A Place of Hiding

“What’re you doing here?” she asked her brother. “How’d you get up here? Did you fix your car?”


“That piece of crap?” He padded across the linoleum to the refrigerator, pulled it open, and browsed through the plastic bags of fruit and vegetables inside. He emerged with a red bell pepper, which he took to the sink and meticulously washed off before scoring a knife from a drawer and slicing the pepper in half. He cleaned both halves and handed one of them to China.

“I’ve got some things going so I won’t need a car anyway.”

China ignored the hook implied in his final remark. She knew how her brother cast his bait. She set her half of the red bell pepper on the kitchen table. She went into her bedroom to change her clothes. The leather was like wearing a sauna in this weather. It looked terrific, but it felt like hell. “Everyone needs a car. I hope you haven’t come up here thinking you’re going to borrow mine,” she called out to him. “Because if you have, the answer is no in advance. Ask Mom. Borrow hers. I assume she’s still got it.”

“You coming down for Thanksgiving?” Cherokee called back.

“Who wants to know?”

“Guess.”

“Her phone doesn’t work all of a sudden?”

“I told her I was coming up. She asked me to ask you. You coming or what?”

“I’ll talk to Matt.” She hung the leather trousers in the closet, did the same with the vest, and tossed her silk blouse into the dry-cleaning bag. She threw on a loose Hawaiian dress and grabbed her sandals from the shelf. She rejoined her brother.

“Where is Matt, anyway?” He’d finished his half of the pepper and had started on hers.

She removed it from his hand and took a bite. The meat was cool and sweet, a modest anodyne to the heat and her thirst. “Away,” she told him.

“Cherokee, would you put your clothes on, please?”

“Why?” He leered and thrust his pelvis at her. “Am I turning you on?”

“You’re not my type.”

“Away where?”

“New York. He’s on business. Are you going to get dressed?”

He shrugged and left her. A moment later she heard the bang of the screen door as he went outside to retrieve the rest of his clothes. She found an uncooled bottle of Calistoga water in the musty broom closet that served as her pantry. At least it was something sparkling, she thought. She rooted out ice and poured herself a glassful.

“You didn’t ask.”

She swung around. Cherokee was dressed, as requested, his T-shirt shrunk from too many washes and his blue jeans resting low on his hips. Their bottoms grazed the linoleum, and as she looked her brother over, China thought not for the first time how misplaced he was in time. With his too-long sandy curls, his scruffy clothes, his bare feet, and his demeanour, he looked like a refugee from the summer of love. Which would doubtless make their mother proud, make his father approve, and make her father laugh. But it made China...well, annoyed. Despite his age and his toned physique, Cherokee still looked too vulnerable to be out on his own.

“So you didn’t ask me,” he said.

“Ask you what?”

“What I’ve got going. Why I won’t be needing a car anymore. I thumbed, by the way. Hitchhiking’s gone to crap, though. Took me since yesterday lunchtime to get here.”

“Which is why you need a car.”

“Not for what I’ve got in mind.”

“I’ve already said. I’m not lending you my car. I need it for work. And why aren’t you in class? Have you dropped out again?”

“Quit. I needed more free time to do the papers. That’s taken off in a very big way. I’ve got to tell you, the number of conscienceless college students these days just boggles the mind, Chine. If I wanted to do this for a career, I’d probably be able to retire when I’m forty.”

China rolled her eyes. The papers were term papers, take-home essay tests, the occasional master’s thesis, and, so far, two doctoral dissertations. Cherokee wrote them for university students who had the cash and who couldn’t be bothered to write the papers themselves. This had long ago raised the question of why Cherokee—who’d never received less than a B on something he’d written for payment—couldn’t himself get up the steam to remain in college. He’d been in and out of the University of California so many times that the institution practically had a revolving door with his name above it. But Cherokee had a facile explanation for his exceedingly blotted college career: “If the UC system would just pay me to do my work what the students pay me to do their work, I’d do the work.”

“Does Mom know you’ve dropped out again?” she asked her brother.

“I’ve cut the strings.”