But that’s all photography is, Jake says. You can do that from home.
SEPTEMBER 15 1986
I go over to Kid’s trailer sometimes just to talk and hang out. He moved here fifteen years ago to help clean up the oil spill, and he likes to tell me about what it was like to live here before it was a real town, when it was mostly just the volunteers. It hasn’t changed much, he says. But it will. It will go the way of Sausalito and Tiburon and Petaluma.
He sounds so solemn. Like an oracle auguring birds in ancient Rome.
Truthfully, I don’t give a shit if Callinas changes. I have no attachment to how it is now. But when he says stuff like this, I nod like I agree, because he is my first and only friend here. Two years here, and one friend. And although I’m rusty at friendship, I know it is easy to make men like you, if you say you believe what they believe.
13.
KATE
“Louise says you were rude the other day,” Kate’s mother said. “Something about a cake?”
Kate rolled her eyes. She turned her phone to speaker and placed it on top of a pile of folders in the middle of the dining room. She had woken up to a text message saying HAVEN’T HEARD FROM YOU IN A WHILE CALL ME THIS AFTERNOON NO EXCUSES.
It wasn’t that Kate had been avoiding her mother, exactly. But she wasn’t sure what they could talk about. Darcy obviously would want to go into detail about Kate’s “condition” and medications, which Kate had zero desire to discuss. As for work … Kate had already broken the nondisclosure agreement for her mother, who was much better than Louise at keeping secrets, but she couldn’t tell Darcy she had been searching the house without worrying her, and she didn’t want to lie to her outright. Nor did she want to talk about Theo. She had barely seen him the last few days, anyway. He said he was in the middle of some big project and had to work through lunches, but it felt like he was avoiding her.
No Theo, no Miranda, no psychological check-ins: there were a lot of things Kate didn’t want her mother to mention right now. In a desperate effort to find topics for today’s conversation, she had spent her lunch break poring over that day’s newspaper headlines and weather reports. She had actually studied for a phone call with her mother. It was almost as bad as that time in college when, having recently lost her virginity, and convinced that her mother would somehow be able to intuit it from three hundred miles away, she had pretended for several weeks that she had shattered her phone while sledding down a local hill.
Maybe the Fourth of July cake debacle wasn’t such a bad topic after all.
“I don’t think I was rude,” Kate said. “Louise just did something stupid, and I told her she shouldn’t have.”
“What did she do?”
“There was this party, and she made a cake for Theo, my boss. But it had a picture of his mom on it. And she made him blow the candles out and everything, and then everyone ate pieces of his mom. His dead mom.”
“Well, not literal pieces of her body.”
“Obviously, Mom. But Theo doesn’t like being in the limelight. I think the whole thing was really hard for him.”
“He probably sees his mother’s photo a lot.”
“I know that. I just—it wasn’t very sensitive of Louise. That’s all.”
Oh, how awful for him, Louise had said dryly when Kate told her that she had misstepped. Getting a cake. Blowing out candles. Birthdays must be the end of the world.
“She means well,” Darcy said.
“I know, I know.”
“And remember, she’s letting you live with her for free. You can’t criticize her all the time.”
“I don’t,” Kate said, trying not to roll her eyes again. “You asked me what had happened, and that’s what happened. I wasn’t rude to her. Maybe she took it that way, but you know her interpretations can be … off.”
“Kate.”
“Mom.” Kate turned her attention back to the pile of photographs she was sifting through. “Is this why you wanted me to call? So you could yell at me?”
“I’m not yelling at you. And no, I just wanted to chat. You haven’t called in a while. Dad and I worry about you. We like to hear what’s going on.”
“Nothing, really.” Kate ran through the list of forbidden topics again