“A bunch of guys. Surfer types. They ended up at the beach, Santa Monica or Malibu, I couldn’t tell you which. We partied some more, and I fell asleep on the sand. The next morning, I woke up and I was alone. Cold and wet and sick to my stomach. The sun was rising over the ocean and I suppose it was gorgeous but all I could think about was how lousy I felt. Then I thought about my father—stationed up at Mugu and I started crying and got it into my head that I had to go see him. It took me four hitches to get up there and when I reached the base, the sentry wouldn’t let me through the gate. I started crying again. It had been a long time since I’d seen my dad. He’d remarried, and his new wife hated me. Or at least that’s what my mother was always telling me. Whatever the truth was, he’d pretty much stopped calling. I bawled like a baby, and the sentry made a call and told me my dad wasn’t there, he’d shipped out to Turkey three days before. I just broke down and I guess the sentry felt sorry for me because he gave me all the money in his pocket—thirty-three dollars and forty-nine cents.” She smiled. “That I remember precisely.”

Reaching under her glasses, she fingered the inside corners of her eyes. “Finally, someone was being nice to me. I never thanked him, never knew his name. Walked back to PCH, stuck out my thumb, caught a ride with some Mexicans heading over to Ventura to pick cabbage, just kept thumbing my way up the coast. My first stop was Santa Cruz, and I stayed there a while because it was beautiful and there was this retrohippie thing going on, plenty of free food and parks to sleep in. Eventually, I moved on to San Francisco, Crescent City, Oregon, Seattle, back down to Sacramento. The next ten years are kind of a blur. Finally, I got it together—you don’t want to know the boring details.”

“Like I said, we want to maintain your privacy.”

Melinda Waters laughed. “Thanks for the thought.”

CHAPTER

26

Milo asked her a few more questions—more gently,
unproductively—then we left her sitting at her desk looking dazed. As I drove out of the lot, the smoke from the Italian restaurant’s chimney caught my eye.

“Want lunch?” I said.

“I guess . . . yeah, why not.”

“No fast food, though. Let’s aim high. We deserve it.”

“For what?”

“Making some progress.”

“You think so?”

The taverna across the street was divided into four small, whitewashed rooms, each warmed by a beehive-shaped fireplace and topped by low ceilings striped with rough-hewn logs. We ordered beer, a mixed antipasto, spaghetti with capers and olives and garlic, and osso bucco from a lithe, young woman who seemed genuinely happy to serve us.