I looked at the black radio set into the console, the green and orange scanner lights. There was a shotgun clipped under the dashboard, and I glanced over at Lester behind the wheel. He was shaking his head.
“Does your lawyer know you’re sleeping in your car?”
“She thinks I’m with friends. That’s what she wants to think anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean there’s a limit to how much she wants to help, that’s all; she has her limits.”
He drove onto the Cabrillo Highway and went quiet a minute. “There’s no one you can stay with, Kathy?”
I shrugged, my face heating up. “You don’t meet a lot of people cleaning houses, I guess.”
I felt his eyes on me. I squinted out at the bright ocean. My foot ached and I wanted my sunglasses. We passed a few cars and I watched the drivers hold their heads still, glancing down at their speedometers and keeping their eyes on the road, only looking up once we’d pulled away.
“You ever get used to that?” I said.
“What?”
I nodded out the window at the slowing traffic. “People you don’t know being scared of you.”
“You really think they’re scared?”
“Scared enough to mind their P’s and Q’s.”
Lester turned off Cabrillo into the lot of a hot dog and ice cream shack on the beach. There were picnic tables on both sides of it and in back, and five or six teenage boys and girls sat at one near the order window. Their arms, legs, and faces were tanned or sunburned. When they saw Lester get out of the car they looked away like he was the fourteenth cop they’d seen in the past ten minutes, and I liked being on the other end of that look. I could smell cooked hot dogs, the cigarette smoke of the teenagers, somebody’s tanning lotion. The girl working behind the window told Lester they didn’t have coffee so he said two Cokes would be fine, but then he looked over at me to check and I smiled at him.
In the shadow behind the shack Les carried our drinks while I hopped through the cigarette butts in the sand. We sat at a weathered picnic table, and way ahead of us the Pacific Ocean seemed to be pulling out into low tide, its waves coming in long and small before they finally broke. Out on the water was a blue-gray cloud bank, the kind that usually came in as a fog, and the sky around it was a haze. Lester sat next to me on the bench facing the beach and for a while we just looked out at the water. I drank from my Coke and turned to him enough to take in his profile, his deep-set brown eyes, the small nose and badly trimmed mustache. Again, there was this gentleness to him, this quiet.
“How did you ever end up in that uniform, Lester?”
“Les.” He glanced at me and smiled.
“Les.” I was smiling too, but like a flirt, I thought. Like I wasn’t really interested in the answer to my question.
“I was planning on being a teacher, actually.”
“That’swhat you look like. I mean, that’s what you seemlike to me.” I wanted to light a cigarette, but didn’t want the taste in my mouth, not right now. “So then how come you’re a boy in blue?”
He shook his head and looked down at the old tabletop, at a plank where someone had carved two breasts with X-shaped nipples. “My wife was pregnant. The academy was cheaper than graduate school, the guaranteed job afterwards. That kind of thing.”
“You like it?”
“Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
He smiled at me, but his eyes had gone soft and he suddenly seemed too tender so I looked straight ahead again, at the cloud bank that had moved closer in just the past few minutes, the haze around it too. The beach sand wasn’t as bright as before, and I caught the smell of seaweed. “Fog’s coming in,” I said. I could feel him still looking at me. I drank from my Coke until the ice slid to my teeth.
“Kathy?”
“Yeah?”
“I’d like to ask you something personal, if I could.”
“All right, get it over with.” I was kidding him again but I couldn’t look at him so kept my eyes on the green water, on the haze it seemed to make.
“Why is your husband not with you any longer?”
I watched a low wave ride all the way into the beach, and just before it broke, I felt I was rooting for it, hoping it wouldn’t. “I wanted kids and he didn’t. I don’t know, I think if he really wanted me, he would have wanted them too, you know?”
Lester put his hand over mine on the table. It was warm and heavy. “He’s a fool.”
I looked down at his hand. “Have you been watching me, Officer Burdon?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“It is?”
“That you didn’t lie.”
He took a breath. “I haven’t stopped thinking of you since the eviction, Kathy.” I looked at him now. His voice was quiet, but there was something like boldness in his eyes. My right foot ached but our knees were touching. He lowered his eyes, but then, as if he’d made himself do it, he looked back at me, his brown eyes not bold anymore. He reminded me of me. He squeezed my hand and I suddenly felt so close to him that kissing him didn’t even feel like a forward movement. His mustache was prickly and soft against my upper lip and I let my mouth open and I tasted his sweet Coke. I held his back and he held mine and the kiss went on for a long time, it seemed, until we finally took a breath and pulled apart and the fog was floating in close to the beach and it was getting hard to see the water. I looked at him, at his small straight nose, his lower lip beneath his mustache, his shaved chin. When I got to his eyes that were taking me in so completely, my mouth felt funny so I focused on his gold star badge, his name etched on the tag beneath it, and I wanted to run my fingertips over the letters. The temperature had dropped and I had goose pimples on my arms and legs.
“Let’s find you a place to stay.” Les stood up and grabbed our empty cups, and as he helped me over the sand to his car, I didn’t say anything. We rode quietly through Corona into San Bruno, where he turned north just before the El Camino Real Highway. Under the gray sky we passed one-story houses with small grass lawns. Behind them was the highway, and I could see the cars and long trucks going south for towns like Hillsborough, I guessed, San Carlos, Menlo Park, Los Altos, and Sunnyvale, towns I’d driven through alone for months now, telling myself I wasn’t looking for Nicky’s gray Honda. Les was quiet behind the wheel and even though we were in his police cruiser, it was so familiar to be sitting on the passenger’s side of a car with a man driving again that I felt sort of up and down all at once. Then we were away from houses and in a neighborhood of gas stations, fast-food restaurants, and a shopping center right next to the highway. “So where’re we going, Les?”
He looked at me, then rested his hand on my knee and turned left, driving past the shopping center to a stretch of motel and travel inns on a grassy hill along the El Camino Real Highway.
“You want a pool?”
Without waiting for me to answer he turned into the small parking lot of the Eureka Motor Lodge, a two-story white brick building with a fake-looking terra-cotta roof. Outside the office door were two Coke machines and an ice machine. A carved wooden sign hung over its window: Eureka: I have found it!
“This neighborhood’s better than the other one, Kathy. I can’t let you sleep in your car.”
“I’ll have to pay you back.”
“Shh.” He put his finger close to my lips. I pretended to bite it and he smiled, then went into the office, all uniform, gun, and wedding ring. For a second I asked myself just what I was doing anyway, but then I concentrated on how good a bath would feel, a firm bed with clean sheets.