Amen, L.A. Read online

  “But?” I prompted her.

  “But I’m so tired and stressed that I can’t write a decent sermon. Working until nine at night six days a week. We have so much less family time.”

  “Sounds like someone needs a hug.” I heard my father’s voice as he came bouncing into the kitchen in a pair of khaki shorts and a golf shirt. He bent down and hugged my mom from behind, planting a kiss on the top of her head. “How goes it, love?”

  My mom shook her head. “Maybe the real writer in the family should take a crack at my sermon. Because the fake writer in the family isn’t having very much luck.”

  My dad pulled up a chair facing backward. “Maybe you could talk about how God gave a well-deserved break to your long-struggling husband, by having his new novel optioned for the movies.”

  “Not so sure God had anything to do with that, Charlie,” my mother opined.

  I agreed.

  My father smacked his chest. “Wounded! Wounded by my own wife and daughter. How tragic!”

  I couldn’t help smiling. I couldn’t remember ever seeing him this happy.

  My mom’s BlackBerry sounded; she’d left it on the table. She sighed again—her third sigh in the past ten minutes. “Some church crisis,” she guessed.

  She was wrong. It was a Minnesota number on her caller ID. “Donna Thiessen,” she announced, sounding surprised and happy. Donna was the longtime president of our church in Mankato, and a family friend.

  “Put her on speaker so we can all say hi,” my dad suggested.

  A moment later, Donna’s familiar flat tones filled the kitchen. I had a moment of homesickness when she said how much everyone missed us.

  “I’m gonna get right to the point,” she went on. “We’re having some problems with your replacement, Marsha. That fellow we brought in from Duluth? Peter Hayes? A lot of people aren’t warming to him.”

  “I’m sure he’ll work out,” my mom responded diplomatically. “Sometimes it takes a while.”

  “And sometimes if the fit isn’t good at the beginning, all you end up waiting for is blisters the size of the Metrodome,” Donna observed.

  “I wish there was something I could do for you.” My mom was sympathetic.

  “Oh, but there is.” Donna’s voice was grave, and she let the silence build the tension. “You, Charlie, and the kids? You can come on home. The board asked me to make this call. We need you, Marsha. Your job is waiting for you. All you have to do is say yes.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The morning after the phone call from Mankato—my mother had told Donna that she was flattered but that she’d made a commitment here, and then retired to the outside deck by herself, refusing my dad’s offer of company—was when the church youth group was supposed to go to the Sepulveda Basin park in the San Fernando Valley and volunteer at the weekly outdoor soup kitchen.

  Ha.

  The day dawned with a rare June downpour of nearly biblical proportions. I’d been warned about the so-called June Gloom of Southern California, which was when the marine layer from the ocean collided with the hot inland temperatures to create an impenetrable blanket of fog. But rain so intense that television networks kept cutting to their meteorologists for “storm watch” updates? During which the TV helicopters were grounded, and crews showed streets utterly inundated? Obviously, this didn’t happen very often.

  Just as obviously, the outdoor soup kitchen in the 818 was completely washed out. Gemma woke up with a stomach bug and would have had to stay home anyway, so she wasn’t all that upset, even though she’d been looking forward to hanging with her new church friends. As for my mom, she hated to see a teen volunteer force go to waste, so she worked the phones for an hour after her morning coffee, looking for some other endeavor that would allow us to do good works of which she could approve.

  As someone from the pediatrics department at the UCLA hospital put her on hold, I mouthed, “Please make sure it’s inside.”

  UCLA didn’t want us—some legal thing about our being underage. That seemed ironic, because most of the kids I’d met in Beverly Hills had fake IDs. You could find a way to drink underage; you just couldn’t find a way to do charity underage.

  As my mother made calls, I went upstairs to my room to play my new guitar and muck around on my computer. I had no idea whether Sean was working that day, but we hadn’t really checked in since he’d texted me about his tentative itinerary. I’d given it a lot of thought. I was not opposed to a boyfriend from Minnesota coming here. I just wanted to make sure that the boyfriend who was coming was really my boyfriend. Maybe I wouldn’t have scrutinized our relationship so much if we were both still in Mankato, but now things were long-distance. Long-distance? I wanted a boyfriend—I needed a boyfriend—who would share what was in his heart with me, the same way I would share my heart with him.

  As the rain beat against the hummingbird feeder and my window, I texted Sean to see what was going on. It turned out he was home; he had the morning off. Three minutes later, we were at our respective laptops, webcams activated, talking to each other on Skype.

  My video came up first, then his, which meant he got a look at me before I could see him. I was wearing a black men’s undershirt and a pair of gray shorts. Nothing special. But Sean still exclaimed when he saw me.

  “Nat? Wow! What did you do to your hair?”

  Whoa. That’s right. He hadn’t seen me on Skype since I’d gone with Alex to Agua. Well, now I’d have to talk about it.

  His video popped up on my screen. He wore a green tennis shirt and looked exactly the same as he had when I saw him last.

  “I went with a friend to a spa here,” I explained. “They’re called extensions. You like?”

  “Yeah, I like, I guess. But it doesn’t look like you. I just have to get used to it. How much did it cost?” He leaned back in his desk chair and laced his fingers behind his head.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

  “What do you mean you don’t know?” he said challengingly.

  “They were a present. From the girl who took me to the spa. So it didn’t cost me anything.”

  “It had to cost someone something,” he went on. Was I wrong, or was there a distinct note of derision in his voice? “Someone had to pay for it. Who’s the new friend?”

  Crap. I really did not want to get into the subject of Alex Samuels if he was going to be hostile. On the other hand, I told myself that I wanted emotional honesty from Sean; I’d better start by being emotionally honest myself.

  “Her name is Alexis—Alex—Samuels. She’s a neighbor of ours. Sean?”

  “Yeah?”

  “She has a past,” I said. “She used to be a party girl, but now she’s changed.”

  To my surprise, he smiled. “Ah. You met her at church. Is your mother working her usual magic?”

  I was blunt. “Alex doesn’t go to church.”

  Sean raised his eyebrows. “Ah. Not your church.”

  “Not any church. None at all. That’s her choice.”

  “You’re trying to change her mind, of course,” he prompted me.

  “Nope. Like I said, that’s her choice.” I folded my arms defiantly. Then my voice softened. “How do you feel about that?”

  He shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

  “Come on, you have to feel more than that.”

  He shook his head. “Nope. It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other, really. She’s your friend, not mine.”

  I could sense it. A paramecium could sense it. He was shutting down on the topic. I pushed a little. “It’s okay, you know, if you’re worried, or angry. I won’t melt.”

  He shrugged again. “I’m okay. It’s your life, it’s your friend. Let’s change the subject, okay? Did you check with your parents yet about those dates? For when I can come to Los Angeles?”

  My stomach lurched a little. “No. Not yet. My mom’s been kinda crazed.”

  “Well, do it soon. Because it’s okay on my end. And I can’t wait to s
ee you.”

  “I will,” I told him, which was the truth. Then I took a deep breath. Maybe this was the time to talk to Sean about my worries about us, about how hesitant I was feeling about him. About how this conversation wasn’t helping.

  Just then, though, Sean got a text from his boss at the mall. There’d been some sort of oil spill in the parking lot, and he was being summoned to work immediately.

  “Let me know when you talk to your folks,” he said quickly. “Gotta go. Love you.”

  Thus endeth the conversation. It seemed like a good time to take another look at my song “The Shape I’m In.” I opened my notebook.

  The sun sets bright, it rises dim,

  That’s the measure of the shape I’m in.

  The ice it warms me, the heat it chills,

  That’s the measure of the games and the thrills.

  The sun sets bright, it rises dim,

  That’s the measure of the shape I’m in.

  Sleep wears me out, life makes me sleep,

  That’s the measure when I try to go deep.

  The sun sets bright, it rises dim,

  That’s the measure of the shape I’m in.

  I added a few lines that I thought made sense, considering the weather.

  The rain dries me out, the sun soaks my soul.

  If the drummer played faster, it could be rock ’n’ roll.

  No rainbow coming, more clouds moving in,

  That’s the measure of the shape I’m in.

  Decent. I was about to try another verse, but my mom texted me to come to the kitchen. She’d found a volunteer project for our youth group.

  The Church of Beverly Hills was a cosponsor of the largest interfaith homeless shelter in the county, located near Pershing Square downtown. It was called the Tom Bradley Shelter, after a former mayor of Los Angeles, and it served the needs of hundreds of homeless people every day.

  When I went back downstairs, it turned out that my mother had just talked with the director, LaVonne Williams. I learned later that LaVonne had been homeless herself, but with the assistance of the staff at this very shelter, she’d worked up to master’s degrees in both administration and counseling. When my mom told LaVonne that she had fifty kids from several congregations ready to roll up their sleeves and go to work, LaVonne had literally shouted, “Praise the Lord!”

  Which is how it came to be that two hours later, I was riding in a church minivan—fortunately, not the limousine van, but a regular one—downtown, past the Staples Center and the public library, toward a sprawling warehouse of a building located a block from Pershing Square, a park better known for its drug trade than for its flora and fauna.

  We navigated the sodden streets, rain pounding at the van windows. I was in the backseat between Sandra and a girl named Courtney, who had a blunt blond bob and Californiatanned skin. Everyone was wearing variations of jeans, T-shirts, and hoodies. I couldn’t help noticing the logo on Courtney’s hoodie. D&G. It had to have cost a fortune.

  Meanwhile, I was being chatted up by a guy in front of me named Fitz, which was short for Fitzgerald. He was cute enough in a retro hippie kind of way, with a wispy goatee, a blond ponytail, and a tie-dyed T-shirt. He said he attended a private school called Harvard-Westlake, where he was on their math team, and also played Ultimate Frisbee. He had an endless supply of make-you-groan jokes, most of them directed at me. Sandra nudged me and gave me that raised-eyebrow “he likes you” look. I just couldn’t see him like that. Between texts from Sean about the overturned tanker truck near the mall and daydreams about Brett, I had already overloaded the “guy” space in my brain.

  As Fitz cracked more jokes, my mind drifted to Brett. We’d made our date. Friday night, a week from that night. He didn’t want to say where. “Let me surprise you,” he’d said. “You seem like a girl who likes surprises.”

  I wrote back to say that I’d keep my busy social schedule open for Friday, and that yes, I was a girl who enjoyed surprises. Of course, I can’t think of a single time a guy in Minnesota surprised me, even with a dating destination. This could well be because in Mankato and the surrounding hamlets, there was a very limited number of destinations from which to choose.

  Brett had texted that even though Temple Emanuel was supposed to be sending a group of kids to work at the soup kitchen, he couldn’t be there, since he’d be shooting a segment of Working Stiff. Could I please ladle some soup on his behalf? I thought that was sweet. But then, looking back, I realize I was in that infatuation stage, when everything the guy says seems sweet or funny or really deep. Don’t try to tell me you haven’t been there, too.

  The van made a left turn into a parking lot and stopped at a guard gate, where the security people let us pass. The shelter had been built in an out-of-use warehouse, and the line of homeless and hungry people waiting to use its various services stretched from the door all the way to the street. We passed hundreds of people of all races, colors, and ages, tucked under a Spartan sheet metal and framework canopy that only semi-shielded them from the rain. When the wind blew, they got drenched.

  I saw a tan Asian mother in a housedress, holding the hands of two toddlers. An elderly black man with a hat fashioned out of aluminum foil. Four huge Latino guys in matching T-shirts and black shorts. A cluster of kids our age who had that raggedy look of having lived out-of-doors for too long a time. More people like that. My heart turned over.

  “It shouldn’t be like this,” Sandra murmured, staring out the window. “Not in America.”

  Courtney nodded. “And definitely not in L.A.” She tapped a finger against the glass. “Look at those two cute little girls. They don’t even have jackets!”

  The snippy thought that came to mind was You could have bought decent clothes for those kids instead of your D&G hoodie.

  I surveyed the line again as it slowly snaked forward. To my surprise, I saw some well-dressed people, who didn’t look like they belonged there at all. Yet they were here in the pouring rain for the free lunch that started at eleven o’clock. Maybe they even wanted one of the beds, where they could spend the night for free.

  The surprise must have registered on my face.

  “The economy,” Fitz said knowledgably, stroking his wispy goatee. “Since the downturn, with the state running out of money, shelters are, like, overrun.”

  “There really aren’t jobs for these people?”

  Fitz shook his head sadly. I was actually a little bit shocked. In the shelter back home where I did volunteer work one night a month in the winter, most of our “guests” were on the verge of certifiable and utterly unable to work. Twice I’d had to call someone from the hospital psych unit.

  With Mr. Bienvenu at the wheel—I found it hard to call him by his first name, as he asked us to—our van rolled on, joining several other vans and buses parked by the side of the building. Each was from a different house of worship. I saw the white one from Brett’s temple right away and felt a moment’s disappointment that he wouldn’t be here. There were others—from a Roman Catholic church in Alhambra, a mosque in Carson, and a Lutheran church in Hancock Park.

  We all piled out, dashing inside through the downpour. We were led into a nondescript multipurpose room filled with rows of cheap metal folding chairs, where we joined the other volunteers. As soon as everyone was seated, we got the quickest orientation in history from LaVonne Williams herself. She was tall and imposing. When her deep, resonant voice rang out, she reminded me of the famous poet Maya Angelou.

  She wandered down the center aisle as she spoke. Most of us would be serving lunch. Some of us would be doing intake for people who needed social or medical services. Some of us would be doing a deep clean in the dormitories. Some of us would be working in the free clothing area, and some would be making phone calls, trying to raise additional funds for the shelter.

  LaVonne gestured to several staff members who had entered with signs detailing the assignments. “Go to the station that most interests you, but fair warning: if
the stations aren’t balanced, staff will move you around.” She paused to make sure there were no questions. “We appreciate your help so much. Thanks for being you.”

  The volunteers applauded politely and the orientation broke up. Sandra and Courtney asked me if I wanted to go sort clothes, but I was more interested in seeing what life in the shelter was like. I decided to volunteer for the cleaning crew and made my way across the room to the lady holding the sign for it. When I reached her, I felt a tap on my back.

  Brett Goldstein.

  He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt and was more or less soaked. In fact, he was mopping his wet hair with a dark towel as he grinned at me. Do I even need to tell you how surprised and happy I was to see him?

  “Come here often?” he asked nonchalantly.

  “You said you had a shoot!”

  He put his arms out to me. “Canceled due to rain,” he explained, and gave me a quick damp hug. “We were supposed to be on location at the La Brea Tar Pits.”

  “The what pits?”

  “Los Angeles natural wonder. I’ll take you sometime. Anyway, I called a bud, who told me all the volunteers had ended up here, and here I am.”

  “There you are,” I echoed, the same idiotic smile of joy still plastered to my face. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “So am I. And Natalie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This does not qualify as our first date.”

  We were a small group. Cleaning crew was hardly anyone else’s first choice. For the next two hours, we scrubbed bathrooms. Literally. We were given two buckets full of ammonia water, two mops, two scrub brushes, and two rolls of paper towels and told to make the main bathrooms spotless. Each bathroom serviced one of the three dormitories. Each dorm had nearly a hundred beds, which meant the bathrooms were huge. The women’s bathroom, for example, had ten shower stalls, sinks, and toilets, plus changing areas. Cleaning them was no simple matter, but it felt great to be working with Brett. He was even more disciplined than I was, not taking a break until he’d worked his way through all the shower stalls and I’d finished the sinks and changing areas. We’d agreed to tackle the toilets together, leaving the mirrors and the floor for last.