as we watched her. “What if she was the first to try the Flying Swing? Then we could give her a super special bravery award.”
“Brilliant,” Willa said.
“It’s brilliant, if she’ll do it.”
I’d found the reward in the treehouse, getting the idea from the Superman movie posters I’d seen everywhere—one of the marigold-colored fabric remnants we used as carpet.
At the swing later that week, when we presented Dylan with the cape, for her bravery, she turned positively drunk with happiness, the bright, butterfly-print fabric streaming behind her in the sun. She wore the cape night and day after that.
That’s how it began—our informal day camp. One afternoon became every afternoon. It became expected, that we would corral the littler kids while their parents lazed in the grassy bowl or at the beach or in the springs, restoring themselves after the morning’s work, the night’s revelries. It was only a few hours a day, and helping felt like an honor since it was for Graham. I’d have organized his guitar picks if he’d asked.
“They listen to you,” Willa said in astonishment, when a little boy refused to come into shallower water at the beach and I lured him using a “redirection” trick I’d learned from an old book I’d bought at the thrift store. Parenting with Compassion, written by a wise-looking woman named Barbara Fairwhistle, Licensed Clinical Social Worker.
They didn’t always listen to Willa. She overindulged, and they climbed all over her. Still, together we made a good team, and Graham showered us with praise about how wonderful we were with the children, how clever.
Angela helped sometimes, when she was around. She taught the kids how to make daisy chains, how to hold their hands flat to offer apple slices to the goats she’d adopted, after they wandered over, neglected, from the neighboring property Willa had showed me from the treehouse.
One day after lunch she emerged from the house in thick stage makeup. We were making pine cone birdfeeders at the picnic tables, and the sight of her garish, painted face—the left side happy, the right sad, like mime masks—was a shock, at first. I think Willa and I may have been more startled than the kids.
But then Angela pulled an old tweed train case from behind her back and revealed its treasures: sticks and pots of old Max Factor greasepaint. The real stuff. She held the kids in thrall, as I imagined she did in the touring plays I’d never seen, demonstrating how a few stick-paint swipes in the right places could transform them into witches or fairies.
Like Willa, she was gentle and serene, murmuring confidentially to a little girl as she made her detested freckles vanish with a few strokes of her ancient Max Factor stick.
Graham wandered by and stood over Angela. “Can I be next?” He reached over her shoulder for a red stick and painted a sloppy clown smile over his own, making the kids laugh.
He leaned down to kiss the crown of Angela’s head, just above her old-fashioned gold bun.
Angela closed her eyes to receive his kiss as she spoke gently to the little girl beside her: “This stuff can hide anything, see? I’ve used it for decades. But you may decide that you miss your freckles. You know, my favorite flowers have freckles...”
I would remember this afternoon later, how Angela helped us “entertain” the little kids, showing us all how to try on new faces. And how even under greasepaint, she and Graham looked more natural and happy together than my father and Patricia ever had.
The morning after Angela’s face-painting lesson, as Willa and I crossed the parking lot from the beach trail—now that we were busy with the kids every afternoon, I got up at dawn with her for my surf lessons—I noticed the Sandcastle’s latest arrival.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Who?”
“That guy over there. Prince Valiant with the truck.”
I watched the tall, shirtless man unloading crates of fruit from his truck bed. His blond hair was pulled into a ponytail, and his shoulders were slick with sweat. “He must be delivering supplies for Kate.”
“Oh, that’s just Colin. He crashes here a few nights every summer, on his way back from picking. He’s an old friend of my mom and dad’s, he’s nice, you’ll like him. Colin!” She flung her bike to the gravel and ran across the parking lot. They exchanged a friendly hug and Willa waved for me to come over.
I fiddled with my bike, propping it against a tree. This old friend seemed a lot younger than Graham and Angela. Maybe twenty-five or twenty-six. And good-looking. Wearing brown sandals, Levi’s faded almost to white, and nothing else.
I tucked my salt-stiffened hair behind my ears and crossed the parking lot, wishing I’d put anything but Get up on surfboard on my Never-done-but-want-to list. Willa was a patient and creative instructor, but my lessons made my nose run and my eyes red.
“This is my cousin, Jackie,” Willa said.
“Named after the Jackie? My folks were wild about all that Camelot stuff, too. My little brother’s name is Kennedy.”
“Actually, I was born in ’61, but it’s just a coincidence. I was named after a great-great-grandmother from France named Jacqueline.” In one swoop, I’d pointed out our exact age difference and shifted the conversation to the supremely unsexy topic of great-great-grandmothers.
But he didn’t seem to mind. “You have her eyes. Wide-set brown eyes. Hey, you two mind helping me carry these up to the house?”
“Sure!” My worn-out muscles had, miraculously, gotten a second wind.
As we lugged the berry boxes up the field, I watched a rivulet of sweat progress down the valley of tanned skin between his shoulder blades.
I would always associate the smell of fresh berries with Colin.