California Sunrise (7 page)

She repeated her words as she did the actions. While Luis initially flinched when she picked him up, he didn’t go stiff or start wailing.

Progress.

As soon as they walked through the doorway, though, he tensed and drew in a lungful of air.

“We’re in Elizabeth’s house now. We’re going into the kitchen, and I’m going to put you in a playpen with Hannah. You like Hannah.” She tried to keep the desperation from her voice.

“There he is!” Annie, Elizabeth’s best friend, exclaimed. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen him—Elizabeth’s wedding, I think.” She reached for Luis, but Alicia shook her head. “He doesn’t do well with strangers.”

She waited for the reaction she typically got.
What’s wrong with him?

“David was like that,” Annie said. “Must be hard.”

“
Sí
.” Some of the tension seeped from her shoulders as she put Luis in with Hannah and handed him a toy. Soon he was engrossed in putting shapes into the slots, dumping them out, and repeating the process.

“What’s in the box?” Sarah asked.

“Chocolate mousse cake.”

“Oh, yummy. We’re having a feast tonight, aren’t we, little girl?” she cooed to Hannah.

Her daughter looked up at her and gurgled a smile.

A dart of jealousy pierced Alicia.

“What would you like to drink? Marcos got us a couple of Soquel Vineyards Zinfandels to go with the lasagna,” Elizabeth offered.

“No raviolis?” Alicia asked in mock horror.

“I needed a change.”

“So do I. I need a break from burritos and tacos. Thanks for the offer, but I don’t drink yet, remember? Do you have some iced tea?”

Elizabeth pointed to the pitcher on the counter.

“How are things going with the music business?” Alicia asked Annie.

“I’ve pulled together my first CD.” Annie’s grin wreathed her whole face.

“It’s great.” John, Annie’s husband, came up beside them.

Annie gave him a mock punch in the ribs. “You’re saying that because you’re my husband.”

He shook his head. “I’m saying that because it’s true.” He handed Alicia a disk. “Demo. See for yourself.”

“I will. I’m so excited for you, Annie.” Another dart entered her heart.

“It’s a dream come true.”

Elizabeth’s husband, Marcos, joined them. “Many dreams have come true. We have much to celebrate today!” He held out a bottle of wine. “My first vintage from America.”

The label showed an antique-looking globe. Gamari Vineyards Pinot Noir.

Alicia’s soul deflated. Everyone around her had accomplished so much, while she had only managed to produce a fatherless child with problems.

Sarah grabbed her hand. “C’mon outside with Hunter and me and leave the old folks to the cooking.”

“I am not old!” Elizabeth called from her place by the stove.

“Don’t let their recent accomplishments fool you,” Sarah said. “They’ve had twenty years to stop screwing up and do something.”

“What’s your excuse?” Alicia followed Sarah out to the shaded garden. “You’re a successful innkeeper.”

Sarah cocked her head. “I’m older than you are, Alicia. Time does matter. And I still haven’t completed my degree, much to Mother’s annoyance.”

They grabbed some lounge chairs on the patio. Hunter sat nearby, his legs propped up on a stone bench and a cold beer in his hand. His love for Sarah showed in a half smile on his lips.

All of them had love. If she allowed someone to get close to her, maybe someone like Raúl, would that make a difference in her life?

Alicia paced up and down the parking lot overlooking the valley. She needed solitude for her first coaching call, and this was one of the few places she knew she could be alone and still get cell reception. Fog covered most of fields, as misty as her direction in life.

“So you are Sarah’s sister. She told me how special you are.” Carol Eos’s voice transmitted kindness over the phone.

“Half sister,” Alicia clarified.

“Funny, she never referred to you like that.”

“Oh.”

Silence.

Sarah had warned her that the life coach often stopped talking to let what she’d said settle in.

Crap.
Silence made Alicia squirm inside. “I’m stuck,” she said, the lack of sound driving her to speak.

“Many of us are,” Carol said. “Tell me more.”

“I thought I knew what I wanted from life. Now I don’t.”

“Can you give me an example?”

“I went to school to sign up for business classes. Which I did. But then …” Her steps became more rapid. “Then, like an idiot, I signed up for sociology. Why did I do that? It’s not practical. It’s not what I was supposed to do. Elizabeth took a chance on me. I owe her. I know she wants to travel with Marcos. She’s depending on me to be able to run the business when she’s gone. I can’t let her down.”

“Do you want to run the store? Or is it guilt that’s forcing you into that box?”

“What do you mean?” She stopped walking.

“You said you owed Elizabeth.
What
do you owe her?”

Another trait Sarah had warned her about. The coach often answered a question with a question.

Alicia hated dredging up the same old story. If only she could have had normal parents.

“You know about my father. He was married to Elizabeth, but also ... well ... he was with my mother. He told her he loved her but couldn’t leave Elizabeth because of Sarah.” The familiar, golf ball-sized mass choked her throat, making it difficult to speak. “He ... uh ...” She started to pace again. “Got my mother pregnant. Then he died.”

He’d left everyone in a tangled mess.

She hated talking about this.

“It must be very difficult for you,” Carol said. “Your parents were living a lie for a very long time. You didn’t have anything to do with their deception, but I can understand its impact on your life.”

She perched on one of the rocks that edged the parking lot and stared at the fog-enshrouded shoreline. Far out in the bay, the sun cut through the mist, shining on the roiling water.

The steel hand on her chest loosened.

“Elizabeth told me that your mother asked her to give you a job when you became pregnant, and she did,” Carol continued. “Is that what you mean by owing her?”

“Yes.”

“So ... she’s only kept you on because of obligation. You haven’t provided any value as an employee or a person? You never see her outside of work?”

That was ridiculous. Of course she did.

“I was at Elizabeth’s last Friday night.”

“Ah.”

Silence.

New ideas inched into her head. “Do you think I only want to own a day spa and cosmetic store because of Elizabeth?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“But I wanted to work in one in high school. That’s why my mother went to Elizabeth in the first place.”

“People change, Alicia. What we thought we wanted as young people very often shifts when we experience reality. What do you want right now?”

A longing for something filled her heart, but she couldn’t define it. Her vision was as shrouded as the valley below. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s see if we can do some work to figure it out.”

Alicia remembered the other thing Sarah had warned her about. “You want me to journal.”

Carol laughed. “Word travels fast. Yes, my dear. At least three pages every morning before you get out of bed.”

Alicia tried to come up with a good excuse as to why she couldn’t do the journaling, but she knew there weren’t any.

“One other thing,” the coach said. “You talk about Elizabeth, but not about your own mother. She did a very brave thing by asking for a job for you. Aren’t you close to her?”

“I don’t like my mother.” She stood and started pacing.

“Why not?”

Her feet pounded the blacktop as she tried to find an acceptable answer.

“Are you judging your mother for what she did?”

Back to the other end of the parking lot. Unease pulled at her. Of course she was judging her mother. She’d committed adultery.

“Look. Can’t we leave it at ‘I don’t like her’?”

“For now, maybe. But I think it’s something we’re going to have to address, don’t you?”

Not if I can help it.

• • •

Later that evening, Alicia seated herself in an aisle desk in the last row of the sociology classroom.

What would it be like?

“Hi.” A familiar-looking boy slid in beside her. “I’m Josh. We met a few weeks ago when you were signing up for the semester. Alicia, right?”

“
Sí
.” She pulled her notepad from her bag. Glancing at Josh, she saw he’d set up a slim tablet with a keyboard.

What was she doing here? How was sociology going to get her one step closer to independence?

Chair legs scraped on the linoleum floor as other students took their places. Like Josh, many of them set up tablets. A few pulled out notepads.

Susan Walker, the instructor she’d met when she registered, strode to the front of the room.

“She’s supposed to be good but tough. No easy grade here,” Josh said.

“Welcome, class. I’m Dr. Susan Walker, and you’re in Sociology of the Family. If this is not your final destination, please deplane now.”

A current of nervous laughter flowed through the classroom.

“By the end of our time together, I hope you’ll have a firm grasp of the internal and external dynamics that mold a family, influences beyond the people inside the construct, as well as how the nuclear family interacts and influences society.”

What was she talking about?
Tension gripped the veins in Alicia’s temples. If she couldn’t understand the first things Dr. Susan said, how was she ever going to pass the class?

I need to drop it. Get my money back. Take another business class so I can finish sooner.

“As some of you may have heard, this isn’t a cake class. There’s a great deal of reading and three required papers. But I also want you to succeed, so I’ll be available to meet with you for whatever help you need.”

Dr. Susan paced in front of the classroom and made eye contact with each student. “Ah, my friend who enjoys the view from the top of the stairs as much as I do. Welcome, Alicia.”

Everyone turned to stare.

She wanted to slink into her chair.

Dr. Susan moved on. “I’m going to ask you to take a good, clear look at your family of origin and whatever relationships you have right now and compare and contrast them to what we learn from our text.” She smiled. “You may learn things that surprise you.”

Great. The last thing Alicia needed was any more surprises about her family.

“My office hours are posted on my door down this corridor. However, I know many of you have jobs, families, and other obligations. If you need to see me for any reason and can’t make my hours, please make other arrangements. I’d rather see you before you have problems than flunk you out of this class.” She leaned forward on her desk. “And make no mistake. If you don’t do the work, I
will
flunk you.”

An F in her first class? Definitely dropping out.

“Okay. Let’s begin. What’s a family?”

A mother, a father, two children, and a dog. Nothing like my mother and me.

Josh raised his hand, and Dr. Susan nodded at him.

“It can be any group of people who make a commitment to each other. Traditionally, it’s a man, woman, and their offspring, but there are lots of different kinds of families these days.” He sounded like he’d not only read the textbook but memorized it.

“Good,” Dr. Susan said. “In order to be good sociologists, we need to look at reality, not some stereotypical picture.”

Alicia glanced at Josh.

He winked at her.

“What kind of family do you have?” Dr. Susan asked.

Josh chuckled. “Mom, Dad, younger sister. Pretty classic.”

Dr. Susan turned to Alicia. “And you?”

“About as opposite from that as you can get.”

The professor waited.

“My grandmother. My mother. Me. My son.” Stark comparison.

“And it’s still a family from a sociological point of view.” Dr. Susan walked to the board. “So let’s delve into the idea of family more.”

Now that the instructor was talking at a human level instead of sounding like an academic paper, Alicia became absorbed as she talked about how different families interacted. Her own family had been molded by their culture and the expectations of other Mexicans, as well as Anglos’ views on Latinos.

How different Josh’s experience was from hers. She’d never looked at how culture affected the interactions between two people before.

Her pulse quickened as she thought about the implications.

What about Raúl? What little she knew about fieldworkers—and there’d been many of those families in and around Los Banos—told her those families experienced a lot of hard labor for very little pay, while she’d grown up relatively comfortable. Between the money her father had left and her mother’s job as a paralegal, she’d never wanted for anything.

From what she’d learned from Raúl, his childhood had been nothing like hers. Yet he’d been more than kind to her.

Maybe she should go out with him. Get to know him more. See if they had anything in common besides running and Luis.

Questions bombarded her. How did people with different backgrounds communicate? When people fought with each other, did they know what they were actually angry about? What if they disagreed about important things? How was that ever resolved?

Dr. Susan’s words wormed their way into her mind and hooked her.

She wasn’t going to drop sociology. She was going to ace it.

“When’s your next class?” Josh asked at the end of the session.

“I’m done for the day. I have to get home to my child.”

“Oh. When are you here next?”

“Thursday.”

“Can we hook up for coffee?”

Alicia hesitated. She didn’t want to encourage Josh, but she didn’t want to be standoffish. Part of going to college was meeting new people.

“Just friends.” He held up his hands, his smooth-skinned palms white in the overhead fluorescent lights.

“Sure.”

“Great!”

After he left, Dr. Susan called out to her. “Alicia, I wanted to reiterate my offer of extra help whenever you need it. With a little one, it can be hard. I don’t mind if you bring him or her with you to see me if you need to do that.”