When they are done shopping, they take the bus back up the hill because they are carrying their purchases, not because of Cole’s untrustworthy heart. They have both found cowboy boots: Riley’s a pair of deep-brown, hand-tooled Tony Lamas and Cole’s a gaudy pair of snakeskins with no discernible label. Riley has added to her collection of T-shirts, and Cole has found one as well. It says, “Dip Me in Honey and Throw Me to the Lesbians.”
“Oh yeah,” Riley says. “The girls are going to love that.”
“I know.” He is delighted, grinning pork chop to pork chop. Some of the women at the bar are still not smitten with him, but he knows very soon any lingering resistance will be futile.
When they get back, Lu — one of the irregulars, out for the time being on her own recognizance — is the first to weigh in. “Where the fuck did you get that?”
“Flea market,” Cole says proudly.
Lu holds her hand out. “Give it to me.”
“Sorry, Lu. Not this one.”
She narrows her eyes. Turns her back and hunches over her drink. “You little shit.”
He laughs. This one loves him for sure. He can tell by how fierce she is. And she is the same with Riley, only different. They have a thing, but Cole hasn’t figured out what it is yet. He thinks it might be a simple wish on Riley’s part to mend broken objects. Of which he is not one.
When Riley is busy, and it is pointless or at least ill-advised to vie for her attention, Lu and Cole play pool together, or pinball, or wander around the neighborhood collecting stuff people leave out on the sidewalks. They present Riley with treasures to take her mind off her hangovers, her regrets, her drug-addicted boyfriend, and to keep reminding her that they are her best (however damaged) angels. They give her a broken but still beautiful and delicate gold chain; an old green typewriter missing only a few keys; potted succulents for the windowsill, clay pots chipped in places but still perfectly good. Some of the scraggly little suckers are even in bloom. Riley makes room for it all, since neither Cole nor Lu lives anyplace in particular.
“We are campers!” Cole says. Because life is nothing short of a grand adventure.
At the moment he is camping out at a pizza joint just the other side of the panhandle. The man who owns it is an old friend of his mom and dad, and has given Cole something of a job — gopher, really; fill-in prep cook — even though the kid is nothing if not unreliable. He tries really hard. But something keeps wanting to yank him back, to a time when he was someone else’s responsibility.
After closing — if Riley has not drunk all the shots people buy for her during her shift, and/or snorted any of the lines of coke they leave for her in the bathroom — and after Cole has helped her clean the bar, Riley drives him to the restaurant, to sleep on his bedroll in the small dining room.
It is usually after three by the time they get on the road, and this night they are still wound up. She leaves the car parked on Stanyan, and they run together into Golden Gate Park, past the tents and sleeping bags scattered at the edge, through the tunnel, onto the soccer fields, and then farther, into the woods. Other nights they’ve gone all the way to the ocean. They don’t care that the grass is wet or that the moon shines down on them only in their minds, hidden as it is by the unrelenting fog. They pretend they are actually in the ocean, in a fabulous place only they know about, able to walk around and breathe underwater because they are special.
Sometimes Riley takes her clothes off and dives into some damp thing: Stow Lake, a lily pond, a pile of medicine-scented eucalyptus leaves, the sea. She lies down on the wet grass and tells Cole stories about Montana and its mountains; its dinosaurs, fossils, and preposterously blue sky. She talks about the South China Sea and about a brother she says she invented because she is an only child. He wants to hold her, bury his face in her hair, tell her he knows how she feels. But it is enough — he lets it be enough — to be connected to her by this, by anything.
Before he met Riley, Cole had never gone into the park, had not known of its many wonders or just how big it was, how many places in it a person could conceivably hide, and how unalike all those places were from one another.
“One minute,” he tells Lu, back at the bar, “you’re in Hawaii. Then Australia. Then the redwoods. Then—”
Lu breaks in. “Before you know it,” she says way too brightly, “you’re getting a blow job from some guy behind the fence in Queen Wilhelmina’s tulip garden. Under a windmill.”
“Jesus, Lu,” Riley says. “Give the kid a chance.”
“Well, it’s true,” Lu says. “That’s what they do out there.”
“In a very small part of a very large park. You are such a cynic sometimes.”
Lu snorts.
Cole says, “Sometimes?”
“I am not cynical,” Lu says. “I am a realist.”
Riley shakes her head, does that oh-no-I-won’t-smile maneuver with her mouth and her eyes, and goes back to washing glasses. “Don’t you two have some trouble to get into somewhere else?”
Lu downs her brandy. “Come on, you little rat fink. We’ll find something. Let Glamour Girl here entertain the masses.”
It’s early afternoon. There’s no one else in the place. Cole hates leaving Riley alone, because he thinks it makes her sad. Sadder. But she sounds serious. And they won’t be gone long.
“Shot for the road,” he says, as if he is just another customer and his money is as good as anyone’s.
“Fat chance,” Riley says. “Nice try, though.”
Cole laughs. “Thanks, Mom.”
Riley raises her eyebrows. He tries again. “Thanks, baby.”
“You two make me sick,” Lu says. “Stop it right now.”
She and Cole leave arm in arm.
Lu says they should take the bus downtown, straight down Mission Street, all the way to the end. But first someone has to go back into the bar and get two dollars from Riley for the fare. That someone being Cole. Riley gives him ten bucks.
“Aren’t you going to tell me not to spend it all in one place?”
“Nope.”
“Cranky.”
“I’m not cranky, sweetheart. I’m tired. I’ll be better when you get back. Promise.”
“Okay.” He stands on the rail and leans over the bar, turning his not-quite-clean-shaven cheek toward her.
She kisses it. “Git,” she says. Behind the bar smells like limes and bleach and spilled liquor. He wonders if she even notices it anymore.
“Will you miss me?”
“How can I miss you if you won’t go away?”
“Ha,” he says. “That’s my line.”
“Mine now.”
He waits. She sighs, and her eyes are a little squinty. He still sees a light in there, though. “Yes, I will miss you.”
Outside, he finds Lu sitting on the curb with her back to a parking meter, smoking a cigarette with her eyes closed. The sun is out and the wind hasn’t begun to blow yet.
“Pretty day,” Cole says.
“What do you know about it?” She pushes herself up off the concrete, offering him the crook of her arm.
“Nothin’,” Cole says, certain it is the correct answer.
“That’s right,” Lu says, as they head down the hill to the bus stop.
The 14 arrives and they get on, finding seats together because this far south it is not jam-packed with bodies yet. As the bus crawls through the Mission, stopping at nearly every corner, more and more people board, and nearly all of them, when they speak, are speaking Spanish.
“Do you understand any of that?” Lu says.
“A little.” Because he is a California kid, Cole had Spanish in elementary school, and his mother would practice with him. “¿Cómo se llama?” she’d say. Some days he would be Roberto. Others, Antonio. Someone new every day. “¡Me llamo Zorro!” Leaping onto and then off the couch, into her arms.