vigor.
“I’ll bring you tomatoes in a few weeks,” David said. “I planted Early Boys. Does Sam like tomatoes? I’ll bring you a lot.”
“He loves them. I won’t tell him they come from you, though. If he knows they’re connected to Cecilia he’ll want to put them on an altar and worship them.”
“Ha,” David said. Turning to face her, he dropped one eyelid in a slow wink, like the gesture of a clumsy, fleshy uncle. A sleepy-eyed kid, one of two customers in the store, looked up and she frowned at him.
“We don’t need two people up front,” she announced, yanking the hot water nozzle to full spray and plunging her hands in. “I’ll go chop almonds.”
“Atoning for something?” David said. Often the partners prepared mix-ins after Life Ties meetings, pondering mistakes they’d made on the home front. After especially heated meetings Sam said the back room sounded like a flamenco troupe was practicing.
“Nope. This one’s for charity.”
David made a fond shooing motion, and Vivy wondered, as she slipped through the swinging door, how he had managed to jump straight into a grandfather’s mannerisms without ever pausing at fatherhood.
Her sandals slapped across the isthmus of tile flooring between the chopping board and the enormous freezer. Vivy had arranged to buy that freezer, slightly used, from a restaurant that closed its doors after six months. The thing took up the whole back wall and saved the partnership over $1,000. Vivy briefly wondered, as she often did, whether she could apply the $1,000 to her and Sam’s debt.
She pulled down the good knife, the one as long as her forearm, then reached in the freezer for a carton of almonds. She’d barely had time for the first rough chops when the phone rang—most likely Nancy, the only person who regularly called the store. Vivy was careful to sound cheerful when she picked up the phone and said, “Natural High Ice Cream,” and so was reduced to a delighted sputter when Fredd’s voice said, “Christ, Vivy, calm down. You sound like Shirley Temple.”
“I had my tap shoes on.”
“Take them off. You could scare a guy.” Vivy could hear a clicking noise behind his voice, and wondered what he was juggling. Sounded like dried beans. “Listen, I heard about a festival down in Watsonville. I’ll bet they need a juggler.”
“So call.”
“I was thinking you could do it for me. Take a cut. I’ll feel better if you take care of the details.”
“Flatter me, why don’t you?”
“No problem. Seeing you the other day reminded me how much I need you in my life.”
Vivy snorted. “Fredd, are you trying to proposition me?”
“In a way.” Click. “I got to thinking about how things used to be. It was easier when you were around, reminding me of things, looking out for me. So I want you to go back to being my agent. All my gigs. Straight ten percent, right? This can be just between us. Nobody else needs to know.”
“What the hell are you juggling over there?”
“Pennies. I’m practicing one-handed. What do you say? Get back in the saddle?”
“I guess you’ve overlooked the pesky fact that I already have a job.” David’s words rolled out of her mouth before she could stop them.
“Come on, Vivy. You don’t need forty hours a week to book one juggler. You can make phone calls while you’re cooking dinner. You don’t even have to go to the gigs—I can set myself up. You’ll still keep track of stuff better than I do, and you’ll get some extra dough for whatever you want. Clothes, a car. You win, I win.”
“We all scream for ice cream. If I went out and bought a car, my butt would be in a crack in a big way. Sam and I are in the hole eighty thousand bucks. No new cars until that’s paid off.”
“Well, this will help you start socking away some bread.”
“I don’t mean to make you doubt yourself, but I’ll have to represent you for two hundred years to sock away eighty grand.”
“That’s the other reason I called. My nephew’s in a band. Elphenevel. They play songs about Dungeons & Dragons games, with heavy metal guitar.”
“Save me.”
“No joke. Seventeen-year-old boys are nuts for this. The band played at a high school last week, and two thousand kids showed up. Two thousand kids, and the band brought home five hundred bucks. They need you.”
“Heavy metal wizards? No thanks.”
“You don’t have to love it, Vivy. But they could fill the Civic Auditorium. You could catch them at the beginning of a real career. T-shirts. Posters.”
“I get it,” Vivy said.
“The guys are in college, in case music doesn’t pan out. They don’t want to play but a couple nights a month.”
“I get it,” she said. She ran her tongue back and forth across her teeth, an old nervous habit. This was a band that would call for big management, full promotion, the kind of work she and Sam had barely glimpsed before the old company slipped away from them. House managers, stagehands and the IATSE, contracts stipulating eight percent—was it still eight percent?—of the box office. The Civic Auditorium held five thousand, at no less than $15 a seat.
Fredd mumbled “Shit” and grunted—scrambling after one of the pennies, Vivy assumed. His voice sounded coaxing when he came back to the phone. “You’re going to do this for me, aren’t you?”
“Yup,” she said. “For you and your nephew. But twenty percent, not ten.”
“For crying out loud, Vivy, people have to make a living. I thought I’d be helping you, not bled dry.”
“You want jobs? Twenty.”
“Fifteen,” he said.
“Done.” Picking up the knife again, she lined up a handful of almonds and sliced them like a machine. Usually she couldn’t manage such precision.
“Still a shyster. I feel better already.”
“Checks will come through me,” she said, missing the angle on one almond and watching it ping off the wall. “And nobody knows about this. Nobody.”
“You’re not even going to tell Sam?”
“I’ll get around to telling Sam,” she said. “I just want to wait a little. Right now he’s developing his own act.”
“He better not be juggling. I don’t like competition.”
“He’s juggling, all right,” she said. “He’s juggling and walking a tightrope and balancing an egg on his nose.”
“I didn’t know he was so talented.”
“You just forgot,” Vivy said. “Stick around. The old acts are coming back to life.”
Four
Sam
Hot, hot, hot. Through May and into June, despite rumors of approaching rain that sprang up, spread, and dissolved like mirages, the temperatures in the valley around El Campo soared. Summer was always hot in this part of California; farmers planted long rows of apricot and pear trees, counting on sultry days to ripen the fruit. But these temperatures were too high, and blossoms were dropping before fruit could set. Nearly every afternoon passed one hundred degrees, and hardly any night dipped below eighty-five. Farmers were interviewed every night on the news. In grocery stores and beside swimming pools the heat was everybody’s only topic. Natural High was doing land-office business, half of its customers, some of them old enough for retirement, coming into the store wearing bathing suits and flip-flops. Sam rarely looked twice anymore. Looking at skin—even thin, depleted skin