Playdate by Thelma Adams

Author:Thelma Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2010-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Belle peered over the dashboard at the horizon. The eastern fires supercharged the sunset: Tang orange melted into raspberry sherbet. Belle could see that Encinitas was pretty, even today, and maybe the sunsets were better than Barstow’s. But pretty only went so far. She didn’t measure up to this landscape; she was not a pinky, peachy girl. She missed dust and rust and the ticky-tacky Barstow bungalows. How could she explain that she was a desert girl born to bake under the big blue sky, snug in a small inland crisscross of blacktop where everything she needed was just a bike ride away?

Belle missed zipping down to the playground against the warm wind, pretending her secondhand bike was a motorcycle tearing up the asphalt, until she slung it down next to the metal merry-go-round that got almost too hot to touch in the summer. She would join the throng already in motion, little kids in the middle and the big kids running in the dusty circular track before they leapt on board. They all laughed for the sheer dizziness of it as the shabby parched-grass park spun around them. And, as long as they were moving, they were beyond thoughts and rivalries, boys and girls, toddlers and big kids, spinning at the center of the universe, Barstow-variety.

Barstow was less than three hours north by car, but it seemed impossibly far to Belle. She even missed her hometown’s volatile, four-season weather: dry heat, gusty northeast winds, crackling wildfires, shattering thunderclaps, javelins of lightning, muddy flash floods, snow. She loved freezing star-speckled midnights followed by blazing noons. She wanted those three-digit days, so hot she waited eagerly for the sun to set. Looking at her father biting the inside of his cheek, his sloe eyes squinting at the road as if navigating a sandstorm, Belle knew it wasn’t a moment to say she’d rather be in Barstow. It just bummed him out, like all the things that bugged her that he couldn’t change or fix. Mommy needed to be here in Encinitas, that had been explained. On a good day that was enough. But today was not a good day, thanks to Mr. Baumgart and Max’s wild ride. At least she and her father shared the same funk at the moment.

“How was school?” Lance asked dutifully.

“Rough,” Belle said. “My oral report was a disaster—Krakatoa, East of Java. Baumgart’s going to flunk me because I raised a question that I couldn’t answer.”

“He probably couldn’t answer it, either,” Lance said sympathetically. “What was it?”

“Why are people so into their careers? And why do adults judge each other based on what they do?”

“Beats me,” Lance said with a shrug. “But it makes people feel comfortable if they can slot you by what you do.”

“What’s the difference between a job and a career?”

“You do a job just to make money,” Lance said, pausing to give the question some thought. “Flipping burgers at McDonald’s is a job, managing one is a career. But plenty of people start out in careers and end up in jobs.

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