Uncommon Type: Some Stories

A Special Weekend

It was the early spring of 1970 and because his tenth birthday was in a week and a half, Kenny Stahl, still thought of as the baby of the family, did not have to go to school. He was going to be picked up by his mother around noon to spend a special weekend with her, so he came to the breakfast table in his ordinary, nonschool clothes. His older brother, Kirk, and older sister, Karen, both in their uniforms for St. Philip Neri School, thought the deal was unfair. They wanted their mom to come and pick them up, too—to take them away, out of the house they had been moved into, to live again in Sacramento or anyplace else as long as they were the only kids and the dark moodiness of their father and the constant, sunny practicality of his second wife would not make their lives an emotional teeter-totter.

Kenny’s three stepsisters were seventeen, fifteen, and fourteen years old. His stepbrother had two years on him. None of them had opinions as to the fairness of the birthday plan. They had always lived together in Iron Bend, attended the unified public schools, and never had to wear uniforms. This weekend didn’t strike them as interesting, notable, or in any way special.

The small house they all lived in was far out of town on Webster Road, closer to Molinas than to Iron Bend, which was the county seat and where Kenny’s father was head cook at the Blue Gum Restaurant. Eucalyptus trees—blue gums—lined both sides of Webster Road for most of the miles between the two towns, scattering their leaves and nuts all over the two lanes and both shoulders. Decades ago the messy imports from Australia were planted as windbreaks for the almond groves as well as in a misinformed attempt to farm the trees for railroad ties. This was back when big money could be made in railroad ties, as long as they were not made of eucalyptus. Fortunes were lost on the twisting, peeling, gnarly-growing trees, three of which were spaced across the front yard of Kenny’s house; the constant rain of debris laid waste to every attempt to plant decent grass there. The backyard had sort of a lawn, a patch of weed-studded green, which the kids took turns mowing on occasion. Across the road were almond orchards. Almonds were a big industry then and still are now.

Kenny’s father had found a new job in Iron Bend, a new home, a new school, and, it turned out, a new family. He’d moved his three kids into the small house the very same night they had left Sacramento. All the boys slept in what had been a screened-in porch. All the girls were in one bedroom with twin bunk beds.

After two school buses had come and gone, Kenny spent the morning shuffling around the house as his father slept and his stepmother quietly cleaned up the breakfast dishes. He had never been at home without the other kids and was thrilled to have the run of the place. His only instruction was that he was to keep quiet. For a while, he watched TV with the volume nearly mute, but there was just one channel, Channel 12 from Chico, and during school hours there was nothing on that interested him. He played with the model ships and planes he had made from kits, using the top of the living room coffee table as the vast sea. He went through the dresser drawers of his brother and stepbrother looking for secrets, but their treasures were hidden elsewhere. In the backyard, he punted a football, trying to clear the nearest almond trees, gambling that in failure the ball wouldn’t get stuck in their branches. He tied a cut of an old bedsheet to a discarded beanpole, making a flag that he ran around with like he was leading a charge in the Civil War. He was trying to plant the flag into a hole when his stepmom called to him from the kitchen window she had cranked open.

“Kenny! Your mother is here!”

He hadn’t heard the car.

In the kitchen, he was caught short by a sight he had never seen in the near decade of his life; his dad was awake and sitting at the table with his morning coffee. His mother, his real mom, was sitting at the table as well, a cup of coffee of her own. His stepmother was on her feet, leaning against the counter, sipping coffee, too. The three caretakers of his world had never been in the same room at the same time.

“There’s the Kenny Bear!” Kenny’s mom was beaming. She looked like a secretary in a TV show—professionally dressed, wearing heels, her trim black hair neat, her makeup showing red lips that left marks on her coffee cup. She stood and hugged him with perfumed arms, kissing the top of his head. “Go get your bag and we’ll hit the road.”

Kenny had no idea about any bag, but his stepmother had put some clothes into one of her daughter’s small pink suitcases. He was packed. His father stood up and frazzled Kenny’s hair. “I gotta shower,” he said. “Go check out your mother’s hot wheels.”

“You got me Hot Wheels?” Kenny asked, thinking that his birthday present was going to be some miniature cars made of die-cast metal.

But no. In the driveway was an actual sports car, red, a two-seater, with wire wheels. The top was up and already littered with eucalyptus fallings. The only sports cars he’d ever seen were on television, driven by detectives and young doctors.

“Is this yours, Mom?”

“A friend let me borrow it.”

Kenny was looking through the driver’s side window. “Can I sit in it?”

“Go ahead.”

Kenny figured out how to open the door and sat behind the wheel. The dials and switches of the car looked like they came from a jet plane. The wood paneling was like furniture. The seats smelled like leather baseball mitts. The red circle in the middle of the steering wheel said FIAT. After his mother put the pink suitcase in the car’s trunk, she asked for Kenny’s help putting the top down.

“We’ll let the wind blow through our hair until we get to the highway, okay?” She undid the latches of the top and Kenny helped fold it back, bending the clear plastic window in on itself. His mother fired up the engine, which sounded like a dragon clearing its throat, then she backed out of the driveway—she had taken off her heels to work the pedals and put on a pair of sunglasses, the kind worn by snow skiers. Mother, son, and Fiat roared away from the house, down Webster Road, the gum tree shadows making the sunlight strobe in Kenny’s eyes, the wind sounding in his ears and whipping his hair from back to front. The car was the coolest, most boss ride Kenny had ever seen. He was the happiest he had been since he was a little kid.

The attendant at the Shell station in Iron Bend was all over the car, giving it and the woman driving it his keen attention. He filled the tank, wiped the windshield, checked the oil, and marveled at the “dago motor.” Kenny was offered a free soda pop from the vending machine. While he was pulling a bottle of root beer (always his choice) from the cold box, the man was helping his mother put the top back up and close the latches. The man was smiling and chatting, asking questions about if his mother was headed north or south and if she planned on coming back to Iron Bend soon. When they were back in the car and on the highway (heading south), she told her son the Shell man had “cow-eyes” and she laughed.

“Find us some music, honey,” she said, pointing to the tiny radio in the wooden dashboard. “Turn that knob, then that one for a station.”

Like a radio operator on a bomber, Kenny moved the red line of the dial along the numbers. The local radio station had a commercial for Stan Nathan’s Shoes for the Family, a store in town. Static and voices came and went until Kenny located the beam from a station that came in loud and clear. A man was singing about raindrops on his head. Kenny’s mom knew the words and sang along as she dug around in her purse at the same time she steered. She found a little leather case with a clasp on it, which she unsnapped to reveal the tips of cigarettes. They were long cigarettes, longer than those his father smoked. She had one in her lips, the red lipstick already staining the white filter, when she pushed a button on the dash. In a few seconds the button popped and she pulled the whole thing out. There was a glowing red coil on the end of the button, so hot she used it to light her long cigarette. She put the hot button back in its hole, then switched hands on the wheel to open a small, triangular window. As soon as there was a whistling crack, the smoke from her long cigarette was sucked out the window like a magic trick.

“Tell me about school, sweetie,” she said. “You like school?”

Kenny told her that St. Philip Neri wasn’t like St. Joseph, the only other school he had gone to, back in Sacramento. St. Philip Neri was small, not many kids went there, and some of the nuns didn’t dress like nuns. As he savored his bottle of root beer with short, airy sips, he told his mom about the bus rides to school, how the uniforms were red plaid instead of blue plaid and they had some days when they didn’t have to wear them, and that a kid in his class named Munson made models like he did and lived in a house with a pool, but not an inground pool like at the city park, but a circular aboveground pool. From just the one question, Kenny talked all the way from Iron Bend to the Butte City cutoff as his mother smoked. When the one radio station faded, Kenny found another, then another. His mom let him signal to the truck drivers they passed to blow their air horns. He would pump his fist up and down, and, if the drivers saw him, more often than not they would send out a toot. Once, Kenny saw a truck driver looking at them in his sideview mirror and got a blast on the horn without having to pump for it. The driver blew a kiss that was probably meant for his mom, not for Kenny.

They stopped for lunch in Maxwell at a diner called Kathy’s Kountry Kafe, a place for travelers and, in season, duck hunters. The Fiat was the only sports car in the parking lot. The waitress seemed to love chatting with Kenny’s mom—they talked like old friends or sisters. Kenny noticed that the waitress had very red lips, too. When she asked what to bring for the young man, he asked for a hamburger.

“Oh no, honey,” his mother said. “Hamburgers are for anytime. At a restaurant we should order from the menu.”

“Why not, Mom? Dad doesn’t care. And Nancy lets us.” Nancy was Kenny’s stepmother.

“What say we make this a special rule,” his mother said. “Just for you and me.” This seemed like an odd rule to suddenly impose. Kenny had never been told what to order or what he could not have. “I think you’ll like the hot turkey sandwich,” his mother said. “We’ll split it.”

Kenny thought she meant a sandwich that was going to be steaming hot and was not sure he was going to like it. “Can I have a milkshake?”

“Yep.” She smiled. “I’m flexible!”

Truth be told, Kenny liked the open-faced sandwich that was swimming in brown gravy and was not too hot at all. The white bread that sucked up all the gravy was just as good as the turkey meat, and mashed potatoes were his favorite food of all time. His mom had an igloo-shaped scoop of cottage cheese on tomato slices but cut up a few bites of the hot turkey for herself. His vanilla milkshake came in the freezing steel cup it was made in and twice filled up a fancy glass. He poured it himself, tapping the steel against the glass to help it along. This was so much milkshake, Kenny couldn’t finish it.

When his mother went to the restroom, Kenny noticed all the men travelers following her with their eyes, turning their heads to watch her go. One of them got up to pay his check, stopping by the booth where Kenny sat alone.

“Is that your mommy, slugger?” the man asked. He wore a brown suit with a tie partly undone. His eyeglasses had flip-up sunshades that stuck out like small visors.

“Um-hmmm,” Kenny said.

The man smiled. “You know, I got a boy at home just like you. But not a mommy like you got.” The man laughed out loud, then paid at the register.

When his mom came back from the restroom, her lips were freshly painted. She took a sip from what was left of Kenny’s milkshake, leaving red marks on the paper straw.

Sacramento was more than an hour down the highway. Kenny had not been to his hometown since his father packed their stuff into the station wagon, the day they moved to Iron Bend. The buildings had a look of comforting familiarity, but when his mom turned the Fiat off the highway it was at a street he had never traveled. When he saw the sign for the Leamington Hotel he felt a smile on his face—his parents had both worked at the Leamington, but now only his mom did. He and his brother and sister had spent time there, tagging along on some weekends when their folks were still married. They played in the big conference room when it was empty and would eat at the counter of the coffee shop when the place was not busy. Dad would pay them a nickel for every tray of potatoes they would wrap in tinfoil for baking en masse. If they asked permission, they could get their own chocolate milk from the dispenser, as long as they used the small glasses. This was long ago; a big chunk of Kenny’s life had passed since then.

His mother parked the Fiat in the back of the hotel and they entered through the kitchen—just as Kenny remembered doing in his dad’s station wagon and his mom’s Corolla. The staff all welcomed his mother and she greeted each person by name in response. A lady and one of the cooks could not believe that Kenny had grown up so much since they had last seen him, but Kenny could not remember who those people were, though he thought he recognized the lady’s cat’s-eye glasses with the thick lenses. The kitchen looked smaller than Kenny remembered it.

When he was little, Kenny’s mother was a waitress in the Leamington Hotel coffee shop and his father one of the cooks. She wore a uniform then, but now dressed in business clothes and had an office off the hotel lobby. Her office had a desk stacked with papers and a wall covered by a bulletin board that had many index cards, all written upon in different colored inks and arranged in neat columns.

“Kenny Bear, I have a few things to do, then I’ll tell you about your birthday surprise, okay?” She was sliding some papers into a leather folder. “Can you sit here for a bit?”

“Can I pretend this is my office and I work here?”

“Sure,” she said, smiling. “Here’re some notebooks, and look, this is an electric pencil sharpener.” She showed him how to push a pencil into the opening of the machine and make the grinding noise that produced a pencil point as sharp as a sewing pin. “Don’t answer the phone if it rings.”

A lady named Miss Abbott came into the office and asked, “So this is your little man?” She was older than his mom and wore glasses on a chain around her neck. Miss Abbott would keep an eye on Kenny and would know where his mother was if he needed her.

“Kenny is going to do some work for us today.”

“Wonderful,” Miss Abbott said. “I’ll give you some stamps and an ink pad to make everything official. Would you like that?”

His mother left, carrying her leather folder. Kenny sat in her chair behind her desk. Miss Abbott brought him some stamps that said the date on them and INVOICE and RECEIVED as well as a metal rectangular box with blue ink on a pad.

“You know,” Miss Abbott said, “I have a nephew just your age.”

Kenny used the stamps and ink on a few pages of a notebook, then, bored, looked through the top drawers of the desk. One drawer had dividers that separated paper clips, boxes of staples, rubber bands, pencils, and some pens that said LEAMINGTON HOTEL on the sides. Another drawer had envelopes and letter paper that said LEAMINGTON HOTEL with a little drawing of the building at the top of each sheet.

He got up from the desk, went to the door, and saw Miss Abbott at a desk of her own, typing some kind of letter.

“Miss Abbott,” Kenny said. “May I use some paper that says ‘Leamington Hotel’ on it?”

Miss Abbott kept typing. “What’s that?” she asked without looking up.

“May I use some paper that says ‘Leamington Hotel’ on it?”

“Go ahead,” she said as she kept on typing.

Kenny used the stamps and hotel pens on the paper, drawing lines and signing his name next to the stamps. Then he had an idea.

He took the cover off the typewriter that was on its own little desk beside his mother’s. The machine was light blue, had the letters IBM on the front, and was really big, taking up most of its special table. He rolled a sheet of paper into the workings of the typewriter and pressed on the keys, but they were dead. Nothing happened. Kenny was about to ask Miss Abbott why the typewriter didn’t work but then he saw the rocker switch that said ON/OFF and that the OFF part was depressed. He rocked it to ON and the machine hummed and vibrated. The mechanical ball with the letters on it swept back and forth once, then stopped on the left side. The carriage with the paper in it did not move, which made Kenny think the typewriter must be part computer or one of those Teletype machines.

He tried to type his name, but it came out That’s when he discovered that if he kept the key pressed down, the letter repeated, sounding like a machine gun— . What confused him the most was the lack of a handle he was supposed to slap to make the page go back. There was none. There was a very big button that said RETURN on it. When he pressed that the ball moved back with a chunk and he could type a new line. This was now, officially, the most amazing typewriter Kenny had ever seen or heard of.

Kenny did not know how to type like a grown-up—like Miss Abbott or his mom—so he used just one finger, finding the letters he wanted but sometimes hitting ones he didn’t— . By going very slowly and being very careful he finally typed his name correctly— —and rolled that page out of the IBM. He put the date stamp next to his name along with .

“How about a coffee break?” Miss Abbott was standing in the door.

“I don’t drink coffee,” Kenny said.

Miss Abbott nodded. “Well, let’s see what else we can find, shall we?”

He followed her into the lobby, where Kenny saw his mother standing with a group of men. They were all talking business, but Kenny still called out to her.

“Mom!” he hollered, pointing toward the hotel kitchen. “I’m taking a coffee break!”

She turned to him and smiled and gave a little wave, then turned back to the businessmen.

In the kitchen, he asked Miss Abbott if he could get his own chocolate milk like he used to, but the dispenser no longer held chocolate milk. Just regular milk and something called Skim. Instead, Miss Abbott went to a silver refrigerator and pulled out a carton of chocolate milk, grabbed one of the big drinking glasses, and filled it to the top. This was more chocolate milk than Kenny had ever been allowed, which he thought was great. Miss Abbott got herself some coffee out of a round, glass pitcher that sat on a Bunn Coffee Service maker. They could not take their drinks back through the lobby, so they went into the coffee shop, which looked and smelled exactly the same as when Kenny was little. They sat in an empty booth, not at the counter.

“Do you remember me?” she asked him. “I worked here with your daddy. Before your mommy started.” Miss Abbott asked Kenny more questions, mostly if he liked the same things her nephew liked—baseball, karate class, and TV shows. Kenny told her they only got Channel 12 from Chico.

Back in his mother’s office he decided to write her a letter on the IBM typewriter. He started with a new sheet of Leamington Hotel paper and went very slowly.

Kenny folded the letter as best he could and put it into a hotel envelope and licked the seal, careful not to cut his tongue on the sharp edge. He wrote TO MOM on the front with a Leamington Hotel pen, then looked for a place to hide the letter, deciding the best place would be in a desk drawer under a few pages of Leamington Hotel stationery.

Kenny was playing with some rubber bands when his mom came back into her office. She was with a man who had dark brown skin and the straightest, blackest hair. “Kenny, this is Mr. Garcia. He let us borrow his car for the ride down today.”

“Hello,” Kenny said. “That’s your car? The sports car?”

“It is,” Mr. Garcia said. “I’m glad to meet you. But let’s do it proper, shall we? Stand up.”

Kenny did as he was told.

“Now,” Mr. Garcia continued, “we shake hands. Grab firm now.”

Kenny squeezed Mr. Garcia’s hand as hard as he could.

“Don’t hurt me.” Mr. Garcia chuckled. Kenny’s mom beamed at the two men. “Now, look me in the eye, just like I look at you. Good. Now you say, ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Kenny repeated.

“Now comes the most important part. We ask each other a question, engage each other, man to man, see? I’m going to ask you this—do you know what ‘Fiat’ stands for?”

Kenny shook his head, because he was confused by the question and because he had no idea what was going on. No one had ever explained to him how to shake hands.

“‘Fix it again, Tony.’” Mr. Garcia laughed. “Now you ask me a question. Go ahead.”

“Um.” Kenny had to think of something to say. He was looking at Mr. Garcia’s head of thick, jet-black hair, held stiffly in place and so shiny. That was when he remembered seeing Mr. Garcia before, when he was little, when he was playing in the hotel with his brother and sister. He remembered that Mr. Garcia did not work in the kitchen with his dad, but would come in from the lobby wearing a suit. “You work here, too, like my mom, don’t you?”

Mr. Garcia and his mom shared a glance and a smile. “I used to, Kenny, but not anymore. Now I’m at the Senator.”

“You’re a senator?” Kenny knew what a senator was from the news on Channel 12.

“Mr. Garcia works at the Senator Hotel, Kenny,” his mother said. “And he has a big surprise for you.”

“You haven’t told him?” Mr. Garcia asked.

“I thought it should be your treat,” she said.

“Okay.” Mr. Garcia looked at Kenny. “I hear you have a birthday coming up, is that right?”

Kenny nodded. “I’m going to be ten.”

“Have you ever flown?”

“You mean, in an airplane?”

“Have you?”

Kenny looked at his mother. Maybe, when he was a baby, she had taken him on an airliner but he had been too little to remember. “Have I, Mom?”

“Jose is a pilot. He has a plane and wants to take you up for a ride. Won’t that be fun?”

Kenny had never met a pilot before who owned his own airplane. Where was Mr. Garcia’s uniform? Was he in the Air Force?

“What are you doing tomorrow?” Mr. Garcia asked. “Want to go up?”

Kenny looked at his mother. “Can I, Mom?”

“Yep,” she said. “I’m flexible.”

Kenny and his mother had their dinner at a restaurant called the Rosemount. She knew everybody who worked there. The waiter took away two place settings because his mom said that she was on “a special date with this young man,” meaning Kenny. The menus were as big as newspapers. He had spaghetti and, for dessert, the waiter brought him a piece of chocolate cake as big as his shoe. He couldn’t finish it all. His mother smoked her long cigarettes and drank an after-dinner coffee. One of the cooks came out, a fellow Kenny remembered from his days at the Leamington. The cook’s name was Bruce. He sat at the table with the two of them and talked with his mom for a while, mostly laughing.

“Good God, Kenny,” Bruce said to him. “You are growing up as fast as alfalfa.” Bruce could do an amazing trick—he could throw a drinking straw into a raw potato and make it stick like an arrow. On the way out through the kitchen—Mom had parked the Fiat in the back—Bruce did the trick for Kenny. Whap! And the straw almost went all the way through the potato. It was amazing!

His mom lived in a two-story building with a stairway in the middle that separated the two apartments on each floor. The living room of her place had something called a Murphy bed that folded up and disappeared into the wall. When his mom pulled the bed down, it was already made. She had a small color TV on a rolling stand that she turned to face the bed, but before he could watch it she made Kenny take a bath.

The bathroom was small and the tub was tiny, so it quickly filled up with water. On one shelf there were bath soaps and other girlie things, all in colorful bottles and tubes with flowers on the labels. On another shelf was a can of Gillette shaving cream and a man’s razor made by Wilkinson Sword. Kenny played in the tub until his fingers wrinkled and the water got cold. Pajamas had been packed in the pink suitcase from home, and, as he put them on, he smelled popcorn. His mom had made some, shaking it to life in a pot on her little kitchen stove.

“Find something to watch on TV, honey,” she called out as she melted butter in a saucepan to pour over the popcorn.

Kenny turned on the TV and it came to life immediately, without having to warm up like the one at home. He was delighted to see all the old channels, the ones he had watched before his mom moved out of the house and his dad got married again. There were shows on Channels 3, 6, 10, and 13. And, on the other channel knob, the one that turned rather than clicked, there was a Channel 40. Every channel was in color, too, except the old movie on Channel 40. He settled on a show called The Name of the Game, which was fine with his mom.

They lay on the Murphy bed together, eating popcorn. His mom kicked off her shoes and put her arm around her son’s shoulders, her fingers playing in his hair. At one point she sat up and said, “Rub Momma’s neck some.” Kenny rose onto his knees and tried to give her neck a massage, moving her hair out of the way and avoiding the little chain around her neck. After a few minutes she thanked him and said that she loved her little Kenny. They both lay back down. The next TV show came on—Bracken’s World, in which grown-ups went on and on about things Kenny could not understand. He was asleep before the first commercial.

Music was playing on a radio when Kenny woke up in the morning. His mother was in the kitchen, having already made coffee in a glass percolator on the stove. Kenny had to hop down from the Murphy bed because it was a bit high.

“Well, hello, sleepy-bear.” His mother kissed his head. “We have a big problem.”

“What?” Kenny rubbed his eyes as he sat at the two-seat kitchen table.

“I didn’t get milk yesterday.” She did have a can of something called Evaporated Milk—there was a cartoon cow on the label—that she was using for her morning coffee. “Can you go around to Louie’s Market and get a half gallon of milk? You’ll need some for your cereal.”

“I can.”

Kenny had no idea where Louie’s Market was. His mom explained that it was out the front door, one right turn, then one left turn. A three-minute walk. There were some dollar bills on her dresser in the bedroom, he could take two and buy himself a treat for later.

Kenny dressed in the same clothes he wore the day before and went into his mom’s tiny bedroom. There was money on her dresser, so he took two one-dollar bills. Her closet door was open with the light on inside; Kenny could see all her shoes on the floor and her dresses and skirts on hangers. There was also a man’s suit jacket and pants hanging in the closet and some ties on little hooks. A pair of man’s shoes were in there with her high heels.

The streets around the apartment were lined with big trees, but not the blue gums of Webster Road. These trees had wide green leaves and branches that were thick and high. The roots of the tall, old trees had grown so large they buckled the sidewalks and made them uneven. Kenny carried the two one-dollar bills in his hand as he turned right, then left, finding Louie’s Market in less than three minutes.

A Japanese man was behind the cash register, surrounded by candies and sweets on display. Kenny found the dairy case and carried a half gallon of milk over to pay for it. As the Japanese man rang up the sale he asked, “Who are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

Kenny told him his mother lived nearby and had forgotten to buy milk.

“Who is your mother?” the man asked. When Kenny told him, he said “Oh! Your mother is a nice lady. A very pretty lady. And you are her boy? How old are you?”

“In nine days ten,” Kenny said.

“I have a girl just like you,” the grocer said.

For the treat he would have later, Kenny picked out a twin pack of Hostess CupCakes, chocolate with the swirl of white icing down the middle. They cost twenty-five cents, which Kenny hoped was not too much. His mother said nothing when he got back with the milk. She made him toast to eat along with his bowl of Rice Krispies and cut up sections of a seedless orange.

Kenny was watching Channel 40—a whole morning of cartoons and commercials for toys—when the phone on the wall of the kitchen rang. After saying hello, his mother said something he did not understand.

“Que paso, mi amor? What? Oh, no! He was looking forward to it. Are you sure?” Kenny looked at his mom, she at him as she listened. “Oh! Yes, that could work. Yes, two birds with one stone. Love it. Okay.” She listened on the phone for a moment more, then giggled as she hung up.

“Kenny Bear,” she sang, coming into the room. “Change of plans. Jose, Mr. Garcia, had business come up and he can’t fly you in his plane today. But…” She cocked her head, as though a more exciting possibility was about to be floated, like there was a trip on a rocket ship available instead. “He can fly you all the way home tomorrow! We won’t have to drive.”

Kenny did not quite understand how a flight home on an airplane was possible. Would the plane land on Webster Road right at his house? Wouldn’t they crash into the blue gum trees?

With the whole day now to fill, Kenny and his mom spent the late morning at Fairytale Town, a place for kids run by the Parks Department. There were little houses painted to look like they were made of straw, sticks, and stones; a long and curling version of a yellow brick road; and puppet shows every hour until 3:00 p.m. The whole family used to visit the storybook village when Kenny was little, although never with Dad, who was always sleeping at home. Since Kenny was now nearly ten years old, the fairy-tale sets were too young for him. Even the swings were for kids littler than Kenny.

The zoo was nearby. That, too, had been a favorite destination when Kenny was smaller. The monkeys still aired out their limbs by swinging on the rings in their cage, the elephants were still in a pen on the other side of the fence that was no longer as tall as it had been, and the giraffes could still be fed carrots from pails full of them, kept on hand by the zookeepers. He and his mom stayed at the zoo longer than they did Fairytale Town, lingering in the Reptile House. There was a huge python in there, wrapped around part of a tree with his head, as big as a football, right next to the window glass.

For lunch they ate at a little market that also had sidewalk tables with checkerboard cloths. Kenny had a tuna sandwich with no lettuce or tomato, just the tuna, and his mother had a small tub of pasta salad. To drink, there was golden juice that came in bottles shaped like apples—this was instead of a Coke. Kenny was disappointed at first, but the apple juice was so sweet, so thick that his whole body felt good when the drink slid down his throat and into his tummy. He imagined that must be what drinking wine was like, since grown-ups were always making such a big deal about “fine wines.” He had his Hostess cupcakes for dessert.

“What shall we do now, Kenny Bear?” his mom asked. “What if we tried our hands at peewee golf?”

She drove the red Fiat onto the freeway, heading west toward the foothills. When they crossed the river, Kenny realized they were near the exit for Sunset Avenue, which was the off-ramp they used to take to get home, to his old house. He recognized the big green sign with the white arrow and SUNSET AVE, and he saw the Chevron station on one side and the Phillips 66 station on the other. But his mom didn’t merge into the exit lane. She kept going. Farther down the highway a colorful little town of tiny windmills and castles appeared, the Miniature Golf & Family Fun Center. The place looked brand-new and magical.

Because it was a Saturday, there was a pretty good crowd made up of carloads of families and idle kids who had ridden their bikes or been dropped off, kids who were supplied with enough money for a day of Fun-with-a-capital-F. There was a circle of baseball batting cages with automatic pitching machines, an arcade filled with pinball and shooting games. A snack bar served corn dogs and giant pretzels and Pepsi-Cola. Kenny and his mom had to wait in line to get the balls and the right-size putters from a teenage boy who smiled at his mom with the same cow eyes as the man at the Shell station in Iron Bend. There was a choice of two courses to play and the young man behind the counter not only suggested the Magic-Land course, with the castle, but also walked them to the first hole and took pains to explain how to use the little pencil to keep score on the card. He also explained that if they got a hole in one on the eighteenth, they’d win a free game.

“I think we have the gist of it,” his mom said to the kid, hoping to get rid of him. Still, he lingered until they both putted. He wished them a good round and went back to the counter to hand out more putters and colored golf balls.

They never bothered to keep score. Kenny hacked at his ball, the purple one, caring more about distance than accuracy, taking as many strokes as necessary to make the hole. His mom was a bit more careful. The most fun hole was the one where Kenny hit his ball into a polka-dotted toadstool and it disappeared for a few seconds before coming out of one of three tubes onto a lower circular green. From there, he had to hit the ball into a giant frog’s mouth that moved up and down like the drawbridge on a castle. Again, the ball disappeared, coming out at an even lower green and nearly rolling right into the cup. He only had to tap the purple ball with his short putter. His mom took forever to make it through the frog’s mouth.

“Peewee golf is pretty fun,” he said to his mom when they were back in the Fiat. She had gotten him a corn dog, which he ate before getting into the sports car.

“You’re awfully good at it,” she said, shifting gears as they pulled out of the Family Fun Center parking lot and headed back into the city, back toward the Sunset Avenue off-ramp.

“Mom?” he asked. She was lighting another of her long cigarettes with the Fiat’s lighter. “Can we go see the old house?”

His mother blew smoke out of her mouth, and she watched it disappear into the wind. She did not want to see the old house. She had brought Kenny home from the hospital to that house two days after he was born. His brother and sister had been born in Berkeley, but they had few memories of the apartment there. She had watched her older kids play in the backyard of that house as she carried little Kenny around in the crook of her hip. Kenny had crawled on the hooked rug—her mother’s old hooked rug—in the living room until he learned to walk on it. That house carried memories of Christmases and Halloweens, of birthday parties for the kids in the neighborhood, the sweeter memories of her marriage and her life as a mother.

But unhappiness also lingered in the corners of the place, arguments sure to be echoing still, a loneliness that haunted the nights after the kids were asleep as well as the days when they were a maddening handful. To escape—the house, the kids, the boredom found in the shadows of discontent—she took a job at the Leamington Hotel. There was an opening for a waitress. She’d drive in early, before her husband came in for the lunch and dinner shift, leaving the kids with one of the Mormon teenage girls who lived down the block. The money was nice, of course, but the activity was what she looked forward to every day—having a place to go, work to do, and people to talk with. She was still Mrs. Karl Stahl, and her husband was the head of the kitchen, but everyone, including Jose Garcia, called her by her first name. She proved to be so very good with numbers that the hotel’s general manager moved her from the coffee shop to a bookkeeper’s desk. She had risen to the sales office after she divorced Kenny’s father and was no longer Mrs. Karl Stahl.

She had walked away from that old house a lifetime ago. She did not want to see the place again.

“Sure,” she said to her son. “I’m flexible.”

She turned off the freeway, made a right at the Phillips 66 station, and continued down Sunset Avenue to Palmetto Street. She turned left on Palmetto to Derby Street, downshifted as she made the right turn, crossed Vista and Bush Streets, then pulled over and stopped in front of 4114.

Kenny had just two homes, and this was his first. He stared at it. The mailbox by the driveway was the same, the X-frame railing on the porch was as he remembered, but the tree in the front yard looked weirdly small. The lawn was mowed, he’d never seen the grass so neat, and flowers were planted in arrangements along the front of the house. They had never had flowers along the front of the house. The big window had blue curtains in it, not the white ones from when he was a kid. The garage door was closed, unlike when he lived there and it stayed open for easy access to all the bikes and toys and the back rooms of the house. Rather than his father’s old station wagon or his mother’s Corolla, a new Dodge Dart was parked in the driveway.

The Anhalters had lived next door. Kenny expected to see their white pickup truck, but it was not around. The house across the street had a For Sale sign in the front yard. “The Callendars are selling their house,” Kenny said.

“Looks like they’ve already moved,” his mother told him. Yes, the house looked empty. The Callendar kids, Brenda and Steve, were not twins but looked like they’d been born on the same day. They rode Schwinn bikes, had a dog named Biscuit, had been on a swimming team, and now lived somewhere else.

Kenny and his mom sat in the Fiat for a few minutes. Kenny looked at the window of what had once been his bedroom. The shutters with the moving slats were still there, but had been painted blue, like the living room curtains. The shutters had been a natural wood when he and Kirk slept in their twin beds in that bedroom. It didn’t seem right that they were now blue.

“I was born here, right, Mom?”

She was looking down the street, not at the house with the blue window shades. “You were born in the hospital.”

“Oh, I know that,” he said. “But I was a little baby here, right?”

His mother started the Fiat and put it into gear. “Yep,” she said over the growl of the motor. On the night she left the house at 4114 Derby, her children were asleep in their beds and their father was standing in the kitchen, silent. She did not see any of them again for seven weeks. Kenny was five years old.

By the time they had driven back to the apartment, she had smoked three of her long cigarettes, the smoke sailing away in the wind of the open-top sports car.

She took him to dinner at the Senator Hotel, which was downtown like the Leamington, but much fancier and crowded with men in suits who all wore name tags. They ate in the coffee shop. Jose Garcia stopped by to see them as Kenny was eating his dessert, a huge slice of cherry pie with ice cream on top of it—à la mode, the waitress called it. Kenny didn’t care too much for the cherries, but he finished every bite of the ice cream.

“What say we wheels up at noon?” Mr. Garcia said. “We’ll see the delta for a while then head up north. Have you ever been in a plane before, Kenny?”

He had already been asked that question but politely answered again. “Never.”

“You may just fall in love with the sky,” Mr. Garcia said. As he left, he kissed Kenny’s mom on the cheek. Kenny had never seen that happen in real life before, a man kissing a woman on the cheek. His dad never kissed Kenny’s stepmom like that, just because he was leaving the room. Kissing on the cheek was something men and women did on TV.

Jose Garcia took them to breakfast the next morning, to a coffee shop called Pancake Parade with a décor that made the place look like a circus. The two men ordered waffles and, for Kenny’s mom, another igloo of cottage cheese. As they were eating, car after car of well-dressed families came in, filling up the place. They were all in Sunday church clothes—the dads wore suits, the moms and girls were in nice dresses. Some of the boys wore neckties and were the same age as Kenny. With all those people talking and ordering breakfast the place sounded as loud as a circus.

When Jose and his mom finally finished their coffee—the waitress kept coming over and offering refills—Mom re-redded her lips and they went back out to the Fiat. Mr. Garcia drove, wearing a pair of gold metal-frame glasses with mirror lenses and hooks to go around his ears. His mom had on her skier’s shades. Kenny sat in the little area behind the seats, where the wind was the wildest and made it difficult to hear. For the whole ride, he never knew what the grown-ups were saying.

He had fun back there, though, sitting sideways and waving his hands up in the slipstream of the open top. They drove past solid brick houses with wide lawns and a huge green park with a golf course. They came to a place called Executive Field, which turned out to be an airport, but Jose did not use the parking lot. He drove around to a gate that opened and stopped by some small airplanes that were parked side by side.

“Ready to cheat fate, Ken?” Mr. Garcia said.

“Are we flying in one of those?” Kenny pointed to the planes. They were not like the model airplanes he had at home, which were from the war—fighters and a B-17 bomber. These planes were small and had no machine guns, and they did not look like they could go very fast, even though some had two motors.

“The Comanche,” Mr. Garcia said. He was walking toward a white plane with a red stripe, one of the single-engine aircraft.

The doors opened on the plane just like a car, and Mr. Garcia left them ajar to cool off the inside. Kenny got to stand on the wing and look inside, at the gauges and the dials and the steering wheel and the foot pedals. There were two of everything—plus some odd switches and controls that all looked very scientific. Mr. Garcia walked around the plane a few times, then looked at some papers he had folded into sleeves on one of the doors.

Kenny’s mom came from the car with the pink suitcase. “I think you want to ride up front, don’t you?” she said to him. She folded down one of the seats and climbed into the back, setting the pink case beside her.

“I get to sit here?” Kenny meant behind the wheel, like the copilot.

“I need a copilot,” Mr. Garcia said. “Your mom’s shaky on the stick.” He laughed, then showed Kenny how to buckle his harness. Mr. Garcia had to pull the straps tight for him, though. Then he pulled a small pair of dark sunglasses out of his pocket and handed them to Kenny. “The sun is bright up there.”

The glasses were gold metal–framed like Mr. Garcia’s, but not nearly as expensive. They, too, had hooks that went around the ears. The sunglasses were oversize for Kenny’s almost-ten-year-old head, but he didn’t know that. He turned to show his mom how he looked. He gave her the thumbs-up and all of them laughed.

The starting of the engine was very loud, and not just because the Comanche’s doors were still open. The body of the plane shook and the propeller seemed to snap with each turn. Mr. Garcia worked switches and knobs and made the engine roar a few times. He put on a set of earphones and did something that got the plane moving even though the doors were still open. They passed other parked planes, then wide strips of grass where little signs with letters and numbers were planted. At one end of the long runway, the plane came to a stop. Mr. Garcia reached across Kenny and latched his door closed, then did the same to the door on his own side. The motor was still very loud, but the plane was not as wobbly.

“Ready?” Mr. Garcia shouted. Kenny nodded. His mother flashed another thumbs-up. She reached forward and rubbed her son’s head. If she said something, Kenny did not hear her, but he could see her large grin.

As the plane sped up and the noise got louder, a feeling came over Kenny that he had never, ever had before. They were moving faster and faster and then lifting up, making his stomach go down but the top of his head feel like it was rising. The ground quickly got smaller; soon the streets and houses and cars no longer looked real. Kenny turned to look out the side window. The wing of the plane blocked his view, so he leaned forward to see the earth and sky in front of the plane.

He saw the buildings downtown and recognized what had once been his world: the Tower Theatre and the grid of the streets, the Old Fort—Sutter’s Mill, it was called, where gold was discovered in pioneer days—and there was the Leamington Hotel. He could read the sign.

Kenny’s first flight in an airplane was the most amazing event of his life. His head seemed to fill up with air and his breath went short. The sun was brighter than it had ever been before, and Kenny was glad he had dark glasses. When Mr. Garcia turned the plane by dipping the wings to the left, the vast delta area of the river took up the view. There were islands down there, separated by twisted waterways and dikes. Right next to the town where Kenny was born lived farmers who needed a boat to get to town. Kenny had no idea!

“That’s what the Mekong looks like!” Mr. Garcia shouted. He was pointing out the window. Kenny nodded out of habit, not sure if he was expected to say something. “That’s the bargain you make with Uncle Sam! He teaches you to fly then sends you bird-dogging in Vietnam!”

Kenny knew about Vietnam because the war was on Channel 12 from Chico. What a Mekong was, he had no idea.

They flew southwest, ascending so high in the sky the cars and trucks on the highways looked like they were barely moving. The waters of the river grew wide and changed hue when they met the salt water of San Francisco Bay. Ships were down in the wide river, big ships that now looked like the toy models Kenny played with on the coffee table. When Mr. Garcia dipped the wings again, Kenny’s tummy went floppy, but just for a moment.

Now they were flying north. Mr. Garcia slid half of his headset off one of his ears. “I need you to fly for a few minutes, Kenny,” he said loudly.

“I don’t know how to fly a plane!” Kenny looked at Mr. Garcia as if he were a crazy person.

“Can you imagine driving a car?”

“Yes.”

“Take hold of the yoke,” Mr. Garcia said. The yoke was half steering wheel, half handlebars. Kenny had to sit up straight to reach the handles. “The plane will go where you point it. Pull back some and get the feel of the stick.”

Kenny used more muscle than he thought he had and, sure enough, the yoke came back toward him. As it did, the sky filled the front window and the engine slowed.

“See?” Mr. Garcia said. “Now level off just as easy.”

The grown man had his hand on his flight controls, but let Kenny do the work of pushing the nose of the plane back down. The earth below took up some of the window again.

“Can I turn?” Kenny yelled.

“You’re the pilot,” Mr. Garcia said.

Very, very carefully, Kenny turned the handlebar-yoke to the right, and the plane tipped ever so slightly. Kenny could feel the change in direction. He reversed his piloting motion and felt the plane ease back.

“If you were a little taller,” Mr. Garcia said, “I’d let you work the rudder, but you can’t reach the pedals. Maybe in a year. Next year.”

Kenny imagined himself, at age eleven, flying the Comanche all by himself with his mom in the backseat.

“What I need you to do now is, see Mount Shasta up ahead?” Shasta, the massive volcano that loomed over the valley up north, was forever covered with snow. On clear days in Iron Bend the mountain looked like an enormous painting off in the distance. From Kenny’s seat in the front of the airplane, Shasta was a triangle of white, poking up over the horizon. “Fly directly at it, okay?”

“Okay!” Kenny set his eyes on the mountain and tried to keep the nose of the plane smack on target while Mr. Garcia pulled some papers out of the side of his seat and a ballpoint pen from his pocket. He wrote some things down, then studied a map. Kenny wasn’t sure how much time went by as he flew the plane straight and true, it could have been a few minutes or most of the flight home, but he never let the plane stray. More of Mount Shasta was visible by the time Mr. Garcia folded up the map and clicked his pen closed.

“Atta boy, Kenny,” he said as he took over the yoke. “You have the makings of a pilot.”

“Good job, honey!” his mom called from the back of the plane. When Kenny looked over his shoulder, her smile was nearly as big as the one on his face.

Looking out the window, Kenny saw the lanes of the highway that led straight up the valley through towns like Willows and Orland leading to Iron Bend and beyond. Just two days ago he and his mom had been down below on that highway. Now, he was miles above it.

After Kenny had flown the plane he had to pop his ears, yawning widely and blowing his nose with his mouth closed. It didn’t hurt. The plane was descending, the engine sounding louder as the ground grew closer and the landmarks of Iron Bend showed themselves. There was the logging yard south of town, then the two motels off the highway, the old grain silos that held no grain, and the parking lot of the Shopping Plaza with the Montgomery Ward. Kenny had never been told there was an airport in Iron Bend, but there it was, beyond the Union High football field.

The plane jiggled and shook as Mr. Garcia came in for the landing. He did something to the engine that made it go soft and nearly silent just before the wheels squeeched on the concrete runway. He drove the airplane like a car and came to a stop a few feet from where other planes were parked. When he shut the engine off, the propeller kept going around a few times until seizing up with a jerk. Without the engine, the quiet was odd, making the unclicking of the seat belts sound crisply clear, like something from a movie at the State Theater.

“Cheated death again,” Mr. Garcia said without having to shout.

“Honestly,” said Kenny’s mom. “Do you have to put it that way?”

Mr. Garcia laughed, leaned back, and kissed her on the cheek.

The airport had a very small coffee shop. There were no customers and, it appeared, no staff. Kenny, still wearing his dark pilot glasses, sat at a table, the pink suitcase on the floor at his feet while his mom put coins into a pay phone on the wall. She dialed, waited, then hung up and put the same coins back into the phone. She dialed another number before she was able to talk to anyone.

“Well, the line was busy,” she said into the phone. “Can you come get him? Because we have to get back. How long? All right.” She hung up and came over to the bench. “Your dad is coming from work to pick you up. Let’s see if there’s some hot cocoa for you and coffee for me.”

Kenny could see through the glass coffee shop door into the office of the airport. Mr. Garcia—still wearing his dark glasses, too—was talking to a man who was sitting at a desk. Kenny heard a loud whirring noise that turned out to be a machine that made hot chocolate. When his mom brought it to him in a Styrofoam cup, one sip told Kenny the cocoa was too watery. He didn’t finish it.

His dad came, driving the station wagon. He left the motor running as he got out of the car, wearing his cook’s pants and heavy shoes. He shook hands with Mr. Garcia, said a few words to Kenny’s mom, then picked up the small pink suitcase and carried it out to the car.

Kenny sat in the front seat, just like he did in the airplane. As they drove out of the parking lot, his father asked him about his dark glasses.

“Mr. Garcia gave them to me,” Kenny said.

Kenny told his father about aiming for Mount Shasta, then about going to the zoo and the peewee golf and seeing the old house.

“Ah,” his father said. He said it again when Kenny told him the Callendars had moved away.

As they rode into town and back to the Blue Gum Restaurant, Kenny looked out the window, his eyes tinted a deep blue by his metal-framed sunglasses, scanning the sky. Mr. Garcia had probably taken off by now, and Kenny hoped to see the plane up there. His mom would be sitting in the copilot’s seat.

But there was no sign of them. None at all.