The sun was setting on the office building across the street, a burning orb that made George and me shade our eyes like we were saluting. I sat on an overturned bleach bucket. George leaned against the part of the window that said his name. We hadn’t talked much since I showed up that morning for my first day. He had the last filling station left in California where attendants still pumped gas for you, and he was always anxious about making sure customers wouldn’t do it for themselves.
I imagined that some of the customers supposed that I was his son and that he would one day turn the auto shop and gas station over to me, with his name still on it. We both had black hair and bent noses and even the same sense of humor: that afternoon we both hid our laughter when a little kid tumbled off his scooter and burst into tears.
“I thought after your parents passed I’d never see you again,” George said, still shading his eyes. “Your pop did good work here — hard work. I figure you must know something about that if you went to college.”
“I’m glad you had something for me,” I said.
I was waiting for him to ask why this was my best option, why if some northeastern university had given me a full ride, I needed to pump gas like my father had all those years. It didn’t matter that the full ride was financial aid and not a merit scholarship — George’s people were Syrian and he, like my father had, still believed a degree opened all the doors.
“I thought you’d move to the hills or something,” he kept going. “Buy yourself a tiger, marry some bimbo.”
His gray eyes narrowed as he smiled.
“Yeah, well, not much going on for me since I graduated in May,” I said. “Seems like now you need a doctorate to make any kind of real money.”
A Range Rover pulled up to the pumps, a lone brunette woman driving. She lowered her window a crack and slid her credit card through, saying, “Fill it please,” as if letting me talk first would throw her whole evening off course.
When I was done, I went back to the bucket.
“Your father hated cars like that,” George said, still smiling. “They’re terrible cars. Like driving a submarine. Women around here can’t wait to barrel around in them. Your dad said nobody in Greece would want to drive a car like that.”
“Sounds like him,” I said.
“Took him a while to learn about America. Anyway, good work, Dominic. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
George pulled a lump of Copenhagen from his cheek and dropped it in the rolling garbage bin filled with oil-stained rags. The lump smelled, crumpled and glistening. The fumes hit me and just as quickly faded in the breeze. The mountains were north of us, purple like in the song. I remembered my mother saying once that when she and my father moved to Altadena, they didn’t see the mountains until February, after a rainstorm washed out the smog.
I cleaned my hands with the hose and dried them on one of the cleanest rags on the pile. The 31 bus departed from the stop across the street, so I walked to the next closest stop on Glenarm, where a middle-school couple was making out and laughing at Tiktoks. I sat on the opposite end of the bus stop bench and soon the bus showed up, lit inside against the early dark of Daylight Savings.
I got off at Walnut and walked to Topeka, the liquid amber trees all red along the block. Our apartment, a duplex at the end of the cul-de-sac, needed a new roof, a new bathroom, and a mold remediation, but you couldn’t tell all that from the street.
Inside, it smelled like sawdust. We lived by the McCullin Lumber Yard, where people bought maple firewood in bulk — especially this time of year, as the holidays approached. I thought about working there, but my uncle said he knew some of the guys, who said the company treated them like shit. So, they “unionized,” overcharging the customers who paid in cash and pocketing the excess. I didn’t want to be part of that. Working for George would keep me inside the law.
When I got home my uncle was cooking halibut in one of my father’s old skillets. My dad never believed the story about nonstick pans. His stirring utensil for eggs had always been a plastic fork, which melted a little by the time he was done. I saw the fish’s juices burbling above the scratches in the pan.
“So, how’s old George doing? Still making friends?” my uncle called over his shoulder, a mitten thrown over it and an apron tied around his waist. I knew he was smiling, enjoying his quip, but with his back turned to me, he hid it.
He was breaking one of the rules he taught me in his letter from prison on my twelfth birthday — his “Rules to Live by Before Becoming a Teenager.” I still had them all memorized.
Never tell a joke when your back is turned.
“George’s exactly the same,” I said, sliding into a chair at the kitchen table. “Neurotic as hell but hiding it in a successful business.”
I was playing into my uncle’s hand — he had misguided theories about George.
“Now that’s a smart one,” my uncle said. “The longer you’ve been back here with me, the better your one-liners have gotten. That college made you less funny.”
Soon he was done with the fish and he split the two pieces between us, mine a little larger than his, but he had more vegetables. I told him about the Armenian lady with the bad nose job who tipped me twenty bucks and smiled like my mother used to; a look that mothers give when they recognize a nice young man. Like it warms their heart and they’re just hooked. She probably thought that George and I were Armenian too, since there weren’t as many Greeks or Syrians around, and our noses were big and bony like hers probably used to be.
I didn’t tell my uncle the part about how she reminded me of Mom, just the bad nose job and the Armenian thing and the twenty-dollar bill she handed me.
“Teddy lived on tips,” he said. “Your dad. People probably thought he was Armenian too. When I worked there, I’d never get tipped. People could smell Chino on me. Once you do time, you’re not Armenian anymore.”
I could see my dad in my mind, pursing his lips as my uncle said that. Chino this, Chino that.
“Uncle Lefty, don’t talk like that,” I said. “At least not outside the apartment.”
I did the dishes and watched Jon, the super from the building next door, bring his cans to the curb for trash day. He looked down at his palms all disgusted from the bird shit, wiping them on his sweats. I looked at my clean, soft, white hands.
The night didn’t have time to deepen because it happened all at once. Six to midnight all looked the same. My uncle fell asleep in his chair before the Lakers game ended, frowning like his dreams were math problems. I went into my room to look at my phone. Nothing much happened for a few hours: I jerked off to some rough stuff on PornHub, brushed my teeth, and fell asleep on my left wrist, which smelled a bit like gas.
I woke suddenly. The room was still dark, but the floor shimmered, and it seemed to dip for a second. My stomach sloshed like water in a pail and I leaned up on my elbows, waiting for aftershocks.
“Hey Uncle Lefty,” I shouted, “you okay?”
I waited for a response and shouted again. I took a deep breath and tried to smell something — anything — but the maple dust was gone.
Suddenly, Lefty poked his head around the door frame, like a poltergeist. I jumped. I hadn’t heard his feet padding down the hardwood. He liked to walk around in his socks and startle me, as if making the point that I didn’t have quick enough reflexes for prison.
He looked at me and grinned wide, a serial killer being led to the stand. Even in an earthquake he could scare me, and he enjoyed that.
“Kaleef-forn-ya!” he yelled, letting his Peloponnese accent slip in, which typically had been won over by his jailbird voice. He threw his fist in the air, then clapped once. “This is the first one in a while. Come on, let’s have a beer.”
I followed him to the living room and saw the 3:21 on the clock above the TV. A little early for us both. He quit drinking for about a decade — not because that was his problem, he just thought it left a good impression. His parole officer agreed. Now we drank together at special moments like this. Or after funerals.
I opened the beers for us by slapping the caps off the edge of the counter. He ran his tongue behind his teeth and raised his eyebrows, acknowledging that I’d just done something slick. We clinked the necks once and each took a long pull.
“That gal of yours is probably going to be on the news soon,” he said.
It was the first time he’d mentioned Kate since we broke up five weeks earlier, after fourteen months of dating. I wasn’t ready to talk about her.
“Probably her boss,” I said. “But everything he says she’ll have told him.”
That wasn’t really true, but I wanted to keep the mood going, and I liked thinking that I had dated the smartest person in that fluorescent lab at Caltech, like Kate had been in our Culture, Medicine, and Society class senior year at BU. We compared childhoods in the dark of our dorm rooms, both from the same hometown — one private school kid, one public. We’d never met until senior year of college three thousand miles away from home.
I leaned back against the counter opposite my uncle, about five feet apart, looking out separate windows at the night.
I thought about Kate dressing quickly, lifting the garage door in the dark alley behind the bungalow. I wondered what she was wearing. I wondered if it was the lilac blouse with the black pencil skirt — something she wore at least once every other week — or something she’d bought since I last saw her, or that someone else had bought for her.
“Do you think she’s ever going to drive by George’s and let you fill her tank?” my uncle said, darting his look sideways to keep eye contact. It was his double entendre look.
“I don’t think she’s really interested in that kind of thing right now,” I replied. I took another sip from the Bud Light. My teeth felt washed by the beer.
The ground didn’t shake again. My parents had always been nervous about earthquakes. Since there were three of us, they foresaw their old village superstition — that death always comes in threes — coming true in one disaster. I imagined the roof caving in on us and satisfying the will of some ancient Hellenic venom that lived in our veins, claiming people in trinities.
I finished my beer within minutes but my uncle let his sit on the counter until a few ants climbed the bottle and he threw it out, shouting, “Skata!” The ants were coming through peeling seams below the sink — no matter what we did, we couldn’t stop them. The landlord wouldn’t pay for an exterminator. We couldn’t afford one on our own. Lefty sprayed the counter with bleach before he left for work every morning.
I showered and thought about the small lump of money I could have by New Year’s, minus any potential tips, and considered Vegas or Morongo or somewhere else in the desert that felt like an oasis. I liked the idea of motel rooms and casinos and a finite budget to splurge on buffets, booze, and maybe, just once, an escort.
I was in the shower for a long time, the water landing on the tub’s brown spots, and I could hear my uncle yelling from the kitchen — I could guess what he was saying, so I got out and dried off and joined him in there with the towel wrapped around my waist.
“Fucking water bill is high enough, Dominic,” he said. “They don’t even let us water the lawn anymore.”
“You know that’s because we’re in a drought, right?”
My father used to water the lawn in front of the duplex wearing his Adidas sweatpants and my mother liked to stand on the porch and smoke and tell him in Greek which parts of the lawn he’d never be able to revive. The water ran into the street, carrying sawdust that sprinkled on the blades of grass.
The year after his heart attack, my mother got sick and moved in with her sister Alexandra in South Pasadena, and my uncle came to live with me in the apartment. He didn’t have a job for a while, but he watered the brown parts of the grass until they grew.
I put on the same shorts as yesterday and the shirt George had given me with the Auto Shop patch sewn onto the left side. I could put my name on there too for $35, he told me. That felt like a commitment.
I ate the burnt toast my uncle left out for me and walked to the bus stop without saying goodbye. He had to get going soon anyway to make it to the falafel place on time and start skewering kebobs. I worried about him getting fired. He had such a big mouth and a hard time keeping out of trouble, even the legal kind. But with my own money, maybe I could stop worrying so much about that.
The red-haired lady with grimy dollar-store headphones was waiting for the bus like the day before, but she didn’t look at me. She wore pink scrubs and a pink scarf and carried a shower caddie of solvents. She got off the bus after I did, probably somewhere deeper in San Marino, where the houses look like they belong to drug lords. Behind every great fortune, there is a crime — another one of Lefty’s prison letter quotes, which I found out later he stole from the book version of The Godfather.
The bus wheezed down Lake Avenue. I looked out the window at the closed shops and the strip mall parking lots. The donut shops in each one were lit up and busy. I thought about Kate’s lab, the scratches on a seismograph, how I once told her they reminded me of brain waves. She looked at me like that was cute and kissed me and it made me feel a little mad.
George was already there when I arrived, like I guessed he would be, even though I was supposed to open. He was hosing down the lot and had elevated the cars that needed work that morning — tasks he had told me the day before to do when I arrived.
“Dominic, go in the office and get the clipboards,” he called out when he saw me jaywalking across Mission. He kept his eyes on the pavement but didn’t hunch his shoulders. The sun was still down. The lot shined under the overhang lights. I thought about George’s electric bill.
The desk in George’s office was covered in mail and magazines, a Sparklets cooler in the corner, a single chair with a peeling seat cushion. The room smelled like mice. I found the clipboards on the corner of the desk and brought them out to him. He studied them for a second and handed me one from the middle. It had a list of cars: make, model, color, owner’s name, owner’s phone number, diagnostics.
“Going to need you to call these people and let them know their status. Wrote some notes on there for them.”
I couldn’t really read his handwriting but I thought with some time alone I could figure it out. I didn’t know too much about cars, but neither had my father at first. He used to say that he made a mechanic’s wage by holding a flashlight.
I waited for the sun, then started calling. Nobody my age likes talking on the phone — everyone I had to call was probably older than me. I got by with the first few, choosing the ones whose issues had been resolved. The people were happy their cars were ready and I enjoyed being polite. At BU I’d worked in a call center for the development office one semester and I was relieved this time not to be pressing people for money. I’d take people at their first “no,” but I was supposed to press for at least three.
The fifth call I made was to a woman named Mary McDonnell, a name I recognized but couldn’t figure out why. I’d maybe seen her picture in The Outlook, the small San Gabriel Valley newspaper we got free every month. They liked to cover society events in San Marino, holiday parties that people paid a yearly membership fee to get invited to. Either that or I had conjured her as a villain in my dreams.
Her Suburban wasn’t ready yet. George needed to drive it around the neighborhood a bit to see if the engine would rumble in the colder weather. His note said, “See if rumbles.” It was parked in front of the tire air pumps with all the windows rolled down, waiting for the test.
“You know, I dropped it off on Friday,” she said. “How long does it take to see if an engine’s rumbling. I mean, I can do that.”
“I understand,” I said. “I think George just…wants to be sure. It’s a big car and a lot can go wrong with it.”
Silence for a second. I felt that I’d said the wrong thing.
“Fine, but I’ll be by later today,” she said, and hung up.
I had three more calls and they all went ok, nothing but good news or the people accepted readily that something was wrong with their car and it wasn’t anybody’s fault. George came in and said I should be ready to pump gas.
Traffic picked up on Mission and it picked up on Escarlata, neither really a main street, but people used them to get to the 110, which brought them downtown. While I waited for customers, I sat on my bleach bucket and thought about that bad car wreck in 2011, how an entire family died at the freeway’s last bend — just lost control of the car because it was raining — and how the wreckage wound up at George’s, smashed like an accordion.
“A family of six,” my father had said, and my mother crossed herself.
A guy about 35 drove up and asked me to fill his tank with 93 Premium, which meant his car probably had something wrong with it. I looked at the dark green panels of the SUV and saw some grating — he’d maybe taken an angle too sharp in a parking garage and scraped it against a pillar. His Husky was in the backseat, turning from window to window as I walked around the sides to take the guy’s credit card and start the pump.
This guy had enough money for a car and a pure-bred dog, but not enough to fix the damage.
I made a kissy face at the Husky as I was walking back with the receipt, when I thought the guy was looking down at his wallet. The dog stared at me dumbly with its long tongue hanging low. I met its gaze as the gallons pumped and the price climbed. It won our staring contest.
George was in the garage most of the day working on the cars. He never walked slow and never kept his head down — he walked like my uncle. When George gave Lefty a job after my mother got sick, Lefty immediately assumed George was suspicious of him and must have double-checked the register every night. It didn’t last long. Lefty quit in a huff, saying there were better ways he could bag a rich widow than pumping gas for her while she picked her nose.
I imagined George comparing my uncle to my father, as if studying passport pictures, wondering how they could have been identical twins. Generally, I could think about Lefty as a separate person from who he had been when I was very young, the guy with bloody knuckles my mother wouldn’t let in the apartment. It had been all the more confusing because he and my father looked like the same person.
Around noon George left without telling me and came back with a brown paper bag full of sandwiches from Munch & Co. up the street. He dumped them out on his office table and told me to pick one and I grabbed the turkey and Swiss with lettuce, tomato, and mayo. The other mechanics emerged from the garage and grabbed the rest, nodding at me or saying, “How you doing,” with oil smeared across their jumpsuits.
I said thank you to George, forcing myself to look him in the eye, but he acted like he didn’t hear me. He just said, “That McDonnell woman’s going to come here and ruin our day, so just let me handle it.”
He took his sandwich to the garage, leaving me the office chair, and a few minutes later I heard him packing his tin of Copenhagen, that slap slap slap that made me want to try it. I ate quickly and threw the cellophane out in the office garbage can with a plastic Pavilions bag lining it and I went back out to watch traffic and wait for customers.
My father always wore a ranch hat and gardener’s gloves while pumping gas and I realized now that he wanted to sit in the sun without getting burned and that he didn’t want his hands to smell. It was his neck and his hair and even sometimes I thought his breath smelled like gas. My mother never mentioned it. She would swat him and tell him to shower after he worked in the garden or to use mouthwash if she’d been out all day and came back to him “tasting like an ashtray,” despite the fact she also smoked.
About an hour later, Mary McDonnell showed up. She was about five-foot-three in her green heels, gin blossoms on her moisturized face, and a swooping salon-done haircut. She was the sort of woman Lefty joked about tricking into marrying him. I recognized her before she had the chance to look at me. My spine retracted down to my tailbone and for a second or two I felt dizzy.
She was Kate’s landlord, who had seen me on that last day we were together, that last awful fight — me holding Kate by the wrists and yelling in her face, all because I thought her mom was going to make her break up with me. For two hours, we yelled. Kate was shouting, “Here he is, everybody! Here’s Dominic! Watch him go! The Pride of Altadena!”
I hated that, “the Pride of Altadena.” Like deep-down it mattered that I was from the north part of town, where all the shootings happened, not the southern part where her mom had bought a big house in the eighties and thrown her dad out of it.
I then hurled a lamp against the wall, denting the beige wallpaper, and Mary McDonnell showed up out of nowhere, thwacking at the door. “This is the property owner, open up or I’ll call the police!”
It wasn’t our first shouting match, but definitely our worst. I opened the door shirtless, with Kate making sure I wouldn’t do all the talking. Mary McDonnell stood tall in the bungalow court, taking her phone out of her pocket, threatening again to call the cops. “I’ve heard enough,” she told Kate, refusing to look at me again. “If you let him back here, I won’t renew your lease.”
I didn’t have time to grab my leftover stuff, including a white J. Crew V-neck I had worn for lunch with Kate’s mother, the last thing my mother ever bought for me. “Don’t just wear your father’s old clothes,” my mother said, approving of its fit. She herself had on the same blue bathrobe she wore every day her final months.
On George’s lot, I kept watching Mary McDonnell’s face until it stunned at the sight of me. She clenched a bangle of keys. She must have given George the spare. She stopped and stood beside one of the pumps with her hand on her hip, like she expected someone to come fill her up with 93 Premium.
“Well,” she said. “Not like I thought I’d see you here.”
She extended her left hand, palm-up to the sun, as if ordering it to halt. Part of her face looked a little afraid, like some math was adding up. I knew an address that she owned and could make life hell for her if I wanted. Maybe Kate told her my uncle was a jailbird.
Silence hung between us for a few seconds — I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t know if I wanted to really scare her or take the safer route of doing whatever I could to make her feel comfortable with me again.
Finally, I said, “I just started working here.”
Her made-up eyes sharpened and she licked spittle off red lips. She was winding up to say something shitty.
“I hope they don’t do background checks,” she said. “I’m not sure they’d like what they find out about you, especially if they gave me a call.”
Worry plunged inside me, then my uncle’s anger, the Kate-grabbing anger, the you-think-you’re-fucking-better-than-me shit.
Five months after graduating and moving back, essentially living with Kate, I knew it was time to say I love you, finally, but I couldn’t do it. The guilt jolted me. I found myself mumbling, “Dumb, Dominic, dumb,” while washing my hands or shaving in the mirror. Finally, she asked me to meet her mother, the step that made “I love you” an absolute necessity.
The night before the lunch, while Kate brushed her teeth, I jumped out of her bed and wrote on the blank side of a takeout receipt: I wanted to leave this note for you in my favorite place, to show you how much I mean it. I think I’m in love with you, Kate. I hurried to her underwear drawer, buried it under the top layer, and jumped back into bed before I heard the faucet stop.
The next morning, she found the note while getting dressed, and we fucked like long-distance lovers finally reunited, both saying “I love you” for real, out loud, then drove to Old Town to have lunch with her mother — the lunch that ruined everything.
I looked at Mary McDonnell flatly, the sun doing its worst to her on the pavement shining with gasoline.
“Go ahead, say whatever you want,” I said. “But make sure you bring your car somewhere else next time.”
She cocked her head and smiled. I wanted to spray her with one of the pumps, drench that expensive haircut with flammable liquid.
“I’ve been coming here since before you were born,” she said. “I’ll bring my car wherever I want.”
I wondered how many times my father pumped gas for her — if she ever tipped him, if she noticed when he was gone.
“I think I’ll be working here for a long time, though,” I said. “I’d really consider bringing it somewhere else — you know, if I were you…”
She scowled, registering the threat. Regret spilled inside me. By crossing the line, I’d broken my own heart. In five years, gas stations would probably go extinct, so what kind of threat was this? It seemed like arguments often ended that way for me, saying or doing something that made me scared about my future.
I knew that George would have my back, would take umbrage with anyone like her who tried to tell him who to fire. I worried more that she would tell Kate what I said, that Kate would from now on have an even longer story about the low-class creep she let into her life.
How the creep hated women — not just her, but her landlord too.
Mary McDonnell walked right past me into the garage and found George with his head inside a Corolla that was lifted off the ground. He pulled his head out of the Corolla’s engine and listened to her talk with his eyes resting on hers as softly as if he was watching wind ruffle some mustard grass.
I hoped that she would walk out of the garage with the spare key and the bangle, get in the white Suburban, and drive off without making it worse.
I went back to my bucket. I didn’t hear any yelling or socket wrenches clanging against metal. I stared at a middle-aged man with high white socks kicking a soccer ball around the park across the street. One of the other guys hosed down the lot again and a few places where gas had dripped got erased and I thought about the dogs and crows that might lap up some of that water.
Eventually Mary McDonnell came out of the garage and walked straight to her car without looking at me, climbed in the driver’s seat, and pulled a vicious U-turn to exit onto Escarlata. Before turning right, she lowered her window and tried to throw an In-N-Out bag at the garbage can next to the bus stop. She missed. I saw her hesitate as the bag uncrumpled and ketchup-stained napkins blew over the sidewalk. The lane cleared and she zoomed into it, as fast as she could without tilting the wheels.
George walked out of the garage and watched her disappear into the tangle of roads. He stepped in front of me a few paces and stared for about thirty seconds, then turned and looked at me with a small smile, wiping his hands together, and patted me on the shoulder as he walked back to the garage.
Five o’clock lingered ahead. I checked my phone, but not when George was around. I finished a couple bottles of water from the stacks in the office closet and pumped a few tanks of gas, but generally things were slow. The prices were high again and George blamed war and electric cars and the Biden administration. He talked to customers about it when they yelled hello as I pumped their gas and some of them agreed aggressively and others listened politely and told him they were sorry.
When the sun darkened and sank towards the roof of the office building, George joined me again beside the bleach bucket, leaning against his name on the glass. He spat his dip into a Gatorade bottle and I relaxed after a minute or so of him being there.
“Don’t know what that McDonnell lady said to you today, but sorry if I screwed anything up,” I said, too embarrassed to look at him.
“Ah, don’t worry,” George said, staring down Mission Street at someone trying to parallel park. “Let’s just say that not all customers are worth keeping.”
We looked at each other and smiled.
In the silence that followed, I stared at the grooves in the concrete until they started to wobble.
“I might sell this place someday,” he said. “Your pop and I used to talk about that. He thought I should, which was funny because he’d be out of a job.”
He grimaced a little.
“Like I said, took him a while to learn about America. I’ll have to do it before the electric cars ruin the value. My daughter’s back at home, she’s getting married — my wife wants me around more.”
“I bet you’d still get a great price for it,” I said, not sure if that was true.
“I own the land too — remember that,” George said. “I own the land. After they take the tanks out of the ground, they’ll have to let it sit for a few years, but then some developer can build whatever they want.”
“I bet that would piss some people off,” I said, sticking my chin up at the two-story houses on Escarlata, with San Marino High School football banners on the lawns and Little League All-Star banners and Rick Caruso for Mayor signs and one or two signs supporting a woman’s right to choose.
George cocked his head and squinted at me and smiled like that was the best part. “How did Lefty do with that earthquake last night?” he said. “He survive?”
I waited a second before responding because I thought it’d be funny and I said, “Lefty thinks an earthquake would forget about him and go straight for all the people on unemployment. He said that even in prison he had a job.”
George’s smile got bigger and he looked at me, nodding. “Now Lefty, he understood America right away. A little too well.”
I laughed. George laughed louder and kept his eyes on me while I laughed.
He didn’t say anything else about that but he told me I could leave and that he’d see me tomorrow.
“Thanks, George,” I said, noticing the clock wasn’t yet at five. He turned into the office and switched on a light.
Instead of heading for the bus stop, I walked straight on Mission towards the sunset. It opened wide once I passed the office buildings and the bank of eucalyptus along the Alhambra Wash. It was a bruise and a pool of blood and a drooling peach and all the things you hear sunsets compared to. It made me think about Kate.
I walked through Garfield Park where I used to run when my dad brought me to work with him sometimes in the summers. I thought running before sunrise would make for a good story, like Rocky, but my mother refused to let me try out for the freshman football team, even though half the boys in the class went out for it. She said my friends wouldn’t help me when my brains were scrambled and I had to depend on her to wipe my ass.
“Still got my brain, Mom,” I said, throwing a pinecone at an oak tree as hard as I could.
I walked the few extra blocks to the Spanish-style apartment complex on Fremont Avenue where my aunt Alexandra cared for my mother in her last days. Even when my mother could barely walk, she wanted to go to San Gabriel Cemetery every Sunday to see my father’s grave. I held her upright in a way that looked like an embrace — arm around her hips — and thought about the empty plot next to his, which we stood on while she mumbled in Greek.
The kids in the pre-school sandboxes below my aunt’s kitchen window were hopped up on afternoon snack, screeching like parrots. I could see the row of shampoos, conditioners, and wide-toothed combs visible through her frosted shower window. She probably wasn’t in town. Her clients flew her around the world to do their hair when they went on vacation. The places she went always made my mother shudder: “What are you going to do in Aruba besides get kidnapped?”
I kept walking to the far end of South Pasadena, where the overlook gave way to the Arroyo Seco’s Par-3 golf course, batting cages, and dog park. A woman roughly my age parked her Subaru on the overlook, put her leg up on a stone bench, and touched her head to her knee. After stretching the other leg, she took off running into the ravine and I heard my mother say that she was a dumb girl to be running in the dark. I saw my father shake his head and say, “Americans.” I heard Uncle Lefty say something about her shorts and then a joke that was too offensive to laugh at, though I also caught myself staring at her legs.
If I kept going, I’d make it to Kate’s.
Something about her mother had lit a fuse inside me. She was a clinical psychologist with a private practice in San Marino; I saw her as a queen bee, sealed inside the honeycomb of rich people’s secrets. Her life took place in a party I’d never been invited to, an arena where all who were invited acknowledged the fact that there are, actually, right and wrong ways to live.
Although she was perfectly nice to me, maybe I fucked up by saying my uncle Lefty did eight years in prison — nothing violent, I assured her.
Or by gloating about the Rams’ Super Bowl win, even though she and Kate said they thought football was barbaric.
Or (I thought this was probably the worst part) when I said I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life — I was taking it one day at a time — but something with numbers probably made the most sense. I watched Kate’s mother’s eyes narrow and widen as I said it, as if my words played clunky notes. She looked down at her right hand as she teased some bacon bits from her fork back onto her salad. I thought that if I had said something more melodic, she might have rewarded the moment by eating the bacon.
Afterwards, she and Kate walked ahead of me by about ten steps and were talking seriously on the way to her mother’s car. They hugged, squeezing tightly, and her mother said one last thing into her hair. Then she turned to face me and gave me what I thought was a quick goodbye: “Well, Dominic, it was nice to meet you!” Like a goodbye from a job interview.
Back at Kate’s bungalow, I simmered for a while, long enough for her to notice. Through unavoidable tears, I blubbered that her mother didn’t like me — “She must have told you that you could do better!”
Kate didn’t say no. She shouted back, “You think it’s easy to please her? It was bad enough when I didn’t get into Stanford, but you had to act like BU’s greasiest bro. Putting on a nice shirt doesn’t solve everything.”
Now Kate was probably still at work — the fallout from last night’s quake — and Betty, the elderly paralegal who lived across the court from her, would probably be sitting outside, watering her white roses — which my parents considered bad luck — and would say hello and act like she was happy to see me.
She’d tell Kate later that I’d stopped by and it would sound bad.
I thought about how Lefty had written to me in his “Rules…” that only a woman could really ruin your life.
Nothing is worse. Trust me! No drugs no jail no broken bones.
My mother read it over my shoulder and huffed like a horse.
“He’ll blame a woman for anything!” she said. “Imagine! Every creep in that jail probably thinks a woman put him there.”
Then she took my twelve-year-old face in her hands, turning it away from my waffles, and said, “If your life’s ruined, you ruined it yourself. Remember that.”
I walked in circles around the riverbank and almost stepped on a long, stretched-out brown thing blocking the north end of the sidewalk: a rattlesnake, dead or alive I couldn’t tell. I thought about all the people whose lives had been ruined by something — a rattlesnake, a car crash, a woman. According to my mother, they all only had themselves to blame. Shouldn’t have gone hiking; shouldn’t drive in the rain; shouldn’t date a girl with piercings and tattoos. Was that fair?
I went to the opposite side of the street and glanced behind me a couple of times to see if the snake was following me, but it hadn’t moved. The leafy river was running a little faster than usual. Less than thirty yards away, Kate’s door stood closed, and behind it, the shirt my mother had given me. I started to think about all the ways I could get it back.
Michael Juliani is a poet, editor, and writer from Pasadena, California. His work has appeared in outlets such as Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, NECK, HAD, SARKA, Washington Square Review, and Prelude.
High Horse 