Queen of the Dixie Drive-in
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Peg Sutherland
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19.0K
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22
PROLOGUE
San Francisco, 1986
CARSON LAY ON HER TUMMY, chin on her fists, and stared at the glass-and-concrete skyline that rose up in the distance behind the row of picture-postcard Victorian houses.
One day, she thought. One day…
“Do you think sometimes about going home?”
Tony’s voice startled her. She’d forgotten she wasn’t alone. Carson was used to being alone. Sometimes she felt alone even when other people were around.
“Never.” She heard the venom that crept into the single word, despite the ultracool veneer she wore like a pair of steel-reinforced jeans.
When you’re fifteen and you’ve been living on the street for a whole year, you learn how important it is to be cool. Not to let anybody see where you’re weak.
“No, I speak seriously,” Tony persisted. Tony, with his faint accent and the dark good looks that were even more foreign, took everything way too seriously. From his broad chest and deep voice, Carson guessed he was about eighteen, a grown-up, although kids on the street never told their ages. Or if they did, they lied. Carson herself regularly claimed to be nineteen. Nobody believed her, of course. Nobody on the street believed anything anybody else on the street said. That was, like, rule number one: Everybody’s lying, so get with the program.
Tony’s earnest voice, which was as soft as Carson imagined silk must be, continued. “Sometimes, Cookie, do you not think that perhaps if you went back, maybe things would not be so badly as you believed? Or that, seeing you again, they would be so glad that—”
“No!” She rolled on her side and glared at him. “I never think that.”
Carson had a theory about Tony, who had showed up in Haight about a month ago, sleeping in the park near her own favorite spot. She’d decided Tony would never make it on the street. Unless he learned not to care. If you couldn’t get tough, you were lost.
That was how Carson got her street name, in fact. Cookie, all the kids called her. As in One Tough Cookie.
She shrugged, looking away from the dark intensity of his eyes. “Besides, if I do start thinking that kind of garbage…”
He cocked his head to one side, stared at her with those dark, wondering eyes, and prodded, “Then what?”
“Then I remember it wasn’t as bad as I thought.”
“Yes?”
“Yeah. It was worse.”
Tony hugged his knees to his chest. From the corner of her eye, Carson could see the way the muscles bunched up beneath the dark hair on his forearms.
If she’d been one for wishing, Carson would have wished that she wasn’t still a tubbo—all those grown-ups who used to call it baby fat and said she’d grow out of it should wake up with lizards in their beds, that was her opinion. She hadn’t grown out of it and wasn’t going to. Which was why she could only wish that a guy like Tony would look at her the way guys looked at pretty girls. Slim girls. Sure, there’d been times when she was glad guys didn’t look at her that way. Times when she’d seen those pretty street girls get sucked into stuff that gave Carson the willies. Then Carson had been glad that even a year on the street hadn’t been enough to rid her of her pudgy arms and dimpled knees.
Until Tony came along…
Carson rolled back onto her tummy and stared out over the cityscape. At a shrimp-pink house across the street, the front door opened. Carson didn’t move a muscle, not even her eyelids. In case Tony was watching, he wouldn’t think she was interested in the comings and goings at this magical mansion. Out of the house stepped a girl, maybe fourteen. She tripped lightly down the steps and headed for the corner, long golden hair flying, shoulders back. Her jeans were torn and faded as Carson’s were, but the girl from the pink house had probably charged hers to Daddy’s card to the tune of seventy-plus bucks. Carson’s had been a buck-fifty at the Salvation Army three months ago.
Carson hated the girl with the golden hair.
“How about you, Cuba?” she asked, just to get her mind off the poisonous feelings in her blood as she watched the carefree, confident stride of the girl across the street who surely had everything Carson had never had. “Ever want to go back?”
“This cannot happen. I have no place to return.”
“Why not?”
Tony picked at his frayed shoestrings. “The building, she—it—burned down.”
“Your house?” Carson propped herself on her elbows to look at him more closely. “Cool. Did anybody croak?”
“Croak?”
“Die.”
“Ah. No. There were no deaths.”
“So they’re living somewhere else now. Your family, I mean. You could go there.”
“No.” Tony’s long, dark hair was slicked back, still damp from washing it this morning. Tony always managed to find a place to wash his hair, even if he had to sneak into the washroom at Mickey D’s. So it was always shiny, like the hood of one of the slick, black limos on Nob Hill. And it was always curled up at the ends, behind his ears and along the back of his neck. His eyelashes curled, too, the way Carson’s mom’s had after she clamped her eyelash curler on them.
That was a long time ago. Before Carson’s mom had left to pursue her goal in life. Working at a blackjack table in Nevada. Some goal.
“Okay, Cuba, how come you wouldn’t go back?”
His full lips curled tightly. “They believe I did this thing. Made the fire.”
Carson nodded. She knew how that felt, having everybody automatically pointing fingers at you whenever something went wrong. “Did you?”
He didn’t say anything. Not for a long time. Carson studied him, something she liked to do when she could get away with it. Tony was exotic. A Latin lover. At least, that’s what always came to mind when she saw him. The story was he had come to the U.S. with his parents in the early eighties on a refugee boat from Cuba. Carson liked that story, whether it was true or not, because she could picture him facing into the salt air, damp with sea spray. Of course, he’d only been a kid then, if the story was true, but Carson always saw him the way he looked now. His mouth was small and full, and the hair on his arms thick and dark. She’d seen him once with his shirt open. The hair was dark on his chest and slithered down the middle of his belly. The sight had made her feel the way she had felt once at the state fair in Birmingham, Alabama, when the roller coaster reached the top, then suddenly dropped over the edge and plunged toward oblivion.
She’d really liked that feeling.
“Tell me again what it is like where you are from,” he said at last, ignoring the question of his guilt or innocence.
“Not again,” Carson complained. She didn’t like this game, and heaven knew why Tony did.
“Yes, again,” he coaxed her. “Tell me one time more.”
“I’ve already told you. About a trillion times.”
“So a trillion and one is not the big deal?” He grinned beguilingly. “It gets me hot.”
She laughed to hide the crazy stirring inside her when he said that. “You’re too much, Cuba.”
“I have for you the present if you tell me again this one time.”
Carson’s heart did another little two-step, and she tried to harden herself against it. “A present?”
He reached into his front shirt pocket, and there, on his palm, lay a red foil heart.
“What’s that?”
“For the Valentine’s Day. A chocolate heart.”
Bitterly aware that no one in her life—not even sweet-talking Tony—cared enough to want her for a valentine, Carson said, “Keep your bribe, Cuba.”
She refused to look at him, but, even with his accent, he was a good-enough actor to sound wounded. “Please. I bring this just for you.”
Darn Tony, anyway. She hadn’t even remembered this was Valentine’s Day, which had been easier than forgetting Christmas a few months ago. But now, the childish need to belong to someone threatened to hurt. She grabbed at the change of subject he had already offered.
“Sweetbranch was Hicksville,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Yeah. A diner—you couldn’t even get a fast-food burger without driving half an hour one way. A beauty shop in case you were in the mood to be teased and frizzed. A general store, if you can believe that, and a drive-in movie theater.” Pushing away the wistful feeling about the drive-in, she snatched a blade of grass from the hillside. She marveled that it looked no different from the grass growing on the side of Willow Creek back home.
Back there, she corrected herself.
“You couldn’t even get there from the highway without crossing this wretched old covered bridge. It’s probably fallen down by now. Everybody’s probably just stuck in Sweetbranch forever.”
“Each one but you.”
“Yeah,” she agreed with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Speak to me the rest,” he said.
“You know you’re weird, don’t you?”
Tony rolled over onto his back and stared up into the northern California haze. His bare arm lay against hers. It was hot, his brown flesh against her pale skin. So hot it made her weak. So hot it made her want to please him, so she finished the story the way she knew he wanted her to.
“It’s the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else,” she concluded. “They call you by name and they remember your grandparents and they all get together and talk about you after church if you get cancer or married or something.”
That was the part she hated the most, more even than all the things Sweetbranch lacked. The way everybody knew your business. That was the part that had made her feel suffocated, trapped. But it was the part that always made Tony smile. She glanced over at him, and sure enough, he was smiling, a lazy smile that made her feel as if her entire body were thumping.
“And you will never go back?” he asked.
“Never,” she vowed.
Although she meant it with every ounce of conviction in her heart, Carson knew there was one thing she would go back for, if she could. But she never let herself think about that because it was just one more thing she couldn’t do a darn thing about.
“You are truly one tough cookie, are you not?” Tony said, looking at her from the corner of one eye.
“Yeah,” Carson said.
Tony pressed the foil-covered chocolate heart into her hand. She turned away to wait for another golden blond princess to come out of one of the castles against the San Francisco skyline.
