Malibu Rising: A Novel - Taylor Reid (top 10 motivational books .TXT) 📗

“Then you clean it! I’m sick of cleaning it and having you come in and mess it up again,” Hud would say. “I’m not your maid.”

“You are though,” Jay would say. “Just like I’m the fluff and fold around here.”

Jay was in charge of the laundry. He handled his sisters’ underwear and bathing suits with chopsticks, unwilling to touch them whether they were clean or dirty. But Jay quickly became a wiz at stain removal, each mark a puzzle to solve. He threw himself into researching the right combination of liquids that would unlock the dirt from Kit’s soccer shorts. He found the golden ticket by asking an older woman in the laundry aisle what she did to get out grass stains. Turned out, it was Fels-Naptha. Worked like a charm.

“Look at this, motherfucker!” Jay called out to the rest of the house one day from the garage. “Good as fucking new!”

Kit peeked her head in to see her white shorts bright as the sun, unblemished.

“Wow,” she said. “Maybe you can open Riva’s Laundry.”

Jay laughed. They all knew there was only one future Jay would entertain for himself—and that was on a surfboard. He would go pro.

When he wasn’t at school or running the wash cycle, he was in the water. Hud was usually out there with him, helping him perfect every single movement he could control in the waves.

Kit often tried to join. And Jay would tell her the same thing every time. “I’m not out here to play, Kit. This is serious.”

Often, after having been rebuffed, she would watch Jay and Hud out in the water from her spot on the deck, a pair of binoculars in hand. She could do what Jay was doing. Someday, he’d understand.

“Go ahead and get out there,” Nina would encourage her while vacuuming or making dinner or trying to speed-read a book for English class. Nina’s A’s and B’s were quickly becoming C’s and D’s, a fact she kept to herself. “Jay doesn’t own the ocean.”

Kit would shake her head. If they didn’t want her there, she didn’t want to be there, even if she did. Instead, she would watch. And maybe learn.

When she was done watching, she would always put the caps back on the lenses, put the set of binoculars back in their case, and then put the case on the shelf in the living room. Because Kit was in charge of tidying up. And she took it very seriously.

Every single night, before she went to bed, she picked up all of the books and magazines and put them in stacks. She grabbed all of the glasses and put them in the sink. And if she couldn’t see an imminent use for something, she was ruthless about what went into the trash bin.

“Where is my permission slip?” Hud asked one morning when he came to breakfast. Nutritional concerns had been thrown out the window the moment they lost their mother. Grocery store donuts and sugar cereal and chocolate milk took over the kitchen. Kit, not yet thirteen, had taken to drinking coffee with half-and-half and four sugars. Nina tried her best to get each of them to at least eat protein.

“What permission slip?” Kit asked.

“The one about the field trip to the Getty. For my art class. I needed Nina to make it look like Dad signed it. I left it on the coffee table.”

“The yellow thing?” Kit asked. “I threw it away.”

“Kit!” Hud said, irritated.

“I told you all: Keep it in your room or I’ll throw it in the trash.”

Hud went through the garbage and found it, wrinkled and stained with butter. “Where’s Nina?” he asked.

Jay came in and saw Hud with the permission slip. “You know, any one of us can forge Dad’s name.”

“Nina’s better at it.”

Jay turned to Kit. “Do you think we should buy some of those headshots people have of Dad? And sign them? And then sell them?”

Hud looked at Jay, frowning. “Don’t put that in her head.”

“It’s not a terrible idea,” Jay said. “He is our dad.”

Hud ignored him and went looking for Nina. He found her brushing her hair in the bathroom. “Can you sign this?”

Nina grabbed the pen out of his hand and scrawled “M. Riva” across it.

“Thanks,” Hud said. But he stayed a moment longer. “People are going to figure it out. That he’s not here. That he’s … never been here.”

“Everyone knows he’s not here,” Nina said. “The whole school administration knows he’s not here.”

Principal Declan had pulled Nina aside two months prior and told her that he understood her predicament. And as long as it looked like someone was home, he wasn’t going to call the state. “You’re almost eighteen. I don’t want you all split up into different homes or anything else they might do. You’ve been through enough. So … make it look good and we’ll be all set, all right?”

Nina had thanked him as casually as possible and then bawled her eyes out in the girls’ bathroom.

“But I’m saying … how much longer can we really keep this ruse going?” Hud asked. “At some point, we’re going to come up against a problem we really can’t solve without help.”

“I got it, Hud,” Nina said. “Trust me. Whatever it is, whatever happens, whatever we run into or need … I will take care of it.”

They were living off the profits from the restaurant, which was being run by a shift manager named Patricia, who Nina had promoted on the spot one day shortly after her mother died. Nina was flying by the seat of her pants.

But what other choice did she have? June had been gone for four months. Mick still hadn’t so much as sent a sympathy card. And somewhere in all of those days and weeks and now months of the phone not ringing, Nina had given up on her father’s humanity.

She’d consulted an attorney—a guy she found in the yellow pages—who told her that in order to force Mick to comply with his legal