Like Family (17 page)

Unfortunately, Mike took no more notice of my sisters and me than he would a burr stuck to his shoelace, so we were stuck
with the second string: Tony Harlan, Pete and Danny Berringer, Todd Olson — boys who
did
spit bogies and burp the alphabet, to no great effect. We were happy enough to have these boys around, though. With all of
our parents out in the middle of the lake, well out of earshot and engaged for hours, we were free to get into whatever trouble
we could collectively cook up. Sometimes we settled for a floating-dock version of King of the Mountain; sometimes we used
our life jackets as sleds and flung ourselves down the side of a canyon made of a pinkish clay that was startlingly slick
and only hurt when you slid off your life jacket and had to scrape along the rest of the way with your shorts riding up to
give you a world-class wedgie.

On a particularly scorching summer day, a bunch of us climbed a hundred-foot sand hill that sloped gradually down to the lake.
One third of the way up, a dirt road was cut into the hill, upon which several cars were parked.

“See that space between the red car and that station wagon?” Pete Berringer said to no one in particular, pointing. “1’11
bet you can’t roll this rock down the hill, through that gap and into the lake.”

We all looked down at the rock he had in mind, a boulder the size of a medicine ball, and then most of us looked away, chicken,
which is what Pete had been banking on. Even Teresa had her hands firmly in her pockets and was kicking sand.

“Oh, all right, you sissies. Watch.” He squatted to dislodge the rock, then shoved it over a few feet. He knelt down, eyeballing
a path as if he was shooting marbles, then sent the rock with a push. It skittered down the hill, gave a few bounces that
had us cringing and biting our lips, and then flew right through the gap, landing in the lake with a belly-flop-sounding splash.
Pete puffed out his scrawny chest and said, “Hah!”

Hating to be outdone by a boy half her size, Tina stepped up. She put her hands on her jean-shorted hips, leaned all of her
weight on one dirty bare foot and said, “You think that’s something?” She looked up the hill and spied a boulder that was
double the size of Pete’s rock, squashed flat on one side. She headed right for it, and we followed. This was getting interesting.
By the time we got there, Tina was digging like a dog under the rock, throwing up sand. It started to fall before she was
ready, but she gave it a shove anyway, and we all watched with our mouths open as the boulder flew on a diagonal toward the
red car and missed it by a hair. “HAH!” Tina said, and blew up at her damp bangs.

After that, Pete and Tina were unstoppable; they threw every rock down that hill they could get their hands on, softball-size
or bowling-ball-size, it didn’t matter. Danny, who was only eight to Pete’s ten, got nervous and tried to stop them by saying
he could see the parents sailing back into the harbor, but no one was listening. Pete had his eye on a gigantic specimen near
the top of the hill. It was an extraordinary rock, truly, half the size of the red sedan they were half aiming at. Although
it should have taken all of us shoving to get it going down the hill, all of us weren’t willing to bank on the angle of its
fall, and so we watched as Pete and Tina huffed and puffed, sweat staining the armpits of their T-shirts. It wasn’t budging.

“C’mon,” Pete said to Danny and Tony Harlan. “Get over here, you pussies.” Just then, the rock shifted, and shifted again,
so that Tina had to skitter over to the side to get out of the way. The descent was spectacular. It took the hill like an
elephant on roller skates, veered left for no reason we could see, and blind-sided the sedan with enough force to make it
shudder.

Tina gave a chipmunk shriek and looked to Pete. We all did. He wasn’t the oldest there, but he was the oldest boy. He would
know what to feel, what to do, what came next. “Huh,” Pete said, shrugging his bony shoulders. “I didn’t think it would do
that.”

A long hour later, when the race was over and all the boats were docked, Bub, Hilde and Pete and Danny’s parents stood around
the red sedan, clucking and shaking their heads. We thought Pete and Tina were in for a real creaming, but Mr. and Mrs. Berringer
were sensible people who believed in “life lessons.” Pete and Tina’s punishment would be waiting for the owners of the car
to arrive and telling them exactly what had happened. That was part A. Part B was that they would spend the next several years
paying off the damage with their allowances. Pete and Tina sat down in the sand and waited for the owners, looking positively
green. Two years without allowance meant no
Mad
magazines, no pinball, no Saturday matinees, no popping into a corner store for a bottle of grape soda and an Abba-Zabba
bar. Life lessons were expensive.
Was it too late to ask for the creaming?

M
OST
SAILBOAT RACES WERE
held at Millerton Lake, some twenty miles from our house, but we also took
Bounty
to regattas all over California, Redding to Tamales Bay to San Diego. Our favorite was the Mile-High Regatta at Huntington
Lake, where there were always tons of kids on the beach and where the grownups stayed up late singing “Ghost Riders in the
Sky” and “Sloop John B.” around a campfire. Every year, something terrible happened before or during the trip to Huntington.
It was tradition. The first year, Tina ran into a tree and split her head open while we were playing yard games in the dark
near the Yacht Club. The second year, our truck blew a rod on the Grade, a section of mountain highway so steep you could
see it from our property, cut into the Sierras like a firebreak, like an arched white eyebrow. There was a loud
pling
when the rod blew; then the truck shuddered and stopped dead as a road-killed toad. In time, a nice family came along and
offered to drive Bub up to the next town so he could call a tow truck, and fortunately he stopped saying
goddamnitshithellshit
long enough to accept.

Another time, we got all the way to Shaver before disaster struck, an engine fire this time. Bub saw smoke threading from
the hood and pulled the truck over. Leaving the engine running, he got out to raise the hood, and my sisters and I moved up
in the camper to look through the cab window. The flames were a foot high, popping and curling. When Bub yelled for us to
get out of the camper, my sisters and I fell over one another trying to get through the small door. So much for keeping our
cool in emergencies. Bub was hollering and Hilde was hollering. We weren’t carrying a fire extinguisher, so Bub shook up several
cans of Dr Pepper and shot the carbonated, squiggling streams at the fire.

“The puppies!” Penny screamed suddenly, and we realized we’d left our eight-week-old Saint Bernard / Lab mixes, Ben and Barry,
in a cardboard box inside the camper. If the truck exploded, they were goners; we had to save them. Bub was busy with the
Dr Pepper and Hilde was busy with her nervous breakdown, so it was up to us girls to rescue them. This was no time for fear.
I lunged back through the door like the Bionic Woman, grabbed the big cardboard box holding the puppies and tried to push
it through the door. It was too big, though, even when I squished down the sides. I shoved and shoved, whimpering like the
puppies. We were doomed. The puppies and I were going to die in the volcano of the camper while Bub screamed
goddamnit
over and over to the fire and my sisters hopped up and down and yelled …
what? Take the puppies out of the box? My
brain turned on like a refrigerator light —
out of the box! —
and I handed the puppies through the door just as Bub stopped swearing. The fire was out, the emergency over, and we were
saved, all of us. Even if I turned out to be more like Laverne or Shirley than the Bionic Woman, even if Bub was more like,
well, Bub, than the cavalry, we were delivered.

A
MBER
S
WENSON MARCHED ACROSS
the street and up our dirt driveway and rapped three times fast on the jamb of our open front door. “Yoo-hoo!” she hollered.
“Anybody home?”

It was Saturday. Tina and my sisters had gone to the grocery store with Hilde; Bub was out back, swearing under the hood of
the Subaru, something to do with a fan belt; I was in the living room watching
Land of the Lost
in my bathing suit. It was 105 degrees, standard fare for a Fresno summer. I got up to see who it was, and my mouth fell
clean open.

We hadn’t seen much of Amber or her brothers since the star-thistle episode. Throughout the school year, Amber had been in
the third-grade classroom next to my fourth-grade one at Jefferson Elementary, but she was easy enough to avoid. She and her
brothers rode a different bus than we did, and if I saw Amber in the halls or at recess, I ducked and hightailed it the other
way, needing no reminder that the last time I had tried to make friends I’d nearly croaked from blood poisoning. Now she stood
in our doorway in white Ditto shorts and a tight-fitting pink T-shirt with kittens batting at a ball of string.

“Hi,” she said brightly. “You’re Paula, right? I’m Amber.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Hi.” She wasn’t packing any obvious ammunition. She didn’t have her mean brothers with her. She looked harmless,
really, more than harmless with two honey-colored ponytails sticking out from right above her ears. Her shoulders and hips
were broad, her waist doughy. Both of my legs together were smaller than one of hers, but Amber didn’t seem to be self-conscious
of her size. When I invited her into the house, she bounced in like a Superball.

“So,” Amber said, looking around at the yarn explosion that was our kitchen; everything but the stove and refrigerator was
covered with something Hilde had crocheted. “Do you have any bread?”

“Uh, sure. Yeah.” I walked over to the counter and picked up the loaf of Wonder. “Is this okay?”

Every square inch of Amber’s face brightened when she saw the red-and-yellow-dotted plastic bag. She sat down at Bub’s place
at the table. “More than okay.” Disposing of the twist tie in a nanosecond, she pulled a slice out and methodically began
to tear the crust off, keeping it whole, like an apple peel. Then she crushed the white square in her hands and began working
it like a snowball, smaller and rounder. When it was walnut-size, she ate it, popped the whole thing in and chewed happily.

Three slices had been scarfed this way before Amber took a breather. “Okay,” she said, leaning back in Bub’s chair, “that’s
yummy. The parents never let us have bread, not the good kind anyway. They say it has too much sugar or something stupid.”

“The parents?” It was odd, her putting it that way; not “my mom and dad,” not “my parents” but “the” (like Bub’s one ocean),
as if the world wasn’t littered with, lousy with parents.

She lifted her big shoulders toward her ears, lowered them again. “Yeah, the parents. The rents, the parental units.”

“Right.”

She fished back in the bag and started dismantling another slice. “So, what are you doing tonight?”

“Um, nothing, I guess. Watching TV.”

“Why don’t you come over to my house for a sleepover?”

My mouth fell open for a second time, but I caught it, closed it and said, “Sure,” as casually as I could, considering I was
the Superball now. Amber Swenson wasn’t a sticker-bush girl at all, but a doughy bread girl, and she had just invited me to
my very first sleepover.

“Ask if you want. You can let me know later.” She dug a fat, felt-tipped pen from her shorts pocket and wrote her phone number
on my palm. As she walked down our driveway toward home, I stood in the doorway, blowing on the numbers, hoping they didn’t
blur with sweat before Hilde got home.