I maneuvered through the store’s narrow, crowded aisle carrying a loaded plastic basket on my arm. When the metal handles dug too painfully into one arm, I shifted the basket to the other. For a break, I set the ugly green container in the only clear space, a corner of the back counter, and reviewed the items I’d collected. I matched them against my shopping list.
Three bathtubs. Check. Fourteen lamps. Check. One outdoor swing set. Check. One baby carriage. Check. One life preserver. Check. I still needed six counter stools and two refrigerators, one modern and one 1930s style with the motor on top.
The minute I’d told my crafters group I was headed for a dollhouse and miniatures store in Benicia, sixty miles away from our town of Lincoln Point, they clamored to capture my attention and give me their wish lists. There weren’t that many independent miniatures stores in northern California anymore, so when one of us was able to make the trek to a shop, we all submitted our needs.
Another half hour of browsing and I was weighed down with all the desired items, plus unplanned “must-haves.” I gathered up a few tools-a mini drill, a miter box, and needle-nose pliers that were on sale-and lugged the basket toward the cash register.
I’d been successful with everyone’s list but my own. I couldn’t find the perfect six-inch Christmas tree. That may have had something to do with the fact that it was August and nearly ninety-five degrees, although crafts stores generally carried at least some inventory for each holiday year-round. I checked the Christmas bins again and found eighth-inch mistletoe and a set of one-inch stockings, all of which I added to my basket, but no “tall” spruces to my liking.
On this weekday morning, the store was nearly empty. While I paid for my purchases (the grand total was anything but miniature), I chatted with Cindy and Jim Cooper, the store’s owners, reminiscing about the time when there were shops like this in every town.
I could have stopped for lunch at one of Benicia’s many cafes. A charming small town on a strait of San Francisco Bay, Benicia offered a variety of cuisines, including Thai, my current favorite. I chose instead to head home to Lincoln Point, more than an hour away, to arrive in time for leftovers with my eleven-year-old granddaughter, Madison Porter.
As I walked to my car, passing vintage Victorian houses, antique shops, and clothing boutiques, tempting smells and interesting music wafted from doorways. But cafes were ubiquitous and would be around for a long time-who knew how much longer Maddie, approaching the years of teen angst, would want to eat with her grandmother?
Maddie was staying with me for three weeks while she attended a high-tech summer camp program at Lincoln Point’s Rutledge Center, the town’s educational and all-purpose facility. I considered it surprising, and amazing good luck, that our tiny town offered a computer program not available in Maddie’s new, more sophisticated residence city of Palo Alto, home to Stanford University, among other grand institutions. Her parents were using the time for a little camping of their own, at a cabin at Lake Tahoe.
I was thrilled to have Maddie to myself.
I drove home with a smile, wondering what her latest computer joke would be.
“Why are computers skinny?” Maddie asked.
This was easy, a rerun from the first day of her class. “Because they eat only bits,” I said.
Maddie frowned and kicked her legs under my kitchen table. “I already told you that one, didn’t I?”
I admitted as much as I scooped ice cream into cone-shaped, cone-colored dessert dishes.
“Is that all you’re learning at computer camp? Jokes and puns?” Once in a while I assumed the role of strict grandmother, but it never lasted long.
“It’s not computer camp, it’s technology camp,” Maddie said, pulling a bowl of ice cream toward her. “We’re learning how to do two- and three-D video, flash animation, and modding for games. Some kids are on the robotics track, which I’d like to do next year. They’re attaching a Bluetooth interface to a robot so they can control it from any location connected to the Internet. Cool, huh?”
Like most children her age, Maddie grew up with computers and had surpassed me in the language a long time ago. My only contribution now was, “Yes, very cool.”
“Does that sound like we’re just telling jokes all morning?” Maddie asked. Then, much to my relief, she broke into laughter and came over for a hug that she knew would turn into a tickle and a messing up of her red Porter curls.
Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz.
Maddie ran to the door. We both knew it was probably my nephew, homicide detective Eino Gowen, whom she called Uncle Skip. First cousin once-removed had been too much for her as a toddler and no one in the family thought there was a reason to revisit the uncle title.
“Looks like I’m just in time for dessert,” Skip said, helping himself to a handful of my just-made ginger snaps. “I could smell these half a block away.”
I scooped a generous portion of caramel cashew ice cream, Skip’s favorite, into a bowl for the second redhead at the table. A Porter by marriage only, I didn’t share in the redhead gene and had to make do with ordinary dark brown hair, now tinged with gray.
“What timing,” I said. “I think you have a GPS on my oven and freezer door.”
“That’s not how-” Skip started until he caught my look.
I liked to keep my family guessing about just how much of a Luddite I was.
“Uncle Skip, what did the computer’s fortune cookie say?” Maddie asked. She’d finished smashing her chocolate ice cream with her spoon, to a mushy consistency, just as she did when she was three years old. Aspiring robot maker or not, she was still a little girl.
Skip put on his best thinking expression. “Hmm. Not a clue. What did the computer’s fortune cookie say?”
“Take one data at a time,” Maddie said, triumphant.
Skip slammed his palm against his forehead. “Good one.” Unlike inconsiderate Grandma/Aunt Gerry, Skip not only let Maddie have the punch line, he also laughed harder than I did. No wonder she adored him.
“Are you busy down at the station, Uncle Skip?” Maddie asked.
“There’s not too much going on right now.”
“No big cases or piles of folders on your desk like you have sometimes?”
“Nope. I guess all the criminals are too hot to work.”
“And August is the only month when we don’t celebrate an Abraham Lincoln event, so there are no big crowds to worry about,” Maddie added.
“Exactly. Next month we’re back on track with the big Emancipation Proclamation Convention.”
“But August is pretty clear, right?”
Uh-oh. I knew where she was going with this.
“You’re doomed, Skip,” I said.
Maddie swooped in. “Remember you said when you weren’t busy you’d teach me some police things, like how to do fingerprints and how to investigate? And tour the building”-here she shook her spoon in his direction-“including the jail.”
Skip hung his head. He’d been had. I saw it on his face. Twenty-eight years old and a preteen had bested him.
The good news was that our little town of Lincoln Point was homicide-free for the summer, a comforting statistic.
Skip cleared his throat. “Let me look at my calendar when I get back from my meeting, okay?”
“Promise?”
“Hey, any cute boys in your computer class?”
Nice try, I thought. But Maddie had something to say about that.
“Are you kidding? The boys are all dorks. We had a class photo taken for the newspaper and the boys all made funny faces.” Maddie splayed her fingers, held a hand to each ear, and wiggled her fingers. “Like this.”
Skip mimicked her hand gesture and stuck out his tongue. “It’s no good without the tongue,” he said, once he could talk.
Maddie and I rolled our eyes. “Boys never grow up,” I warned her.
It was a dream come true for me when Maddie had decided she’d like to be part of my Wednesday-night crafts group. During the school year she stayed overnight with me and I drove her back to her home in Palo Alto early on Thursday mornings in time for classes. We’d all agreed that we’d keep this schedule as long as her schoolwork didn’t suffer.
“Not likely,” I’d told my son, Richard, Maddie’s father. “She’s a genius.”
“So you say,” said the orthopedic surgeon, a man of few words who knew better than to argue with his mother.
For our group project this summer, we crafters borrowed from a Bolivian tradition, Alasita. We’d learned about it from Beatriz, a woman who joined us briefly while visiting her mother in Lincoln Point. We were fascinated by the concept: during the Alasita festival, people made or bought miniature versions of what they hoped for in the coming year.
“In the markets you find everything,” Beatriz told us. “Tiny cars, houses, and food, and even little bitty marriage certificates, passports, and money. Men buy hens and women buy roosters in the hope of finding a partner before the year’s end. If you buy these things or make them, it’s supposed to bring them into your life in the next year, as long as it is blessed by a shaman.”
“Do you think there’s a shaman in Lincoln Point?” Karen Striker asked now, as we sat around a large table in my primary crafts room. (According to my late husband, and everyone who was familiar with my house, the whole rest of our four-bedroom home was a secondary crafts area.)
Karen, five months pregnant, was building a lovely nursery, augmented by the one-inch-scale baby carriage I’d picked up for her this morning in Benicia. “I want to send good vibes into the air on every possible wavelength,” she told us.
“I know a priest,” Mabel, our oldest member, offered.
Her husband, Jim, the only male in our group, grunted, conveying doubt that a Catholic blessing would work as well. Mabel and Jim were working on a ship’s cabin, a model of the luxury version they hoped to occupy on their fall cruise to the Mediterranean.
Maddie enjoyed playing hostess on these evenings and tonight she seemed to have fun refilling glasses of ice tea and plates of cookies, running back and forth between the kitchen and the atrium of my Eichler home. It took the record-breaking heat we were experiencing to get us to move all our supplies from my crafts room to the cooler atrium, and this week had qualified.
For her own project Maddie had chosen to build a miniature soda fountain. She’d worked diligently on a sign that named flavors after her own friends and relatives. In her red-striped shop, one could “buy” Ginger Grandma, Pistachio Porter, Strawberry Skip, Tutti-Frutti Tracey, and so on.
“Does this mean your goal for the year is to eat all the ice cream you can?” Karen asked.
“For now,” Maddie said.
I was happy that my granddaughter considered her life so good that all it needed was more ice cream. I also loved that she worked the spectrum of creativity, from computer programming in the morning to crafting tiny ice cream sodas in the evening.
Of all the projects, Rosie Norman’s was the most interesting and packed with meaning-she was building a half-scale room box replica, one-half inch to one foot, of the hallway of lockers at Abraham Lincoln High School.
“It’s where David Bridges, the star quarterback, kissed me,” was her only explanation the first week.
Rosie, who owned the bookstore in town, was a student of mine during my first years teaching English at ALHS, right after Ken, our three-year-old son, Richard (Maddie’s father), and I moved to California from the Bronx. Rosie had also become a good friend who sometimes watched Maddie when I had undisclosed errands at the police station across the street from her shop.
Rosie’s class was holding its thirtieth reunion at the end of the week. At first I questioned the math, but finally grasped the reality-it had been three decades since I helped distribute diplomas to my first graduating class. Faculty, current and retired, like me, were also invited to the gala weekend, most of which would be spent at the beautiful, old Duns Scotus Hotel in San Francisco. (Apparently, no one wanted to party at Abe’s Beard and Breakfast, the only motel in Lincoln Point.) Rosie had talked me into going so she wouldn’t have to walk into the opening cocktail party alone on Friday night.
“Why are y’all bothering to go?” Susan Giles asked, her heavily accented “y’all” referring only to Rosie. “You always say how you weren’t very popular in high school.”
“You wouldn’t get it,” Rosie told her.
Rosie was probably right. Susan’s voice betrayed a lack of understanding, and I pictured her as a class officer and prom queen of her Tennessee high school. Rosie, on the other hand, had had a reserved personality and an almost matronly body even as a teenager. Thick glasses and a slight lisp hadn’t helped.
“Well, I just think you have to be realistic,” Susan said. “People don’t change, and if you think you didn’t fit in then, you probably won’t now.”
Harsh words from someone whose “realistic” hope was to win a trip around the world. Susan was working on a set of miniature luggage, using tweezers to manipulate in place tiny pieces of floral brocade and minutely thin strips of leather. I hoped the trip would be all expenses paid; otherwise the life-size version of this seven-piece luggage set would cost a fortune to check at the airport.
Over the summer weeks, as Rosie had added scuffed sneakers and spiral binders to the three-inch-tall (six feet in real life) lockers, and posters, photos, and mirrors to the insides of their doors, she’d revealed more and more about her history with David Bridges.
“I had a huge crush on him,” she’d told us. “And one date, almost, which had a sorry end, but it wasn’t his fault.” She promised us all more details on that later. The important thing was that now, out of the blue, after thirty years, David was sending her presents and notes about how eager he was to meet her again during the reunion weekend. He’d sent flowers, candy, and jewelry. “I don’t want to wear the bracelet he sent until the reunion weekend, but I’ll tell you it’s really, really beautiful. Tiny emerald and diamond stones. David did not spare any expense.”
Sooner or later in their four years at ALHS, every student, some more memorable than others, passed through one of my English classes. My memory of David Bridges was of a good-looking and popular young man. A star athlete, but not a very engaged student. He was immature for his age, as were the boys in his crowd, if I remembered correctly. For Rosie’s sake, I hoped that the responsibilities of adulthood had brought him more wisdom and perspective.
The chatter during this last crafts meeting before the big weekend seemed to be completely devoted to what Rosie would wear to the opening cocktail party on Friday night. Something classic, but not dowdy. Flattering, but not trashy. Bright, but not gaudy. We talked as much about Rosie’s dress as we did when one of us needed help designing a canopy for a miniature Victorian bed or a yarn rug for a log cabin kitchen.
Rosie had been invited to David’s room for a private party on Friday night after the cocktail party. I, of course, would be her guest. That gave me only two days to come up with an excuse for getting out of it.
“What’s David doing with his life now?” Karen said.
That question, intended or not, sparked a very long response from Rosie. “David has the title of chief engineer at the Duns Scotus, which you all know is the premier hotel in San Francisco.”
This was a very responsible job, Rosie explained, often meaning he was the only manager on duty for days at a time. How else did we think her class was getting such a good rate on rooms? He’d been married briefly but was now divorced, with one son, Kevin, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time. He lived in South San Francisco.
“I thought you lost track of each other a long time ago. How do you know all this?” I asked.
Rosie blushed. She lowered her head to apply a sealant to the floor of her room box. She’d achieved a decent semblance of the ALHS first-floor hallway, with ugly linoleum on the floor and steel gray lockers lining one wall. “I haven’t talked to him in all this time, but I volunteered to put together the booklet that has information on everyone’s life at the present time. It’s like a yearbook, but updated.”
“And you got that input from him? Even the part about his being estranged from his son?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. He filled out the form I sent to everyone in the class and he just drew a line next to the question about children’s occupations. So, I’m assuming they’re estranged.”
“Maybe the kid’s just unemployed,” Susan offered.
Rosie waved her hand as if to say, “So what?” She smiled broadly. “I want you to know he didn’t just fill in the blanks; he added a personal note that said, ‘Thanks, Rosie.’”
One thing crafters were good at-talking and working at the same time. Fingers were busy gluing, cutting, trimming, painting, and sewing while questions and answers continued to fly. There was also a fair amount of snacking from the potluck bowls that had arrived with my guests.
“And these presents-do they come with a note, or a phone call, or anything?” Karen asked.
“How do y’all know these presents are from David?” Susan jumped in.
“You both sound like my dad. He’s the only other one who knows about this. I’ll tell you what I tell him. I know it’s David, that’s all there is to it. And besides, there’s a card with each present, signed Love, D. B. That’s for David Bridges.” Rosie rolled her eyes. “Who else?”
I saw that we were all tiptoeing around a warning to Rosie that there was something not quite right about this reunion within a reunion. Mabel gave it the best try.
“Have you called him, to thank him for the presents?” our polite, most senior citizen asked.
“Of course not,” Rosie said with a tense laugh. “Our meeting is supposed to be romantic and dramatic. And besides, girls don’t call boys, remember?”
“What if it doesn’t turn out the way you think, Rosie? What if he’s toying with your feelings?” Karen asked. “You said your first and only date didn’t go well. Maybe he’s setting you up for another fall.”
Rosie lifted her eyes from the tiny brush dripping with red paint from the last application of trim on the wall of the school hallway.
She gave us all a deathly serious look.
“Then I’ll kill him,” she said.
Silence washed over the room.
I forgot that Maddie was with us until I heard her small voice.
“What do you get when you drop a computer on your toes?” she asked. She waited a beat, then answered her own question. “Megahertz,” she said.
We all took a breath, followed by loud laughter. I didn’t dare look over to see if Rosie was amused.