Shining Sea by Anne Korkeakivi Read Free Book Online Page A

seeing her.”
    Mike ignores him. “I thought her shift was done at four today, like mine. That’s what she told me this morning.”
    His two brothers look at each other. Whole blocks burned down in Watts. People were even killed.
    “Don’t worry, Mom,” Mike adds quickly. “Lee was picking Patty Ann up. Nothing could have happened to her.”
    Lee is Patty Ann’s steady. Skinny and dark-haired, in jeans and boots even when it’s hot out, Lee’s only job this summer seems to be driving Patty Ann to work and taking her parking after. Their mom says the worst part about Patty Ann not getting a scholarship to Vassar is that it means not putting the whole of the United States of America between the two of them. She says if their father were still alive, he’d have sent Lee packing a long time ago. Their mom doesn’t like Lee much.
    She and Patty Ann had a fight about him again just this morning: in fact, Lee is what they mostly fight about. At least CSU will get Patty Ann to a different part of town, his mom said after Patty Ann went running out the door into Lee’s Dodge Matador. With a different sort of boy.
    “Right,” his mom says now. “She’s with Lee. That makes me feel miles better.”
    There’s no way to reach Patty Ann if she’s left the coffee shop. Maybe she and Lee went to the movies, or maybe they’re just hanging out in Lee’s car—although, normally, Patty Ann would have said if she weren’t coming home for dinner. If anything, Patty Ann seems to enjoy telling his mom when she’s staying out with Lee.
    They go ahead and eat. Afterward Mike does the dishes without protest, even though tonight is supposed to be Patty Ann’s turn. His mom bathes Sissy and tucks her into bed, and Luke goes to read to Sissy as promised while he stays in the kitchen to dry the dishes and help Mike put them away. When the kitchen is all cleaned up, he and Mike return to sit in the living room again, Mike pulling out a deck of cards. Soon, his mom joins them.
    As the night crawls in, his mom gets more and more irritable. She smokes one cigarette, and then lights another. A little before ten, Mike taps the cards neatly into a pile, slides them back into their cardboard box.
    “Good night, Mom,” Mike says and disappears to their bedroom, yawning and stretching.
    The house is quiet around him and his mom now, just the radio, the crickets outside, the low hum of the fridge. She starts folding laundry on the dining room table, something she normally never does at this hour. He sits in his dad’s old armchair, listening to KHJ. The DJ is talking about the Beatles playing the Hollywood Bowl this weekend. His favorite band is the Byrds, though, and he waits patiently for their new song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” to come on. He knows it will eventually. McGuinn’s voice sounds like no one else’s, and his guitar is reedy and twangy, almost like the little piano-organ at church. He’s never heard a guitar sound like it before. If only he had a record player, he’d buy the 45 for “Mr. Tambourine Man” and listen to it over and over again.
    Maybe he’ll get a job after school this year, so he can buy a guitar and learn to play it himself. So he won’t have to wait for it to come on the radio.
    But what kind of job can he get during the school year that’ll pay enough for a guitar? Could he start bagging groceries on weekends already? Or washing cars after school? Delivering newspapers before school?
    Eugene will have an idea. Eugene always needs money.
    At eleven, the phone rings.
    “Can you get that, Francis?” his mom says, looking hard at him from the sill of the dining room. She reaches into a pocket for her cigarettes.
    She doesn’t follow him to the phone, but he can feel her expectation trail after him.
    “Hello,” he says into the receiver.
    “Francis? Is that you?” Patty Ann’s voice sounds funny—faint and crackly—but it’s definitely Patty Ann. He glances at his mom. She has her hands on her