They never bothered to keep score. Kenny hacked at his ball, the purple one, caring more about distance than accuracy, taking as many strokes as necessary to make the hole. His mom was a bit more careful. The most fun hole was the one where Kenny hit his ball into a polka-dotted toadstool and it disappeared for a few seconds before coming out of one of three tubes onto a lower circular green. From there, he had to hit the ball into a giant frog’s mouth that moved up and down like the drawbridge on a castle. Again, the ball disappeared, coming out at an even lower green and nearly rolling right into the cup. He only had to tap the purple ball with his short putter. His mom took forever to make it through the frog’s mouth.
“Peewee golf is pretty fun,” he said to his mom when they were back in the Fiat. She had gotten him a corn dog, which he ate before getting into the sports car.
“You’re awfully good at it,” she said, shifting gears as they pulled out of the Family Fun Center parking lot and headed back into the city, back toward the Sunset Avenue off-ramp.
“Mom?” he asked. She was lighting another of her long cigarettes with the Fiat’s lighter. “Can we go see the old house?”
His mother blew smoke out of her mouth, and she watched it disappear into the wind. She did not want to see the old house. She had brought Kenny home from the hospital to that house two days after he was born. His brother and sister had been born in Berkeley, but they had few memories of the apartment there. She had watched her older kids play in the backyard of that house as she carried little Kenny around in the crook of her hip. Kenny had crawled on the hooked rug—her mother’s old hooked rug—in the living room until he learned to walk on it. That house carried memories of Christmases and Halloweens, of birthday parties for the kids in the neighborhood, the sweeter memories of her marriage and her life as a mother.
But unhappiness also lingered in the corners of the place, arguments sure to be echoing still, a loneliness that haunted the nights after the kids were asleep as well as the days when they were a maddening handful. To escape—the house, the kids, the boredom found in the shadows of discontent—she took a job at the Leamington Hotel. There was an opening for a waitress. She’d drive in early, before her husband came in for the lunch and dinner shift, leaving the kids with one of the Mormon teenage girls who lived down the block. The money was nice, of course, but the activity was what she looked forward to every day—having a place to go, work to do, and people to talk with. She was still Mrs. Karl Stahl, and her husband was the head of the kitchen, but everyone, including Jose Garcia, called her by her first name. She proved to be so very good with numbers that the hotel’s general manager moved her from the coffee shop to a bookkeeper’s desk. She had risen to the sales office after she divorced Kenny’s father and was no longer Mrs. Karl Stahl.
She had walked away from that old house a lifetime ago. She did not want to see the place again.
“Sure,” she said to her son. “I’m flexible.”
She turned off the freeway, made a right at the Phillips 66 station, and continued down Sunset Avenue to Palmetto Street. She turned left on Palmetto to Derby Street, downshifted as she made the right turn, crossed Vista and Bush Streets, then pulled over and stopped in front of 4114.
Kenny had just two homes, and this was his first. He stared at it. The mailbox by the driveway was the same, the X-frame railing on the porch was as he remembered, but the tree in the front yard looked weirdly small. The lawn was mowed, he’d never seen the grass so neat, and flowers were planted in arrangements along the front of the house. They had never had flowers along the front of the house. The big window had blue curtains in it, not the white ones from when he was a kid. The garage door was closed, unlike when he lived there and it stayed open for easy access to all the bikes and toys and the back rooms of the house. Rather than his father’s old station wagon or his mother’s Corolla, a new Dodge Dart was parked in the driveway.
The Anhalters had lived next door. Kenny expected to see their white pickup truck, but it was not around. The house across the street had a For Sale sign in the front yard. “The Callendars are selling their house,” Kenny said.
“Looks like they’ve already moved,” his mother told him. Yes, the house looked empty. The Callendar kids, Brenda and Steve, were not twins but looked like they’d been born on the same day. They rode Schwinn bikes, had a dog named Biscuit, had been on a swimming team, and now lived somewhere else.
Kenny and his mom sat in the Fiat for a few minutes. Kenny looked at the window of what had once been his bedroom. The shutters with the moving slats were still there, but had been painted blue, like the living room curtains. The shutters had been a natural wood when he and Kirk slept in their twin beds in that bedroom. It didn’t seem right that they were now blue.
“I was born here, right, Mom?”
She was looking down the street, not at the house with the blue window shades. “You were born in the hospital.”
“Oh, I know that,” he said. “But I was a little baby here, right?”
His mother started the Fiat and put it into gear. “Yep,” she said over the growl of the motor. On the night she left the house at 4114 Derby, her children were asleep in their beds and their father was standing in the kitchen, silent. She did not see any of them again for seven weeks. Kenny was five years old.
By the time they had driven back to the apartment, she had smoked three of her long cigarettes, the smoke sailing away in the wind of the open-top sports car.
She took him to dinner at the Senator Hotel, which was downtown like the Leamington, but much fancier and crowded with men in suits who all wore name tags. They ate in the coffee shop. Jose Garcia stopped by to see them as Kenny was eating his dessert, a huge slice of cherry pie with ice cream on top of it—à la mode, the waitress called it. Kenny didn’t care too much for the cherries, but he finished every bite of the ice cream.
“What say we wheels up at noon?” Mr. Garcia said. “We’ll see the delta for a while then head up north. Have you ever been in a plane before, Kenny?”
He had already been asked that question but politely answered again. “Never.”
“You may just fall in love with the sky,” Mr. Garcia said. As he left, he kissed Kenny’s mom on the cheek. Kenny had never seen that happen in real life before, a man kissing a woman on the cheek. His dad never kissed Kenny’s stepmom like that, just because he was leaving the room. Kissing on the cheek was something men and women did on TV.
Jose Garcia took them to breakfast the next morning, to a coffee shop called Pancake Parade with a décor that made the place look like a circus. The two men ordered waffles and, for Kenny’s mom, another igloo of cottage cheese. As they were eating, car after car of well-dressed families came in, filling up the place. They were all in Sunday church clothes—the dads wore suits, the moms and girls were in nice dresses. Some of the boys wore neckties and were the same age as Kenny. With all those people talking and ordering breakfast the place sounded as loud as a circus.
When Jose and his mom finally finished their coffee—the waitress kept coming over and offering refills—Mom re-redded her lips and they went back out to the Fiat. Mr. Garcia drove, wearing a pair of gold metal-frame glasses with mirror lenses and hooks to go around his ears. His mom had on her skier’s shades. Kenny sat in the little area behind the seats, where the wind was the wildest and made it difficult to hear. For the whole ride, he never knew what the grown-ups were saying.