The minute he said it, my stomach growled. I was starving.

He heard it, and grinned. ‘No problem. Get dressed and come on downstairs. We’ll have lunch on the deck. It’s really beautiful out today.’

I dragged myself out of bed with an effort. I had my pj’s on. I didn’t feel very much like getting dressed. So I just pulled on some socks and a bathrobe, brushed my teeth, and stood for a minute by the bay windows, looking out as I tried to work the snarls out of my hair. The red dome of the Mission church glowed in the sunlight. I could see the ocean winking behind it. You couldn’t tell from up here that it had been the scene last night of so much destruction.

It wasn’t long before an extremely appetizing aroma rose up from the kitchen, and lured me down the stairs. Andy was making Reuben sandwiches. He waved me out of the kitchen, though, towards the huge deck he’d built on to the back of the house. The sun was pouring down there, and I stretched out on one of the padded chaise longues, and pretended like I was a movie star for a while. Then Andy came out with the sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade, and I moved to the table with the big green umbrella over it, and dug in. For a non-New Yorker, Andy grilled a mean Reuben.

And that wasn’t all he grilled. He spent a half hour grilling me pretty thoroughly . . . but not about what had happened the night before. To my astonishment, Sleepy and Doc had kept their mouths shut. Andy was perfectly in the dark about what had happened. All he wanted to know was whether I liked my new school, if I was happy, blah, blah, blah . . .

Except for one thing. He did say to me, as he was asking me how I liked California, and was it really so very different from New York – uh, duh – ‘So, I guess you slept straight through your first earthquake.’

I nearly choked on a chip. ‘What?’

‘Your first quake. There was one last night, around two in the morning. Not a big one, really – round about a four pointer – but it woke me up. No damage, except down at the Mission, evidently. Breezeway collapsed. But then, that should come as no surprise to them. I’ve been warning them for years about that timber. It’s nearly as old as the Mission itself. Can’t be expected to last forever.’

I chewed more carefully. Wow. Heather’s goodbye bang must have really packed a wallop if people all over the Valley, and even up in the hills, had felt it.

But that still didn’t explain how David had known to look for me down at the school.

I’d moved upstairs, and was sitting on the window seat in my room flipping through a mindless fashion magazine, wondering where Jesse had gone off to, and how long I was going to have to wait before he showed up to give me another one of his lectures, and if there was any chance he might call me querida again, when the boys got home from school. Dopey stomped right past my room – he still blamed me for getting him grounded – but Sleepy poked his head in, looked at me, saw that I was all right, then went away, shaking his head. Only David knocked, and when I called for him to come in, did so, shyly.