She didn’t seem to remember him convincing her to go. He told her he’d be able to help; she could maybe stay four years instead of taking so many credits to graduate in three. But she might not even need him. She’d received a Pell Grant. She said she didn’t mind a five-course load. He told her again to send a picture of herself in front of a Barnard building for their mom’s bed.

  * * *

  —

  Maybe her mother didn’t remember her, Lina all of a sudden thought, because she’d never sent a picture. She hadn’t sent a picture because she wasn’t beautiful anymore and she didn’t want her mother to be disappointed. Her mother had always loved having a beautiful girl.

  51.

  When a wrecking ball swung at the brick edifice of Central, Walter felt it in his chest.

  Piles of trash littered the ground, possibly things that should be salvaged, but where could he sell them? He was supposed to be memorizing Shakespeare. Jackhammers blared. Heat rained onto his arms. A huge crane lifted debris, dropping a screen of dirt. Walter made a list for the GC, whose clipboard rested on the shelf of his belly.

  “Don’t you have some test you got to study for?” the GC said.

  “I have to pass this quarter,” Walter said. “I’ve already taken the money.”

  On a legal pad, Walter numbered eighty-seven tasks. He’d hired two graduate design students at minimum wage to draw the electrical grid. He needed them, to remember his other life.

  The crew talked about pussy. White guys, Black guys, Hispanic guys, two Asians, bragged in the relentless sun about getting ass. And all were getting it, apparently.

  Susan and Carrie had already memorized their lines. Walter was still reading from the book. But he had a massive loan from the Bank of California. That felt more pressing than Much Ado About Nothing. To file for a leave of absence, he needed to tell Mr. Matthews.

  “You’ll still graduate,” Susan had said last night, on the sorority porch. “Only later.”

  “Someday,” Carrie had said, yawning. She’d slept on a sidewalk in front of a San Francisco district court to watch the Patty Hearst trial. She had a reporter’s card from The Daily Californian, but she still didn’t make it in.

  Walter pocketed a tape measure, grabbing a hard hat from the pegboard on the trailer wall, where a Playboy pinup calendar had appeared this morning. He wanted to measure the yards between the perimeter and the future footprint. When he finished his calculations, he found the GC on a bulldozer. Shouting above the noise, he said that the nine-inch red linoleum tiles heaped in the dumpster should be salvaged. “Full of asbestos,” the GC yelled, ramming the machine into loud reverse. By the time Walter took the Ashley exit and drove uphill toward Berkeley, he admitted that architecture had nothing to do with this project. He’d found a beautiful building in the middle of California and was demolishing it to build an ugly one.

  In class, he’d been the one to say, “What about the client? Some of us hope to make a living at this.”

  “We know you’ll succeed, Walter,” a girl behind him once said.

  He’d liked being the straight man in Berkeley, but maybe only there.

  52.

  All the time that Lina was working in the Barnard store, throwing pots in the clay room, sitting in classes, doodling, listening to her dorm friends complain about their mothers, Donnie was growing up in Julie’s apartment. Lina called Walter to talk about whether this was even okay. “I mean, when we moved there, the idea was a year maybe. This summer it’ll be two.”

  “She might like having someone there with her, besides cats.”

  “I’m sure the cats never gave her as much trouble.”

  “Donnie’s a good kid. It’s not healthy for people to live alone.”

  “You don’t think we should ask Julie about it?”

  “We don’t have any alternatives to offer.”

  Lina remembered the kitchen next to Donnie’s room, Julie’s tense grip on the handle of a pan. Julie had become a real cook. Those lessons. Indian cooking. Thai.

  “How’s art?” Walter asked before they hung up.

  Lina had finally told them about her major, over the holiday. They’d merely nodded, which was also infuriating. It hadn’t mattered, she decided, because she was female. They thought she’d get married. That would be her career.

  Only Mrs. Anjani was disappointed. “Oh well, you can always teach,” she said. “It isn’t the worst life. You’ll have your summers.”

  * * *

  —

  At least Walter made a choice, she thought. He’d taken those pre-med classes. She remembered his fucking A-plus on the bungalow refrigerator. He could have become a doctor, but he decided on architecture or building or whatever it was he was doing instead of graduating on time. Lina thought what she was trying for (even the name “art” seemed pretentious) was, though she’d never say it, noble. She hadn’t even picked it, exactly—this was all she could do, even a little, and it happened to be the hardest thing in the world. She doubted that she could succeed.

  The college store manager caught Lina drawing when she was supposed to be refolding sweatshirts and fired her. But then, the same day, Troy gave her his morning hours in the clay room. Unlike Lina, Troy had taken to education. He’d come to Columbia knowing he wanted to be an artist but then fell for the core curriculum.

  “The fucking great books.”

  “Do you swear even in your thoughts?” he asked.

  Her mouth had driven her mother crazy, she told him.

  “Of course. She’s a mother. See, around Judy, I stopped calling her mama when I was eleven, I keep it to myself that I love the goddamn Odyssey.” At dawn, Troy still subwayed downtown, looking for new graffiti by the artist called SAMO, which he said stood for Same Old. Lina thought he didn’t sleep enough or that she slept too much. He was dating a straight-up Kenyan nursing student.

  By now, she and Troy talked most days, she went to the Hungarian Pastry Shop with other art students, and even attended the occasional party, but she was still in preparation for life, while her mother was still in recovery.

  53.

  Walter waited for Ken in the trapped light of the co-op’s entry. In the summer, Walter thought, the two of them could drive to Clovis together and life would feel the way it used to when Ken was the person he saw the most. They couldn’t plant for another year, but the irrigation and hardscape had to be drawn.

  They walked for an hour, stopping in the eucalyptus grove so Walter could unroll his plans on a stump. “I can’t wait to show you the place.”

  “What are they going to sell in this future emporium?”

  Walter hadn’t considered what people would be buying inside his building; they’d be shopping, obviously, but for what? The Outlet, they’d named it. In design class, Jan Tudor had talked about the imperative of use. “Whatever they sell,” he said, “business’ll probably be good because there’s not much else to do in Clovis. I saw a sign for a rodeo…”

  “Maybe we can build them something to do,” Ken said.

  Jan had shown slides of apartment blocks designed to echo medieval town squares. He and Ken sketched a playground with a fifty-yard sandbox. “At the edges I’d like something fruiting,” Walter said. “To screen parking. Citrus, maybe. How much do trees cost?”

  “My dad always says it’s better to put a one-dollar plant into a hundred-dollar hole.”

  “How is your dad?” Walter asked.

  “Melinda applying to med school hasn’t helped. They think she’ll leave me for another doc.”

  The phone was already ringing when Walter rolled his bike into the Pelican.

  Ken’s father. “No commercial landscaping until after graduation. I told Ken. I’m telling you the same. Finish up first. Get the degree.”

  In a week, Walter planned to put in the paperwork for a leave of absence.

  “I think that’s a mistake. But I’m not your parent. Have you told your father?” He must have known about Walter’s mom. Otherwise, he would have said “your father and mother.”

  “My father’s not really in the picture.”

  “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry. Well, I’ve given you my two cents.”

  Mr. Matthews was no better. All business, he said he had nothing to do with withdrawals or readmittance, there were forms for that. He didn’t stand when Walter thanked him. “Glad I could be of use,” he said, looking at papers on his desk.

  Walter had disappointed the man. Still, he knew he was doing the right thing.

  Mr. Barsani shook his head. Then he called his own son, a sophomore at Cornell. “Antonio? Your dad here,” Walter heard as he left the store.

  Enough of fathers.

  * * *

  —

  Susan knew he was driving to Clovis every day, but no one else did. He hadn’t talked much to his sister or brother. Things were not going in order. He’d meant to build his life and then figure out love. He remembered Carrie’s hands trembling the paper of her poem, the poem that was now in his possession. He tried to be his best self with Carrie, but always having to be your best self was exhausting. And she didn’t feel the same way about him. Susan had picked him and he wasn’t sure he could stop it. But why didn’t he ever get to pick?

  He took his last final in an auditorium. The teacher wrote a question on the blackboard: How has your reading of Shakespeare’s late tragicomedies changed your life?

  Carrie lifted both elbows, pulling her hair into a ponytail. Walter thought for a full fifteen minutes as he heard pens tock on paper around him. Finally, he opened his blue book and began. There was a particular sound in a tiered room of fifty people trying to translate their thoughts into sentences on paper in the spring. After an hour and a half, they stood, one by one, placing their blue books on the front table, and left. The professor stood at the podium, reading a book. Over the quarter, he’d sometimes lectured in a wig and Elizabethan costume; he’d once leaped in brandishing a sword, reciting a soliloquy from memory. Walter glanced at the clock as it jittered ahead. He believed adult love would be like Shakespeare’s older heroes and heroines, who reunited after breaking up and joked with each other, understanding their own faults. The room was empty now, except for himself and two others. Walter had already filed the forms to suspend enrollment. This exam had not been as difficult as he’d thought. The other two walked to the front and the professor accepted their blue books. He shook Walter’s hand when he thanked him.

  There was a feeling of confetti in the air when Walter stepped outside. People stood with radios on the balconies of apartments Walter passed on his way up the hill.

  In the co-op attic where he used to live, Walter got down on all fours and looked under the bed. The cat’s eyes, from the far corner, gleamed like lit marbles. Melinda was doing the splits on the floor. Ken held a letter. “She got in,” he said.

  “Remember the English guy who said one out of three?” Walter asked. “You’re the one.”

  There was something so triumphant about the letter that Walter and Ken stood looking at it for longer than it took to read. It seemed amazing. Dr. Melinda.

  54.

  Walter sat at a tulip table in Susan and Carrie’s room reading a clipping Em Ball found.

  When they opened in 1947, a few blocks east of the Santa Monica Pier, they had to have police officers for crowd control. Two thousand people pushed into the store the first ten minutes. They had a main entrance for pedestrians and also entrances from the back parking lot. Parking lots were new then. A decade later, Santa Monica’s first civil rights demonstration was held there in front of Sears….

  A petal fell from a mason jar of roses. Susan’s glasses lay on a yellow legal pad. She looked at the grainy news photo of the square, flat building. “I like the lettering,” Sears in cursive neon.

  She knelt by the stereo, flipping through albums. She owned Karen Carpenter. Just then, Carrie slammed in, her hair up in a clip. “Oh, hi” was all she said. She grabbed a book from the floor, mumbled “Virginia Woolf,” and left, footsteps cascading downstairs.

  He’d blown it and ended up with the wrong girl. “She seemed strange.”

  “She was probably surprised to see you here.”

  He knew exactly what Susan meant. “Should we say something?”

  “Not yet.”

  * * *

  —

  Walter pushed his bike into the Pelican a week later and found Carrie sitting in the dark. She wanted him to accompany her on a newspaper assignment, her last-ditch effort to find something she could make a living at that was still writing. She’d already been admitted to library school. Her dad had mailed in the deposit.

  “Did you talk to Em Ball?” Walter asked.

  “Yeah, she had me over. Thanks for the introduction. I loved her house. But anyway. Tonight.” She’d let herself get recruited by some Moonies on purpose. The Moonies hadn’t admitted they were Moonies. They never did, but you could tell. “The nude nylons with tie-up shoes.” They’d invited her to dinner and she was going undercover. But all of a sudden, she didn’t want to be there alone.

  The address belonged to an old building on the North Campus. Carrie elbowed Walter; a framed portrait of Reverend Moon in the entry. A woman with long, dun-colored hair led them into a room of low tables that, on inspection, were hollow-core doors on cinder blocks.

  A free meal, Walter thought.

  The food was unidentifiable: green-brown strands in a bowl of warm, viscous liquid. A skinny guy in overalls next to Walter lifted his to his mouth. When he finished, Walter swapped bowls with him. When the guy finished that, Walter gave him Carrie’s. As a wan girl collected bowls, a man with a shaved head called the woman who’d led them in to play the guitar. She stood, head down, strumming, and sang “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Walter wondered if there would be dessert. Oreos or something. The woman’s voice veered and creaked. Pitiful. But when she finally stopped, the clapping continued a long time. No dessert in sight, they snuck out.

  On the street, Walter and Carrie talked at once, interrupting each other. They decided that finding a person’s secret hope, like that woman’s to be a singer, and then praising her for what, in fact, she couldn’t do, was a way to hold her captive. If you searched for a real strength, even a pedestrian ability, like knowing how to change a tire or do dishes, and praised someone for that, she might recognize her skill and become independent. The world needed people to change tires and do dishes. A person with a skill could leave you. Whereas the only audience for the concert they’d just heard was this group of Berkeley Moonies.

  “Thus, library school,” Carrie said.

  “It’s not the same. You’re talented.” As they neared the Pelican Building, he asked, “Should I walk you home?”

  “Let’s have tea.”

  Stacked boxes of the latest Poetry Review towered inside the door. Carrie banged the kettle onto the stove. She asked how he liked his new big job.

  He said it was an opportunity, but he missed classes. Their conversation was eerily proper. She was going to grad school in North Carolina. “No one’s going to pay me to read novels. This way, at least I’ll always be around books.”

  It was strange to be alone with her. He’d wanted this. For years, he would have done anything to make it happen. They sat on the arms of couches, holding their tea mugs. He told her she shouldn’t give up on writing poetry. She said she never would, but poets hardly ever made a living. It was getting late and she was still here. This chance didn’t feel like a chance. He almost wished she’d leave. Then she was pulling her shirt over her head, not in a gesture of abandon; the fabric tangled and her shoulders curled in like a child’s. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her breasts were small and beautiful, the nipples maroon. She looked down, compliant. He felt drawn to lift her chin, uncurl her shoulders, but something held him back. Why now? A campus maintenance truck rattled outside.

  Then it came to him: she knew. She’d always had his allegiance. His love, really. She’d had it without a use for it and now she sensed change; she was afraid of losing her reign over him.

  “Do you really want this?” he asked. “I don’t think you do.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You don’t. If you don’t know, you don’t. Come on. I’ll walk you home.”

  She put her shirt back on and they left. For the first two blocks they didn’t say anything. Then Carrie asked, “How’s your mom?”

  “She’s okay. Pretty much the same.” He realized that though he’d always thought of Carrie as the one who could understand him, it was hard to talk to her about his mom. Susan knew more of the details.

  Carrie would always have him anyway, he thought, the way she had him now. Spring smells of dirt and rainwater rose from the ground. Love was a mixed business. As in building, he couldn’t afford the refinement he desired. He needed too much. Carrie had been his great romance. He hadn’t been hers. With Susan it wasn’t romance, exactly. It was home.

  * * *

  —

  He climbed two steps at a time to the room where she sat reading, with a yellow pencil. He could hear an ice-cream truck outside. It was spring break and they were the only ones in the old house. She looked up at him from her book.

  There had never been a question.

  An awkward twirl, a bump against her dresser, and they were finally on her bed, shoes dropping off the side, one then another.

  Okay, it was happening.

  She kept her glasses on, unbuttoning her blouse. Was this passion? If the phone had rung, he could have answered. Outside, dense cumulus clouds moved across the blue. He’d thought touching Carrie would have changed him into someone else. He was still himself now, opening Susan’s blouse. The afternoon had a feeling of summer.