JILL BARNETT

New Beginnings

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Jill Barnett 2008

Jill Barnett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781847560254

Ebook Edition © 2008 ISBN: 9780007335039

Version: 2018-06-19

DEDICATION

March is not us, nor are her experiences ours. This story is fiction. But we know her world, because we have traveled down the same kind of unfamiliar, muddied roads, because we had to overcome the past to find a future, because of this and so much more, New Beginnings is for Jane, Meryl, Cathy, JJ, Deb, and me.

What is this really like? Never mind the conventions and the decisions we’ve all made together. What is it really like?

Mike Nichols, Inside the Actor’s Studio

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two

March

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Three

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Epilogue

Top Winter Destinations

A Winter’s Tale

About the Author

By the same author:

About the Publisher

PART ONE

San Francisco is a mad city—inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.

Rudyard Kipling

Chapter One

March Randolph Cantrell was named for the time of year she came into the world, and had lived all of her life in a golden state. The Golden State exists deep in the bones and blood of those born there, and makes them different, natural to the land with all its mysteries and quirks. Native Californians are immanent beings who can recognize instinctively the color and stillness of earthquake weather, and are never divided by that invisible latitude/attitude that separates Northern from Southern; they understand the human geography of one whose first breath of air was in a land of gold rushes, gold hillsides and golden bridges.

A native can stand on the sandy spot where the biggest and deepest blue ocean in the world touches land and know there are more hungry sharks behind them than in front of them.

Birthright gives them ownership in the fables of California, those Disneyesque stories of El Dorado and Father Junipero Serra, who once sowed a magical trail of mustard seeds as he walked the length of the land, on leather sandals coated with brown soil in which almost anything could grow.

Come every spring, Father Serra’s yellow mustard seeds sprout up from the ground on rolling hillsides, around fresh asphalt—in spite of concrete and wood frames—as bright a gold in color as one could imagine, and there to remind those who care to notice of the way things once were.

The month of March is a time of lions and lambs, and, in California, the time of the four-leafed mustard blooms that some claim are luckier than clover, and certainly more resilient. No matter what the weather: freak snow and ice, brush fires, crackling drought or Pineapple-Express-rains that drive homes down crumbling hillsides, despite all that Mother Nature can cast down from the heavens, every year the mustard always grows back.

For March Randolph Cantrell, California native was just one of many things that defined her: woman, daughter, artist, wife, mother, friend, businesswoman, now grandmother, a title that sounded too decrepit for a baby boomer who still wore string-bikini underwear and listened to rock music.

Growing up on the West Coast in the 1950’s, March and her sister May were known as those Randolph girls with the strange springtime names. Back in Connecticut, where the Randolph family had deep roots, names like March and May were simple tradition, appropriate as Birch and Rebecca, and not uncommon to girls with a great aunt named Hester, who had pointed out during one family holiday, “California is a fine place to live if you happen to be an orange.”

One bright blue day when March was eight, someone called the Randolph girls California natives. So with the peacock feathers from her mother’s vase sticking out of her ponytail, March stood at the medicine cabinet mirror and war-painted her face with blue and white tempera paint left over from vacation Bible school.

For those few weeks during an incalescent and sullen August, she ran around with a rubber Cochise tomahawk tucked into the waist of her seersucker shorts, speaking to everyone in bad Indian dialogue from an old black and white western.

At night, in those deep, still, blue hours when girls might lie in bed with secret thoughts of silly crushes and dreams of some-day-grown-up lives, her dreams weren’t about the neighborhood boy who let her ride his new Schwinn bicycle with the baseball cards clothes-pinned to the spokes, who loaned her the rubber tomahawk and wore his hair in a flat top. She dreamed that she was inside the wild stories that came from their small-screen TV—topped with tall rabbit ear antenna (which sometimes worked better if you put a piece of aluminum foil on them).

While her sister May had a passion for movies and heart throbs like Tab Hunter and James Dean, March demanded more from her television heroes and dreamt about falling in love with someone like Cochise, a noble man with a big dream. That was 1958. Ten years later, she met him.

A year after the Summer of Love, 1968 was filled with youthful dreamers fast becoming disillusioned. The sweet legacy of Haight had suddenly become hate. San Francisco, like most of the country, reeled from shock and the frightening belief that the world was rotting from the inside out.

Every night the broadcast news about Vietnam was too bleak to watch and too important to miss. Death and destruction, the body counts, escalated daily. After a dark day in early April, Martin Luther King, Jr. was gone, too young, and along with him a dream. Now it was June, only half the year gone, and ten days ago Bobby Kennedy’s future ended horrifically with another assassin’s bullet.

The two men who stood for change and hope were senselessly stolen away from an upstart generation demanding the same change, and whose loud, chanting voices had been fueled by hope and a belief they could make a difference.

No, no, we won’t go.

Coffee-house talk and conversation in North Beach bookstores and the underground presses compared recent events to history’s anarchies. The city’s street-corner disciples (the ones who weren’t hiding in the nirvana of acid) railed at The Establishment, shaking their fists as they cried over the injustice of men killed here and overseas.

You can’t vote for the man who sends you to your death?

At home, where it was supposed to be free and safe, someone was assassinating the country’s heroes. In spite of all the shouting and ranting, most people carried a silent, dark dread down to their bones, and the youth of San Francisco sought anything available to pull away from a world so out of control they had to shout at it.

March’s father was only a single generation away, yet a continent stood between their ideas. He taught math and geography, was logical, conservative, a genius, a veteran. Her mother was a housewife who sewed from Butterick patterns, played bridge and the organ at church, and served dinner at six o’clock. March was raised to be standardized and conventional, the perfect round peg to fit in the perfectly round hole.

Her sister May fit precisely into the Randolph mold. She was stockings and white shoes. May was the one who went off to Smith some three thousand miles away and was picked as one of Glamour’s college girls, modeling in the magazine in her plaid skirt and cashmere sweater, her hair cut in precise angles and her smile as perfect as piano keys, even without braces.

March, however, was bare feet and Bernardo sandals.

She regularly forgot to wear her retainer and lost it often enough that she had to get mouth molds for new ones at least three times a year. Right after graduation, she was out of her parents’ house and living on her own near the Haight in a room cut out of the attic in an old Victorian. She worked a part-time shift in a coffee-house bookstore and attended the Art Institute, where thought was free, ungendered, and those East Coast kinds of traditions her sister May wrote home about were nowhere to be found.

San Francisco’s artists worked in loud, in-your-face-you-can’t-ignore-us colors that defined the place and time. At the Institute, among so many unique individuals, March didn’t have to be exactly like her family.

A close friend from a graphics class created psychedelic posters advertising local rock shows at the Fillmore, Winterland and Avalon ballrooms. Another designed velvet, lace and leather clothing, fringed sweaters and beaded tops for a trendy boutique frequented by local rock singers. Some poster work came to March via her graphics friend, and by connection she was soon part of the San Francisco music scene most weekends.

It was dark inside the Fillmore that night in mid-June, one of those down moments between music sets. The place was filled with three times more people than city hall permitted, because Joplin and Santana were on the bill. The cloying, sweet scent of hashish floated above the crowd in foggy clouds of contact highs, and crudely-rolled cigarettes were passed from hand to hand, glowing like red fireflies through small, compact circles of people.

As one of her friends dragged her through the crowd, she spotted a stranger a few feet away, standing alone, wearing a Nehru jacket, faded jeans and sandals. His hair was thick and dark and almost to his shoulders. His profile was noble. Even the lack of light and his close-clipped black beard couldn’t hide his dark, intense looks, the kind of guy girls noticed but only the bravest or silliest would ever approach. Within seconds, the music started again and she lost sight of him when he was engulfed by a flood of half-stoned people making for the stage.

By midnight the Fillmore’s lightshow rose up from behind the band in those vibrant, poster-colored hues, pulsing with the ragged voice of Janis singing a spiritual turned into hard rock by Big Brother and the Holding Company. Near the stage rim, March danced in a circle, barefooted, her sandals stashed in the deep pockets of her long velvet dress, her arms raised high in the air and five inches of mismatched bangle bracelets rattling down toward her elbows.

Freedom rang through the notes of the music and the words of songs: there was nothing left to lose, something that felt more true lately than ever. Her loose, uncut hair hung freely, and beneath the heavy velvet dress she wore nothing—free after being held captive and rubbed raw for too many high school years of elastic garter and Kotex belts.

Even the apples in a copper pot by the Fillmore stage were free for the taking, but probably laced with something to make your mood all too free.

When she looked up, he was standing in front of her, his hand out as if they’d known each other forever. But she kept dancing, shouting over the music: “What do you want?”

“You.”

His eyes weren’t drug-shot, but clear, his manner too confident and too knowing for her. He’d caught her off-guard and she didn’t know how to react, so she shook her head and turned her back to him, cutting him dead and feeling surprisingly calm about doing so.

Earlier, in a ballroom filled with people she had looked at him and felt something she couldn’t name, then an odd sense of regret when he’d melted into the crowd. When she had thought about it a little later, she told herself the moment had been silly and Hollywood, the kind of moment that called for elevator music playing in the background.

A numb second or two passed before she felt his breath above her, the heat of his body as he came closer. Guys came on to girls all the time; three, four or more times a night someone would hit on her. But they gave up easily when she always hesitated. You couldn’t go two blocks without seeing a sign that said: make love not war; love was as free as thought, as free as speech, and as free as most girls nowadays.

But he hadn’t moved on to some other girl who would give him what he wanted. He stayed by her, but didn’t touch her, a good thing since she might have incinerated right there.

The music stopped with a loud end note from the band. In that first heartbeat of silence, he leaned in and said in her ear, “You’re a fraud.”

She faced him. “What?”

“I see a barefoot girl, dancing alone, dressed in velvet, and with ribbons in her hair. If I stand close enough, when she moves, her jewelry sounds like tambourines.” He touched the necklace she wore. “Tell me those are love beads.”

She stepped back and pulled the necklace with her. “Do I know you?”

“No. But I’m trying to fix that mistake.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“You called me a fraud first. Let’s stay strangers for now and deal with that.”

He shrugged. “You disappointed me, sunshine.”

“March. My name is March.”

“That’s different.” He sounded surprised. “I like the name March.”

“My mother will be thrilled.”

“Good. You can take me home to meet her. Mothers love me. My own can talk about me for hours.”

“I don’t live at home.”

“Even better. Where do you live?”

“I’m not going to tell you where I live.” She laughed then. “I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m Michael Cantrell. Don’t disappoint me, sunshine.”

Sunshine? She ignored that he called her that out of self-protection. “Okay, Michael. Look, you don’t know me so how can I disappoint you?”

He didn’t answer immediately, but studied her thoughtfully, seeming to find his words with care.

She knew she was giving him a hard time, and she had the awful thought that the word he might say next would be “Goodbye.” He could turn around and leave, when secretly that was last thing she wanted him to do.

“You look to me like the kind of girl who chooses to walk in the rain. Who stands on the breakwater, arms spread wide and laughing as a storm rages in. A girl who sings, even when there’s no music playing. And quotes poetry. Who’ll eat raw oysters and drink ouzo. The rare girl who will easily jump out of a plane or into my arms. Someone who’ll love me so long and hard I can’t stand up in the morning.”

It took a minute for his words to sink in. His words? God…his words. So far from what she’d expected. She had always thought in a visual sense, her artist’s side, believing life for her was most powerful if spoken through the eyes. Through vision, life had volume and depth, color and impression. The things you saw, you could always remember in color.

But his words came with more feeling than any first visual impression she could ever paint in her mind. She understood clearly at that moment the color of words.

What he said to her was so different from anything anyone had ever said to her. Until that moment, standing in front of this one guy, she would have never believed a minute of conversation could affect her so completely.

She heard his voice over again in her head saying those things about her. Is that who she was? A free spirit. Or was that only who she wanted to be?

This stranger was suddenly something else altogether, and he watched her as if her reaction were the most important in his life. He was perfectly serious, waiting, and a little on edge. The way he looked at her made her feel exposed, film out in the noonday sun; vulnerable, like he could see her past and into her future; and sexually charged, naked and out of control.

The music started again, loud and vibrant, and the crowd closed in. She felt the hard edge of the stage against her shoulder. Only a few inches separated her from him—they were breathing each other’s air—like a helium balloon she felt as if she needed to be anchored to earth. The poetry of what he had just said to her, the images it created, his honesty, all deserved more than her usual smart comebacks and flip comments.

Clearly this was one of those seminal times in her life when a new door opened wide. She could choose to walk right by it, or through it. There was still enough of a good girl in her to make her pause. Her sister May would not understand and would run in the other direction. Her friends might see open possibility. But did anyone else really matter?

In a crowd of almost a thousand, at that single moment, there was only the two of them. Michael Cantrell stood in front of her and asked her to love him. So, without a word, she took his hand and left.

Chapter Two

For the six months after that night at the Fillmore, Mike Cantrell had kept a secret part of himself from March. Some days more than others, it was easier to believe the right time to tell her just never came. He told himself she was worried about making the rent when her shift at the bookstore was cut; or about a difficult project for a final exam; a friend from school who couldn’t find his muse without psychedelic drugs. Why worry her?

And those times when they were having fun—so often now—he would think, why screw it up? Other times, in his head, he couldn’t find the exact right words he could say aloud. Funny that he could find the words for justification; he could find the words for his excuses.

To hide one passion while another consumed him was not an easy existence, like straddling life between two worlds. His life was great with her in it. So great he wanted to stand on a mountain and shout. Amazing! Righteous!

But the truth was that March was fast becoming the best part of him. Yet she didn’t know one of the biggest parts of who he was; she didn’t know his dream. Some wounds just ran deeper than love and trust, and got all mixed up in his head when he tried to believe in all of it at once. Families could so simply and unknowingly cut the deepest wounds on one another.

Don Cantrell, his father, was an executive with Spreckles, the sugar company, a success, a man of few words and many expectations. Mike and his older brother, Brad, had grown up at a dinner table with only their mother on most nights, except Sundays when, in the formal dining room, his dad would sit at the head of the table set with china and dominated by a standing rib roast, smoked ham or leg of lamb, knife in hand as he tried and failed to carve some kind of relationship with his sons on one night a week during an awkward, too formal meal; being a father was the single thing at which Don Cantrell failed.

His success was a matter of Cantrell pride, driven by some hungry, innate gene that battled with the few cells his dad inherited that were gentle and understanding. He was self-made, the son of a farmer, grandson of a Swiss immigrant who relocated to America near the turn of the century to save his sons from being conscripted.

Last year Brad had torn up his draft card, stuck the pieces to the refrigerator along with his draft notice, and was now somewhere in Canada, a subject handled in whispers by the family and friends and anyone who knew the truth about his older brother. That their ancestors had come here to escape the draft was almost as ironic to Mike as the idea that his father worked for a company that produced sugar.

Since the day Brad left, everything Don Cantrell had expected from both of his sons fell on Mike’s shoulders. He’d made the mistake of telling his dad about his idea and what he wanted to do with it and his future.

His father laughed at him, until he realized Mike was perfectly serious. Don told him he was a fool who needed to grow up and stop thinking life was only about fun and games and things that weren’t important. What Mike needed was to think straight and find something he could do to make an honest living for himself or for a family, if he ever chose to become responsible enough to think of someone other than himself.

Because the most important man in Mike’s life called him a failure, Mike thought everyone else might believe that, too. He went to college since that was what the world expected, and he didn’t want to find his ass in Dah Nang anymore than the next guy.

But one of his buddies once joked if there had been six feet of snow in the jungle, Mike would have signed the enlistment papers and taken the oath. The joke was too close to the truth. Mike would crawl through jungle, through desert, to get to the perfect hill, to find the perfect conditions, to experience perfect packed snow.

For almost a week straight it had been snowing in the Sierras, a sign it was time to test March, or himself, or what they were together, so with some measure of hope and false courage he walked into her place at five thirty on a Saturday morning, fell on her bed, swatted her on the nicest ass he’d ever seen and said, “Pack some warm clothes. I’m taking you to the mountains.”

They had to chain up on Interstate 80, but came into the Tahoe Basin as the snow stopped and patches of blue grew into a huge bowl of a Sierra sky, the lake shimmering as silver as the ore mined by all those barons from the last century. Mike left the main road circling the lake and soon pulled his old car into the parking lot at a small North Shore ski area.

March turned in the seat. “What’s this? You told me not to bring my skis. Ugh. I hate to rent.”

“We’re not going skiing.”

“I hate surprises more than renting equipment.”

“No, you don’t. What you hate is not knowing the surprise.”

“I must be doing something wrong in this relationship because you understand me. I’m supposed to be the mystery woman, capable of shocking. To be an enigma. To keep you constantly on your toes. A true paradox. I want you to look at me and see fine wine, hundred-year-old Scotch. Smooth and unexpected.” She frowned at him. “Instead I’ve become boring. Like milk.”

“I like milk, and you’ll never be boring. Let’s go.”

He pulled their gear from the back of the wagon, slung the large bag over his shoulder and carried the rest. She took one canvas duffel bag from him, then locked her cold fingers through his and trudged alongside.

In the complete silence of freshly fallen snow, the slick fabric of their winter wear rubbed together and made a scratching sound. The air was cold and tasted pure. Mike was quiet, a million things running through his head and all of them centered on the fact that now it was too late to go back.

After a few minutes she said, “This better be good.”

“Are you warm enough?”

“Depends on what for. I won’t know until I see where you’re taking me.”

“It’s a surprise,” was all her single-minded questioning would get out of him. He took her to the maintenance building—a trio of oversized metal garages where the snow had already been packed down. From behind came the sound of a snow plow engine and a big yellow Cat chugged and coughed around the corner, stopping in front of them.

The engine died and Rob Cantrell jumped down into the soft powder. He pulled off his ice-crusted ski mask, sending his black frizzy hair in every direction and walked toward them, ski vest open over a flannel shirt, a leather bouda bag with a red plastic cap hanging from his waist. “Mike! Hey, cousin. You made it. Great.”

“Rob. This is March.”

Rob stared at March for longer than a couple of deep breaths and said, “I think I’m in love.”

She laughed and Mike punched him in the arm. “Back off. I saw her first.”

“You always were a lucky stiff. Although I’ll tell you something, March. He’s the blackest sheep in the family.”

“Really?” March threaded her arm through his in a way that said everything Mike didn’t have to. “The black sheep? I’m glad to hear it. I would hate to think I ruined one of the good ones.”

One thing about March, she wasn’t easy to fluster. She seldom lost a word battle, seldom missed a beat.

“I like her,” Rob said, recovering well for a first meeting with March Randolph. “And, I guess I was wrong. Your brother Big Brad earned the blackest sheep distinction. Any word from the family draft dodger?”

“Last I heard he was hitchhiking through British Columbia. But that was a few months back.”

“And Uncle Don?”

“Still an asshole.”

“That’s my father’s brother,” Rob said. “Same gene pool. Same personality pool. The war hero in my dad still can’t forgive me for being 4-F. Look. Put your gear in the cab and climb on board. I’ll help March up.”

“Just keep your hands where I can see them,” Mike said.

Minutes passed as they rode the Cat around the base of the mountain, and Rob told March every stupid when-Mike-and-I-were-kids story he could muster up: the time they stole penny candy from the neighborhood market, were picked up by a squad car and brought home with sirens blaring; a Sunday when they put Milk of Magnesia in their grandmother’s famous butter cake; how loud Mike had screamed the day their grandfather chopped the head off a chicken and the headless bird came right at him; and the day they were fishing for snapping turtles and were cornered by their grandfather’s prized bull, an animal Rob swore was the size of Godzilla.

Mike tossed out some terrible Rob-tormenting-his-younger-sister stories, until, shaking her head, March said, “You both have no idea how glad I am I never had any brothers.”

The Cat took a sharp turn and easily rumbled down through the trees and into a clearing where there was a short steep run with a rope tow, chained off with a “Closed” sign. Mike’s cousin killed the engine and hopped down. “Here, pretty baby. Jump into my arms and run off with me. Leave this weird geek. I swear I’ll be sweet to you.”

“Sweet like you were when you locked your poor sister in that trunk.” March jumped down on her own and gave Rob a quick pat on the shoulder. “Thanks, but I don’t think so.”

“Don’t think I’m terrible. She only cried for an hour. Hell, I couldn’t sit down for days.” He raised his hand to Mike. “Give me a minute. I’ll unlock that chain and start the rope tow. Then the run’s all yours.”

Mike dropped the bags. “I brought three boards. You staying?”

Rob turned around, walking backwards and grinning. “Absolutely.”

“What boards?” March looked over his shoulder as Mike dug through the gear, grabbed his goggles, and pulled on his ski gloves. She leaned closer. “Are you going to tell me what we’re doing now?”

“No.” He unzipped a long ski bag and pulled out three of the latest and best skiboards he’d made in his garage during the summer. The skiboards, wide and formed like a skateboard without the skates, had foot plates and buckled straps to hold regular leather snow boots, and he’d crafted the edges of each board as close as he could to the metal edges on his Rossignol skis.

“Mike?” March asked, frowning.

He slung a board over his shoulder. “We’ll show you. Watch us.” When she started to argue he added, “Stay here, woman, and watch.”

She saluted him irreverently, then gave him the finger.

The rope tow was glacier-slow and seemed to take forever to get to the top of the run. But once there and poised at its crest, a wide chute of white before him, the air like fresh laundry, the sun gleaming almost too white on the powder below, Mike adjusted his goggles and looked over at Rob. “Ten bucks says it takes us twenty passes to the bottom, and you fall first.”

“You’re on.” Rob pulled down his own goggles and they took off a heartbeat apart.

The snow was perfect, the new board design much improved, and better than his skis in deep powder, which showered up and over them. It was something to be on the mountain again. He shouted out, unable to keep his excitement inside, and shook his fists, crossing Rob twice and edging ahead down the run.

The new board turned more easily, cut well, and gave him more control than on these same slopes last spring, when he’d ridden so often his old board felt like skiing on a cloud, a natural extension, floating on the snow, almost like flying.

Years ago, for only a short time, there had been a ride at Disneyland called the Flying Saucers. Inside a huge circular pit in Tomorrowland, the saucers were big, flat, round and rubber. They hovered off the ground just a few inches and could race across the pit when you leaned into the direction you wanted to fly. That is, if you had a clear path. Without one, you bounced off the other saucers like buoyant bumper cars.

That one summer trip, he and Brad had spent half the day and into the night chasing each other around the pit and crashing into each other and the walls, bouncing away, and really flying. It had been the best ride at Disneyland. A true E-ticket, though the park hadn’t been using ticket books much anymore. When the amusement park first opened, they sold ticket booklets for their rides and each ticket was A,B,C,D,E—E being the best rides in the park and the fewest tickets. That was how he felt on this hill, at this moment, on this board. All he had to do was lean into the direction he wanted to fly. His newest skiboard was an E-ticket.

He cut across the hill and flip-turned, then flew past his cousin. Rob tried the same maneuver and went down. “Ten bucks!” Mike hollered as he passed him, whipped down to the bottom and skidded to a stop right in front of March. Snow coated his lenses and he could only see part of her smile, so he raised his goggles and kissed her before she could speak, then lifted her off the ground, spinning around. “God…It doesn’t get any better than this.”

“Yes, it does. I need to be on that hill with you. Let’s go.” She picked up the other board and ran toward the tow ahead of him.

“March, wait!”

But all too fast she was on the board, hanging onto the rope and heading up the hill. About twenty feet up, he said, “Get off now and we’ll take a short test run first.”

“No guts, no glory!”

“Come on. Get off.”

She looked back at him, probably planning to flip him off again, but she lost her balance and slipped off the rope, swearing. So he stepped off and helped her up. “Let me tell you what to do.”

“There’s a man for you, always wanting to tell women what to do.” For just a moment she looked irritated.

“I don’t want to bring you home with a broken leg, sunshine.”

“I’ve been skiing since I was three.”

“This is different than skiing. More like a skateboard. Have you ever ridden one?”

“Yes.” But the way she said it told him March and a skateboard weren’t close friends. Her stance was unyielding. “So come on, big man. Tell me what to do. Time’s a-wasting.”

“I’m waiting for you to tell me what happened on the skateboard.”

“This snow is a lot softer than concrete.”

“Break anything?”

“Nothing important.” She turned and looked up the hill.

“I have all day.”

“Okay, okay. I’m right-handed, and I only wore a cast on my left wrist for six weeks. I can do this. Really. I can.” Then she relaxed long enough for him to tell her how to turn and most important: to dig in her heels to stop.

“You should be good at that,” he said.

“Funny man.” She patted him on the cheek.

“I’ll go first. You can follow, but not until after I stop at the bottom. Agreed?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes…come on.”

“Watch me and don’t go until I tell you. Got it?”

“Yes, master.”

Laughing, he took off down the short, flatter section of the run, stopped and turned back toward her.

“Can I go now, master? Please? Please?”

“Someday your mouth is going to get you in deep trouble.”

“It already has,” she called down to him. “Just ask my father. Although he’s not talking to me this week.” She took off.

To his complete amazement she made three perfect turns—not even a wobble—stopping a few feet from him, grinning and cocky. Rob was at the top of the run, whistling loudly. Typically March, she made an exaggerated bow, her hand gesturing from her forehead like a swami. But she bent too far, lost her balance and fell on her face in the powder.

It took a minute for her to look up at him, snow hiding her expression, her voice a little muffled, “Now will you let me go all the way to the top?”

The first thing out of Rob’s mouth when they came off the rope tow to the top of the run was, “Wow. She’s a natural.”

“Why do you men always talk about us as if we’re not here?”

“Sorry,” Rob said. “But hell…I skidded down the hill on my face the first time I tried this. Tell her, Mike. My nose was bleeding everywhere. Look. No blood. She went down that hill like she’d been doing this for years.”

Mike expected a smart comeback, but March wasn’t paying attention. She stood right at the edge of the run looking down. “You know, if I had poles,” she said thoughtfully, “I could really shove off. Maybe get a little air.”

“You can get air. Just jump,” Rob said. “Like this.” He pulled his knees up and was off.

“No!” Mike reached for her. “Don’t.”

But it was too late. She was already in the air, board pulled up to her chest so tightly she looked like a big, dark human fist, sailing through the air, the fur-trimmed hood on her parka hanging behind her.

He stopped breathing until she landed on the steepest part of the hill. The board flew out from under her and she tumbled head over heels for a good ten feet. When he reached her, she was already sitting up, hands resting on her knees. All she said to him after she spit the snow from her mouth was, “I need poles.”

“No, you don’t. It’s called balance,” he said and took off.

She cupped her hands and called out. “It’s called unfair advantage. Cheater!” She stepped back onto the board and came after him at full speed, yelling at him. He stopped at the bottom of the run, turned just as she sat down low on the board and came right at him.

She took him out, both of them tumbling together in the snow, her laughter muffled until they lay still, dusted in powder. She raised her head and said, “Gotcha. Master.”

“I hate surprises,” he spit snow.

“No, you don’t. What you hate is not knowing the surprise.”

“Funny.”

“I know,” she said.

“I don’t get it. Have you ever surfed?”

“No.”

“Slalom waterskied?”

“A few times. I wasn’t very good. Why?”

“How the hell did you come down that mountain so fast without falling?”

“Talent, my dear. My innate skill. The ability to learn on my feet. With my feet. Ha!” She picked up the board. “Besides, I’m a woman.” Then she began to sing a Maria Muldaur hit about all the things a woman could do.

She stood above him, dancing, singing, and grinning as if the world were hers. He rested his arms on his knees. “What does being a woman have to do with it?”

“Old Russian proverb. Women can do everything; men can do the rest.” She held out her hand. “Get up, pokey. Let’s do it again.”

So that was how Mike spent only an hour teaching March to board, instead of the whole weekend he’d expected. When he thought about it later, driving to his cousin’s cabin near Tahoe City to drop off their stuff, exhausted, high on the day and her, he realized he shouldn’t have been surprised. Nothing about March was expected. How nuts it was that she wanted to be special and thought she was ordinary. She was better than one of his father’s expensive wines, better than any hundred-year-old Scotch.

Sunshine. The name just came out of his mouth at the Fillmore that night, along with everything else he was thinking and feeling. Enter brain, exit mouth. He’d spilled his guts, said exactly what he thought then, all the while expecting her to turn and run. But here she was, now the brightest part of his life. His luckiest hunch.

At dinner that evening with his cousin over draft beer and thick sirloin burgers covered in onion rings, served in red plastic baskets at his favorite place, a small shack near the water packed with locals every night, they sat on metal chairs and ate on old, mismatched dinette tables in front of a huge fire while she quizzed him about everything, how he made the boards and where his idea for them had come from.

“It all started with a sled you could stand on and slide down the hill, a Snurfer. But before I ever saw one, I’d spent plenty of years on a skateboard. Brad and I surfed summers in Santa Cruz.”

“We all got Snurfers one year for Christmas from our grandfather,” Rob told her. “Gramps said they reminded him of when he was a kid and they used to sled down hills standing on barrel slats tied together with clothesline.” Rob nodded at Mike. “Genius here was the one who after one Snurfing season wanted to improve the design.”

“I got tired of face-planting.”

“You always were an over-achieving asshole.”

“Better than just being an asshole.”

“You’re jealous because Gramps liked me best.”

“No. He worried about you the most. It was that IQ test you failed.”

“Screw you, Mike.” Rob laughed, finishing off his beer.

Rob and Mike were the same age, personality and shared the same fire in the heart, both forced to survive in a conservative family run by men who demanded they be anything but what they were. In each other they found the strength to hang onto their fire when others kept trying to extinguish it.

“We had to do a project in my shop class,” Mike went on. “I figured I could combine the idea of a Snurfer with something like a skateboard, a surfboard and skis. That first skiboard was made out of wood and a piece of carpet and aluminum.”

“Man…was it fast.” Rob shook his head. “If you could stay on and if you could control it, you could book-it down a hill.”

“We started racing each other on those.” Mike pulled out his wallet to pay the bill. “I’m still trying to find the right material for the board’s bottom. The aluminum facing isn’t right. Still, these boards are so much more controllable than last year’s. But there’s got to be something better.”

March had one of those contemplative looks on her face again, and for a tough, doubtful moment he wondered if she was thinking like his dad. He worried that he’d just bored her senseless talking about board construction. Rob was right. He was a weird geek.

She tapped the tabletop. “Have you thought about this stuff? Formica? I remember seeing my dad install it in our kitchen. Don’t you laminate it onto a wood base?”

Mike exchanged a look with Rob, who was shaking his head. It was so simple.

“What?” she asked, looking back and forth between them. “You don’t think it’s a good idea?”

“Sunshine…it’s the perfect idea.”

By the time they were scraping the snow off the car, she was talking to him about how he needed to apply for a patent. Back at the cabin they walked inside and she turned around, walking backwards, her hands moving in time with her mouth. “I think you should try to sell your boards, Mike.”

With those few words from her, everything his father had said to him evaporated. March Randolph was the smartest girl he’d ever known and she believed in him. Until then, he hadn’t actually admitted to himself how badly he wanted to be important in her eyes.

Later that night, after they were lying in the dark, legs tangled, March in the crook of his arm, he told her how proud he was when she came down that hill. That he was surprised. Amazed. And his cousin was right. She was a natural.

She told him she loved him and was quiet for a long time, but awake, fiddling with his chest hair. He was almost asleep when she asked, “Mike? Are you awake?”

He looked over at her. Something about her tone said trouble. “Yeah. Why?”

“I have something to tell you.”

“What?”

“When I was about thirteen?” She paused. “Maybe I shouldn’t admit this.” Her voice gave her away. She was trying not to laugh.

He rolled over with her and pinned her to the bed. “Spill it.”

“My dad bought me a Snurfer for Christmas.”

After a heartbeat of silence, he was the one laughing. And he knew then he wanted to live the rest of his life drinking only milk.

“Sweetheart…Can’t you and Mike just have a normal wedding? In a church?”

With those words, March realized that Beatrice Randolph, her mired-in-tradition and old-fashioned mother, didn’t remember there was supposed to be romance in a wedding. Clearly her parents could never possibly understand the open, unfettered appeal of marrying the man you loved outside of a church, on rolling lawns, surrounded by the freedom of open blue skies and cypress trees twisted by the wind. How could marrying on a San Francisco hillside not be the perfect wedding venue, surrounded by nature’s honest realism?

In the time March had lived away from home, nothing had really changed there. Her parents could never see her unique place in the world, as least not in the way she did.

“It’s a religious ceremony,” her mother said, standing in the family kitchen, a large eat-in room with off-white painted cabinets, copper pots hanging alongside fish-shaped aspic molds, and those classic blue and white dishes that had been around for more than a few hundred years displayed on crisp ivy papered walls. “We belong to a perfectly lovely church. The whole congregation has known you since you were baptized.”

“It’s not their wedding,” March said simply. “It’s mine. And Michael’s.” In her heart, she wanted no traditional trappings. She was acutely aware of that fact while standing inside her parents’ home, which only reinforced her determination to make their wedding about the two people taking the vows.

“The wedding is about the bride, dear, not the groom,” her mother corrected her.

“It’s his wedding, too. It’s our marriage. This is important to both of us.”

“Of course it is.”

“We’re only going to do this once, Mother.”

“Then I don’t understand why you want your only wedding to be in the woods.”

“It’s not the woods. It’s a park. You’ve lived here long enough. You know the city. The view from that hillside is spectacular. When you stand up there, you can see from the ocean to the bay, you can see the bridge and all those blue skies.”

“March. Please…” Beatrice Randolph sat down hard on a kitchen chair, a sure sign she was disgusted. Littered across the painted tabletop were bridal magazines and old-fashioned etiquette books with gingham covers her mother had borrowed from the neighborhood library, along with printers’ samples of engraved invitations on heavy cream-colored stationery with vellum inserts and embossed tissue. Her mother must have brought them home and called March after the very first flush of wedding news.

“The park is closer to heaven than inside any stuffy church,” March told her.

“And so windy you’ll blow away. Think of your veil.”

March snapped her fingers. “Not a problem, Mom. I’m not wearing a veil.”

Beatrice sank her head into her hands and groaned.

“No white lace gown with a train either.”

“You need to think about this. It’s outside, March.”

“I know.”

After a too long silence her mother said, “The seagulls will poop everywhere.”

“Oh, Mom…” March burst out laughing. “If we were Greek, that would be good luck.”

“If we were Greek, you’d still live at home and we wouldn’t be having this argument.”

March sat down across from her mother and took her hand, looking her straight in the eye. “Are we really arguing about my wedding?”

Her mother swallowed, clearly uncomfortable, then looked down at her hands, thoughtful. Her nails were manicured into perfect ovals, cuticles pushed back, and painted with her immutable Coty red. The familiar pale skin of her mother’s hands didn’t have a single mark, not even a freckle. Her mother had the ivory complexion of a natural redhead. For as long as March could remember, a bottle of Jergen’s that smelled exactly like maraschino cherries sat next to the kitchen faucet. Her mother’s hands had always been one of the softest things in her life.

Harsh paint cleaners and hard, city water purified with bleach made her own hands a mess, split her impossibly short nails. Her cuticles were hopelessly snagged and often bloody. The engagement ring Mike gave her was lovely, perfect really: white gold and a row of small baguette diamonds around an oval aquamarine, her birthstone. Just looking at it made her unbelievably happy. But her hands were godawful, and she said as much.

Her mother laughed, took March’s hand and looked at the ring for a long time, her expression slowly changing. “I suppose a church can be stuffy,” she said after a minute.

At that moment March knew she had won. Her wedding would be exactly the way she had envisioned: majestic views and green grass, kites in the air and a hundred wind chimes in the trees. Tomorrow, those gingham-covered etiquette books would go back to the library, the bridal magazines to the waiting room of her uncle’s dental practice, the invitations in the trash, or even better, in a folder kept for her sister May.

Beatrice took her other peeling, dry, ugly hand. “The beauty is inside your hands, not outside; it spills out onto blank paper and canvas. You have the creative hands of an artist.”

Not even on her most cynical day, could March miss the pride in her mom’s voice.

Funny how the small and irritating things in a day could evaporate in the face of a moment of honest emotion. Her conservative family, all of them, would wear whatever she asked, hike up a grassy hill and stand in the Pacific wind to witness the moment she promised life’s most important things to the man who loved her.

She’d grown up in this house. For all its unappealing and stodgy tradition, the kitchen was the heart of their home and had only been changed once, when her parents put in all electric appliances like in all the suburban tract homes built in nearby neighborhoods.

Her own place in the Haight had a tiny kitchen with one of those old gas stoves you have to lean into the oven and light with a match. She always expected it to blow up in her face. She’d come home today to tell her mother the latest, most important news, fully prepared for the same kind of reaction.

“I want to show you something.” March put her portfolio on the table and pulled out her initial sketches and samples. “These are my hand-designed wedding invitations. Each one is a little different. See? No printer could create these for us.”

Her mother took each one, studying it before spreading them all out before her. The paper March had used was raw with frayed edges, soft and fibrous, hand-printed with pen and ink like old scrolls or music from the Middle Ages. Birds and stars, music notes and snowflakes were in free-form designs and patterns, some done as borders. Another had a very small pattern of the male and female symbol on each side of a scale, at equal levels. Her mother looked at them for a very long time. “They’re lovely, and very much like you.”

“Take a look at these, too.” March slid two folded note cards across the tabletop, holding her breath for a few counts, and waited.

Her mother looked confused by the soft colors and design.

“They’re both very traditional. I thought you’d like that. See the colors? Pink or blue. We’ll have to send them sometime in October. The baby’s due around October 10th.”

For a few heartbeats her mother said nothing at all. Then Beatrice sank her shaking head in her hands all over again. “Oh my God, March.”

So the wedding was briskly-planned and Renaissance-styled, outdoors in a lush park high on a breezy San Francisco hillside, and the best of days, the way March wanted it to be. The wind was a participant; it kept the bright silk kites flying high in the air and rang the many wind chimes they’d hung in all the trees; it ruffled the sleeves of Mike’s white shirt and blew at their long hair, hers topped with a flower wreath and trailing with candy-colored ribbons.

The wind billowed and flowed against her embroidered peasant dress, made of cotton the color of kite string, and whatever direction that wind blew, it outlined the softest beginnings of the change in her once youthful and free life, the rounded bulge of her first pregnancy and a future: motherhood.

Chapter Three

Mike had been working at Spreckles for a while when his son Scott made his long, difficult entrance into the world, at exactly three-thirty in the morning. Labor for March lasted more than twenty-four hours, much of that time with her acting uncharacteristically irrational, banishing him from the room one minute and the next, calling out for him to never leave her.

By the time he first held his son, looking like a small red face swamped by a blue-striped blanket, Mike was blurry-eyed, over-emotional, numb, his hands crushed by hours at her bedside, and he was sapped dry of everything, especially sleep. When asked to, he dutifully counted the fingers and toes and came up with nineteen the first time, then twenty-two.

“Count again, Mike,” March insisted.

“Look. He has one head. I’m not worried.” But Mike was worried. Nothing would ever be the same for them again.

The baby became the center of their world. Everyone’s world. He would come home from work to their apartment in Redwood City and meet his mother or mother-in-law, both of whom were there so often it seemed as if they were living with them. Both women handed out advice that often contradicted each other’s.

Already he spent a third of his life on a crusade of germ warfare, boiling everything that came into contact with anything “baby.” (He had read all the baby books himself. On occasion, March had even accused him of memorizing some of them.)

To go anywhere they needed a moving van for all the child paraphernalia. March was determined to breastfeed and had a frustrating and uncomfortable time. She cried as much as the baby at first.

All of those changes he could handle. What scared him was something else altogether. He was a father, a word that held roiling meaning for him and caused him plenty of internal anguish and self-doubt. He was responsible for his son, for his child’s life and future and happiness.

Ahead lay a world of strangers who could easily swallow his child whole if given the opportunity. Life, people, took big bites out of you. Mike felt this immense, overwhelming responsibility to protect his son from everything he knew awaited his child, and it scared the hell out of him.

Finally one night, when he paced the room with the baby so March could sleep, he made a promise to his son, and to the world in that room, and mostly to himself: he would never be distant and demanding. He wouldn’t be the thing that stood between his kids, the way his father had often put himself between Brad and him. He would definitely not come into the house one day a week to rule the roost, carve some meat, and expect those slim, atavistic moments to stand for fatherhood.

Still, every morning, Mike got up at five am, just his father had for so many years, and he went to work at a job he hated because the paycheck was good and the insurance even better. He had a family, so he did what was expected, everything Don Cantrell had said to him.

March accepted the news that she was pregnant for a second time without too much terror. Scott wasn’t even a year yet, and honestly, she was too tired to summon up any negative emotion. Again, the pregnancy was an accident, one that happened during an exhausted night when Scott was barely four months old.

A few months into her new pregnancy, Mike came to her one night. (He’d been reading the latest books again.) One of the things she had always adored about him was his ability to see even a small modicum of possibility, and to embrace it with his own Cantrell enthusiasm.

But her pregnancy was now his sudden obsession. Any day she expected him to double over with Braxton Hicks pains. On that night, after he had read somewhere that infants inside the womb could hear, Mike had come to her with a grand idea to start their baby’s education early.

“If a child can hear, what if he can learn?”

“Just what are you thinking?”

“Let’s teach him to count.”

“Great. He can help us during the contractions. I can hear him now, calling out of my uterus: One! Two! Three! Breathe…Push!”

“March. This is serious. What if it’s true? We have to try this.”

She snapped her fingers. “I have an idea. Let’s teach him algebra. Geometry? Trig? You took calculus, didn’t you? Or we could always call my dad over to teach him. Maybe by the time the baby is a toddler he will do polynomial equations with rational coefficients and even draw sketches of the seven continents.”

But despite all of her sarcasm and teasing, Mike had been undaunted. At night he read to her belly, which was fine because he often read some kind of classic literature, Call of the Wild, David Copperfield, The Grapes of Wrath, which made her fall asleep more easily. For the first three months she could have slept twenty hours a day without being read to.

She loved it when he read poetry. Mike’s deep voice reading the metaphysical poets, or Beat poets like Cohen and Ferlinghetti. It was sexy as hell. The only real argument they’d had was when Mike decided to read a popular contemporary fiction novel and for some unknown reason picked Rosemary’s Baby.

Every day there was something new. He moved the radio by the bed and played the classical stations, old standards, musical soundtracks and the Beatles. The eight-track tape player in the car had everything from Bach to Bob Dylan, the Smothers Brothers to Hair. One night she awoke to him hovering above her protracted stomach, counting in Spanish.

About three weeks before Phillip was born, Mike was sound asleep after one Spanish lesson, two Wagner arias, Peter, Paul, and Mary and multiplying the sevens. She was wide awake at two thirty in the morning, the baby tumbling and kicking her ribs like crazy.

Since it was partially her husband’s fault she was sleepless, she leaned over and punched him in the arm. “Quick. Mike. Wake up.”

“What?” He sat up, disoriented. “Is it the baby? Don’t move. I’ll call the doctor.”

“No…no…It’s not the baby. I want you to get the protractor, honey, and draw an isosceles triangle on my stomach, then later we can go over to the Castro District and I’ll get pi, 3.1416, tattooed right here.”

Groaning, Mike flopped back on the bed, “Funny. You wake me up for jokes.” He stretched and yawned. “You can’t sleep again, right? What time is it?” He glanced at the clock, turned and faced her. “You laugh at me, sunshine, but wait and see. This kid’s going to be Nobel Prize material.”

Months and months later, when their wonderful son Phillip finally spoke something other than baby gibberish (much later than Scott since Scott spoke for him most of the time, a fact that drove Mike crazy), Phillip’s first word was “Mama.”

For two long and wickedly hilarious months he called Mike “Mama.” To March, the only way it would have been even funnier was if the baby had called Mike “mamacita.”

Eventually, from their Nobel prodigy came his second word: “shit.” His first sentence? “You idiot,” which he shouted after March had honked the car horn and waved at a neighbor. Yes, Mike had educated Phillip. Their Pavlovian child had learned from his father that whenever you honked the horn, you had to holler out “you idiot.”

Mike had always made his skiboards in his parents’ garage. At March’s insistence, he’d applied for a patent not long after that winter so long ago, when he’d first taken her skiboarding and long before they ever got married. But with marriage and family and work, he hadn’t made a skiboard in too long for him to remember.

After Phillip was born, Mike went over to his folks’ place one day to find his dad had put all of his board materials and equipment into the shed because, “Son, you have more responsibility now. You aren’t a teenager anymore.”

No one argued with Don Cantrell, so whenever March asked Mike about his boards, he blew her off with some lie.

He came home one night from the job he hated, stepping over baby toys into an apartment that smelled like spaghetti sauce and baby powder. He tossed his tie and sport coat on the sofa in the living room and headed for the kitchen.

March met him with an icy beer in one hand, waving a letter from the Department of Commerce in the other. “We have something to celebrate. The patent came through.”

He took a sip of the beer, sat down and read the letter with mixed emotions.

“I have more news. I weaned Phillip early and took a job today.”

That got his attention. He set down the beer. “Why? I make good money. You don’t need to work.”

“Yes. I need to work, not only for me. For you, Mike.”

“You don’t have to work for me. I thought we decided that we didn’t want to farm out the kids.”

“We don’t have to. I can work from home. Dave Wilkerson, you remember him from when I was still at the Art Institute? He called last week. Would you believe he’s with the biggest ad agency in the city? Stone Morgan and they want me to do some of their graphics. Most of the time, I can work from home, but they have day care onsite—the company’s run by a woman—so when I have to go to the office, it won’t be a problem. The pay is less than you make, but it comes with full benefits and it’s enough for us to get by.”

She knelt down in front of him and put her hands on his knees. “Quit your job. You hate what you’re doing. I don’t want it sapping all the joy from you. It kills me to see you give up on the skiboards. I know you have, by the way. I can’t get you to talk about them. You’re trying to hide it. What you can’t hide is that giving up your dreams is slowly killing you.

“I talked to your mom. She told me your dad packed up all your boards and tools months and months back. You never told me, Mike. You’re supposed to talk to me. You don’t have to protect me.”

“I’m fine. Dad was right. Chasing after some dream doesn’t make practical sense with the boys.”

“It makes more sense with the boys. It’s their future. The pregnancies, the marriage and babies, all of it got in the way of what we wanted. The kids are gifts. They are certainly not a reason to turn our lives into our parents’ lives.” She gave a short laugh. “It’s not just you who is changing.” She lowered her voice. “A month ago I actually bought three Butterick patterns.”

“You? Sew?”

“Happy-Hands-At-Home March. If I start to play bridge it’s all over for me.”

He wanted to believe they could shuck everything practical and shoot for the moon. He wanted to work at a job that made him want to set the alarm clock, that made him want to work long hours and take pride in what money he made. But he was a father with two young sons. To chase his dreams felt irresponsible.

“Look, honey,” March went on. “I believe this letter is a sign. It’s telling us something. Let’s move back to the city. Get a place with space for you to work on your boards. I’ve been thinking all day. Maybe a warehouse or a place where we can live above a shop? It’s only two hours up to the mountains. We can go up to the ski resorts on weekends and you can try to sell your boards. The boys are young now. They’re not in school yet. When they are in school, that’s when we will be tied down.

“Look. I’d be willing to bet we can get some kind of exhibition meet organized with Rob and his local connections. I can see if we can get support for some kind of race, a special run. Maybe at Northstar? The resort is new. They need publicity. I can get ad sponsors. What if I could get some good sponsors through my new job? This is our time. Our chance.” She took his hands. “This may be our only chance. Do you really want to look back and think if only?”

He was acutely aware that his wife knew exactly what to say to him. She knew which buttons to push.

“We’ll do this together,” she said so easily and confidently “You can make the boards and I’ll design the graphics for them.”

Inside he was warring with himself, what he wanted to do with what he should do. What was right, what was wrong. Could it all be so easy?

“You’re too quiet. You know you want to. Say yes.”

“I don’t know, sunshine.”

“Say yes. What have we got to lose? We don’t own a house. We aren’t tied down financially. If we fail, what’s the worst that can happen? We start over. But at least you’ll have a chance to be happy, even for a while.”

“Happy with you supporting the family?”

She stood up so fast, hands on her hips, glaring. “Since when are you Mister Macho-I-Must-Be-the-Breadwinner? Why is this any different than if I were putting you through med school or law school? That’s pretty small-minded of you, Mike. Are you planning on keeping me barefoot and pregnant too?”

“Not a bad idea. We had a good time making those two.”

“Both accidents.” She grabbed the letter and waved it under his nose. “Are you, a smart and talented man with honest vision, really going to ignore fate and probably ruin our destiny?”

“Destiny, hell…I don’t want to ruin our lives.”

“You won’t. I’ve always believed in you. Don’t tell me you can’t believe in yourself, too.” She paused and leaned very close to him. “Let’s do it.”

Of everything that streamed through his head in those few moments, the most frightening was her complete and absolute faith in him. This whole thing wasn’t a lark to her. For one brief moment he wondered if he would lose her if he failed, but then thinking that way meant he didn’t have the same strength of faith in her she had in him.

Maybe because she believed in him he could let go of all of his dad’s hauntingly defeatist phrases. But then self-doubt was the worse kind of weakness, worse than anything his father had ever said.

There it all was: his dream laid out before him, door open—come this way—with all the possibilities flashing through his mind in neon letters. Races. Skiboard runs. Sports shops. Endorsements. TV. The Olympics?

He almost laughed at that last one and couldn’t even say that improbable pipe dream aloud, so he took a drink and lifted the beer in the air. “What the hell…Let’s do it.”

Chapter Four

A year after champion board racer Hank Knowles appeared in a national beer commercial on a Cantrell board, and twenty-eight months after Sports Illustrated, Good Morning America, and Entertainment and Sports Program Network covered the first National Snowsurfing Championship, March and Mike moved from the first house they owned in the Marina District to a large place on Russian Hill with a hundred and eighty degree view of San Francisco and the bay. Both homes were a huge change from the crumbling, drafty, three-room Eleventh Street apartment over a warehouse, that first place in the city they’d moved back to after Mike had quit his job at Spreckles.

In that old building, near a knot of San Francisco’s freeway interchanges, was where March chased two small and energetic little boys while her husband worked long hours producing the skiboards he sold in the local mountains on winter weekends.

One tired and impossible-to-keep-clean-apartment was where both she and Mike took turns cooking dinners in an oven that burned the edges of every casserole they struggled to make, and where they had scraped by on graphics work she did on mornings so early it was still dark out, and during the kids’ nap times.

As bad as that apartment had been, in retrospect, it was where the Cantrell family really began and being there brought them all into a time when the boys didn’t need naps, a place where the oven worked perfectly and a job where March oversaw the graphics end of Cantrell Sports, Inc.

Skiboarding had morphed into snowsurfing, and into snowboarding, a new sport that was bred almost simultaneously on both sides of the country—on the West Coast by Mike, and the East Coast by Jake Burton. Both were called visionaries, kindred in their love and creation of snowboards, who along with some other enthusiasts from surfing and skateboarding promoted and pushed the sport, met then raced each other at events in Colorado, Vermont, Lake Tahoe and Mt. Baker. The Entertainment and Sports Program Network desperately needed to fill twenty-four hours a day of air time and began to televise the meets and races on cable TV.

By the time the Cantrell boys were nine and ten, snowboarding parks were successful at some of the major ski areas and the family move to the Russian Hill came about because of an absurd need for a much larger tax write-off.

But the truth was: March loved the house from the first moment they walked inside. They were lucky to live in such a romantic, red-blooded city, and certain landmark homes were natural to that terrain. The classic old glorious houses she had driven past so many times began to sneak into her wildest dreams.

Like some foreshadowing of what was to come, over the years March had felt some odd sense of joy just sitting at the red light and merely looking at that same house. Living there would make life perfect.

It was a big beauty of a home on a famous corner near the crookedest street in the world, with views that went from foggy bridges and city lights, to glimmering water and all those blue skies. Wrapped in California stucco the color of butter, with a terracotta tiled roof and dark-timbered doors and window frames, it spoke of the homes on coastal hillsides along the Mediterranean and had once belonged to an infamous Spanish opera singer.

Shortly after they moved in, March redid the second floor master bedroom in Chinese red, because she’d read enough history of the place to believe the room needed color—passionate color. The night after painting the room red, she and Mike drank a rich bottle of Sonoma County cabernet, listened to Carmen, fed each other fruit and imported cheese and made love three times on a three-hundred-year-old antique silk rug.

Not long afterward March was sick every morning and sound asleep by seven o’clock every night, signs she knew all too well from her previous two pregnancies. Nine months and three days later, Molly was born, to the instant delight and future dismay of her two older brothers, Scott and Phillip.

One look at her and Mike had laughed—their own intimate joke—because their daughter had bright red hair. From that day on they always associated her with red, a color of high emotion. More often than not, Molly lived up to that association.

She came into the family like an earthquake, and shook it up, so different was she from Scott and Phillip. March could gauge her boys and understand when something was wrong, see trouble coming with a mother’s sharp and innately-tuned instinct.

But unlike the boys, Molly didn’t cling to March even as a toddler. The outside fascinated her. From the sight of her first butterfly to the crowds in Union Square during Christmas, Molly believed the whole wide world was all hers.

March had come from a family of three women and one lone male, her father, while Molly was born in a family of men, with March the only other woman. Instead of combining feminine forces, they were always at opposite sides, like knights on a jousting field and ready to knock the other one off the horse.

While March’s strength and control was the fulcrum on which the family pivoted, Molly was the family princess, with an amazing ability to get her way and make everyone circle around her like footmen.

March and women like her were products of a generation that straddled two feminine cultures, raised to be good girls, like their mothers, yet they ended up rallying for their independence and their individual rights in a society that, for all its touting of freedoms and liberties, was dismally patriarchal.

Most women back in the Sixties and Seventies had to have male co-signers for anything financial. Early in their marriage, when March called the credit card company, they wouldn’t talk to her, even though she made most of the income and paid the bills. They had to speak to Mister Cantrell.

But her daughter, Molly, was born into a world of men changed by women like March. Almost as if with that first breath of post-feminist air, Molly innately understood how to work inside her world, and it was very different from how March’s world worked.

Mother and daughter could look out the same window at completely different scenes. Mothering Molly was like some kind of grand game of Where’s Waldo. There was an undeniable sense of irony in that March had wanted a daughter so badly, only to give birth to a diva instead.

Beatrice’s only answer was, “You were a difficult child. She takes after you, dear. Your father and I always felt your name was perfect. March, in like a lion.”

“Daddy said that all the time. Funny I don’t feel like a lion.” March was exhausted. “Molly and I are polar opposites. My daughter is nothing like me.”

“She will be,” was all her mother had said.

Mike set her straight in terms more clear, the way men could see the world in black and white while women saw nothing but a confusing mass of passionate colors. “You are and always have been an independent woman and never afraid to tell the world what you think. Look, you’re a strong woman with strong emotions. Why on earth would you want a daughter who is any less?”

March was quiet for a long time, knowing he was right. “Because my life would be easier if she were a little more malleable.”

“And our marriage might have been calmer if you had been that way.”

She punched him in the arm. “You know you love to argue with me. Makes your life colorful and interesting.”

“So look at it this way, sunshine. Our little red Molly is the color in your day. She will never bore you. I was reading on the plane, a book about how we parents make the mistake of looking for pieces of ourselves in our kids. The psychologist said it’s natural, narcissistic and necessary, that we think if we can catch a glimpse of ourselves in our kids then perhaps we will understand how their minds work. But it’s a scientific fact that traits skip generations. So in the same way our own parents didn’t have a clue about us, neither do we about our own kids.”

“God cannot possibly be so cruel.” March sank down into a club chair, hugging its pillow to her chest. “And Mother Nature wouldn’t do that to another woman.”

“Women are toughest on other women. You’ve said that yourself. Motherhood is an emotional extreme for a woman…”

At that moment she wanted to zip his mouth shut. There was a man who couldn’t pick up his shoes, shirt, or tie, who regularly lost the remote control but like magic could always find her car keys, and he was suddenly quoting some new self-help book about the differences between women and men and telling her about motherhood? If only one of their babies had been born through his penis…

“…Manhood and womanhood are forced on us by chromosomal serendipity, but we actually choose to be parents. Fascinating stuff. Our choices become some of our biggest mistakes and the hardest to live down. Basically, the point this doctor made was: we can never live down our kids.” Mike took off his tie and hung it on the closet’s doorknob—the tie rack was a foot from his nose—then he kicked his shoes off near the bed and walked away from them.

If she didn’t pick them up, she would trip on them in the middle of the night on her way to the bathroom.

He pitched his shirt across the dressing room and missed the laundry basket, then faced her with his hands on his belt.

“Mike?”

“What?” His belt buckle banged the door as he hung it from the bathroom doorknob.

“You really have to start reading fiction.” And she threw the pillow at him.

The month Mike appeared on the cover of Business Week with the caption “It Only Looks Easy,” (“it” referring to the rise of the sport of snowboarding), Mickey, their fourth child, tried to ride his Transformer car down the stairs and had to have seventeen stitches in his forehead. Behind the accident were Scott and Phillip, caught standing in the corner of the upstairs landing and whispering sworn vows to not tell Dad what they did.

Mike had grown up with an older brother and clearly understood sibling dynamics. Brad duped him enough times to make him remember all the bruises and challenges and dirty tricks. The antics between his older brother and him were a rite in natural family order.

But it was his father’s reaction that changed the dynamic from brotherly prank to damage. Every time Brad got the better of him, Mike could see he became more and more of a fool in his dad’s eyes. Sometimes the darkest legacy between brothers was more about emotional scars than the physical ones.

Through the coming years his own kids made his life fuller, even though they fought over Monopoly money, the biggest slice of cake, who would sit in the middle, which bedroom was better, often with Scott and Phillip so involved in arguing with each other they never realized Molly just waltzed in and took what she wanted when they weren’t looking.

Occasionally they managed to get even with her, like when they taught her to snap her fingers backwards or filled her bed with ants. But for Mike she was a butterfly who seemed to light upon the ordinary things in his world, making them seem rare and special. Her Mollyisms could paint the unexpected into a regular day.

“Dad? Do you know where rainbows come from?”

“Ireland?” he’d asked.

“No, silly.”

“Leprechans?”

She had giggled in that way little girls did, a simple sound that gave him a great sense of joy.

“Light refracts through the water droplets,” she’d said. “And because water droplets are round, they cause the light to bend. A rainbow is really a full circle of colored light but the ground stops you from seeing the other half of the circle.”

“Where are the pots of gold?” he asked to tease her. But he knew the real pot of gold was walking along side him, her red hair in long braids, the little girl who snapped her fingers backwards, explained scientific facts, got even with her brothers by rolling their boxer shorts in itching powder—payback for the ants—and constantly reminded him what a wonderful thing the imagination was.

They were walking toward Alioto’s for oysters that day she told him about the rainbows and he stopped for a second. “Look at that, shortcake.” He pointed to a white seagull feather on the ground. “Do you know what that is?”

She reached down and picked up it up. “This is a feather.”

“It’s also a message. A white feather is a gift from someone who loves you. Someone in heaven. When I was about your age, not too long after Poppy, my grandfather, your great-grandfather, died, I began to find white feathers in my shoes, my school notebook, stuck to my bicycle handle. One day my grandmother saw me pick up one and she was the one who told me they were from him. Signs that he missed me, she’d said.”

He didn’t tell his daughter, looking up at him with her wide-eyed expression and wonder at a perfect white feather, that his father had told him to forget all that rubbish. Poppy was dead and the feather was only some seagull molting.

For Mike, his children—watching them grow up, the boys who pulled funny but awful pranks on each other, his imaginative daughter and her stories, and Mickey the fearless, who would try anything because his brothers did it—made Mike understand what his own father has missed.

Early on, Mike made his decision about what kind of father he wanted to be: a father who kept the peace and used bargaining chips, who went out of his way to make everything even for his children as much as possible.

He gave the older ones both the same bike on the same Christmas. Each child always had the same number of gifts, even the same dollar amount spent; it was a pattern that lasted until the two oldest boys were teenagers, when his work ethic came into play and he made Scott and Phillip earn the right to use the car or boat keys.

But for most of their lives, he had chosen to be a father who measured the cake into even sections before anyone ever cut it. Unlike March, who from the time when the kids were young, would let them battle it out or choose to make her life easier by picking the winner with some trumped-up reason the boys always bought into without a lick of resentment.

But then along came Mickey, the youngest and his namesake, who grew up trying to find a place amid all the strong Cantrell personalities. He was close to his mother in a way lost to Mike. To his sister Molly, he was half pet and half annoying little brother, the one who chanted stupid kissing rhymes out the window during her teenaged years whenever a boy came to pick her up for a date. He was challenged by a pair of brothers who were more than a decade older, and who he worshipped at the same time he constantly tried to keep up with them.

To level the playing field full of powerful 9.75 siblings, Mickey had to be a 10.0. He learned to throw caution and thought and fear out the window and “just do it.” Following his brothers boarding down the toughest mountain faces made him fearless before he ever started school, and eventually turned him into a hotshot, the Cantrell who sought the limelight. In almost every moment of family video, Mickey’s antics dominated most of the camera time.

Being the youngest he had to work hard to fight for a place in his family. It wasn’t easy to come after a sister like Molly and his older, dynamic brothers, who taught him he could only earn their attention by breaking all the rules.

Suddenly there was no way Mike could even the playing field for his youngest son. Mickey spent more moments in the emergency room than all the other kids combined, was suspended from kindergarten, held back a year, but then went on to skip the third grade. In junior high, he was the only honor roll student suspended, after he managed to sneak into the administration building and change the school bell system so the bells rang every two minutes. The limelight was important to Mickey, whether the light was positive or negative.

Mike had never been or wanted to be the kind of father who inspired fear in his kids, but Mickey tested his well-thought-out father plan to the limits. There wasn’t a book on parenting or child psychology in existence to help him prepare for raising his youngest son, or to make him understand Mickey’s surprises that were always waiting around the corner for him.

Chapter Five

March gave Molly her old Brownie camera when she was barely ten and bought her a good thirty-five millimeter when she was in junior high and planning a trip to Washington DC with her class. By high school, Mike had built a darkroom for Molly in the back corner of one of the garages and she was chronicling Cantrell life moments in both black and white and color.

One Sunday afternoon, post Forty-Niners’ football, Molly dragged Mike and her out with the excuse that she had an assignment to do a family portrait for a photography project in school.

Indian summer burned through most of California in early October, days where the temperature in the city was still seventy-five degrees at four in the afternoon and the later sunsets would turn the western skies red and purple. It was that warm when Molly insisted they travel across town to the hillside where March and Mike were married, and she took a couple rolls of film of them all over that hillside.

There were moments that afternoon, sitting on a rock or leaning against a twisted cypress tree when March looked up and caught a certain look in Mike’s eye.

He squeezed her shoulder. “I think this was where we were standing when May dumped that Singapore Sling on Rob.”

March began to laugh and ruined their pose.

“Mother! I can’t get a good shot with you bent over.”

“Sorry. Your father’s making trouble.”

“Daddy…please.”

“Okay, shortcake.” Mike leaned in and said, “I can still see your mother swatting bees with that huge straw hat.”

March tried not to laugh again but failed at the image of her mother hitting Mike’s dad in the back of his bald head. “Your father looked pretty dumbfounded when he turned around and saw it was her. I felt sorry for her, standing there embarrassed. She was just so scared of bees.”

“After your mother smacked him a good one, my first thought was to find some way to paint honey all over his head. Figured your mother could get even for the crap he’d put me through.”

March looked at him and patted his hand. “I know. I don’t think he knew how to be any other way.”

“Hel-lo. Earth to parents.” Molly stood in front of them, clearly annoyed. “Would you two please pay attention to me? I need you to look at the camera before I lose the perfect light.”

Mike looked at her. “You need to stop making jokes, sunshine. You heard your daughter. We need to look in the camera before she loses the perfect light.”

March jabbed him in the ribs.

Molly walked back, muttering, “You two are such a problem.”

Mike looked at her. “We’re a problem.”

“Good,” March whispered.

So they spent a Sunday on a hillside, smiling into a camera lens, Mike goosing her or poking her, and annoying their daughter when they laughed too hard. Later, whenever March asked to see the shots, Molly was always too busy. She showed them one or two shots that were not as good as March knew Molly could produce. When March said as much, Molly told her she had turned her only good prints in to her teacher and she would make more copies when she had time.

They spent Christmas that year at their house in Lake Tahoe. On Christmas morning under the tree was the best gift March could ever remember. The photo Molly took of Mike and her was amazing. Their daughter had caught all the love and humor between them as they looked at each—best they each could be because they had each other—captured forever in celluloid.

Chapter Six

March had started her official life as a Cantrell on a San Francisco hillside, and four kids and almost thirty-four years later she was still on a San Francisco hillside. Though her generation had once sung about the sounds of silence, the sounds of the city were what she loved: those white mornings when the plaintive notes of foghorns floated above the bay, the deep water and moisture-thick air magnifying every sound so that whispering wasn’t really secretive at all.

At noon, there was the chatter of people at the corner deli on short lunch hours ordering salami and Jack cheese on fresh sourdough (Dijon mustard and pepperocini, no pickles). Muni trams rattled regularly on tracks over the Avenues, and freeway traffic during rush hours hummed like distant swarms of bees. Horns honking, voices, and air brakes, close to home the distant clanging of a cable car bell at Leavenworth & Hyde and the soft rumble of an automobile changing into low gear to power up the hill were merely single moments in a day where the constant din of life was going on around her.

For her, there was something incredibly grounding about a place where she’d taught her children to ride a bike to the ringing of a cable car bell and the applause of tourists, and where the call of gulls was as much a part of the air she breathed as oxygen.

The noise of the city was most noticeable in the old brick courtyard at the center of their home. Mike called it March Country—an oasis where on temperate mornings she drank her coffee surrounded by raised planters and huge stone pots spilling over with flowers the color of a fall sunset. Some of the wind chimes from their wedding hung from courtyard posts, ringing out occasionally in the October wind.

March looked up from the kitchen sink when she heard her grandson cry. Sixteen-month-old Tyler was out in the courtyard trying to scale the seven-foot brick wall and not one bit happy that he was failing. She dropped the pasta strainer and, wiping her hands on her shirttail, she was through the French doors in a heartbeat. “Hey there, sweetie. What are you doing out here alone? Escaping?” She scooped him up and headed inside. A minute later she stood in the door of the media room, Tyler hooked on her hip while a good minute and a half of Sunday afternoon, Forty-Niner’s football passed without a single male in the room noticing them. “I think you lost something, Scott.”

Her oldest son looked her, then quickly glanced at the corner where a five-foot square rainbow of bright Fisher Price toys lay abandoned.

“Daddy!” Tyler shouted. Her grandson had great timing.

Scott was up and made a beeline for her. “Damn, Mom. Sorry.” He took his son. “You okay, buddy?”

“Daddy!” Tyler rubbed his hands on Scott’s cheeks.

Scott groaned. “What’s all over his mouth and hands?”

“Dirt. He was trying to climb the courtyard wall.” She held out an open container of baby wipes.

“One play,” Scott muttered. “I only looked away to watch one play.” He cleaned up his son and wiped his own face. “He fell off the back of the toilet last week when I was watching him. Renee will kill me.”

“Then you’re lucky she’s out with Molly and Keely,” she told him.

Her eldest son looked at her over his son’s head, thickly-covered in his same black curly hair, and Scott grinned at her, knowing she wouldn’t say anything to his wife.

For just one second, one small heartbeat of memory, there stood Mike in another time and place holding Scott and giving her that same grin. Those moments were why she wouldn’t want to be twenty-five again. The future was always a blank, out of control; it lay out there as unclear as morning fog on the horizon. But the past was familiar and kept coming around and around in tender, special moments that gave her some measure of contentment about her choices in life.

Looking back was the best way to understand destiny—something she’d always believed in because how could life and all its complications be completely accidental? There had to be a master plan, a book somewhere, like something out of an episode of the Twilight Zone, that foretold who, why and where everyone existed.

“Tyler’s part monkey. Takes after you, big brother.” Phillip set down his beer and grabbed a handful of chips. “You’ve always been the live and hairy proof that Darwin was right.”

“You’re just pissed because I actually have hair.”

“I have hair. See?” Phillip bent over and rubbed his dark-stubbled scalp. “Keely loves this. Women go for men with the confidence to shave their heads. Think Willis…Think Agassi…”

“Think MiniMe,” Scott finished.

Mike set a box of Wheat Thins on the table and stood, stretching. “Remember the time Scott disappeared, sunshine? You were a climber, too, son,” he said to Scott. “We looked for you for almost an hour. Your mother was frantic, crying like crazy, certain you had somehow gotten out in the street and been kidnapped. Eventually we found you sitting on a ceiling beam watching us.”

“I was just glad you were safe,” March told him.

“So I guess that means I’m not going to get much sympathy from either of you.”

“Payback is hell,” she and Mike said at the same time.

“See?” Phil said laughing. “I keep telling you. I’m the perfect son. That’s why they like me best.”

Scott looked at Tyler. “Do you want to go to Uncle Phil?”

“Yes!” (Tyler’s favorite word.)

Scott set his son in Phillip’s lap, sat down in a club chair and picked up his beer. “Daddy is smarter than Uncle Phil, isn’t he?”

“Yes!”

He took a swig of beer. “And Daddy is more handsome than Uncle Phil, isn’t he?

“Yes!”

Phil just shook his head and turned to Scott, who said, “Uncle Phil has big, ugly, jug-handle ears, right?”

“Yes!”

Phillip smiled, familiar, a little wicked, the same way he had as a kid when he just passed Go, collected two hundred dollars and owned Broadway with a hotel. He glanced at Scott, then held up Tyler in front of him and said, “Your daddy likes to dress up in your mommy’s clothes, doesn’t he?”

“Yes!” Tyler said in perfect toddler Pavlovian.

“I’ll get the kid gate,” Mike said, laughing.

“It’s in the laundry room,” March told him.

Mike swatted her on the butt as he walked by. “I know.”

On the third Sunday of every month, like today, March cooked for the entire Cantrell clan, kids, wives, grandkids. Most of the year they met in the house in the city, except during the winter season, when they spent most weekends at their place in Tahoe. Years back, Cantrell Sports Inc. created the roving three-day week during the months of snowboarding season, so everyone from the top down could take advantage of the Sierra snow. They worked longer hours, a little harder in late summer and early fall to get ready for the new season, but when the lifts were running, at least one week a month the whole company worked three days and took off four.

Already into late fall, the past week had been crazy with Mike working fourteen-hour days, Mickey in the beginning of his senior year with college selection on the horizon, and an auction and benefit March was chairing coming in mid-October, all pre-snow season.

While she was still intimately involved in the family company, she didn’t spend the time there she used to. Other than the board meetings, and there was one this coming week, she had hired good managers for the graphics side of the business. The graphic designs for the new season had been selected months ago, so she had home time now, time for some charity work, her grandkids, and a gourmet cooking class she took from one of the top chefs in the city.

Tonight the menu wasn’t gourmet, just the kind of food her family liked on these evenings: salad, hot bread, lasagna and anything chocolate and gooey for dessert.

March was spinning lettuce dry when she heard her granddaughter, Miranda, chattering even before she heard the sound of the electric garage door closing.

“G-Mo! G-Mo! Look what I made for you!” Miranda came running across the courtyard from the open door to the garage, followed by her daughters-in-law, Renee and Keely, then her own Molly.

The kitchen was suddenly chaos, all of them talking at once, shopping bags on the counters, a long loaf of fresh Boudin’s bread and two bottles of Chianti suddenly in her arms, her granddaughter jumping up and down and tugging on her shirt, trying to tell her everything they had done in the last three hours.

“I think we got everything from the list,” Renee said. “Let’s see…You have the wine. I gave you the bread.” She looked up. “Did we forget the garlic?”

“No. I put it in the cart. It’s there somewhere. Here it is.” Keely handed it to her.

“Oh, we couldn’t find the nine-layer cake so we got chocolate banana from Henshaw’s.” Renee closed the refrigerator door. “Was the baby okay?”

“He’s fine.”

“Neiman’s has the most beautiful suede jackets, Mom. You have to get one. Look at Keely’s shoes,” Molly insisted. “They are to die for.”

March glanced at Molly. “What did you do to your hair?”

There was utter silence. The words had slipped out of her mouth before she could stop them.

“I had it layered last week, Mother.” Molly shook her head defiantly and her deep auburn hair, once sleek and gorgeous, went every which way possible.

Keely checked her watch. “Two minutes,” she said to Molly and Renee. “You owe me lunch.”

March was at the kitchen island…feeling like one. The girls had bet on her reaction, which really should have been funny. She should have been laughing, but it stung a little instead. “It looks nice,” March lied, thinking her daughter looked as if she had a run-in with a lawnmower. “Change is good.”

For a few seconds no one spoke, so March opened a nearby drawer and took out the foil, which she might have rather chewed than stand there in the telling, heavy silence of generation gaps between women.

Miranda sidled up to her and tugged on her shirt. “I made this for you in art class, G-Mo. It’s a bird-feeder. Look. Look.”

For one brief moment March wished Molly were still six and their relationship were simpler. She squatted down to eye-level with Scott’s daughter. The bird-feeder she held was large, made from a milk jug, and awkwardly covered with silk leaves and sparkles. “Wow…Did you really make this?”

Miranda nodded.

“Let’s go fill it.” On the backside of the feeder, written in sparkles, was G-MO. In a strange new world reduced to initials J-Lo and BFF, “Grandmother” simply became G-Mo.

“I really didn’t do everything,” Miranda admitted quietly. “Mrs. Burke helped me with the sparkles.” She looked up to March for approval. “But I did all the leaves.”

“You know, I think I love the leaves the very best.”

Miranda’s whole face brightened. March could encourage her granddaughter and not feel as if something she said opened wounds or created new ones. She wondered if Molly would take a bet on what she said to Miranda. Somewhere in their mother-daughter lifetime, she and Molly had become real adversaries. “Come along. You can help me find the perfect spot for this most wonderful of bird-feeders.”

A ten-foot fichus tree she had grown from only knee-high dominated one corner of the courtyard. There were other bird-feeders in different shapes, along with all those old wedding wind chimes hanging from the painted beams and lathe. March hung the bird-feeder on one of the fichus branches. “What do you think? Here?”

“It’s perfectly perfect, G-Mo.”

March stepped down from the brick planter and stood back. “I believe this is my favorite gift ever.”

Miranda melted against her and they stood there like that, the fugal sounds of the city outside, overhead, the tinkling of a few wind chimes with a whisper of a breeze that skirted the courtyard, young women’s laughter coming through the slightly open French door, one of her sons shouting about a play in the back room and, through her cotton slacks, against her thigh, March could feel the flutter of her granddaughter’s heartbeat.

“Look! Look!” Miranda broke away, jumping and pointing at a hummingbird that flitted from a giant fuchsia in a hanging basket right to the lip of the feeder. “It works! I’m gonna go tell Daddy!”

And her little hummingbird of a granddaughter flew into the house. The next sound March heard was the phone ringing.

Mike followed his youngest son down the front steps of the juvenile wing of the San Francisco Police Department in tense silence. Mickey and his friends were brought in for stealing a local icon, the brightly painted grinning cow sculpture from the neighborhood drive-thru dairy, then hoisting it up their high school flagpole. All because stooge Mickey Cantrell and his clown buddies had thought it would be fun to concoct a little surprise for the student body on Monday.

Mickey stopped at street level. Since he didn’t know where to go from there he was forced to wait, his back to Mike, his hands shoved into the kangaroo pockets of a dark hoodie emblazoned with the new season’s slogan Elevate! Eliminate Snowboredom and the Cantrell logo.

“The car’s this way,” Mike said, walking to where he’d parked. They would laugh about this someday, but there was little room for family jokes inside the tight confines of Mike’s German sports car. Mickey needed to get the message that getting arrested wasn’t okay. His son hadn’t looked him in the eye again since he’d first walked into the detention room, and somewhere in the release process had taken on that typical boy-in-trouble attitude, mumbling or grunting responses. Behind his act and I-don’t-give a-damn demeanor, the truth was his fearless son was scared shitless.

Mike didn’t start the car. He called March on his cell, told her they were on the way home, then rested his arms on the steering wheel, still searching for what he could say that would make an impression on a bull-headed teenager without yelling at him like his own dad would have done. A couple of deep breaths and the best he could do was: “What the hell were you thinking?”

“It was a joke. We wouldn’t have even gotten caught if Gabe would have moved the car like we told him.”

“This discussion isn’t about getting caught. It’s about doing something stupid. Really stupid.” Mike started the car and headed home. “Where was your judgment?”

“Okay…I’m sorry.”

But his tone wasn’t the least bit apologetic, which really pissed Mike off. “You’re off to college in less than a year. A dumb jackass prank like this one could keep you from getting into the school you want. Your grades are high and your SATs are amazing, better than anyone else’s in the family. You can get into the best schools in the nation. We’re proud of that, son. Those kinds of grades don’t come easily. So why would you blow all that work for a few laughs from a bunch of your buddies?”

Mickey was staring out the window.

“Trust me. It’s not worth it. Your education is your future.” No matter how hard he tried to be different, there was an echo of Don Cantrell in what he’d just said.

After a few miles of prolonged silence, Mickey said quietly, “Maybe education is not my future.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve been thinking…I might not to go to college.”

That got Mike’s attention. “Since when?”

“I’m not going to be a doctor, so what good is a degree? I keep hearing how few graduates actually get jobs in the field they study. Why should I do all that work for a degree I won’t use?”

“Not an option. You’re going to school.” Mike punched the button on the garage door opener and pulled into the driveway. There he was again. Hello, Don.

“I’ve been thinking that I want to make the switch to professional boarding.”

Mike killed the engine and held up his hands. “No way.” He was mad at himself. Madder at Mickey. Mad that this wasn’t going well.

“You don’t think I’m good enough,” Mickey shot back, his voice high and angry. “But I am. I can outboard every person in this family. Just because you’re the big man who invented it, you think you can judge me? That’s fucking bullshit.”

Mike took a deep breath, then another, and said calmly, “What’s fucking bullshit, sport, is you not going to college.”

“You don’t think I can get sponsors for the circuit?” It was clearly a challenge.

Mike laughed at him, the sound loud and abrasive in the small sports car. “I know you can get sponsors.” He lowered his voice to an even tone. “Nice try. You want me to get pissed off and tell you I can stop everyone in the business from sponsoring you. Even if I could, I don’t work that way.”

“You can’t make me go to school.”

“And you can’t get me to fight with you over this. There is no discussion. Your mother and I raised you to make decisions for yourself. You’re a damned smart kid. Sometimes too smart for your own good. You know what you need to do. Picking a fight with me isn’t going to change the fact that you need an education in this world. It gives you a step up and the brains to make solid choices.”

Mike turned in his seat, giving Mickey a square look, so there would be no doubt he meant what he said. “Yes, we’re lucky. Our business has done well, but that business didn’t appear overnight. Your mom and I worked our asses off. You don’t get to skate inside the business because you’re my son and Scott and Phil’s brother.”

“I’ve worked in the factory and warehouses every summer since I was thirteen.”

All of four years, Mike wanted to say but didn’t. “So that’s the kind of work you want to do for the next forty or fifty years? You will need more than a last name to move into any good job out there without education and experience.”

“I can get experience on the circuit.”

“And you think school is hard work?” Mike laughed again and shook his head. “Be pissed off all you want. Try to pick a fight with me about college and change the focus of why we are even in this car and talking right now. We are here because you were arrested for blind stupidity and you’re in deep shit. Here’s the payback, sport. No car to drive until I see a big change.” Mike reached up to the visor and punched the garage door closed, then got out of the car. They faced off over the top of the Porsche as the garage door slowly went down.

“How am I supposed to get to practice?” Mickey said, his voice distinctly whining. “How am I supposed to get to school?”

“We live in a great city with public transportation. Use Muni. Use your friends. Your mom and I will drive you, when it’s convenient for us. You can walk. Ride a bike. But your idiotic decision just cost you a big chunk of your freedom. Get it?”

“Yeah. Great. I got it.” Mickey headed for the door but not before Mike heard him mutter. “Asshole…”

“You boys stop it,” March said, half annoyed and half laughing. Scott and Phillip had invaded her kitchen and were tossing a wooden pepper grinder back and forth like a football, first over her head, then holding it out to her, acting contrite, only to snatch it back when she reached for it, crowing and using the granite island to block her from getting to them.

“Aw, Mom,” Phillip pitched the grinder to Scott and scooted around the island. “What happened? You used to be quicker.”

“She’s getting older.”

“Scott!” She stopped where she was, hands on her hips. “Give me the grinder.”

“Nah.”

“I’ll tell Renee you let Tyler eat dirt.”

“Don’t believe her, big brother. Mom never breaks a promise. Over here.” Phillip stood behind her, all six feet two of him, his shaved head shining from the recessed lighting, his long arms in the air waving like an open receiver.

March jammed her elbow into his ribs.

“Ouch! Ma…” Phillip waved a yellow dish towel. “That’s a foul.”

“You knucklehead. I guess that’s what I get for saying hand me the pepper.”

“Is that what you said? We thought you said hand-off the pepper.”

“You always were a lousy liar.” She pulled out a small pepper bottle from the spice drawer. “You boys can have your toy. I’ll use this.” She hammered a bottle of seasoned pepper over the Caesar salad a couple of times, then looked up just as Mickey came out of the garage and stalked toward the kitchen, head down, looking guilty and sullen and angry. Her stomach sank.

Mike followed on his heels and paused in the kitchen doorway. One quick, pointed exchange and a nod told her everything with the police was okay.

She put her hand around Mickey’s neck and kissed his cheek. “Hey. Rough day.”

“Yeah…”

“Good work, numb nuts,” Phillip said, then turned to Scott. “Look at that. He gets himself arrested wearing a company sweatshirt. Next time you’re going to do something stupid, wear Burton.”

“Phillip!” March said.

“I was only joking. Trying to lighten things up for him. The kid looks like he’s going to cry.”

Mickey spun around, the skin on his neck and face instantly bright red, eyes still moist, and pinned his brother with a hard look. “Good thing I’m not wearing your SkiStar logo, Phil, since everyone says your part of the company isn’t doing shit.”

For the longest, stunned few heartbeats, the room was dead quiet, the unspoken just spoken, and the family itself suddenly cracked in half. Two of her sons looked like junkyard dogs, facing each other and ready to pounce.

Scott grabbed Phillip’s right arm as he pulled it back, hand in a fist. “Don’t.”

Mickey started to move toward his brother.

“That’s enough, you two,” Mike said, stepping in between them.

March couldn’t move. Yes, the SkiStar division had been losing money for the three years, but there was a longstanding, solemn rule that the family only discussed company business together at the office and in the board room. Mickey might be seventeen, but he knew the rules.

In family business lines had to be drawn to separate family from profit and loss, especially when the company and the strong-minded, strong-willed Cantrells were all tied so tightly together, with every one of them having a stake in the business, in its red and black, and its future.

“The table’s ready, Mom.” Renee walked in with Tyler, started to give him to Scott, then stopped, looking around. “What’s going on?”

March handed her the salad. “Put this on the table for me, dear, and get the girls to come eat.”

Renee left, but not without exchanging a questioning look with Scott who said, “Come on, Phil. Get your wife and let’s eat.”

Mickey stood in the middle of the room, alone on his battlefield after trying to cause a war when no one else wanted one. He was confused, angry, embarrassed, full of young male emotions that needed blowing off. “Go wash up, Mickey,” Mike said, talking to him as if he were ten years old without realizing it.

Mickey scowled at Mike, turned away and walked toward the heart of the house. “I’m not hungry.”

Mike started to go after him but March placed a hand on his shoulder. “Let him go. He needs to work things through and get the salt out of those wounds of his.” Through the wide kitchen archway, she watched her youngest run up the stairs.

“He’s trying to pick a fight with anyone he can,” March said. “Did it work?”

“Close, but not quite. Not with me, anyway. And he called me an asshole. Phil almost took the bait, though.”

“Mickey’s embarrassed. He can’t control his emotions.”

“He’d better control his impulses pretty damn quick or I’ll show him what an asshole I can be.”

“Mike. Come on. That’s not how you do things.” “I took the car away. No driving till he changes his attitude.”

She had seen the tears glistening in her youngest son’s eyes. Times like this were when she remembered that not even for a reflection without a wrinkle would she want to be seventeen again. March picked up the dish of lasagna. “Come on. Let’s eat.”

Chapter Seven

Four hours later, Mike flipped the light on in his wine cellar carved into the bowels of the three-story house, found the bottle he wanted from the racks and headed upstairs to their bedroom. In the corner of the sitting area, near an original slate fireplace flanked by mahogany bookcases, he’d had a private bar installed. Over the years, for birthdays, Father’s Days, Christmases, his kids made certain it was stocked with any and all the high-end wine paraphernalia.

He was just pouring the red wine into stemmed bubble glasses from a Baccarat decanter etched with his initials when March came out of the bathroom, freshly showered, hair slightly damp, makeupless, creamed up and wearing something black and lacy and barely there, with a tiny pair of matching panties.

It seemed almost another lifetime ago, and perhaps only yesterday, when he’d first spotted her dancing to music loud enough to shatter the pricy wine decanter in his hand, under the flash of a Sixties’ psychedelic light show that captured every movement of her incredible body.

He had been raw, kind of half finished in the way all young men were at some point, a kid in the Sixties, still hampered and driven by dark and uncertain coming-of-age edges, with a free heart and a ton of baggage, and even more bravado that hid the fact that his father had killed any natural belief he had in himself.

Saved by a golden girl in a Golden State, Sunshine, amazing and dancing in a rapid squall of colored light that night. She captured his heart and became the woman who believed he could do anything, gave him his family and pride and would grow old with him, always still the single most beautiful thing in his lucky life.

She took the glass of wine he offered her and sat down on the sofa by the fireplace, settling back, her long legs drawn up beside her. All golden skin and black lace in the firelight, she patted the sofa pillow. “Come sit.”

He set the carafe on the coffee table as she took a sip of wine. She frowned slightly at the glass and looked at him first, frowning, then at the bottle sitting on the bar. “Is that Opus? What’s the occasion?”

“A really shitty day.” He sat down and put an arm around her, then added, “And those panties.”

A car horn honked in the distance. A truck changed gears up a nearby hill. But those were the only sounds around them after a day filled with noise: football, his sons, a sleepy, cranky toddler of a grandson and chattering granddaughter he adored, even though she could talk the ear off of an elephant. The family all talking at once. The sour words and fights started by his youngest. The empty place at the table that said more than stern words could.

At that moment, it felt so damned good to sit there next to March, saying nothing at all and not feeling like he had to. One of the things about a marriage of over thirty-three years was you could live in long silences without either of you feeling like you had to fill them. “On our anniversary this year…It’s thirty-four years, right?”

“Thirty-five.”

“Is that one of those important ones?”

March started laughing. “What?”

“You know, tenth, twenty-fifth, thirtieth—the ones that mark some irrational, special numbers—the ones you get in really deep trouble for forgetting. Is thirty-five important?”

“Every anniversary is important, you stupid fool,” she said. “You’ve never forgotten our anniversary.”

“That’s right. It was your birthday I kept forgetting. How many years was it before I realized it wasn’t in July?”

“About five. But I didn’t care. I always made out like a bandit those years, with two birthday gifts. The makeup present was a really, really good one. You should forget again, honey. I want that Cartier bracelet.”

“What bracelet?”

“The one I’ve been dropping large hints over for a good five years.”

“Oh, yeah. I’m waiting to surprise you.”

“I hate surprises.”

“No, you don’t. You just hate not knowing the surprise.” He rested his head back and took a deep breath, staring up at the ceiling, the vagaries of his business running through his head after Mickey’s words to Phillip.

After a few minutes he said what was bugging him out loud. “I wonder now if buying SkiStar was such a great idea.”

“Don’t let what Mickey said get to you. He’s seventeen. He thinks he knows everything. He was embarrassed and angry at Phillip for pointing out he was going to cry, probably even more angry at himself.”

“Pissed at me, too, for taking the car away.” Mike poured some more wine. “He’s right, though. There’s a lot of talk.”

“I know SkiStar is struggling. But the brand was already failing when you bought it. No man can make a business turn around overnight.”

“Three years and counting isn’t overnight. Orders for the new line are in the toilet. Scott’s been making noises about all the money we’ve been pouring into Phillip’s side of the company.” Mike paused, staring at the dark color in his wine. “Just the other day Scott said something to me about how Phil is always just skating by. He was complaining that because he’s older, he’s had to pave the way and take harder knocks.”

“That’s not true and you know it.”

“But he thinks it’s true.”

“Children always think we ruined their lives. Those two operate so differently. Scott analyzes everything, thinks it through. He’s methodical. Risk-averse. Phillip makes his decision and that’s it. He’ll decide whether the risk is worth it quickly, then jump on it or walk away. He has a quick mind. He’s you.”

“But he doesn’t suffer fools and says exactly what he thinks, like someone else I know.”

She laughed. “Some of my better points.”

“I know Scott’s frustrated and I understand that,” Mike said. “SkiStar’s pulling a hell of a lot of money every year out of the board business, and with no sign of any gain at all.” He paused. “I wonder sometimes if I’m beating a dead horse.”

“Is it Phillip? Is he screwing up?”

“No. He told me tonight he has some kind of plan to present to the board Wednesday. I know he’s the doing the best he can. But Scott isn’t happy about it. I think the financial draw and constant losses are starting to create friction between the two of them, which is exactly what I was trying to avoid when I bought the SkiStar.”

“You have always tried too hard to keep things fair and even for them. I know why you do it and I love you for it, but they’re brothers. They’re going to compete. It’s perfectly natural. Look at them on the slopes. Look at how they’ve always fought for our attention. They need to work out their own status in life and in business. Each of them needs find his place. As much as you’d like to, you can’t make their worlds perfect.”

“Well, that’s good because I haven’t. Things are far from perfect.”

“Don’t beat yourself up over it. Listen to what Phillip has to say.”

“Whatever it is, it’s going to cost money and Scott isn’t going to be happy.”

“Too bad for Scott. Don’t let them put you in the middle because your father was a jerk with you and Brad. It’s your company, Mike. You make the decisions. I’ll support you. The boys will have to accept your decisions.”

Mike set this empty glass down. “Has Mickey said anything to you about joining the professional boarding circuit?”

March laughed. “Only constantly since his sophomore year. He’s looking for a reaction whenever he says it.”

“Well, I gave him one.”

“I won’t,” she said stubbornly. “You know what the real problem is?”

“Enlighten me. You’ve got a better handle on him nowadays than I do.”

“He’s just unsure of himself and looking for an easy out. These kids today have so much pressure on them and they’re greener and even less ready to choose their futures than we were. They have so many more choices. College selection is coming up. The truth is he’s scared he won’t get accepted at his first choice. It’s important for him to shine in this family. Look at Scott and Phil. He’s afraid to want it too much and be let down. Or worse, he’s afraid to let you down.”

“Hell, I don’t care where he goes to school as long as he goes and gets a decent education.” Mike drank some more wine, then added, “And I do care that he doesn’t become a convicted felon in the next nine months.”

March laughed. “I know as a parent I should be concerned about what happened today.” She paused. “But Mike, really…The purple cow?” She began to giggle.

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