The Summer I Learned to Fly (6 page)

Mrs. Mutchnick stood when she saw me and rubbed her hands together like an excited child.

“Ooooh. Let me see him. Give him here.”

I unzipped my bag and took out Hum’s cage. He made his happy clicking sound. I had a feeling Hum knew Mrs. Mutchnick, knew she was the one responsible for delivering him to his new life with me, for rescuing him from his fate as a boa constrictor’s lunch.

He leapt into her outstretched hands.

It was summer, the days of endless light, but her store felt like a place you’d settle in for a long winter’s nap. I’d never seen a customer at P&L Fabrics, but I wasn’t sure Mrs. Mutchnick cared too much about actual sales. She’d bought the building and opened the store with her husband, the L of P&L, over forty years earlier. He’d been dead for the last ten of those years, and the shop gave her someplace to go.

“To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?” she asked.

“Hum missed you. He’s always begging me to bring him by for a visit.”

“He’s a prince, our Humboldt Fog.” She scratched him between the ears.

She asked me about the cheese business. She’d heard most of the Euclid Avenue merchants were having a rough time of it, though the diner was going like gangbusters. When times are tough, people turn to comfort: a cup of tomato soup, blueberry pancakes, a chocolate malted.

“Things seem okay to me,” I said. “Maybe a little slow.”

I made a note to myself:
We should start making the ultimate comfort food: macaroni and cheese
.

“Do you know Garfield Park?” I asked.

“Of course I do. I used to take picnics there with Mr. Mutchnick. A lifetime ago. It’s lovely.”

“Could you tell—”

“It’s named after James Garfield, of course. Our twentieth president. He was shot by a disgruntled lawyer, as if there’s any other type of lawyer. Do you know about Garfield, or did you assume the park was named for that asinine orange cat? Sometimes I wonder about your generation. If you’re getting any education at all.”

It was a challenge, keeping Mrs. Mutchnick on point, and she seemed not to know or care whether anyone was remotely interested in what she was saying. This might have had something to do with why nobody seemed to shop there.

“Mrs. Mutchnick—” I reached over and put my hand on her forearm. “Can you tell me where Garfield Park is? I’m meeting a friend and I’m already late.”

“Yes, dear. But it’s a hike. You have to go to where Capri Drive dead-ends and there’s a trail you can catch through the brush. I’ve been after the fire marshal forever about it. It’s a hazard, all that dry brush. Anyway, the trail will lead you to the park. It’s a good half-mile straight uphill, but well worth it. The views are to die for. Are you picnicking?”

I nodded. I’d gone to collect food for Hum and then decided it wouldn’t hurt to bring along some cheese and bread and what was left of the fruit tart Mom had baked last night.

Mrs. Mutchnick returned Hum and walked over to the corner, where bolts of fabric were stacked on top of each other like a gigantic pile of pickup sticks. She pulled one out
from the bottom, grabbed a pair of shears, cut a large square, and then folded it up.

“Here. For your picnic. Something to sit on.”

“Really?”

“Yes, of course. I’ve got more material here than I know what to do with.”

I slipped it into my backpack. I paused before speaking again, hesitant to start up a whole new conversation. “Mrs. Mutchnick, do you ever think of leaving what you don’t need out back behind the store?”

“No, I can’t say I ever thought of that.”

“It’s just that someone who really needs it might come along and take it.”

She squeezed my hand with affection. “It’s a wonderful idea, Drew. Now get out of here. Don’t keep your friend waiting. Time is precious.”

garfield park

As I walked up the hill I found myself thinking of one of the items on Dad’s list of Things I’d Like to Do but Probably Never Will:
climb Mount Kilimanjaro
.

My dead father and I were different. I had no desire to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

Mom was always after me to get out and
do
something. To stay, as she liked to call it, heart-healthy. I rode my bike most places, but that was all. I much preferred to read about Belgian cheeses while sitting behind the counter in a quiet store. And no, I did not want to accompany Mom to one of her yoga classes. It wasn’t that I was getting plump or even curvy—I was still growing in only one direction: up. But as I climbed this mountain my breathing grew heavy and my shirt stuck to my back with sweat, and I started to wonder, grudgingly, whether Mom might have a point.

Maybe if my dad hadn’t died we’d have gone hiking together. Maybe it would have been something we did on
Saturdays, just the two of us. We’d lose ourselves in the wild and talk about life. We’d wear hats. Sunglasses. We’d carry special matching packs. Maybe I’d be in better shape, and this walk wouldn’t be taking such a toll on me.

It hadn’t occurred to me to bring water. It was hot and I was thirsty. Dad would never have let me forget water.

I started to have a crisis of faith.

What am I doing? Who is this Emmett Crane? What if this is all a big joke and there’s nobody waiting at this park?

I plodded along until I reached a fork in the path. Not a metaphorical fork but an actual fork, and I cursed Mrs. Mutchnick, who rarely spared a detail yet had somehow managed to forget to tell me whether to bear right or left.

And then I saw it.

A paper crane. In the brush in front of me. I unfolded it.

Keep right. You’re almost there
.

Did you bring anything to eat?

I don’t know about you, but I’m starving
.

I put it in my back pocket, continued on, and then paused before reaching the crest of the hill to catch my breath and wipe my forehead with the hem of my tank top.

I took the final steps, and there he was, in the middle of a field of green—an oasis amid so much dried-out earth. I wasn’t a worrier particularly, but Mrs. Mutchnick’s fire concerns had followed me up that hill. Fires were common in this part of California, especially in summer, especially in the hills. A fire would devour this brush and me in a heartbeat.
But from this patch of green at the top of the dried-out hill you could see the ocean, endless and blue. The world, my world, felt full of possibility.

He was stretched out on his back, his eyes closed, and he’d rolled up the cuffs of his jeans with the holes in the knees. Beside him sat a large bottle of water. I walked toward him until my shadow fell over him. He sat up and peered at me from under the palm of his hand.

He held out the bottle.

“You look thirsty.”

I put my backpack down and unzipped it. “And you look hungry.”

He reached inside, but instead of grabbing for the cheese or the bread or the tart he went for Hum’s cage. He mimicked Hum’s happy clicking sound so perfectly, I thought it came from Hum himself.

“Hey, boy,” he whispered between clicks. “Good boy.”

Emmett was the only person other than Mrs. Mutchnick who genuinely loved my rat. Mom had finally come around to accepting that he was a part of our lives, so long as he didn’t get too close. Swoozie and Nick tolerated him; they’d even scratch his belly or head when prodded. Georgia, Beatrice, and Janice shrank back in horror at the sight of him, making it clear that he was not welcome in our circle, lest they become known as friends of the Rat Girl.

But Emmett. He had a way with Hum.

I took the fabric Mrs. Mutchnick had given me and spread it out on the grass along with the food. All in all it didn’t look like much of a picnic.

“That’s Emmentaler.” I pointed to the wedge I’d brought. “Which is really just a fancy way of saying Swiss cheese. Some pear and cranberry tart. And day-old French bread.”

“Day-old bread gets a bad rap,” he said, tearing off a hunk. “I love it. The fresh-baked stuff is way too soft.”

He moved onto the blanket. I sat down next to him, and for a few minutes we just ate and stared out at the ocean. I was able, finally, to place his smell. He smelled like onions, but not like when Mom chopped them in the kitchen until my eyes watered, or like the ones frying on the griddle at Daisy’s diner. He smelled like sweet, fresh onion. A pleasant sort of smell.

Sitting with him wasn’t like sitting with Georgia and her crew with their never-ending talk. Nobody rushed to fill the silence.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you around school,” I said, finally.

I hoped this line would lead to more information. He might tell me what grade he was in, and then I could figure out his age. I was pretty sure he didn’t go to my school—there wasn’t a boy two grades above or below us who Georgia, Beatrice, and Janice hadn’t dissected down to his brand of socks. If I learned where he went, I’d know volumes.

If he wasn’t at Benjamin Franklin with me, then there was the private school, the only one in the area, where you got to call your teachers by their first names and choose your own reading for English. Why someone who had the money to go there would take day-old bread and cheese on its last legs from an alleyway was a mystery to me, but everything about Emmett was a mystery.

Finally, if he didn’t go to Benjamin Franklin or the
private school, there was a vocational school for troubled kids where you went to learn service-industry skills or how to work farm equipment. I’d always suspected this school was made up, invented by parents as a threat for kids who weren’t applying themselves academically. Sort of like threatening to call Santa’s elves to report bad behavior.

“I’m new to the area,” he said. “I moved here from down south a while back.”

“Down south like Alabama?” We’d studied the Montgomery bus boycott in history that year, and it had entered my consciousness in a way I couldn’t shake.

He laughed. “Down south like Los Angeles.”

L.A. I’d never been, but I knew from movies and TV shows that everything, all those mansions and palm trees and swimming pools, all of it, was always bathed in blinding white light. How could someone ever go from there to here?

“So where are you living?”

“For now we’re staying with some friends of my dad’s, but when he finds a job we’ll get a place of our own. A bachelor pad, he likes to say.”

I’d told him about my father when I explained my name to him in the alley, but he didn’t offer information about an absent mother, so I guessed it was something he wasn’t eager to talk about.

I picked a blade of grass at the root. My father had taught my mother to whistle on a blade of grass, and she’d passed the trick on to me. I couldn’t pull it off just then, so I tossed it away.

“Why would you ever come here?”

I’d always felt like I lived at a stop somewhere on the road
to where life really happened. You didn’t come here; you left here.

Sure, there was Swoozie, who’d moved from Wisconsin, but by her own admission real cities were too much for her. I always pictured Swoozie’s beat-up Porsche running out of gas on Highway One, getting a tow to the Mobil station on the corner of Euclid and Fourth. I could see her getting out of her car, taking a look around, and deciding there were worse places to start over.

“Well, like I said, we have friends with a spare room.” He didn’t say this rudely, but he said it with an emphasized period, signaling the end of this part of our conversation.

“I’m almost fourteen,” I blurted out, and immediately felt stupid. For one thing, my birthday was in January, so I was thirteen and a half, and everyone knows that only someone insecure about her age rounds up to the next year.

Also, he hadn’t asked. So he might have wondered why I’d blurted out this random fact about myself. It could have been worse. I could have said
My favorite color is magenta
. But I didn’t care about his favorite color. I cared about how old he was.

“Well, happy almost-birthday.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. And thanks for coming all the way up here.” He paused. “You’re cool, Robin.”

Once Chris Tanner told Georgia she was
hot
while he walked by her in the hall at school. Georgia told us at lunch. And she told us again the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

I’d thought,
What’s the big deal?

But now I knew.

Emmett Crane said I was cool, and had Georgia and Beatrice and Janice not been half a world away, I’d have told them. Over and over and over.

“Thanks,” I said.

“By the way,” he added, “don’t be in any hurry to turn fourteen. Believe me, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

From Dad’s Book of Lists, third on the list of Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was a Teenager:
it gets easier
.

Sometimes Dad’s brevity was crazy-making. Would it have killed him to write more? What gets easier? Riding a bike? Learning a foreign language? Understanding the opposite sex?

When I read this for the first time I found it totally perplexing. Then I moved on and forgot it. But now these words found their way back to me, right at the moment when words were so hard to come by.

“I think it’s supposed to get easier,” I said. “So maybe fifteen will be better?”

He shrugged. “I hope you’re right.”

We’d finished everything. Every last scrap of Emmentaler and bread and tart. I peered in my bag anyway, hoping for something to extend our picnic, and I spied a flash of red. Hawaii’s favorite candy bar. I’d picked it up the day before at Fireside Liquor and forgotten all about it.

I held it out. “Good News?”

“Sure,” he said. “Who couldn’t use some Good News?”

absolutely, positively fine

That night when Mom came home from the shop she asked me about my day. I said it was
fine
. She said
fine
wasn’t an answer. I said
Okay, my day was absolutely, positively fine
.