This Must Be the Place: A Novel (26 page)

“Fondant, meet Arthur.” Mona scooped a warm ball of shortening and powdered sugar together and dropped it in Arthur’s open hands. “Arthur, this is fondant. Now shake.”

Arthur squeezed his fingers into the warm white putty. “That’s . . . different,” he said. “How much do we have to make?”

Mona spun her sketchbook on the kitchen table. Carrie Waters-soon-to-be-Kessler had been explicit about her ideal wedding cake: “Cover it with daisies—daisies with happy yellow centers. Hundreds of them. I want it to look like you rolled the whole cake in a field of white sugar daisies.” When Mona had shown Carrie her sketch—three tiers carpeted with fat fondant flowers—it had occasioned a double high-five.

She’d approached the task mathematically, calculating the number of daisies it would take to carpet the top of the smallest tier, multiplying that by the percentage each subsequent layer grew larger, subtracting from that the area covered under each stacked layer, and finally concluding that she’d forgotten everything she ever learned about math and would need, precisely, a buttload of sugar daisies.

“A buttload, Arthur,” she said. “We need a buttload of these things.”

“Is that metric?”

“I’ve been working on these for a few days by myself, but now that you’re helping we’re going to Henry Ford this sucker.” Mona grabbed her own hunk of fondant and began kneading it. “I’ve got two daisy-shaped cookie cutters, a whole stack of trays, an empty table out on the back porch. We knead the fondant, we roll it, we cut and shape daisies, we knead, we roll, we cut daisies—”

“That’s not a true assembly line. I’d have to knead the fondant and you’d have to roll it and then I’d have to cut it for it to be a true—”

“Was I unclear? I asked for assistance, not sass.” Mona grinned and leaned her full weight forward on her palms, into the fondant, spreading it flat on the table.

Arthur, facing her, did the same. His hands were larger than hers, and stronger; his fondant already looked pearly and smooth. They both leaned forward, Mona lifting herself off the ground half a foot. She flopped the fondant over, set her palms again, pushed, and lifted with a small grunt.

Mona, balancing in the air, wiggled her bare feet. Arthur locked his arms and pushed himself up and into his fondant. They teetered on opposite sides of the table.

“Who taught you how to do this?” he asked, wobbling. “Circus folk?”

Mona touched down and smoothed the fondant with her fingertips. “My first real boyfriend. The only one who counted, really,” she said. “In Ocean City.”

Mona learned to bake in a pizza place on an old section of New Jersey boardwalk, a hundred yards from the ocean, nestled between a decrepit video game arcade and a souvenir shop that sold hemp bracelets and tiny personalized license plates. The pizza place was wide open to boardwalk traffic and all the smells of the beach, so that each gust teasing hair from her ponytail brought with it a touch of coconut Copper-tone, mustard and hotdog, sand and salt. She worked from five until closing, Tuesday through Saturday, downing her free slice of cheese pizza as daylight faded over her dinner break. Between serving house pies to families with matching plastic flip-flops and individual slices to bikinied girls who seemed younger than her but probably weren’t, Mona experimented with cakes and cookies and pastries—and the owner’s son—in the shadow of the great Vulcan oven.

His name was David Danger,
she told Arthur sixteen years later.

David Danger. He was shifting slices and pies around in the belly of the Vulcan when she first saw him, wielding the big wooden pizza paddle with a finesse that took Mona’s breath away. He was older, she
guessed, but not much—seventeen, maybe eighteen. He was laughing with someone else behind the counter, someone she couldn’t see. His teeth were white and perfect, his hair was dark, long in front and a little floppy, his skin smooth and tanned. There was a five-pointed red smear on his white shirt, like he’d adjusted his collar with saucy hands. He leaned against the counter with the lazy confidence of a boy who owns his place in the world—which he would one day, he told her, when his father died and left the pizzeria to him.

But Mona didn’t know that the first time she walked into the House of D’Angier. Mona didn’t know anything about the boy behind the counter, other than he was beautiful and she wanted him.

She was glad Amy wasn’t there. Amy would march up, ask if they were hiring, and march right back out. Amy had no patience whatsoever for flirting, and Mona intended to give her prey both barrels.

She wasn’t even sure where Amy was. Amy had passed over the House of D’Angier as being too fast-food, too kid-friendly—not a place she could make serious tips. Ever since they’d arrived at the miniature Ocean City bus depot, Amy had been a mess of nerves about money or, rather, their relative lack of it. They didn’t have the money to waste on a cab; they could walk. They didn’t have enough money for a real restaurant; they’d grab some snacks or order Domino’s. Mona tried to calm her down (it wasn’t like money was the thing she needed to worry about most), but Amy was silent and stoic, which meant she was freaked right the hell out. Mona didn’t blame her. She was freaked right the hell out herself. She had never imagined she was the kind of kid who ran away from home, but she couldn’t let Amy do it alone.

They’d paid cash for a room at the pink-stucco Seahorse Motel, which was practically rotting but insanely cheap and only a few blocks back from the boardwalk. Their room smelled stale, last year’s sunscreen and beer and sand permanently bonded to the bed linens and the woolly shag carpeting. Amy dropped her backpack on the closer bed and ran to the bathroom to throw up.

“Let me in.” Mona leaned her shoulder against the bathroom door, painted a sickly pink. The whole room was a symphony on the theme of Pepto-Bismol: faded pink drapes, pink-and-teal striped blankets, a pink-shaded lamp overhanging a wobbly-looking table and two painted-pink
chairs. Even the television was supported by a pink rattan cart. “Come on, Amy, you have to let me in if I’m going to help you at all.”

The door creaked open. Amy was curled around the toilet, her head and knees on either side of the U-bend.

“The floor feels good,” she said. “Tile’s cold.”

“Probably hasn’t been mopped since last summer.” Mona flushed the toilet and dropped the lid. She sat on it, tenting her legs over Amy’s wraparound body. “Who knows what you’re going to catch down there. Hepatitis. Syphilis. Leprosy.”

Amy choked or laughed, she couldn’t tell which.

“I ordered a pizza,” Mona said. “Just cheese. Cheapest they had.”

“ ’K.”

The silence and stillness after eight hours on a roaring Greyhound was disorienting. Mona’s butt hurt from sitting for so long and her head was killing her. It was past five o’clock—her parents, wondering why she hadn’t come home from school, would have found the note by now, propped on her pillow, not hiding. She didn’t want them to think she’d left because of anything
they
did. The whole time she was trying to write it, Mona thought of that Beatles song about the girl leaving home—about how the note she ended up writing was a note she’d hoped would say more. What could she have said, though, other than the barest truth?
Hi, Mom, Hi, Dad, Amy is running away from Ruby Falls, and she’s scared so I’m going with her. We’ll be careful. I love you. Don’t worry about me and please don’t come looking. I’ll be back. Desdemona.

Her mother would be hysterical. Her father would be irate. Maybe in the evening, when her father was putting away his pocket watch and his tie clip, he’d notice the empty space in the valet on his dresser—the space where William Fitchburg Jones’s red jasper and diamond cuff links usually sat. Now they were secreted in the bottom of Mona’s backpack, an insurance policy wrapped in a tube sock. It would break her father’s heart. She felt like throwing up.

When she woke the next morning, sweaty and sticky from damp summer sheets, Mona’s stomach rumbled unhappily. She lay in bed and studied the water-stained ceiling, trying to find a sign or a signal or anything, anything at all, in the irregular brown and yellow eddies. She saw a cat, maybe: a big fat cat.

“Hey, Amy,” she said. “You awake?”

Amy’s voice sounded stronger. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

Mona winced. “Well that’s a relief,” she said. “I was a little worried last night, when I went to sleep and you were still one with the toilet.” She rolled over. Amy was sitting cross-legged on her bed, already showered and dressed, her brow creased in concentration. It made a huge difference to see Amy back to her normal self—well, close to her normal self. Maybe this wasn’t the most asinine thing they’d ever done after all.

“Today,” Amy said, springing out of bed and whipping Mona’s sheets off, “today we get jobs.”

Today we meet boys,
Mona thought, as she drew up to the counter at the House of D’Angier.

“Plain cheese slice,” she said. “And a large Mountain Dew.”

The boy pushed his hair out of his eyes with the back of his hand and smiled at her. He was sweaty. She could feel the heat from the oven on the other side of the counter.

“That all?” he asked.

She propped her elbows on the red Formica. “Actually,” she said. “I’m looking for a job. For the summer.”

The boy tilted his head and smiled at her funny, like she’d said something monumentally insane. Mona bristled.

“What?” she said. “You think ’cause I’m cute I can’t fling a pie?”

It worked. The boy grinned and called over his shoulder to the invisible other, and a sandy-haired man with a stomach like a beach ball waddled into view. A terrible sunburn was peeling across the bridge of his nose beneath a large pair of Ray-Bans.

“Uncle Roof, we have an applicant,” the boy said, tipping his head at Mona.

“Darling,” said Uncle Roof, and Mona couldn’t tell if he was addressing the boy or her, “you’re too adorable. Also, you’re hired. I’ll leave David in charge of your training. I’m gonna go smoke a bowl.” He untied an apron stained with brown and red smears (tomato sauce? chocolate? blood?) and flung it over his shoulder as he lifted a section of countertop and maneuvered his girth out. “What should I call you?” he asked, as he squeezed by her.

“Desdemona,” Mona said, a second before realizing it might be safer not to use her real name.

Uncle Roof clapped a ruddy balloon of a hand to his heart. “Sweet Jesus, what kind of hippie assholes named you? Never mind, I’m sure they were well-meaning hippie assholes. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Come on.” The boy was holding the counter up and motioning her in. “I can show you the basics before the lunch crowd shows up. I’m David Danger.” He shook her hand and Mona felt a charge, bigger, better, than she’d ever felt before, leap between their warm palms. She smiled at him and said hello. Then she realized what he’d just said.

“Wait, no, I can’t—work—you know,
today
.” He closed the countertop behind her and she had no choice but to step forward into the bubble of oven-dry heat. The space behind the counter was no longer than thirty feet, no wider than ten, with two doors leading off each end, one marked
OFFICE
, the other propped open by a bucket and mop. In between was a wooden table spattered with sauce and shriveled toppings that had slid off their intended pizzas long ago, abandoned to the horrors of mummification.

“It’s easy, don’t worry.” David propped his hands on his hips. “Pies are already baking. I’m just going to need you to take orders and money. Have you worked a cash register before?”

Oh, crap, this was a mistake.

“You’ve made change, right?” David’s voice dropped. The overpowering miasma of melting cheese, of salt and grease, in the roiling heat made her feel fuzzy. She was too hot. She should have worn shorts instead of jeans; she was going to faint. Whose fault was this? Amy’s, she thought; I am here because of Amy
Freakin’
Henderson, because for the second time in her life she told me a secret, and for the first time in her life she asked for my help. I couldn’t say no. I didn’t want to say no.

For the first time ever, Amy needed her.

“I can make change, David Danger,” she said. “Just watch me.”

Amy found her right after the dinner rush. Mona had just finished ringing up two cheese and one pepperoni for a huge family roosting in the rear booths, flapping and preening like a flock of seagulls in fluorescent sunglasses. Amy casually approached the counter.

“I’d like a slice of pepperoni, and make it free?” she said. There was a looseness to her that Mona hadn’t seen in weeks, not since the Ocean City plan was hatched.

“Hey, David?” Mona called. Uncle Roof had not returned in an hour; had not returned, in fact, all day. That frantic afternoon and evening had taught her that the quickest path to undying love was to slave and stand, side by side, between overweight vacationers and their precious slices of pizza. She felt comfortable with David Danger, easy, free to tease. Giddy. “My friend Amy’s here, can I steal some inventory for her?”

David was washing utensils in the second room, the one not marked office, and she knew he couldn’t hear her over the roar of the dishwasher.