Pasadena by David Ebershoff

Author:David Ebershoff [Ebershoff, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-43453-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

4

Bruder was right, and by the first of November rain arrived, the sky low and turning like the underside of the ocean, and a two-day downpour softened and loosened the hill road into a muddy chute. The irrigation ditches ran with dirty water, yellow foam quivering, and the kitchen roof leaked and the window by Linda’s bed swelled in its case. One morning while returning from the house with the groceries Linda slipped, the box of food sliding out of her hands and over the edge of the road, a pot roast (“For you!” Lolly had said) lost to the coyotes. Then Bruder met her on the road and opened an umbrella over her. The mud had splattered her skirt like bloodstains and her hair lay wet and flat round her face. He found her beautiful like this—strong, but quiet; and during the moments when Linda needed him most, Bruder could imagine a future that held them together in its palm. “You’ll need better boots,” he said. In the ranch house he gave her a box from the Pasadena Grocery & Department Store, and inside, beneath leaves of lettuce-colored tissue, were two red rubber boots lined with checked cloth. He knelt and dried her feet and then helped her put them on. He had seen them in the window and thought of Linda, and now, as he told her this, she felt a stir within. She tested the boots down the long narrow hall in the ranch house, her hands on her hips. He leaned in the doorframe and watched, happy that she liked the gift, and Linda said that she would wear them through the season, and because Bruder was guileless and had nothing to hide—or so he told himself—he cheerfully said, “I bought Rosa a pair, too.”

“Rosa?”

Bruder failed to see the hardening pique in Linda’s eye; he missed the jealousy curling her fists. She said that she was busy and had to return to the kitchen. She said good-bye efficiently, and again Bruder didn’t correctly read her emotions, and he left Linda for the packinghouse content—as much as a young man like Bruder is ever content—that he had brought simple joy to two girls, and he pondered the similarities between Linda and Rosa and he came up with more than a few.

Why did Bruder misunderstand Linda so completely? It was a question she asked herself, flipping about in her bed, but one he never put upon his own conscience. If he had, he might have realized that over the years he had come to expect people to speak their minds. He had grown up with Mrs. Banning sucking her cheek and saying to him, “Sometimes you make me wonder if you’re all there.” And the children at the Valley Hunt Club, screaming through the window of the kitchen where Bruder sweated as he mashed the bananas for the angel-cream pies: “Freak! Freak! Bruder can’t speak!” And Rosa, a young woman with a wise soul, leaning into him softly: “I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have a friend like you.

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