Power Slide (28 page)

SOMETIMES EVENTS HAPPEN fast. Maybe it was John proclaiming that Dad was what he was and we’d all just have to accept that. No one believed him—he’d be struggling for the rest of his life to justify Dad’s transgressions—but we were grateful, and impressed. Maybe it was Mike hearing about John. Or maybe Janice knew more about Mike’s location than she’d let on. I didn’t ask. Nor did I raise questions when she said she’d drive Mom and me up to Guerneville on the Russian River to meet him. If the rest of the family complained, Janice didn’t let on. But I figured they understood. Mike was my buddy and protector, the one who made my dreams possible from the time I learned to crawl till the day he walked away. As for Mom, I could barely look at her now without thinking of the times, year after year, I had pictured her face on this day.

“He won’t be the same,” I said. We were sitting three across in the front seat of Janice’s car; Mom and I were scrunched together because we had to be this close now, as if only our proximity was preserving this still unbelievable dream.

“We’ll see.”

I wanted to ask Janice if she’d talked to him, but I didn’t do that either.

The sun was blaring off the August-low water as we sped along the River Road. The windows were all open and I had my hair tied back so it wouldn’t snap in Mom’s face. There was a vacation mood in the whole area, with the promise of rowboats, canoes, swimming behind the summer dams. The promise of good times ahead.

Janice slowed as we came into town and I could feel Mom tense.

The light at the Guerneville bridge turned red. Janice ran it. She cut left off Main Street and veered down a lazy commercial street, moving agonizingly slowly now. At the Veterans Memorial Hall, she made a left and then, suddenly—
finally—
pulled up to the edge of Johnson’s Beach. The car jerked to a stop.

For a moment all three of us just sat. I hadn’t asked them how many false leads they’d had over the years, how many moments like this had come to nothing. How hard it had been to let themselves hope again. We sat, preserving this moment of safety.

I opened the door and stepped out.

Across the narrow beach two canoes headed downstream, one slicing through the brown water, the other zigzagging as the paddlers laughed. On the sand, all the people looked suddenly alike. I stared but couldn’t see.

None of them was Mike
.

“Janice, are you sure . . .”

She didn’t say anything.

“Omigod, there. There!”

I recognized his walk first, that loose-limbed stride with an odd catch in his right hip. His walk! I couldn’t see his face; my eyes were tearing. I wanted to run faster than I ever had. But I slowed to let Mom catch up and she whipped right by me. When I looked up she was hugging him and he’d lifted her up like a little kid. Then I ran and wrapped my arms around him and felt the solidity of him really here.

After twenty years, we had really found him.

He wouldn’t be the same. There’d be awkward times. But right now it was everything I had ever imagined it would be.

AGAIN, I AM indebted to stunt coordinator and director Carolyn Day, to writer Linda Grant, and to my superb editors Michele Slung and Roxanna Aliaga. And, as always, to my agent Dominick Abel.

Copyright © 2010 by Susan Dunlap. All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Dunlap, Susan.

Power slide : a Darcy Lott mystery / by Susan Dunlap.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-582-43692-0

1. Women stunt performers—Fiction. 2. California—Fiction. I. Title.

 

PS3554.U46972P69 2010
813’.54—dc22

 

2010008580

 

 

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