Mona had gotten back that afternoon. Christie and Drew were making plans to leave. She was to meet Drew the very next day — today — at two. He would have bought tickets for her and him and Mona. They would fly to New York City, where they’d be married and begin a real life.
But Christie wouldn’t be going to his house in Laurel Canyon, she knew that now. Drew had always been her backup, her second choice.
She had never let him be a man. He would never be a man while he was with her or even just thinking about her. Eric was her man. That’s all there was to it.
“ E ri c Tanne r N olan,” Thomas said into the receiver.
“N-O-L-A-N?” the information operator asked.
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F o r t u n a t e S o n
“Uh-huh.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“I have an ET Nolan on Wilshire. Hold for that number.”
After getting the number Thomas was afraid to call.
What if Eric didn’t remember him or if he didn’t answer the phone? What if Eric did answer and told Thomas not to call anymore?
Thomas felt that this was his last chance, that he hadn’t so much been wandering as looking for his brother, his lost life. He couldn’t let that hope rely on the chance of a single phone call.
The phone stall didn’t have a phone book. Thomas went down street after street looking for another phone with the white pages book. It was at the sixteenth booth that he found what he wanted. He looked up ET Nolan’s address on Wilshire Boulevard. It was a five-mile walk, but Thomas didn’t know that — and even if he had known, it wouldn’t have made a difference. He felt that he had been walking for a lifetime trying to get back to his brother: up and down his alley valley, down on his knees, walking from one drug addict to another, through the juvenile system, and finally behind this wire cart that he’d patched and repaired again and again until it resembled him —
scarred and shambling down the streets of Los Angeles.
That was on the afternoon of the day that Christie drove to the desert.
On her ride back she called Drew.
“Hello,” Drew answered brightly.
“I can’t go with you,” she said in a rush. “I’ve decided that I have to make it work with Eric. Good-bye, Drew. I’m sorry.”
“Wait. Wait. Don’t get off.”
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Wa l t e r M o s l e y
“There’s nothing to talk about, Drew. I’m sorry.”
“But why? What happened? I love you.”
“What we were doing wasn’t love,” she said. “It was pain and anger. It was trying to get a feeling back.”
“I feel it,” he said.
“I’m not coming.”
“I bought nonrefundable tickets,” he cried.
“Good-bye, Drew,” Christie said. She disconnected the call and then turned off the phone.
A s Th omas wal ke d up the incline toward Wilshire, there was a strong Santa Ana wind blowing. He felt this as an invisible force pushing against him, trying to keep him from reaching his brother. He smiled, knowing that he was fighting against his own ill fortune in the attempt to reach Eric. He felt like a hero pushing that heavy cart with two dead wheels up the rough asphalt street.
The police stopped him on San Vicente.
“It’s against the law to push that cart in the street, Bruno,”
the officer said. He was a large white man with a name tag that read P I T T M A N .
“I was staying off the sidewalk, officer,” Thomas replied.
“Because I thought that maybe I’d get in someone’s way with this big thing.”
“He’s right about that, Pitt,” a Hispanic man, Rodriguez, said with a joking smile.
“What are you doing here, Bruno?” Pittman asked Thomas.
“I’m going to see my brother, Eric.”
“He a bum too?”
“Street person,” the other cop corrected with a smirk on his lips.
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F o r t u n a t e S o n
“He’s a doctor’s son,” Thomas replied. “We got the same mother. I called him, and he said he’d help me out.”
