He walked back to the airport office and saw that Laura’s green Cabriolet was now parked out front. She was not inside of it, however. He went back into the office building and found her there, deep in conversation with Dave, who was looking considerably more animated than he had when Jake had been speaking to him.
“I was supposed to come home in early February of sixty-eight,” he was telling her, “but that whole Tet Offensive thing happened, and I got extended for another three months. Got shot down one more time during all that, not too far from Khe Sanh. The Huey took a couple rounds right in the main housing, threw the rotor out of balance and the pilot—old Jimmy Smith, Smitty, we called him—had to autorotate us down in this little clearing. That wasn’t a good time there. There were VC and NVA all around us, goddamn gook central, and they was all popping rounds at us. I had to climb up on top with my tools and rebalance that rotor so we could take off again.” He shook his head a little. “One of them rounds whizzed right over my head, couldn’t have been more than six inches away.”
“Wow,” Laura said, fascinated. “But you were able to do it?”
“Oh yeah,” Dave said, matter-of-factly. “Only took about ten minutes or so, but it seems a lot longer when you got a bunch of gooks shootin’ at you.”
“I can imagine,” Laura said.
Dave nodded in Jake’s direction. “Looks like your other half has returned,” he told her.
Laura turned and saw Jake. “Hey, sweetie,” she greeted. “We made it.”
“So did I,” he said, walking over and giving her a brief kiss. “How was the drive? No speeding tickets?”
“No speeding tickets,” she said, almost as though disappointed. “Dave here was just telling about when he was a helicopter crew chief in the army. Did you know he did two tours in Vietnam?”
“I did not know that,” Jake said. He turned to the airport manager. “From the end of that story you were telling, it sounds like you had quite the time there.”
“Yep,” Dave said simply. “It weren’t no tropical vacation, that’s for sure.”
“Do you fly yourself, Dave?” Jake asked him.
Dave shrugged. “I know how,” he said. “Been around pilots all my life, worked on airplanes and helicopters all my life, and been behind the controls lots of times. I just never went and actually made things official, either for the flying or the wrenching.”
“Why not?” Laura asked.
“Too much bookwork,” he said. “Doesn’t seem hardly worth it.”
“Interesting,” Jake said. He then turned back to Laura. “Shall we go home?”
She smiled. “It sounds weird to call it that, but yes. Let’s go home.”
They both bade Dave farewell and then left the office, climbing into Laura’s car (with Laura behind the wheel, Jake still would not be caught dead driving a certified chick car) and then headed for their new home.
The house not quite livable yet. The movers had brought everything in and had set up the actual furniture where they had been directed to, but the vast majority of the household items were still packed in boxes, each one labeled with what part of the house it belonged in. And there was no fresh food to speak of at all. Everything that had been in the refrigerator at the Nottingham house had either been thrown out or had been transported to the Granada Hills house. They had pantry items such as canned food, flour, rice, beans, but that was about it.
“I need to go to the store,” Elsa proclaimed after helping Jake, Celia, and Laura unpack things for about an hour.
“How come?” Jake asked.
“There is nothing to serve for dinner tonight,” she said. “Nor is there anything for breakfast tomorrow.”
“We can just get a pizza for tonight,” Jake said. He was forearms deep in a box full of bathroom supplies.
Elsa gave him a look. “Jake, you no longer live in Los Angeles, remember? You live on a cliff over the ocean outside of a small town. I seriously doubt that anyone is going to deliver a pizza up here.”
“Oh ... yeah, I guess you’re right,” he allowed. “Well ... one of us will just have to go into town and pick one up later then.”
“I need to go to the grocery store,” Elsa insisted. “In addition to dinner and breakfast concerns, we are lacking a variety of staples. We need bread, eggs, oranges for juice, toilet paper, paper towels. Need I go on?”
“Can’t you make that run tomorrow?” Jake asked. “You’ll have all day to get things organized and stocked while we’re in LA.”
“There is no beer either,” she said. “That all went to the Granada Hills house. And your top shelf alcohol is all buried in one of these boxes somewhere, as are your mixers, as is your wine collection. We may or may not stumble across them tonight.”
Jake, Laura, and Celia all looked at her in alarm.
“That’s different,” Jake said. “You’d better get to the store then.”
“I thought you might see things my way,” she said with a smile.
Five minutes later, she was in her new 4-Runner and on the way into Oceano. There was a Ralph’s Grocery Store near the airport, just inside the town limits. Elsa pulled into the crowded parking lot and eventually found a space near the back. She entered the store and saw that it was teeming with people, many of them dressed in shorts, skimpy shirts, and even swimwear. She took one look at the prices and then turned and exited. This store was where the tourists shopped and the markups on basically everything reflected that. There was no way she was going to pay four dollars for a gallon of milk, two dollars for a loaf of bread, three-fifty for a carton of eggs. And she could only imagine what they might be charging for beer and wine.
She got back in the 4-Runner and drove deeper into the town, heading east on Highway 1. She passed gas stations, a lube and oil establishment, a hardware store, and a dry cleaner. She made note of their locations as she would likely be needing all of these services soon. Finally, she came to an Alpha Beta grocery store on the eastern edge of the town limits, just outside of a residential zone. This parking lot was considerably less crowded. She parked and then walked inside. The prices in this store, while still higher than those in Los Angeles, were almost reasonable. She grabbed a cart and began shopping.
As she worked her way up one aisle and then down the next, pulling things from the shelf and checking them off on the list inside of her head, she noticed that everyone’s eyes seemed to be on her. She did not pass a single person without having to endure an extended stare at the least, a look of hostile astonishment at the worse. No one said a word to her, but their eyes were certainly making some judgments.
I guess they don’t see too many Nigerians in this store, she thought, more amused than anything else at this point.
She finished up her shopping and made her way to the checkout counters. The checker was an early-twenties Hispanic woman, and she was pleasant enough. She greeted Elsa politely and then scanned all of the groceries in the cart while another Hispanic, this one a late-teens male, bagged them.
“Will that be everything?” the checker asked when the job was done.
“Yes, it will,” Elsa confirmed.
“Very good,” the checker said. “Your total is one hundred and twenty-six dollars and forty-three cents. How will you be paying?”
“I have my checkbook,” Elsa said, holding it up. She had already written in everything but the amount.
“Okay,” the clerk said with a smile. “I’ll just need to see your ID.”
“Of course,” Elsa said. She finished writing in the amount and then tore off the check. She handed it over along with her driver’s license.
The clerk looked at both for a moment and then looked back at Elsa apologetically. “It’ll just be a minute,” she said. “It’s an out-of-town check and when it’s over fifty dollars I need to get the manager’s approval.”