Home Free (4 page)

I pulled up to my parents’ house a little
after two o’clock and looked around the street. I was sure Brian
was here because he would never be late, but I didn’t know what car
to look for. I spied a hulking silver Minteres M-class SUV with
vanity plates that read MM MBL. Either Mabel was tasty, or it was a
Mom Mobile, which sounded like the clever sort of thinking Brian
was famous for. Kevin’s black Harley Softail Deuce was in the
driveway, along with my mom’s silver Camry and my dad’s black Chevy
Silverado. Black and silver seemed to be the family colors. I
parked my metallic orange Element on the street, glanced in the
mirror to check my makeup and peeled myself out of the car. I was
wearing denim Bermuda shorts, a yellow tank-top style shirt with
spaghetti straps and built-in bra thingy and red flip-flops. As
close to naked as the law and respectability would allow, and still
I started to sweat as soon as I opened the door. It was one hundred
and eleven degrees already. The asphalt shimmered and I choked on
the smell of melted road tar. A layer of smog hung over the
horizon, held hostage by the inversion layer. Another perfect
summer day in central California.

I trudged up the driveway to the back gate.
That’s what you did in Minter in the summertime. No one went to the
front door because no one would answer. Everyone was in their
backyards, swimming and barbecuing and drinking beer.

“Well here you are,” my mother said as I
walked into the yard. Everyone was in his place. Brian’s wife
(still can’t remember her name) was supervising their spawn in the
pool, Brian and my father were engaged in a Serious Conversation at
the patio table, Kevin was drinking a beer and manning the
barbecue, which meant we were having burgers and hotdogs because if
we were having steak or ribs, only Brian would be allowed to do the
grilling, and my mom was setting out side dishes and fanning
herself.

“Hey.”

Everyone looked up expectantly. I walked over
to the ice chest and dug around for the rare regular Coke amongst
all of the diet sodas and beer. I popped the can, sat down with a
thud on one of the wooden patio chairs and chugged half the soda. I
looked around at my family and burped. My mother gave me a
look.

“So what do you want to know?”

“Are you seeing Doctor Hennessy?” my mother
asked.

I found that question odd, since all the
rumors that had gotten back to me suggested I was screwing Jack
pretty regularly and I wondered when I’d have time to squeeze in
anybody else. Plus, Doctor Hennessy was about sixty-five, and I had
never been one of those sugar-daddy types. Gossip moves in
mysterious ways, I guess.

“That’s just gross. Haven’t you heard about
me and Murphy in Bardini’s orchard?”

“Alexis! Your father and I are worried sick
about your brain tumor, and you have to make tasteless remarks
about your inappropriate affair? Are you ever going to grow
up?”

I looked at my dad, who didn’t look worried
sick to me. He was gazing longingly at his hammock and I guessed he
hadn’t put much stock in the brain tumor and kinky sex rumors, and
I was grateful somebody in my family had some sense. I realized
this was going to be one hell of a long afternoon. I took a very
deep breath.

“I don’t have a brain tumor, Mom. And I’m not
screwing Jack -- ”

“Alex! Watch your language in front of the
boys,” Brian admonished me. Right, I thought. I’m dying of a
fucking brain tumor, and he’s worried that I might corrupt the
devil progeny.

“Oh, it was
Jack
Murphy,” Kevin said
from his perch near the grill. “I heard it was one of the Murphy
boys, but I wasn’t sure which one.”

“Well, at least it was only one,” I
offered.

“At a time, anyway,” Kevin countered.

“Kevin and Alexis, that is enough!” I figured
I was pretty close to being sent to my room, so I stuck my tongue
out at Kevin for getting me yelled at and proceeded to answer my
mother’s questions like the dutiful daughter she’d always wished
she’d had.

After everyone had had their fill of burgers,
hot dogs and the epic tale of how I’d come to be living amongst
them again when I’d always sworn I’d poke my own eyes out with
chopsticks before I moved back to this godforsaken town, I decided
it was my turn to get some information. I turned to my mother.

“How come you never told me that Danny
Salazar was back in Minter?”

She shook her head, confused. “I don’t know.
He’s been here,” she looked over at my dad, “what is it Al, a
couple of years?” Dad grunted from his hammock and mom turned back
to me. “Why would I mention it?”

“
Why
?” I looked at her incredulously,
then caught sight of Kevin out of the corner of my eye. He was
looking at me and shaking his head no. Duh. Why indeed.

The Salazars lived in the house directly
behind us, our back yards sharing a fence. Miguel “Mike” Salazar
owned Salazar’s Sand & Gravel, and his two younger brothers,
Alejandro, or Alex, and Louie worked for him. Technically, I should
say Mike ran Salazar’s because although he may have owned the
business, the mob owned him. Minter is not a big mafia town, but
there are a few bookies and loan sharks that are reportedly
connected. According to popular legend, Mike Salazar was into them
for a lot of money. Rather than break his kneecaps, the mob made a
different deal. They would use Salazar’s for laundering money, they
would use Mike and his brothers as enforcers, and they would use
the gravel pits for whatever they needed them for. Mike was a mean
drunk. He didn’t necessarily drink often, but when he did he would
come home and beat the crap out of whichever family member he met
first. When his sons were small, that usually meant his wife, Rose.
Rose O’Reilly was a redhaired, fair skinned beauty who had fallen
for Mike’s good looks and charming lines. She had two sons with
him, Mike Junior and Danny, and she stayed with him after he
started drinking and cheating, I supposed because she always hoped
he’d stop and things would go back to the way they were before. As
the boys got older, they were frequently the targets for their
father’s rage, more often than not because they tried to protect
Rose. Supposedly Mike Junior was just like his father, hard and
mean. I didn’t know him. He was five years older than me, and when
I was still in junior high he had gone to prison for killing a man
in a bar fight. It was just before his eighteenth birthday, but
they had tried him as an adult, convicting him of second degree
murder, and he had been sentenced to fifteen years in the state
penitentiary at Lompoc.

Danny was different. Being half Latin and
half Irish, it would have been an affront to stereotypes everywhere
if he hadn’t had a temper. But he didn’t have the same reputation
for meanness. Nevertheless, he was a Salazar and there was a burden
associated with that. People didn’t want their kids to play at his
house or become too friendly, and if it hadn’t been for baseball,
he probably would have been alone a lot. As it was, he was the best
player Minter had seen in decades, not to mention the best looking,
and consequently he was always popular, with both the boys and the
girls. Like Mike and Mikey, Danny had a reputation for being a
charmer and a womanizer, and I suspected it was well-deserved. He
was never without a girl by his side, and whoever she was, she was
always pretty, usually blond and tended toward the vapid. My
brother played baseball, too, and so I had known Danny peripherally
my whole life, although I didn’t actually know him. He, like Kevin,
was a year ahead of me in school and traveled in different circles.
In fact, if I had to guess, I would have said he didn’t know my
name, and I was fairly certain we’d never had a conversation. This
was not a problem for me, since I had never given him a second
thought.

About a week before the end of my junior
year, there was this big street festival thing in the high school
gym after school. There were booths for games and booths for food,
and carnival rides outside. The temperature was blistering, school
was almost out, hormones were raging. Pauline and I, dressed for
the occasion in shorts and orange and black Minter High School
Bears t-shirts, were making our way through the food booths. Derek
was out of town at a track meet, and Pauline was temporarily
without a boyfriend.

“Are you sure you haven’t had one? Maybe you
just couldn’t tell.”

“I would know. I’ve done it myself plenty of
times. I don’t know why Derek can’t seem to figure it out.”

“Have you told him what to do? I read in
Cosmo
that a girl should be direct about telling a guy what
she wants.”

I thought that what I wanted was for it to be
something other than two and a half minutes of grunting and
grabbing, but I wasn’t sure how to tell Derek that. I wasn’t in
love with him, but he was nice so I didn’t want to be mean about
it. Derek wasn’t my first boyfriend, but he was the first one I’d
slept with and so far, I wasn’t impressed. Pauline didn’t have sex.
She was saving herself for marriage. She changed her mind the next
year when she started dating Jack Murphy. I certainly couldn’t
blame her.

We had just finished eating a couple of
churros and were approaching the varsity baseball team’s booth.
Expecting to find more food, we wandered up. The hand painted
banner read KISSING BOOTH $1, and there were a couple girls getting
their money’s worth. Pauline started into her feminist routine.

“Hunh. I guess I don’t need to pay some boy
to kiss me. Women aren’t objects, you know.”

“Uh, Paul, I think the guys are the objects
in this scenario.” I was fishing a single out of my pocket. Don’t
ask me why. It was like my body was completely detached from my
brain and I was watching myself do things, like an out-of-body
experience or a split personality or one of those things I’d read
about instead of doing my homework. Danny Salazar was in front of
the booth, leaning against the counter, talking to a teammate, and
I suddenly found him utterly irresistible. I stared and checked for
drool.

Pauline shrugged. “Well, I don’t care. I
think it’s disgusting.”

Yeah, me too. Disgusting.

I handed Danny the dollar.

He took it without looking up and said, “I’m
on a break.” Then he glanced over at me, shrugged and said, “Oh,
what the hell.” I have that effect on men a lot.

He barely leaned forward and kissed me, a
proper kissing-booth kind of kiss on the lips, no tongue, no hands.
And I swear to God, I forgot my name. I guessed it was okay for him
too, because it seemed to last a little longer than it should have,
and then he straightened up and looked at me kind of funny. He
whispered, “Jesus, Lex.” Then he kissed me again, for real this
time. He had his hand on the back of my neck, his fingers tangled
in my hair, and his other hand through the belt loop on the front
of my shorts pulling me into him. I felt his tongue touch mine, and
everything went sort of blurry. It started out tentative but turned
confident and intimate and hot. Eventually, I became aware of
someone speaking.

“...supposed to be a kissing booth, not a
goddamn live-sex show. Jesus Christ, is that my sister?” Danny
pulled back as Kevin approached. Our eyes locked.

“Dude, I hope she paid you for that.”

Pauline was making gagging noises in her
throat and tugging at my arm. Sherry Henderson, Danny’s girlfriend,
walked up and threw a derisive look my way.

“Jeez, Danny, do you have to kiss all the
geeks?”

I smiled. “Hey, Sherry. How’s the rash?” I
let Pauline pull me away, Danny half-smiling, watching us go.

I was in my room doing homework when someone
rang the doorbell around five o’clock that night. My mom was at the
hospital and my dad was at a teachers’ meeting. Kevin was at his
after school job at the motorcycle shop downtown. Pauline had
gotten herself a date for the evening after all, and I was probably
the only loser in town, and maybe even the entire state, studying
on Friday night the week before school let out. I could have been
having crappy sex with my stupid boyfriend, but Derek wasn’t due
back until Sunday afternoon. I was in a bad mood. I stomped to the
front door, flipped the deadbolt and flung the door open without
checking the peephole, something my mother was constantly warning
me about.

“What?”

Danny Salazar smiled and pushed past me into
the entryway. This was exactly the kind of thing my mom said would
happen if I opened the door without checking first. He closed it
behind him. We stood there for a minute, staring at each other.
Then Danny looked around.

“Your brother here?”

I shook my head no, and he nodded.

“So. I have a girlfriend.”

“Yeah, me too. Well, I mean, a
boyfriend.”

“Right. That track kid. Anyway, I have
varsity championships this week, and then I have city league ball
all summer plus working at the gravel yard, and then I’m going to
Michigan on a scholarship in the fall.”

I nodded. I didn’t know where he was going
with this. It was like he was reading me his to-do list or
something.

“So I can’t get involved with...” he
shrugged, “anything else right now.” He looked me in the eyes, and
it was the first time I ever really noticed his. They were dark and
warm and seemed uncertain to me.

“Okay.” I meant it. The kiss earlier, as
outstanding as it had been, had scared the hell out of me. This was
a guy who wouldn’t need me to tell him what to do, if we did
anything, and if we did, I was plenty sure it would last longer
than a couple of minutes. Danny wasn’t the kind of guy I could
date. There’d be too much pressure. He was popular. He had
experience. And he was a Salazar, so my father would never allow
it. It was fine for his son to play ball with Danny, but it would
be a whole other thing for his daughter to date him.