O-kay, that didn’t work.
Normally June talks ten to the dozen, bombarding me with so much information about her teachers and school and who said what and who did what and who has a crush on who that I often have to get her to slow down. The silence now is disconcerting.
She’s had an argument with Abby, I’m guessing, most likely about the choice of movie to watch. Abby’s parents – buttoned-up evangelical Christians who preach God’s love and forgiveness while campaigning vigorously against transgender bathrooms at the school and regularly posting pro-life propaganda on Facebook – don’t allow Abby to watch anything rated over a U. They even pulled the poor girl out of sex-ed class last semester. Later Sam, Abby’s mother, called me up in a rage to complain that June had taken it on herself to explain to Abby the ins and outs of how babies are made. You would have thought from her reaction that June had forced Abby to build an altar and worship the devil.
I apologized, of course, and then took June out for ice cream and talked to her about consent, choice and Planned Parenthood, hoping she’d find a way to leak the information to Abby. Because otherwise that girl is very likely going to go the way of Bristol Palin – abstinence spokeswoman and teenage mom.
I glance across at June again. She’s pulled back her hood and is still staring out the window, lost in thought, and I realize she’s no longer an open book. She’s keeping secrets from me. Laurie’s words echo loud in my head. You can never really know anyone completely.
She’s right, isn’t she? I reach forwards and turn the heat up in the car. I know that better than anyone.
Chapter 4
Even after five years of living here I still get a thrill as I pull in through the gates. I used to look up at these houses on the hill when I was a kid and wonder about who lived there and how they could possibly afford it.
Sometimes, when I walk through the rooms at night, I find myself tiptoeing and looking over my shoulder like a burglar. You’re supposed to put a stamp on a home but I feel like other than my paintings, which are dotted around the place – more at Robert’s insistence than mine – we’ve failed to do so. It feels too big, too vault-like, too grand. I wanted something more modest but Robert insisted nothing but a big house in the hills would do. So I went along with it, even though it meant having to drive into town rather than walking and having to hire a gardener and housekeeper as the grounds were too expansive and the house too big to take care of on my own.
After all those years of living hand to mouth, relying on my parents a lot of the time to bail us out, when Robert’s business finally hit the big time he wanted to make a statement, show the world he’d made a success of himself at last. And I get that, I do, and it’s hard not to fall in love with the place. It’s a beautiful old ranch house on one hundred acres, with the Topa Topa mountains rising up majestically behind us and the valley tumbling away below.
As soon as I pull into the garage, June jumps out of the car and runs through the side door into the house. I follow her, frowning at the thumping music coming from overhead. Gene’s home. Of course he’s home. He’s always home. He’s like an obnoxious foot wart that we’ve tried treating but which refuses to go away, so now, utterly defeated, we just hope it will one day vanish of its own accord. Though there are times I wish we could squirt liquid nitrogen on him and watch him fizz.
I know plenty of twenty-six-year-olds live with their parents these days, given the state of the economy and the outrageous size of college debt, but Gene has no college debt (he also has no college degree either, having dropped out in his sophomore year) and the state of the economy doesn’t really affect him, since Robert and I provide him with free bed and board.
If Gene were my son he would not be living over the garage. He would be a successful graduate, in his first, maybe second job by now, living in his own house and dating someone normal, not one of the many dubious-looking, sleeve-tattooed females who shuttle through his apartment on a high-speed conveyor belt.
Gene isn’t my son though. He’s Robert’s son from his first marriage. He was eighteen months old when I first met him and lived with his mother on the other side of the country. He only moved in with us when he was twelve, after his mom married some guy she met at the bar where she worked and who, it turned out, hated children. She drove across the country and dumped him on our doorstep unannounced. She said she’d be back for him but never returned.
Gene barely scraped through high school, not because he isn’t bright, because he is – he takes after his father in both brains and looks – but because he kept skipping class to hang out at the skateboard park or to go surfing. I think his mother abandoning him was a major factor in his teenage rebellion. But that was also around the time that June got sick, so we weren’t paying that much attention to his attendance, or to anything to be honest, except for cancer treatments and prognoses. I think the guilt about that and about leaving Gene with his mother for the best part of his childhood is why Robert’s so soft on him now.
Gene moved back in with us after he flunked out of college. When we argued with him he told us college educations were worthless. Hell,
