Silver Basilisk - Zoe Chant Page 0,45
was so heavy in the fifties, especially if you were poor, and not white. Not that that is news. But I caught a real break when a good-hearted woman hired me as a governess for her four-year-old. She was Spanish—from Madrid—her English minimal, and her husband was away all the time, traveling for his company. I figured out fast what she really needed was company in that huge house. She insisted that our kids play together, learning Spanish and English equally. She’s the one who taught me to drive. But then her husband got transferred to Europe, she up and moved, and I was out looking for work again. New names, new places.”
She paused at the door of her room, the wind teasing the fine strands of her white hair that had escaped her braid. “When I got out west, I had no money for a car. I hitchhiked a lot, if I was with others, and when alone, got used to public transportation.”
Godiva keyed the door open, and there was her suitcase, packed and waiting. She pulled it out as she said, “By the time a friend gave me an old clunker that her boyfriend had given her, well, for a while there I just drove without a license. That old rattletrap had certainly never been registered. For a long time that wasn’t that much of an issue in California, until things got computerized.”
She followed him to his room as he collected his gear. She was still talking. “The last time I drove a long distance was when I took the coast route, looking for a new home. My first thought was to head for Mexico, but I stopped overnight in Playa del Encanto, and somehow I never left.”
“So you’re not street-legal?” he asked over his shoulder as he stowed their stuff in the trunk—he noticed this time she let him heft hers in.
He smothered a laugh. Somehow the idea of her living by her own rules was just so . . . Godiva. Funny, how fast he’d gotten used to her name, even after years of thinking of her as something else. Maybe it was because Shirley had always seemed a borrowed name, or a label, but Godiva was somehow so very her.
“I’ll have you know I am now a perfectly legal, tax-paying citizen of our republic,” she stated in mock pomposity. “Though I did live off the grid until the books started selling, and I got an agent. Sterling woman, and as savvy as they come. She talked me through the vast wasteland of red tape before I could get legal. I pay my taxes, or the accountant she turned me onto does. But I never got around to memorizing that booklet of traffic laws and rules, and then age crept up on me and I was convinced that anyone applying for their first license over the age of eighty would get thrown out on her ear. So I decided I’d better not drive except for a few blocks here and back, to keep my hand in. But if you want me to take my share—drive the boring parts, so you can nap—I can do that.”
“A generous offer, but I actually find it relaxing to go on long drives. That Los Angeles traffic, not so much. New York is even worse.”
“Oh, you should try San Francisco,” she said.
“I did. Swore I’d never return, at least to those streets. All of them seemed to be one way, always the opposite way I wanted to go. And the hills!”
They laughed as he pulled onto the highway. A brief spatter of hail tinkled over the car, a spectacular rainbow stretching off toward the mountains. “It looks like the Grand Canyon area is still clear,” he said, and when she assented, he said, “I take it you went back to school?”
“Sort of,” she said. “Since I had no legitimate ID, I couldn’t go to a regular school, but in those days, there was plenty of alternative education everywhere you turned. You pretty much got what you paid for. There was a lot of hippie claptrap and woo as well as people who genuinely loved to teach. You just had to pick and choose.”
“Is that where you started writing?”
“Not right away,” she said. “I always liked telling myself stories in my head. Pretending I wasn’t a throwaway kid slubbing away in a greasy spoon, I was a runaway heiress hiding—I was a spy against a gangster ring—I was anything but what I