The Surf Guru (5 page)

Summer ended. April and Kenny went back to school. The nights turned chilly, and the bats flew back to their caves in Mexico. And still Dinaburg did not call.

 

 

The day before the high school closed for Christmas break, Kacy got a call from Mr. Gomez, April's social studies teacher. He was worried about April, he said, because when he'd looked in on the class during their final exam, he'd seen her pulling out her own hair.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “That doesn't sound at all like April.”

“I saw her. She stopped when she saw me looking.”

“Well, better her own hair than someone else's.”

“I'm serious, Mrs. Burroughs. It could be a sign of some, ah, psychological issues. And, ah, if something's wrong, I'd like to see her get, ah, help. She's a special girl—”

“We know that,” Kacy said.

“—and I'm concerned for her.”

“Your concern is appreciated, Mr. Gomez. I'll look into it.”

“Is there anything you can, ah, tell me? I mean, how are things at home? If you don't mind my asking.”

Kacy did mind. “Things at home,” she said, “are just fine, thank you.” Which they were, really. She and Roger were together, which was more than you could say for most families these days. And if Mr. Gomez was blaming her for working, he could go straight to hell, because the hair problem had started long before Kacy's Kitchen opened for business.

“I didn't mean—”

“I'm sure you didn't,” Kacy said, and she hung up. Her chest tightened, and her heart speed-thumped, and she was afraid she might throw up. It was the same feeling she'd had a few weeks before, when she'd opened the oven door and found her butter cake had fallen and it was her fault, she'd overbeaten the egg whites probably, and there was nothing she could do but watch the cake sink farther into itself, ruined.

She took her glass of scotch into the bathroom, set it on the vanity, and locked the door behind her. She looked in the mirror and ran one hand over her jawline, seeing for the first time how her teeth grinding had bulked and hardened her jaw muscles. She caressed the nascent sags of skin under her eyes, trailed her nail along a crease across her forehead that she didn't remember being so deep. She lifted a hand up to her perfectly bobbed chestnut hair, took hold of a single strand, and yanked. It stung, although not as much as she'd expected. She held the hair up to the light. The root was white and oily-looking. Disgusting. She let go and watched the hair flutter into the sink. She plucked out another, and then another, and then a few more. Why on earth would April do this?

The house was still. Cool, contracting metal ticked somewhere inside the ventilation system. And aside from that, nothing. Silence. As if there were nothing else in the world, nothing beyond her standing alone in this bathroom with a spent drink and a sink littered with her hair. With a blast of water, she rinsed the hair away.

The front door banged open and Kenny unleashed his little-boy war whoop. She heard him chase Mooch down the hallway and up the stairs. She just couldn't take it, all the thumping and screeching, not today. “Kenny!” she shouted at the ceiling. “Goddamnit to hell, not now!” Above her, the footfalls stopped dead.

 

 

Kacy and Roger spent New Year's Eve at the Johnson Library at a black-tie benefit for leukemia research. They both drank heavily, and Roger draped himself all over the chesty girl who was serving champagne. After the obviously repulsed girl pried him off, Kacy told him he disgusted her, and they'd stopped speaking. When Kacy awoke the next morning, she could taste cigarettes and alcohol in her mouth, but she felt surprisingly clearheaded. She was alone in the bed; Roger was sleeping it off elsewhere in the house.

A new year. Clean slates, new hopes. She picked up the phone on her nightstand and called Dinaburg at home, humming as her fingers danced over the buttons.

He answered. “Kacy,” he said. “Happy new year!”

“Happy new year to you, too. How's your kitchen?”

“Great,” he said, “though I don't get to use it as much as I'd like. It's funny—I was just thinking that I'd like to talk shop with you. The other night I made a Prinz Tom torte that came out
aces
. My wife's sick of hearing about it. She sure loved eating it, though.”

She asked him how the plans for the wedding were going.

“The groom hasn't run away to Mexico or anything. So I guess we're in good shape.”

“You know, Joel,” she purred, “you never told me about the cake you're getting. The Rona Silverman.”

“We designed it together. Nine tiers, white and dark chocolate—El Rey and Scharffen Berger, of course—with chocolate-dipped strawberries on top and decorations that'll knock everyone's socks off. And it's going to taste
incredible
.”

“The water.”

“Like I said, it's magic.”

“When does the plane get in? I could pick it up. I could assemble it for you, help with the decorations.”

“No need. One of Rona's assistants flies in with the cake.”

“Still,” Kacy said, “I have to taste it. I mean, I'd like to. Or see it. Could I see it?”

“I don't see why not. Professional courtesy, right? It's coming in on Friday, the day before the wedding. Let me check the time. Hang on.” Then, in the background, Kacy heard a woman's angry voice ask him what in hell he thought he was doing. The voice demanded that he hand over the phone.

“We have no need for your services,” the voice said to Kacy. “My husband should have made that clear ages ago. And you've kept calling him—”

“I have not,” Kacy said.

“Don't lie to me. You've been all over our caller ID. Know what I think? I think you're stalking our cake.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“It's
freakish
, is what it is. I promise you, if you come anywhere near us, I'll have you hauled off to jail. This is my only daughter's wedding, and it will not—repeat,
will not
—be fucked with. Not by you. Not by anyone.”

What was her problem? Kacy wasn't going to do anything wrong. She just wanted to see this cake that everyone thought was the best goddamned cake ever in the whole wide world. She opened her date book to look at the days that she'd blocked out for the Dinaburg wedding. When she got to the right page, she saw that her notes had been obliterated by huge, childish, purple-crayon letters: KENNYS BIRDAY
!
I AM 6! She had forgotten. Good Lord, she
was
a freak.

 

 

That week Roger finally won a trial, and he and Kacy slept together. It was passionate and dramatic, celebratory and desperate, with lots of twisting and licking and shoving and clutching and sweat. When they rolled apart from each other, Kacy felt herself melting away with a warm, dreamy clarity she hadn't felt in ages.

They were awakened when Kenny's panicked cries tore the quiet of the dark house. Roger slung on a robe and went to help him. Through the half-open doorway, she saw them walk hand in hand toward the bathroom. She heard water running; heard Roger talking in a hushed, reassuring voice; saw him carry the towel-wrapped boy back to his room; heard clean sheets shaken open; and heard Kenny murmuring quietly, the sound of a child feeling safe and loved. A clot of emotion formed behind her eyes, filling her head with a dense, wet pressure. She'd been finding herself choked up a lot lately, suddenly and for no good reason—a happy ending in a sitcom, the taste of cinnamon, a rainbow in the mist at the car wash. She wasn't prone to swings like these, and she distrusted them, but this one seemed to make sense. Roger was a good man and a good father. Her eyes teared up, and in her vision the light from the hallway sent out fuzzy winking-crystal rays.

Kenny's light snapped out, and Roger came back into the room. He sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her. She admired his silhouetted shoulders.
Honest shoulders
, she thought.

“He shit the bed,” Roger said.

“Was it a bad dream? What was he saying?”

“He said he had a scary dream about his mommy.”

“Should I go in there and show him I'm all right?”

“He was scared
of
you, not
for
you.”

She stared up at the ceiling. She was getting what she deserved; that was the worst part.

When Roger's breathing slowed into a rhythm of sleep, Kacy got out of bed and crept down the dark hallway to April's door. She turned the knob quietly. She wasn't intruding; she just wanted to watch her daughter sleep, watch her breathe, watch her wake up in the morning, watch as her fingers went to her head and started pulling.

She was inching open the door when it hit something solid. She pushed a little harder, but the object wouldn't give. She leaned her weight against the door, but she couldn't get any traction on the carpet in her slippers, so she kicked them off. Leaned again. Still nothing. She put her eye up to the narrow crack and saw what was stopping her: April had barricaded her bedroom door with her desk, the beautiful cherrywood writing desk that Kacy had spotted at an auction and bid on ferociously because it was just so
perfect
for her daughter. She sat down, beaten, with her back against the wall. The central heat clicked off, and somewhere downstairs the dog sneezed, and then everything was still.

 

 

The day before Kenny's party, Kacy drove all over town, picking up party favors and groceries and film, swearing that she'd make up for whatever she'd done wrong and give Kenny his best birthday ever. She was ruthlessly efficient in her shopping, and on the way home, since she'd gotten everything done in half the time she'd allotted, she took a quick drive out to the airport. She put on her sunglasses even though the day was cloudy, and she drove around the airport loop again and again, hoping she'd get lucky and spot the cake. She tailed a shuttle van from the Four Seasons, watched as passengers climbed on, but they were all corporate types with briefcases—nobody burdened with a nine-high stack of cake boxes. After ten or fifteen passes through the loop, a policewoman waved her down and asked if everything was all right. The officer's scrutiny burned through her. “I'm supposed to pick up a friend,” Kacy managed, “but I guess he's not here.”

“Can't keep driving through,” the officer said. “Park and go inside, if you want.”

She would not remember driving home. Inside the garage, she opened the trunk to find that the ice cream had melted and one carton had leaked, sending out skinny liquid-strawberry fingers that pointed every which way.

 

 

She made Kenny's birthday cake that evening—a perfect reproduction of his baseball glove in sweet, sweet yellow cake and milk-chocolate icing. She'd found the mitt in the garage, cradled inside Roger's larger mitt, each with the same smell of leather and grass and neat's-foot oil. She incorporated every detail into the cake's design: the checkerboard webbing, the smudgy grass stains on the fingertips, the violent slice down the middle of the palm from when Kenny had left it in the yard and Roger had hit it with the lawn mower.

The house was quiet; everyone had gone to bed. Often, when she baked, she'd enter an intense state of focus—a trance, even—and when she was done, she'd be surprised at how much had gone on without her. She looked at the clock. Dinaburg's cake must have arrived. It was there. In downtown Austin. At the Four Seasons. One-point-eight miles from where she was sitting in her white, white kitchen in Travis Heights.
I will not try to find the cake
, she told herself.
I will not go there. I will not call there.
She sat at her desk and shoveled fistfuls of Tootsie Rolls and lollipops into little paper loot bags for Kenny's friends. The air held the sweet, buttery smell of baking and the homey warmth still radiating from the ovens. This usually calmed her—the aroma, the heat—but now it just reminded her that she'd spent all night baking a childish yellow cake instead of the crowning work of her career, the cake that would win her customers in New York and London and Paris, the cake that would land her in the pages of
Bridal Elegance
. She picked up the phone and called the hotel. An eager-to-please young woman told her that the Dinaburg-Fleischner wedding would begin at five-thirty the next day.
There was no problem,
Kacy told herself. Kenny's party would end at six. She could do it all: make Kenny happy, talk to Dinaburg, see the cake in private before it got wheeled out to the reception. She could even bow out of the party a little early. Roger and Marisol could handle it.

Upstairs, she changed for bed and slid under the covers next to Roger. He was snoring lightly. She nudged him awake and told him she might have to leave Kenny's party as soon as it was over. Or maybe just a tiny little smidge early. He harrumphed and turned away. She lay still, letting her mind zoom from image to image: Dinaburg's cake, chilling inside the hotel walk-in. Kacy bursting into the reception and knocking the cake to the floor as five hundred snobby mouths drop in horror. Running into Rona Silverman herself at the wedding and calling her a gum-paste fraud. The cake in the walk-in again, only this time, Dinaburg standing with her, boasting, gloating.

Holding the image of him, she slid her hand down her bare stomach and touched herself. She could seduce him tomorrow, if she wanted to, right there in the walk-in. She could undo the trousers of his tux and coax him into hardness even as the cold air prickled their skin and made his scrotum shrink tight around his balls. Yes, she could take him there, could lay him down on a serving tray and take him, fuck him, own him, while his wife and his daughter and the guests and the rabbi and Rona Silverman all looked at their watches and wondered where the hell the father of the bride was.