Excerpt. The Virgin's Children


The Virgin’s Children
Tatum, Victoria
ISBN 13: 978-1-897381-05-2
Paperback; perfect bound; 5.5 x 8.5

Sample Excerpt, © Rain Publishing Inc.

1

My Nanna arose every morning at the same time without an alarm clock. She slept on her back, snoring, and she never stirred or turned over. At exactly seven o’clock her mouth snapped shut, her eyes popped open, and she shot up in bed.

“Morning!” she said, as if it were an announcement.

By then I was waiting outside her room, barefoot because I had already walked on the beach. Cool air rushed under the front door and wrapped around my feet, bringing with it the musty smell of the garage, car oil, and the cement that crumbled like sheet rock.

The front door at my Nanna’s house was actually the back door. It led to the garage and nobody used it, since my Nanna didn’t drive and the DMV had taken away my father’s license. But it was the front door my Nanna opened when Officer Brooks pulled up to her house one August morning with me in the patrol car.

The door we used every day was on the side of the house. We washed the sand off our feet under the outside faucet before entering the kitchen. The beach was five steps from our patio, just across the cement strip that ran all the way from West Beach, our town on the Southern California coast, to the much more popular town of La Costa.

From our living room we watched the waves line up like wings beneath the bank of fog that hovered just offshore on summer mornings. It was the same view they had in La Costa, yet when I was growing up there were three restaurants in West Beach that weren’t boarded up: a Foster’s Freeze on Ocean Avenue, a tiny Chinese restaurant on Third, and a taco bar on the strip where I had gotten sick once from the chicken.


My grandfather brought my Nanna to West Beach after he sold the gas station they owned in Needles, California. At that time Needles, a town whose heat put people to sleep, was a dot on the road map of Highway 40, where travelers stopped for gas and a cold drink at my grandfather’s station.

My Nanna held Bible studies in the office behind the gas station. All the years I lived with her in West Beach, a framed photograph of her Bible study group hung on the wall next to the bathroom. In the picture she and three other women smile weakly at the camera. They are crowded around a desk covered with stacks of mechanics’ manuals.

Hair sticks to their foreheads while a small fan behind them makes a poor attempt to move the paralyzing heat of summer. In 1958 my grandfather sold the gas station and bought a house in West Beach on the breezy California coast. It was a two bedroom bungalow with cement floors in what was then a thriving community. Two years later my grandfather died, and my dad, broke and accompanied by his wife who was seven months pregnant, moved in with my Nanna. It was around that time that tourists stopped coming to West Beach, and one by one, sheets of plywood went up over once popular businesses.

My Nanna liked to say that things went downhill when my father moved to West Beach. as she aimed tap water full blast into the pot, “it’s not true what your grandmother says. Drinking isn’t a vice because there is no heaven. When you die they bury you in the ground and that’s the end of you.”

He said the same thing every night and I had long since stopped responding, probably because my last reply had resulted in a slap to the side of the head.

“If drinking isn’t a vice,” I had said two days after I turned nine, “why does Nanna cook my breakfast every morning while you sleep, and why does she make your dinner every night while you drink?”

My dad slammed his Beer down so hard on the table that the beer sloshed out, forming an orange puddle on the rusting table. Not daring to look at him, I kept my eyes on the puddle, so I didn’t see his arm until the palm hit me full force on the cheek. I heard a cracking sound somewhere near my right eye, as the wire basket chair tipped sideways, landing me in the azaleas and knocking my head against the neighbor’s fence.

From the azaleas I could see him examining his wide, dirty palm, not with regret but as if he might use it again. I scrambled to my feet and ran down the strip, prepared to run all the way to La Costa. I hadn’t reached the taco bar when I heard my Nanna’s voice.

“Paul! Paul!” I turned around to see her running down the strip, one of her two dollar Department Store sandals slipping from her foot.

Without recovering the sandal, she ran toward me. I was acutely aware of the young boy who worked with his parents at the taco bar. He was wiping down the two tall tables they set every day on the strip at lunchtime. I was sure he had seen my Nanna lose her sandal and keep running, and that this would make me look bad. I had to shut my right eye against the mounting pain. I still hadn’t seen the swelling purple lump in the mirror, but I could feel it…