A World the Color of Salt Read Online Free

off it forever. I was putting gear back in the car when she came up from the sand, walking on the side of her foot, saying “Ow-w!” and laughing at the same time. The small guy with her danced in front of her, holding her at arm’s length around the waist as he kept saying, “Bummer, man.” With one hand she clutched at the top of his head, and with the other grabbed up her ankle to inspect her foot, the blood on the bottom bright and shiny as an open tomato and the sand like white salt around the rim. To the rescue I came. I gave her a minipad from my purse, told her to stick it in her shoe till we could get her someplace. The little dude split, saying he’d be in touch. I said I knew where there was an emergency hospital. On the way to ER, she kept telling me how nice it was of me to do this, and then she’d convulse with giggles. I thought, What we have here is a certifiable loony, until she told me that the little dude had been following heraround all afternoon so she wound up smoking dope with him in a cove. She hadn’t been able to figure out how she was going to tell him she wasn’t going home with him, and that made her nervous, which started her laughing, and he just thought she was having a good time.
    Sometime during our drive to the hospital she asked me if I was home on spring break, meaning, was I a college student? No-o-o, I said. But I didn’t mention what I did. I just said thanks for the compliment. I said I worked for the county. Later, by months, I told her precisely how.
    At Chi-Chi’s, six overhead TVs were tuned to rock video, as always. Go to the restroom and you get piped-in KROQ, as in K-Rock. Food servers sing those annoying songs on your b-day, and I suspect people pretend they have birthdays when they don’t, for the free dessert, because you can’t get through a meal without at least two attacks of happy singers interrupting your conversation. But the thing is, voices and laughter shoot off all the hard surfaces, and you’ve got two choices: Drink and join in, or curl up and die.
    I walked in, the food smelled wonderful. Broiled everything. Cilantro and lemon. Good green things. Patricia wouldn’t be there yet. I waited for the hostess. Someone forgot to write the special of the day in the smeary center of a blackboard. At the top, painted words read, “What Foods These Morsels Be.” When the hostess came, she was wearing a blue-and-white flowered island dress pinched high up one leg. I asked for a certain table facing the water, even though it was night. In the daytime, you can see a square foot of Pacific Ocean with a shadow of Catalina Island behind it. I just needed to know it was there. Through fake fig leaves I watched the men at the bar. Red faces, heads whonked up out of their shoulders as they waited for a football moment on the TV. Two big guys. I thought of Jerry Dwyer. He would have been watching the game, Rams losing to the Forty-niners; a Rams man nonetheless.
    â€œHi,” Patricia said. She sat down across from me. Over a deep-purple skirt she wore a hot-pink nubby-silk business jacket, which was frankly stunning with her red hair. Big glass purple-and-pink earrings glinted at her jawline. Her face is round and soft-looking, as if it doesn’t belong to her lengthenedand considerably sinewy body. It’s a voluptuous face, if you can say that about a face, and it sports two dimples: one where you might expect, by the mouth; the other in an odd place I still find myself wondering at—the muscles pull in to form a little hole just under her right eye, riding the crest of her cheek. These twists of muscle make her look twice as happy. She smiles, you can’t help smiling back.
    â€œGuess what,” she said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI passed my real estate exam.”
    â€œCongratulations. You can buy dinner.”
    â€œI will.”
    â€œNo, you won’t.”
    Leaning in, she said,