“Oh, right. You can’t eat junk food.” And he went to the fridge and found me some carrots to munch on while we watched the movie.
It was nice to be around an adult who wasn’t in AARP for a change, someone who didn’t mind doing fun things with me. Sometimes, Lee would take us to concerts in Palm Springs or Riverside or even farther than that, in Orange County. Stacey and I broke up during senior year, but Lee Briggs and I remained friendly. He’d teach me things about Western culture, things I didn’t learn in school, which was pretty neat. When I got to college in Fullerton, I even considered majoring in Classics, but the school closed down the department because of the state’s budget cuts. It was a bullshit excuse, of course, because they didn’t cut Asian-American studies or African-American studies or even Chicano studies. So I ended up majoring in business administration.
It worked out well, in the end, because I started my own business in Irvine. I would have stayed there for good if things had been different, but my mom had Parkinson’s disease and, even though I tried to visit every Sunday, I knew the time would come when I would have to move back home. Her tremors were getting worse; she needed someone to help her with basic things like cooking and cleaning. And my dad, too, he needed help with his business, because he didn’t have as many people working for him anymore. I was married by then and it wasn’t easy convincing Annette to live in the middle of the desert. But that’s what we do for family.
Moving back was a big adjustment. If you liked hiking and rock climbing, or if you were into weird art installations that popped up in the middle of nowhere, then this place was fine. But for someone like me, there were no driving ranges or department stores or even a decent multiplex. After a long day of work at the bowling alley, I still had energy I wanted to burn, and there were no wrestling gyms in town. There was so little to do, really. Which was why I was so surprised to see Nora Guerraoui here. Growing up in this place, all any of us ever wanted was to leave, and yet we both ended up coming back. I would never have guessed it.
Nora
It fell to me, then, to show that what happened on April 28 was not an accident. In order to trace a motive, I had to go back in time, not only to events that preceded that night, but to the very beginning, when my father bought the Pantry. The restaurant had been built in 1951, on land that belonged to Chemehuevi Indians, by Bill and Prudence Swenson, a pair of homesteaders from Corona. At the time, it was little more than a hamburger stand, serving travelers on their way to or from the Marine base that had recently opened in Twentynine Palms. But as the town grew, so did demand for places to eat. The Swensons added a few more items to the menu, built a full kitchen and dining area, and cleared the Joshua trees on the northern side of the building for a parking lot. Over the years, new businesses opened up all around them: Baker’s bowling alley and Oglesby’s dry cleaner next door, Kinney’s tire shop and Linden’s beauty salon across the highway. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that when my father bought the restaurant from the retiring Swensons, he stood out like a tall weed in a clipped hedge. And perhaps he knew it, because he made himself small, and tried his best to keep the place exactly as it had been for decades.
But there came a time when he had to expand the dining room and update the kitchen appliances, and although this had been good for his business, it had led to tensions with Anderson Baker. When I pulled up to the restaurant’s parking lot that morning, I noticed another change my father had made just before he died. He’d put up a huge new sign on the roof. You could see it from down the block. Was this what had triggered Baker’s bout of anger? The sudden prominence? Yet my mother hadn’t mentioned the sign when I’d asked her about recent disagreements. The only incident she’d pointed to was the fight about parking spaces a few weeks earlier, during Presidents’ Day weekend.
Walking into the Pantry, I found Marty at the cash register, feeding a new roll of paper into the printer. At the sound of the door jingle, he looked up. “Morning, miss,” he said. Even though I’d often told him to just call me by my first name, he always insisted on calling me Miss. He was attached to formalities like that.
“Morning. Everything okay today?” I asked, trying to sound assertive, yet cruelly aware of the inexperience in my voice.
“Everything’s fine, miss.”
“Great.” I walked past him and took a seat at the counter. On the stool next to me, someone had left behind a copy of the Los Angeles Times, and I picked it up. The top stories were a fire in Angeles National Forest and the death at fifty-seven of a baseball star whose name I didn’t recognize. Below the fold was news of a failed attempt at land preservation in the Mojave, and of a bomb attack in Syria that had left twenty-three people dead. I made a mental note to buy a copy of the Hi-Desert Star later that day, to see if Baker’s arraignment had been covered.
“What can I get you today?” Veronica asked as she came to the other side of the counter. She was tall and thin, with hazel eyes and a small overbite that on her was not unattractive. She’d been working at the diner almost as long as Marty. The kind of waitress who could handle a party of ten with three screaming children without ever losing her patience, and was always chatty and cheerful, without making it seem like a job requirement.
“Could I have the cheese omelette?” I asked, folding the newspaper and putting it back where it had been. “And some iced tea, please.”
She turned to the kitchen window to place the order. Then she brought me a glass of iced tea and set it on a napkin.
“Were you working on Presidents’ Day, Veronica?” I asked.
“We don’t get time off on holiday weekends.” She tucked her hands into her apron. “I always have to figure out what to do with the kids, especially during spring break or in the summer. And it’s worse now that I’m getting divorced. They have day camps over there at the community center, you know, but it’s expensive. I have to leave them with my sister. She’s on disability, so it’s not easy for her to watch three kids, but at least they’re with family.”
“Right,” I said and waited a moment to bring the conversation back to my line of thought. “I asked because a detective from the sheriff’s department might come talk to you. Coleman is her name.”
“Talk to me about what?”
“About what Anderson Baker did that day,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “How he burst in here and started yelling at my dad about parking spaces. The ugly scene he made about that Land Rover. You remember that, don’t you?”
In the kitchen, the cook dropped a batch of fries in hot oil. A few feet away, Marty rang up a customer at the cash register. “Yeah, I remember,” Veronica said after a moment. “Baker came in just as I was about to go on my cigarette break.” She brought the pitcher of iced tea again and topped off my glass, even though I had barely touched it. “When is that detective gonna come talk to me?”
“Soon, I hope. Any moment, really.”
“That whore works for the sheriff’s department.”
“Wait. I’m sorry, who are you talking about?”
“The woman my husband left me for. She works for the sheriff’s department. Answers the phone for them. I don’t even know how he met her, he never said.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Fifteen years we were married. Can you believe it? Fifteen years. Three kids. One of them a cesarean. He cheated on me twice before and I took him back both times because he said it didn’t mean nothing. And I thought, well, I’m the one he married, not them, so maybe he’s right. But then he met that whore and he damn near lost his mind. Says she’s his soulmate. I thought I was.”
“I’m so sorry.”