China Lake Read Online Free Page A

apart.
    Tabitha hated life as a navy wife. She hated the transient postings—San Diego, Pensacola, Lemoore, California: too big, too hot, too isolated. She hated the mediocre housing and elaborate protocol, hated Brian’s going to sea for months at a time. She must have been painfully lonely, but to my regret I did not sympathize. I was the daughter of a navy man, had grown up living the navy life, and had been a good little soldier. Brian had, too, and he expected his wife to be one. She wasn’t.
    She was going crazy, she said. She couldn’t stand it, taking care of everything by herself, sleeping alone, being cooped up with a demanding child while he was away. Quit the navy , she said. And that, in the Delaney family, was the Wrong Thing to Say. That was asking him to cut out his own heart. After that he didn’t see her as innocent and sensitive, but as immature and needy. So when his squadron was assigned to a Pacific cruise, her whines and threats all misfired.
    It’s not fair. I’m not going to be a single parent, not again—you try it and see how you like it. Why can’t you work for United Airlines? He just looked at her as if she were nuts. Why in hell would he want to drive 737s? He was going to fly an F/A-18 out to the USS Constellation . He had the best damned job on planet Earth.
    A week before Brian went to sea, she walked out. He called me, in tears, asking me to take his son for him.
    Heading home from the courthouse, I stopped to see how Nikki was holding up after the funeral. Her house and mine share a property near Santa Barbara’s Old Mission. She and Carl live in the Victorian home that fronts the street, while I have the smaller guest-house at the rear of the deep garden. I arrived as the postfuneral gathering was winding down. Kids in dress-up clothes were playing basketball on the driveway, and reggae music was sauntering through the front door. Empty casserole trays sat on the dining room table. In the kitchen, cousins were washing dishes. Nikki was sitting on a black leather sofa in the living room, with her shoes off and her swollen feet propped on a coffee table. I gestured for her not to get up.
    She patted the sofa. When I sat down she rested her hand on mine and said, ‘‘Heard you went back for a second round with the Holy Rollers. Mom would have liked your spirit.’’
    I squeezed her hand, wanting to thank her but feeling vaguely embarrassed because Tabitha’s drawings had added to her grief.
    ‘‘You did the right thing,’’ she said. ‘‘I was wrong about ignoring those people. We have to stand up to groups like that, keep right in their face, or they’ll roll over us.’’
    She laid her head back against the couch. Though pregnancy had generally given her a voluptuous glow, she looked drawn, and I asked if she was okay.
    ‘‘I will be. Claudine didn’t raise me to wilt.’’
    A few minutes later I headed across the lawn to my house, an adobe cottage shaded by live oaks and surrounded with hibiscus and star jasmine. I moved Luke’s bike from where it lay on the flagstone path, and opened the French doors. A cartoon sound track rolled over me. On television, Wile E. Coyote was chasing the Road Runner across a painted desert. From the far side of the sofa a small head popped up to see who was home.
    ‘‘Hi, Aunt Evan.’’
    I kicked off my heels. ‘‘Hey, tiger. Can you turn down the TV?’’
    Holding the remote two-fisted, like a ray gun, Luke lowered the volume and hopped to his feet. The babysitter, a college sophomore who moved with tropical lassitude, began tidying up juice boxes and popcorn detritus. My bachelorette pad had been turned into an adventure playground: The Navajo rugs, Ansel Adams prints, and Scandinavian furniture had been overlaid with home decor by Mattel and entertainment by Chuck Jones. Child rearing had fallen on me unexpectedly, but I knew enough to insist that my nephew watch classic television.
    As the sitter was leaving, Luke said,