“Let me guess,” he said. “You don’t have much trouble with flooding.”
“Yah, you betcha,” she said again. “Because we don’t build on flood plains much. There’s no need to when you’ve got plenty of elbow room.”
Napa town was at roughly the same spot on the river as the settlement FirstSide, and for the same reason; this was the head of navigation for shallow-draft vessels, particularly in the dry season. Dozens of barges lined the wharves, mainly on the west bank of the river; tugs brought more, or towed them away in strings; both types were smallish by the standards he was used to, and wooden-built. A slipway on the water’s side held several more under construction. There were more cars and trucks on the roads than he’d seen in Rolfeston, although the traffic was still light by any standards he’d known before, including those of the little North Dakota town of Ironwood.
Back from the docks and warehouses on the southern side of town were workshops and factories; the residential part of town was north of that, a little more spread out than Rolfeston had been, equally hidden in trees—some the tall oaks and sycamores that had once occupied the site, more planted since its founding. Between those houses and the vacant lowland along the river was the business district, small shops and offices along streets with timber-pillared or stone-built arcades, and a broad square with central gardens, benches, brick paths and bandstand.
The riverside itself north of the wharves was a semiwild park, the bigger trees left standing, undergrowth cleared back and some plantings made. It was full of picnickers, people taking advantage of a big municipal swimming pool, impromptu volleyball and touch football or soccer games, people tossing Frisbees to each other or leaping dogs, and plain strollers; it took him a moment to remember this was Sunday afternoon.
“My alma mater,” Adrienne said, pointing to a big two-story stone building overgrown with climbing rose and surrounded by playing fields. A baseball game was going on in one, and the people in the bleachers let out a shout as they drove by. He could see flickers of it between the tall Lombardy poplars that fringed the way.
“You went to the public high school?” Tom asked curiously.
“Everyone does,” she said, sounding surprised. “Why not? Getting a high school diploma means something here, about equivalent to a FirstSide BA. I did very well, when I wasn’t on suspension or waiting to get paddled by the principal. I grant you that was far too often, and if I hadn’t been a Rolfe, I might have got expelled for good.”
“How did you produce grades for Stanford?” he said.
“Oh, we fake ’em,” she said. “Phony private school FirstSide… well, it’s actually a real one, but we slip an extra notional student in now and then for when someone goes to a university there. We endowed it and pick the head-masters, of course. Paying full tuition at the university also helps; they don’t check as hard.”
“Why did you go to Stanford?” he asked. “Why not, ah, University of New Virginia?”
“I started there, but UNV’s still small,” she said. “Particularly the humanities departments, and I wanted to study history.” A wry laugh. “Not that that’s the only difference; you’re not going to find many postmodernist professors of postcolonial studies at UNV, thank God.”
He digested that while they cruised past the town hall. The white walls, square tower and big arched courtyard entrance reminded him strongly of Santa Barbara’s post office; then they turned down a street with palms on both sides and two-story adobe buildings behind a continuous arcade roof supported on columns made from varnished black-walnut trunks. The streetlights were black cast-iron pillars with fanciful detailing, and the sidewalks colored brick in geometric patterns.
“I’ve got to do some business here,” she said, taking an empty parking place; there were, he noted, no meters. “Care to come along?”
He nodded. One of the buildings had rounded corners and tall glass windows along both street-side walls, now swung wide under the arcade overhang. A tilework sign over the open doors read FOUQUET’S. Adrienne walked into the entranceway and halted.
The interior was a single great room, with a roof spanned by exposed wooden beams; one end held a pool table, and there was a flat-film TV screen over the big counter with its top of polished stone and revolving seats on stainless-steel pillars. Elsewhere there were long tables, made of the inevitable giant slabs of redwood, here topped with harder varieties in a sort of parquet arrangement, plus booths along the walls. People bustled about, coming and going; the air was full of the smell of frying food and some sort of plangent country-style music and chattering voices. The waiters behind the counter or circulating with trays were dressed in white, with white fore-and-aft caps and aprons.
Tom blinked. It’s the half-familiar that gets you, he thought. This is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a real old-style soda joint, the kind in Roy’s movies. It’s not a revival or deliberately retro, either. It’s just… what it is.
The crowd within must have numbered a hundred or so, none of them over twenty or younger than early adolescence. Some of the girls were wearing those Catholic-school-uniform arrangements he’d seen in Rolfeston, with white shirts and ties (often loosened), pleated knee-length skirts, and knee socks. Most of the rest were in summery cotton dresses, with a minority in slacks or jeans; none of the girls had short hair, or the boys long, and there were a fair number of pigtails tied with ribbon. The boys were more varied; fewer of them were dressed in their version of the school uniform, which included khaki shorts, and some wore suits. It took him a moment to realize something about the ones in overalls.
That isn’t a fashion statement, he thought. Those are their clothes.
A giggling clutch of sixteen-year-old females in a booth near the door were looking at Tom out of the corners of their eyes; in the next a boy and girl were actually sipping from the same malt with two straws, something he’d never seen outside a book of Norman Rockwell prints. A dozen or more of the older boys and a couple of girls were smoking, but casually, not as if it was an act of defiance; another clutch argued amiably around the jukebox—which was the latest digital model with flash memory storage.
It took him a moment to estimate the ages of individuals accurately, too; after a second look he realized his first estimates for most were at least a year too high.
Not that they’re baby-faced. In fact, they look pretty fit, he thought. There’s a couple of lard-butts and some pimple-faces, but not many for the size of the group.
It was something indefinable about the eyes….
“I thought I’d find a good big crowd,” Adrienne said to him as they stood in the doorway. “When I was a teenager, townie kids always used to hang out here after church in summertime. School year ends on June fifteenth, by the way—the day you got here.”
Then she put two fingers in her mouth and whistled piercingly, followed by a shout: “Hey, kids!”
Silence fell raggedly, and someone turned the music down in the ensuing quiet. Then there were exclamations; it reminded Tom a little of the way a rave crowd responded to a popular deejay, but not quite so open.
“Hi!” he heard over and over. Variations on “It’s Miss Rolfe—Adrienne!”
A pair of boys in their late teens with platinum-and-gold thumb rings waved in a more casual manner from a corner where they held court with their girlfriends and a gaggle of hangers-on, and Adrienne nodded back to them.