“Maybe it’s not meant to be,” she said.
Juliet was as godless as a lizard but believed life to be scripted, something that Draper found odd.
“Have faith,” he said.
“I want to be normal, like everyone else,” she said. “I want things to be easy and natural. For you, too, Cole. You don’t want it all to end, either. I know that.”
“No, I don’t.”
In fact it bothered him not at all that it would end with him. Draper was the end of his family line. Being the last of his kind gave him broad and sometimes terrible liberties. He thought, if he bothered to think of such things at all, that the world would actually be better off without people like him.
“We can be phoenix people,” she said. “We can rise out of the ashes and become beautiful and strong, even when the odds are against us.”
“You’re already beautiful and strong and I’m proud to be with you.”
She sighed into his ear and gently kissed his cheek.
In the Fiori store Draper bought a four-foot-tall ceramic vase, a stunning piece with rich blues and bright yellows and a luminous glaze.
He handed her the receipt and hefted the big piece over his shoulder and they wandered down Coast Highway to Splashes, where Draper sat the vase beside them in the bar and they ordered drinks and watched the waves.
“I think I’ll have more than one,” she said.
“You have whatever you want.”
Draper took her hand and turned it up and gave her a wildly optimistic palm reading, as he often did. It was rich in children and dogs, all with preposterous names.
They talked about a sailboat painting she’d seen at the Pacific Edge Gallery, how good it would look in the media room. Draper registered concern over the $7,500 price tag.
He got her to gossip about her restaurant coworkers, and tell him about the great puppies that came to the shelter this past week, then he guided her into talking about her childhood. She was comfortable there. It was the only truly happy time of her life. It was mostly in San Bernardino, humble but fun. She had friends, and a swimming pool in the tract home where she lived with her wild older sister and mom and stepdad, and there were dogs, and long walks to the 7-Eleven for snacks and pop. She could talk on for hours about those times.
But Juliet’s childhood stopped abruptly at age fifteen, when one of her stepfather’s handsome friends had convinced her, not absolutely against her will, to do bad things. It had gone on a while. There were female problems and a late-term procedure with complications. After that came the chaos, the pills, the men, the purposeful overdose that just barely failed. Finally came the rebirth of Juliet in Laguna. She had told Draper this dark tale only once, and he had held her hand while the tears spilled out of her.
Draper ordered another drink for each of them, then went off on a chipper monologue about his own childhood in Jacumba-his family’s restaurant; his little brother, Ron, whom he had loved and protected from rougher boys; his cute sister, Roxanne; dogs and friends; hitting a grand slam on the frosh-soph baseball team. He told her about the heat and the dust, and the drug runners and human traffickers who used the complex of roads and trails and caves and tunnels and gullies and canyons to transport their products to the north. He told her of the car chases and the spectacular wrecks and even about Mikey Castro, gunned down just like a thirties gangster as he walked from his shiny clean Suburban toward the Draper family’s restaurant-Amigos.
She squeezed Draper’s hand in high surprise as he told her this tale, though she’d heard it before. She had empathy and it led to genuine emotions and Draper liked this quality in her.
Like Juliet’s childhood, Draper’s had a sudden ending when he was also just fifteen years old. A propane line had broken while the Draper family slept on a very cold night, and when the accumulated gas hit the pilot light of the oven, the explosion killed Coleman’s parents, his brother and his sister. Draper had been sleeping out in the barn with the horses and dogs. The explosion had blown fireplace bricks through the barn wall. He had never forgiven himself for surviving. Several times, though, he had asked Juliet to hear the story and forgive him. Please tell me I’m forgiven, he would whisper. It was the deepest, darkest jewel he could offer her.
So when the river of Draper’s memories approached the great black dam that marked its boundary, he became quiet and looked out at the waves. Juliet worked herself closer to him and ran her fingers through his soft blond forelock.
“Be my phoenix,” she whispered.
“I’ll be that.”
“And I’ll be yours. Take me home. Fill me up.”
Draper paid and hefted the vase onto his shoulder and they walked slowly down the beach.
Inside he set it on the hearth as Juliet unbuttoned her blouse, then took him in her arms and kissed him.
The next morning Draper drove down to Jacumba. He passed through the remote-controlled gate and parked in front of his old family home, which had been rebuilt long since the catastrophic fire. It was bigger now, and Draper had had the propane heating system completely replaced by electric.
The old barn that had saved his life was still there. Draper walked over and slid open the door and stepped inside. He stood for a moment, enjoying the smell that never changed and the images flickering in his memory.
He closed the barn door behind him and headed for the house. He’d sold the property a few years back to Israel Castro, which was almost like selling it to a brother or sister. Better, in some ways.
Israel now came through the front door and gave Draper a big hug, slapping him on the back.
Inside he poured cold beers as Draper set the duffel stuffed with cash on the kitchen counter.
They drank to health and Draper piled the vacuum-packed bundles of cash on the granite.
“Fifteen thousand,” he said.
Israel produced a checkbook from a drawer and wrote a check on the East County Tile amp; Stone account for $8,450 to Prestige German Auto and another for $6,550 to Coleman Draper.
Draper wrote a check from Prestige German Auto to Castro Commercial Management for $2,535 and another for $3,875, which were mortgage payments on two of the four Jacumba investment properties that Israel had shown and sold him.
They exchanged checks, then clinked their beer bottles together again. Thanks to Israel’s numerous capacities-most of them legitimate-he could launder Draper’s cold hard cash with just a few strokes of the pen. Israel owned a construction materials business, was a commercial property landlord and manager, a real estate agent, a mortgage originator, a credit union board member and a notary. He did business in both the United States and Mexico, most of it along the half-lawless strip of borderland where he and Draper had grown up. He also helped transport large quantities of heroin and cocaine into California, but not nearly as often as he used to. It was too risky-a young man’s work. His goal was to be 100 percent legit by the time he was thirty years old, and it looked as if he might make it.
“Let’s go see how Jacumba looks today,” said Israel. “You’ll like the progress on the hacienda.”
They took Israel’s trick black Denali, the big tires kicking up dust as they rode through town. Jacumba was poor and parts were nearly squalid, but to Draper it was simply where he had grown up. The fact that it had changed little was a comforting reminder of how far he had traveled from here.
They passed Amigos restaurant, which Draper had purchased five years ago, then closed, gutted, remodeled and reopened. The lunch business looked brisk. Draper looked at the sign that he had commissioned. It featured two happy men with big mustaches, arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling and brandishing cartoonishly large pistols.