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

helium balloon. “I can’t,” she added, but she found no words to explain it further. And so she moved on to the next customer, trying, as she did every day, to sell more fries and sodas than they had the day before.

At the end of the day, that’s what everything came down to: money. She could approximate her mother’s German chocolate cake recipe. She could tell Hud the same things June had told her when she was having a bad day. She could sleep three hours in a night in order to fix Kit’s science fair project. But money was the one thing she couldn’t will into existence.

She had to run the car near empty so often she twice ran out of gas. She started postdating checks, taking out credit cards she couldn’t pay back, and turning off all the lights in the house when no one else was home to save electricity.

When Jay’s wisdom teeth needed to be taken out, Nina spent three weeks trading calls with insurance companies to get dental insurance through the restaurant. When Hud fractured his wrist after slipping off the roof of the car, he’d refused to go to the hospital because he knew they couldn’t afford it. And so Nina, knowing the cost might break her, had to convince him to go regardless of the cost. She negotiated the bill to a sum she could not attain and then went to bed every night for weeks with a clenched jaw, thinking of what would happen when the late penalties added up.

Nina made them lemon roasted chicken when they missed June. She stayed up late watching TV with Kit even though she had to get up early the next morning. Nina encouraged Jay and Hud to get out there in the waves and practice, even if it meant the bathrooms didn’t get cleaned or she had to do the laundry herself.

And every time Hud or Jay offered to drop out of school, too, in order to pick up shifts at the restaurant and help pay the bills, Nina forbade them. “Absolutely not,” she said, with a seriousness that consistently disarmed them. “You quit school, I’ll kick you out of the house.”

They all knew she never would. But if she was serious enough to bluff that hard, then they felt they had no choice but to listen to her.

In the spring of 1978, Nina and Kit sat side by side on the bleachers as Hud and then Jay walked across the stage and accepted their diplomas.

Kit hooted and hollered. Nina clapped so hard she stung her hands.

When Jay and Hud pulled their tassels from one side of their caps to the other, Nina knew that the war wasn’t over. But she let herself rejoice for a brief moment. A battle had been won.

• • •

After graduation, Jay worked at Riva’s Seafood and a local surf shop. Hud got a financial aid package that made it feasible for him to go to college nearby at Loyola Marymount, by taking some side jobs and accepting some help from Nina.

On the weekends when they could, Jay and Hud would ride up the coast, chasing swells. Hud had already bought a used camera by then. The two of them had decided that Hud taking photos of Jay would help both of their portfolios.

And so, it was often just Nina and Kit at the house. Kit, nearing sixteen, did not want to be under her sister’s thumb. She did not want to be told what to do or when to hold back. She no longer wanted to be reminded to be careful.

So, instead of hanging out at home, Kit went over to Vanessa’s. Kit went to parties. Kit joined a club of girls who liked to surf in the early morning hours before school. She took a job assisting a housepainter up in Ventura and begged rides off her co-workers to get to job sites and back.

All of which meant that by the end of 1978 there were moments—finally—when Nina came home from working twelve hours and had no one to take care of.

It unsettled her, having these quiet evenings in the house, when all she could hear were the waves crashing beneath her and the wind blowing past the windows. She would sit down and balance the checkbook, nervously subtracting each sum, continually finding they were still overdrawn. She would go through Kit’s report cards, trying to figure out a way, despite everything, to afford a tutor.

In the rare moments that she truly did not have anything she had to do, Nina would sometimes read Jay and Hud’s old comics, trying not to think of her mother.

And then, one day, in February 1979, three and a half years after June died, Nina sat by herself on the rocks down the shore from her home and caught her breath.

It was just before the break of dawn. The air was chilly, the wind was running onshore. The waves were coming in fast and cold, foam claiming more and more of the dry sand.

Nina was in a wet suit, her long hair fluttering in the breeze. The sun started to rise over the horizon, peeking ever so slightly. She had gone down to the shore to surf before the start of the day.

But as she stood looking at the water, she saw a family of dolphins. At first, it looked like just one dolphin jumping. And then one more. And then two more. And then another. And soon the five of them were in a pack, together.

Nina sat down and began to weep. She was not crying out of stress or frustration or fear, although she had so much of those still in her bones. She was crying because she missed her mother. She missed her perfume, her meatloaf, missed the way she made impossible things happen. Nina missed lying in her mother’s arms on the sofa, watching television late at night, missed the way her mother would always tell her everything