Future Perfect (6 page)

“I just don't want you to do anything stupid,” I say.

“I know,” she says.

“Have you told Jolene?” I ask.

“I haven't told anyone,” she says.

“So I don't count, ha ha?”

She grins at me quick, her lightning-flash smile that illuminates everything. “Maybe Omar can convince you that we've got the talent to make it in the big city on our wits, our convictions, and our old-fashioned work ethic.” She bats one of the palm tree leaves out of her way.

“Maybe,” I say, because anything can happen, and the crash of glass that just came from the kitchen wasn't my fault this time.

T
he problem is that I name them, and once I name them I never want to give them away.

But she just looks like an Annabelle Lee. She's the smallest shih tzu I've ever seen, just a fluff of tangled fur on my knees and little worried black eyes that don't look away from mine, even as I feed her tiny bits of our dinner. She doesn't even startle when the gulls squawk or flocks of tourists flap by to take pictures of the flaking fiberglass lighthouse at the end of the dock.

This is my favorite part of the day, after my work shift and before there is anything else to do right away. The sun is starting to set red-gold and the ocean looks bright and strange in the light, like an alien landscape. My father is late as always to come meet me, but I never mind. My feet hurt and my back hurts but no one is talking to me and I can
not think
for just a couple of minutes.

I had been considering breaking into the big bag of fried things I'm bringing home for dinner and stealing a couple of
fries before they got cold and gross, and then the little dog came slinking close. She crouched down low to the planks of the dock and delicately, deliberately placed her tiny paws down one by one until she was a foot away, stretching out her nose and sniffing at the greasy paper. She stared wide-eyed and intense as I ripped the staple at the top of the bag off and dug around until I found the breaded codfish fillet.

And now she's slowly working her way through my meal, licking my fingertips carefully after each crumb. I jump when my father appears in front of me, his hands on his hips. He's got Toby bouncing around at the end of his leash, ricocheting off Soto's sides and my father's knees. Soto bumps her head into my arm and then sits politely. I kiss her face and the top of her big block head and rest my forehead on the side of her neck. Annabelle Lee licks my wrist and settles her chin on top of my hand.

“Doggone it,” my father says, scooping up Toby under his armpits.

“Ha,” I say.

“Why do we have so many dogs?” my father says. Toby is hanging from my father's arm, panting and smiling hugely.

“You tell me it's because you're a sucker with a heart of gold who lets your daughter collect them,” I say.

“I'm something,” he says.

“How was the open house?”

He's got paint in his hair and on his dress pants and undershirt.
He never remembers to change when he gets home, especially when things had gone poorly. He notices me looking at the stains and fingers the stiff splash of orange on the hem of his shirt. “It'll come out,” he says. “You always get it out.”

“I always end up buying you new pants,” I say.

“They all look the same,” he says, and shrugs in that easy, fluid way that my older brothers have inherited, with the rolling shoulders and head rocking to the side. Toby starts wiggling under his arm and Dad is trying to get a better grip. “I'm going to drop him,” he says, and it sounds more like a threat than a statement.

“You could have left Toby at home,” I point out, setting Annabelle Lee on the step beside me and standing up. She's investigating the big dinner bag, which is starting to turn dark brown with grease. “No more of that,” I say to her, and pick her up.

“What is that?” my father says.

“Dinner,” I say, tucking the bag under my arm. I'm already greasy from work.

“It doesn't have much meat on its bones,” he says. Toby is hanging limp now from Dad's arm but has started to whine, high-pitched and utterly forlorn. “I feel the same way, buddy,” my father says.

“I'll clean her up and bring her in to the shelter in San Luis Obispo tomorrow,” I say as I settle Annabelle Lee against my shoulder.

My father drops Toby down and takes the bag of food from me.

“And then what?” he asks.

“And then I'll bring her back because they have no room,” I say.

“Your grandmother isn't going to be happy.” He frowns, but he drifts off. He's looking off at the water like he just caught a glimpse of something.

“She's never happy,” I say, and set off down the marina with Soto at my heel and Annabelle Lee under my arm.

Toby shoots by, dragging my father behind. “That's not true!” my father says, out of breath. Toby jerks to a halt to examine a post and yanks my father to a stop. “Toby, why are you doing this to me? Why?” Toby lifts his leg. “I mean,” my father says, “there must have been a couple of minutes in 1984 where she might have thought about smiling.”

“History shows that she is unlikely to even notice another dog,” I say.

“It's expensive,” my father argues, nudging Toby away from a small mound of something that came out of a seagull. “Isn't it?” He's never bought dog food or cat food or any groceries. “They eat like animals,” he says, and elbows me.
Ha, ha. Big joke
.
Get it?

“It's fine,” I say. “My paycheck covers it.” Soto bumps her head against my knee and I start walking again, too fast. My father is hurrying behind me, and Toby is trying to keep up on
stubby little legs as we turn off Main Street and down the side roads toward home.

“That's because they're animals,” he says. “That they eat that way.”

“Yes, I got it,” I say.

He stops when Toby pulls to sniff at a lilac bush. My father stands there with his hands in his pockets, watching Toby demonstrate laser focus and slight bewilderment. The lights in the Victorian houses around us are starting to flicker on. Here they're all freshly painted in whites and grays and sands and pale blues like they're trying to remind you that the beach is never far away.

“You ever think about spending your money on something fun?” my father asks. “Buy a golf cart. Rent a bouncy house. Eat a lot of candy. So much candy. Be a little bit more laid-back, like your friend Laura.”

“Yes, I could go live like a bum in San Francisco,” I say.

“Why not,” he says absently, rocking back on his heels.

“I can't do that,” I say, but I know he's not really listening.

“Sure you can,” he says. He's still wearing his dress shoes, and they're scuffed. “You can eat all the candy you want.”

“Dad.”

“Eat thine candy whilst thy may,” he intones.

I sigh. “I don't like candy very much,” I say.

“You never did,” he says, tugging Toby back into motion. He watches me juggle Annabelle Lee into the crook of my other arm
and try to untangle my necklace from my hair. “Those parties your mother used to throw.” We both wait through his pregnant, before-the-joke pause. “She had a great arm.”

“The Easter-egg hunt, you mean?”

“Your brothers got so mad every year.”

“I was methodical!”

“Your mother would hide a metric ton of those plastic eggs all over the yard and the house and she'd have better places every year and kids from all over the neighborhood would go swarming but you'd find twenty of them in under twenty minutes.”

“I had a plan,” I say.

“Your brothers swore you were cheating.”

“I would never cheat!” I can feel my face getting hot just like it did when I was barely nine years old and my heart swelled with the injustice of it when they insisted, their baskets empty and mine overflowing, that I was somehow stealing eggs from them.

“Oh, I know you wouldn't,” he says, slipping his arm around me and tangling Toby in my legs. “I saw your campaign maps.”

“I gave one to Mateo,” I mutter, stepping over the leash. “He didn't even look at it.”

“Your brothers aren't strategists, kid.”

“Well, that's not my fault,” I say. I shift Annabelle Lee back over to my other arm.

“Do you want me to put that thing in my pocket?” He gestures at Annabelle. “Or make Soto useful. Let's strap her on top.”

“She's fine,” I say. Then I realize she's snoring. She looks like a dishcloth and sounds like a blender.

“You didn't have to sell your extra candy back to them, though,” my father says.

“I was saving up,” I say. You'd think I'd have saved enough for college by now, but it's funny how much it costs to support my father, who refuses to ever ask Grandmother for cash.

He glances over at me. “You know, my place is hiring,” he says.

I am startled. “What, the brokerage?” The real-estate company my father works for has only had three employees since the dawn of time. This is mostly because their clients are the kind who have a half-acre parcel of land they need to sell fast and cheap to buy a kidney, or cabins hours from the coast with no running water, which have to be sold as quickly as possible in order to cover legal fees for assorted issues that are never quite clarified. My father takes the clients with hard-luck stories, the hard-to-sell houses that none of the big companies would ever touch. Those guys are trading multimillion-dollar Victorians back and forth between their buyers and sellers—the houses we're strolling by now. The kind of house where the front landscaping looks as if a team of garden specialists descended with measuring tapes and calculators and geometry fetishes.

“Do they have enough business to actually hire someone?” I say, mostly because their business strategy never fails to fascinate me.

“Gloria is retiring,” my father says. “I don't know when she
got tired in the first place.” Toby slows down to a crawl, his nose pushed to the ground and working overtime as we walk past the Alvarez house, where his boyfriend, the German shepherd, lives. The love is not mutual but that will never stop Toby. We stop and watch him inhale the essence of Duke.

People tell me all the time my dad doesn't look old enough to be a dad, and that's probably true. He doesn't have any gray, and when his face relaxes he looks so much like my brothers.

“It would make more sense to just split everything up between you and George,” I tell him.

“Hmm?” he says. He looks over at me. “Don't you think they should paint this place purple?” He tilts his chin at Duke's house.

“Wouldn't that lower the resale value?” I say.

He shrugs. “Does it matter?”

“Dad, why are you even in the real-estate business?”

“It's a living,” he says jovially.

No, not really.
But instead I say, “Is she selling? Or is she just not working anymore?”

He shrugs. “Who knows. She does what she wants.”

“Right, but do you even have a job?”

“Sure I do,” he says. “She would have said something. It hasn't really come up.”

“It ‘hasn't really'?” My voice seems to bounce off the sky, and a group of birds flap off from the topmost branches of the oak a few yards down.

“You worry too much, honey. It's fine,” he says comfortably, patting my shoulder. Toby sighs and snorts and starts waddling forward, ready for dinner. All the light has leaked out of the sky when we turn onto our gravel-scattered road.

“Right, but what happens when I graduate?”

“You could come work for us,” he says. “Eh? Then it's all in the family.”

“I would need—I'm not old enough. And I would need a license.” I am talking like I'm taking his meandering seriously, and I hate when I do that.

“I think eighteen is plenty old enough,” he says. “When is your birthday, is it Saturday? Is that tomorrow? This week went by fast.” He's shaking his head.

“Seventeen,” I say. “I'm going to be seventeen.”

“Then you hang out for a year. Take a couple of classes at that two-year college in Santa Maria. That ought to be a walk in the cake for you. And wouldn't it be nice to take a year off? Your grandmother would be thrilled to have you stay around. She would be rattling around in that old house like a ball bearing if you went off somewhere for college.”

I start with, “You'll still be living there” and “She's actually never home,” but he's still talking.

“I bet you'll be a natural,” he says. “You've got the Perkins charm. You've got your grandmother's drive and go-getterism, don't you think?”

“I'm getting my medical degree,” I say slowly and carefully. I do not want my voice to shake in the wake of the whistling hollow in my chest.

“You're so much like your mom,” he says, beaming at me. “But Santa Maria has a first-aid certificate!” my dad says. “A lot cheaper, I bet, than Princeton.” His face is a pale blue-white blur in this light and my eyes hurt looking at him. Annabelle Lee huffs in the crook of my arm and I loosen my grip and I don't say anything, because my father is a rushing creek and anything you toss in there will be swept away, Ping-Ponging in the current and bobbing its way out to sea.

“Right, is that what you told Mom?” I find myself saying. I don't know, or even care, where that came from.

He frowns at me. “I couldn't tell your mother anything.”

In the picture of her at Harvard, with her Harvard T-shirt stretched over her pregnant belly and barely covering it, she's grinning maybe because she will be back when things settle down, when life is smooth, when my father's landed a full-time job and the twins are old enough to make their own sandwiches or at least be cared for by someone else. And then I came along and it was too late.

I imagine that when she left us it was to go back to her real life. The one she should have had without my father.

“She never went back to school,” I say.

“She didn't need to,” my father says.

“Could she have?”

He laughs. “She could do anything.”

“You know that's not what I meant.”

I can suddenly picture my father with his arms around her and dream-light conviction and confidence in his voice telling her everything is just fine, just fine right here and now and always. My mother, swept downstream under a sunny sky, trying to make it back to shore.