* * *

  —

  Julie’s apartment was small. Donnie’s room had been a closet, his bed separated by a curtain from the washer-dryer. Lina burrowed in her room. Walter tried to talk to her about college, but she was snippy. She had an interview to be a salesclerk, she said. This was the sister for whom Berkeley hadn’t been good enough.

  “It’s been our worst year,” he said. “We lost our parent.”

  “We have two, technically.” She never gave up.

  “He’s useless. You wanna talk about college at all?”

  She did not.

  He called Dr. Moss, who said that his mom was working in the garden. Another patient, the owner of a Japanese plant nursery, was teaching a small group, the doctor included, to train bonsai. He’d spoken to Walter’s mom about the Midsummer Revel. “She told me she’d come and dance.”

  Walter jammed his hands in his pockets and went to the car, where Susan was waiting with two cups of coffee.

  They had finals in a week. Walter and Cub had worked out regular study sessions with Melinda, and his average was up to 90.1. He slammed the car door and they took off. A feeling stayed with him all the way back up to school, a tenderness in the upper gut, as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him.

  * * *

  —

  Three weeks later, Walter returned for Lina’s graduation.

  “Why are you here?” she asked. In a way, she was right. He wouldn’t have been standing on that tiered lawn if her life weren’t a disaster. “Is this what it’s come to? We’re celebrating me getting a high school diploma?” But her flip dismissal—only a high school diploma—rested on assumptions about a future instilled by their mom, who’d once lived in an orphanage. No one had expected their mom to attend college.

  A few teachers looked at Lina sadly. Mrs. Anjani stumped over with a cane. “We’ll be in touch,” she said.

  After the ceremony, Lina drove Walter to the place. She had her license now. Amazing to be in the car with Lina driving. The air was hot, with a low wind. Their mom wasn’t in the parlor of 301, though, or in the dormitory or the garden. They finally found her in a room off another building filled with flowers in buckets, the kitten at her ankles. She stared at stems on a metal-topped table with a concentration bordering on terror. She didn’t turn when they burst in.

  “Lina graduated today,” Walter said.

  “Mm-hmm,” she said, still looking down.

  It was so hot. Norwalk was unbearable in summer.

  “She got her diploma. You have two graduates now.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Her eyes fixed on the geometry of stems.

  They finally found Shirley in 301. “Oh, when she does her flowers,” she said, “she can’t think of anything else.” She led them to another small building, where a woman plinked at a typewriter, and showed them the arrangement their mother had made. The blossoms were papery, petals already falling, mixed in with woody branches. Walter wasn’t sure it was pretty. He noticed blown dandelions. Had she forgotten that those were weeds?

  Her life in the hospital seemed settled now. She’d gained weight and her hair and nails had grown.

  Walking to the parking lot, Lina said, “Julie rails about the stigma. She says, If your parent had cancer…but, you know, sometimes I think this really is different. Cancer takes over cells but this, it infects love. She turns away from love.” She started to cry. Walter looked at her young fingers on the steering wheel. He felt idiotic being unable to drive.

  “I’d hoped,” she said, gulping. “I wanted to…”

  She needed him to understand that once, her dream had been attainable. He had to believe that, now when she had nothing. She looked over at him, almost shy.

  Walter agreed that UC wasn’t the Ivy League, okay, but college was still college. The real disparity was not between this college or that college, it was between learning and working. “Like your job. You scoop ice cream, talk to customers, sweep the floor, right?”

  “And replace the cans. Count the cash. Deposit it at the bank.”

  “And not one of those skills has anything to do with your development. Or figuring out what you’re naturally good at.”

  “I may not be naturally good at anything. I have an application in at the May Company,” she said. “That’s a real job. My arms are already uneven from scooping.” This prompted another gale of tears.

  Julie had looked into community college. Lina could transfer to UC in two years. “And UC is really good!” Walter felt sorry for Lina; she wasn’t even beautiful anymore, her hair in a tight ponytail, her face puffy.

  34.

  While Walter stood laying out pages of the Berkeley Poetry Review on a Ping-Pong table, the editors, lounging on couches, spoke derisively about every submitted poem and decided to set up a display of old issues. Someone said there were boxes of them in the attic. They located the trapdoor but couldn’t find a ladder. The next day, Walter asked Carlos, who lent him one from Buildings and Grounds. He climbed up and pulled on the overhead bulb from its chain. A whole room was up there. Not tall enough to stand in except at the center. One at a time, he carried down the boxes of back issues. The cottage had everything a person would need: a bathroom, stove, and refrigerator. Someone must clean the place, he thought, though it wasn’t especially clean. But the attic lightbulb worked; it stood to reason that the Pelican Building, named for a defunct humor magazine, received at least sporadic maintenance.

  * * *

  —

  “Is it the cat? Does the noise bother you?” Ken asked. Some nights, the cat scratched the bottom of his mattress. Walter hadn’t thought Ken would care about him moving out.

  “I like the cat. Moving won’t change anything.” But as Walter said that, he knew that their friendship had changed. Walter had loved their dorm room, with Ken a solid weight on the other side. They were the same amount of neat, the same amount of social. The soft huffing sounds of Ken’s horn had soothed Walter. They’d never fought. Here in the co-op, the nights Melinda stayed over, they closed the door and Walter heard them laughing in the dark.

  But Walter didn’t like seeing the person he might have been if his mom were well.

  He stacked his boxes on a borrowed dolly, pulling the thing downhill with Ken walking alongside, steadying the turntable on top. Ken declared the hidden attic a treehouse. Downstairs, he opened the oven. “We can throw dinner parties,” he said.

  “You can’t tell anybody,” Walter said. “Seriously.”

  * * *

  —

  After finals, the student editors adjourned for summer trips to Europe and internships at the LA Times. Walter had the cottage to himself. He and Carlos painted the attic walls, beamed ceilings, and floor planks with Buildings and Grounds standard white. Walter bought a sterilized mattress and box spring from the Salvation Army and had them halfway home before he realized they’d never fit through the trapdoor. He had to buy a futon that rolled up.

  He loved the emptier Berkeley. A sorority sister in the 1950s had planted berry bushes, and now more grew than the young women could eat. Carrie and Susan, both staying this summer, thought they could find a waffle iron at the swap meet. Walter went along. Susan insisted they get there at six, when the dealers were unwrapping their wares.

  She lifted a rusted two-piece cast-iron contraption that looked like a clamshell from a box on the ground. “Use it right over the burner,” the seller said. They bought it for a dollar. Then Carrie spotted an electric waffle maker for two dollars. They bought that, too. The prices amazed Walter. Here was an alternate world where he could afford things. He found an hourglass coffeemaker, which Susan bargained down to three-fifty. She’d grown up flea marketing. Her parents had organized vacations around their perennial search for old things. She remembered a hideous town in the Luberon where she and her brothers goofed around while they talked to dealers. Some of those people visited Los Angeles, recognizing the cabinet or table they’d shipped halfway around the world. Susan’s dad had started out as an architect.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “Well, he didn’t have the best experience. He couldn’t get a job; that’s why he went into real estate. It’s probably different now.”

  Not different enough. You needed another degree past your BA, and even then, newly credentialed architects weren’t getting hired in California. “You might as well be a poet,” Walter said. He’d continue pre-med classes, quarter after quarter, and keep up with design, too. Drawing his useless utopias.

  “I’m thinking of library school,” Carrie said.

  It was relaxing to stroll through the aisles, with resurrected junk on both sides of them. Walter found a French library ladder that unfolded from a pole but the man wanted seventy-five dollars. “Probably worth it,” Susan whispered.

  “Not to me.” He could knot heavy-gauge rope from the hardware store.

  Back at the sorority house, girls in pajamas blinked in the kitchen as the waffles came out, purple with berries. “Real maple syrup,” Susan said, pouring from a bottle.

  Walter had never known there was such a thing as fake syrup.

  * * *

  —

  Walter read on the futon under a salvaged lamp. He’d bought an army blanket his second time at the swap meet, when he’d run into Jan Tudor, with a large German shepherd, negotiating for an Eva Zeisel teapot. Painted, his attic looked like industrial space in Berlin she’d shown on slides.

  So now he and his brother and sister had all moved while their mom remained in Norwalk. Maybe getting to know the doctor in their bonsai class. He hoped she was wearing decent clothes. He still sent money home, but there was no longer a clear cause. They’d already lost the bungalow. Lina and Donnie lived with Julie and he tried to help her out. He should have felt relieved, he supposed. But Lina no longer thanked him on their Sunday calls. She wanted to become a shopgirl now. Not long ago, she’d been certain to go to college. This kind of slip probably happened all the time.

  “You can’t never again go to a party,” Susan said.

  “For now, I can not go, can’t I?”

  “You have to have your life, too. You want her to have hers, even there. Didn’t you tell me she was going to a dance?”

  “My mom actually likes parties,” he said.

  He’d have to ask Dr. Moss if she’d gone to the dance. If she danced.

  35.

  Julie left every morning before it was light, in her white uniform. She’d asked Lina and Donnie if she could give Diane’s colored uniforms to a young LVN, who didn’t earn much. Lina hated being asked, as if her mother’s chance to recover was being prematurely snatched away. She’d felt this when she’d passed her driving test and the lady behind the DMV counter asked whether she’d agree to be an organ donor. If she were lying on the road, they might grab her organs when she could still have been saved. With Lauren watching, though, Lina checked the box yes. It would be years before she realized that most morality worked this way. We do the right thing so others think well of us and, eventually, we feel grateful that we did. “I’ll pay for new uniforms when she comes back,” Donnie said. He was working on an arborist’s crew this summer, cutting down a historic live oak infested with termites. That morning, he’d awakened thinking two points diagonal. No jump. The elephants, in Chinese chess, couldn’t cross the river. The king was never allowed to leave the palace.

  Julie carried the uniforms out, draped over her meaty arm.

  As the morning drifted toward noon, Donnie felt a pollen-soft breeze and remembered they lived with Julie. Tonight she was making lasagna again because he liked it.

  Lina worked double shifts at the ice-cream store, where the manager kept threatening to quit. The owners disappointed him daily. They’d promised more cans and a new freezer, but—he shook his head—no follow-through. “You care too much,” Lina told him. He couldn’t get it through his head that this was a stupid job.

  A girl from the clay room had turned in Lina’s application to the May Company. An anomaly at Pali, she hadn’t even applied to college. Her father thought his daughters were pretty enough to get married and have babies.

  Lina’s mother had smuggled her into Pali to lift her out of exactly that mentality.

  Lauren and Jess dropped by the store, but their solicitousness felt like pity and embarrassed her. She gave them free cones and was relieved when they left.

  * * *

  —

  A manager called Lina for an interview to be a stock girl, and the girl from the clay room offered to come see her closet, to help her decide what to wear.

  “You’re looking at my closet,” Lina said. “I have these jeans, overalls, and T-shirts.”

  The girl, Kim, offered to lend her a dress. Lina owned only one dress: the white one she’d worn to graduation. Lauren had said her mother bought two and that it was too late to return either. Lina hadn’t believed her, but accepted it anyway. She wore it now to meet the manager. Kim said she’d have to spend her first month’s salary on a wardrobe.

  But it turned out that Lina could wear jeans in the stockroom. She was hired to make price tags with a machine, to affix them onto garments with a small gun that shot out plastic stems. It was mind-numbing work, only occasionally broken by the noise and color of salesgirls, not allowed to eat on the floor, bursting in for breaks. They looked costumed and of a higher rank than Nancy, Lina’s supervisor, who sat most of the day, tightly packed into her gabardine slacks, checking inventory and complaining. Occasionally, she sent Lina onto the floor to count sweaters to mark against the stock list. Enormous chandeliers shed flecks of light.

  When Lina tried to give Julie her first paycheck, Julie refused, saying, “You save that.”

  “But what about all you paid into Mom’s account? Shouldn’t we pay that back?”

  “No need.”

  Lina began to wear makeup to work. Kim told her what to buy. The manager, a pert woman named Sue who wore jewel-colored clothes, always a tight top and matching voluminous pants, asked Lina if she would like a piece of advice. No one had ever asked Lina this before. They’d just given it.

  “Sure,” Lina said.

  Sue led her to the mirror in the grimy bathroom. “When you do your top eyelashes with mascara, do the bottom ones, too.”

  Was that all? Lina had thought the advice would be about life. Sue brushed the hair off Lina’s face. “Do you ever blow-dry?” She held Lina’s hair back, twisted it, and walked her out that way, asking the others, “What do you think?”

  “Definitely,” the salesgirls said.

  “She’s got a perfectly proportioned face,” Sue said.

  The salesgirls’ murmurs made this feel intrinsic, while other people’s advantages (Lauren’s house, her father) felt like accidents of fate, which could just as easily have fallen to Lina.

  * * *

  —

  A very thin salesgirl, on high platforms, said, “Looks like you blow-dried.”

  Lina had. Quite a production.

  “Do you want a tip? Bend over like this. Dry the back first. That’s how you build volume. Then you have to decide about your ends. My boyfriend likes mine straight, so I iron. But if you get a round brush, you can flip it up or under. Depends.”

  “Well, how is it now?” Lina asked. “Up or under?” She thought she’d prefer the opposite.

  “Kind of neither. That’s the problem.”

  The thin salesgirl was named Marci, and Nancy said she lived with the drummer of the band Geronimo. There were no windows in the stockroom, only a loading dock, where trucks idled, beeping, as uniformed men carried in boxes.

  Lina wanted to work on the floor. For that she had to up her look. Becoming a saleswoman would be like getting cast.

  * * *

  —

  Julie hauled out the heavy, bulbous sewing machine from the closet. She could sew. She had a number of invisible talents that you wouldn’t discover unless you lived with her. Lina had often imagined her mother’s life changing on a dime; by luck, she would meet a man who would fall in love with her and move them into a mansion. Or hire her to run a modern clinic. Julie was overweight, with thinning hair. Lina tried to imagine something wonderful happening to her, but it was harder to picture the details. As they knelt on the carpet piecing out a Vogue skirt pattern, the phone rang. Mrs. Anjani, wanting to schedule an SAT practice session for Lina’s applications next year. They’d met once already in the old typing room. Mrs. Anjani stood at the dusty podium drilling her. Since Lina had started at the May Company, though, she cared less about college. She promised to read the SAT prep manual just to get Mrs. Anjani off the phone.

  Julie pinned pieces of brown-yellow tissue to the fabric. They hadn’t had to shop for material. Julie had a trove, full bolts of cloth that impressed Marci when Lina brought in swatches to work.

  Julie had been collecting lush fabrics for years, buying on sale and saving them. What life had she imagined? Caring about Julie was painful; Lina feared that the world would be unfair to her. Together, they picked a matte, dark green silk. “But don’t you want it?” Lina asked. “Can we make a skirt for you, too?”

  “Let’s do yours first. I don’t have to be anywhere I need new clothes for.”