The Days of Summer. Jill Barnett

protect her from everything.”

      “Laurel doesn’t have Jimmy anymore, but if we move in with Julia, at least she would have his mother. This apartment isn’t the same. All the colors look so faded. Nothing is sharp or clear. It feels empty. I don’t know if I can stay.”

      “You can stay with me, Kay. It’s wonderful on Catalina. The island is small and safe. The house is small, too, but we all can fit. There’s room in back to build a small studio for your kiln and wheel.”

      “You said you were going to plant a garden there.”

      “Who needs a garden? My faculty meetings are always in the mornings. I could watch Laurel in the afternoons and evenings while you work. Please. Think about it.”

      “I love you for offering, but it would be a disaster. Besides the fact that you just bought the place, you have one bathroom. You know we’d be on top of each other.”

      Evie took her hand. “I wish you would.”

      “I know you do.” Kathryn looked around. “Maybe I’m being silly and I should stay here.”

      “Oh, hell, Kay, I don’t know. I can’t tell you what to do. I worry about you both living with that woman.”

      The doorbell rang.

      “Ignore it. They’ll go away.” Kathryn took a drink.

      The bell kept ringing and ringing.

      Evie shifted. “I can’t stand it. I’ll get it.”

      “No. No.” Kathryn stood. “I’ll do it.” When she opened the front door, a flashbulb went off and everything was suddenly white.

      “Star magazine, here. We’d like an interview, now that you’re Jimmy Peyton’s widow.”

      “Leave her alone!” Evie was suddenly standing behind her, a hand on Kathryn’s shoulder. “Go away!” Evie reached around her and slammed the door, swearing.

      Kathryn buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

      “Mama?” Laurel was standing in the dark recesses of the hallway, a stuffed duck Jimmy had given her tucked under one arm.

      Kathryn rushed to pick her up. “Are you okay, angel?”

      Laurel nodded, hugging the duck, but she kept staring curiously at the front door.

      “That kind of thing wouldn’t happen at Julia’s.” Kathryn looked pointedly at her sister. “She has the front gates and hired help.”

      Evie nodded.

      First and foremost, Kathryn knew she had to protect her daughter. Today people had said the stupidest things: It’ll get better with time. God needed Jimmy more. You’re young, dear, you’ll marry again. She could only imagine how Laurel might interpret any one of those comments. And how long would it be before the newspaper people finally left them alone?

      “Mama?” Laurel framed Kathryn’s cheeks with her small hands and brought her face very close, the way she did whenever she wanted someone’s sole attention. “Those people at the door want to view you because you’re Daddy’s window.”

      The words took a moment to register. Kathryn turned to Evie. “I’m a window.”

      Her sister looked as if she were trying not to laugh.

      “I’m a window,” Kathryn repeated—it was all so ludicrous—then laughter poured out of her, uncontrolled, like water running over. She couldn’t stop. It was just laughter, she told herself, a silly emotion, really, and panic edged it—a sound that was closer to shattering glass—and she knew then her laughter was anything but natural.

       CHAPTER 3

       Orange County, California

      On that long stretch of land between LA and San Diego, towns grew quickly and sprawled all over one another. Amusement parks with gravity rooms and wild toad rides replaced boysenberry fields and orange groves where people could pick all the fruit they wanted for a fifty-cent piece. Tracts of shake-shingled homes with attached garages sold out before the houses were even built, and traffic signals sprang up on street corners suddenly too busy for stop signs.

      Public transportation? It was an afterthought. Cars were necessary in Southern California, and oil was big business. Hammer-shaped oil pumps lined the coast highway all along Huntington Beach, where tar spotted long stretches of sand and stuck like gum to broken seashells, litter, and the murky green kelp that washed ashore. The locals called it Tin Can Beach—it looked like a dump, so everyone just used it as one.

      If tar was the automobile driver’s grim trade-off for pumping oil up from the ground, so were the skeletal black oil towers on Signal Hill and the churning refineries off Sepulveda Boulevard, with their tall, cigar-shaped towers that spit white smoke and all those acrid smells into the sweet California air. A popular joke regularly ran through the LA nightclubs that Southern Californians paid the prices for their automobiles in dollars and scents.

      But the truth was, people spent money on cars for mobility and freedom, so they could be in control of where they went and when. They bought homes because they liked to think they owned a piece of a place where the sun shined most of the time and movie stars lived large and died tragically.

      The coastal resort town of Newport Beach was all prime property. The ocean was clean, the sand fine as sugar, and there was no litter anywhere. Pristine white yachts pulled into private docks along the isles, where sprawling California-style homes carried addresses as distinctive as those in Beverly Hills. Whenever the Santa Ana winds blew in, the scent from the eucalyptus trees above Highway 1 cleared the sinuses better than Bano-Rub, a petroleum-jelly-and-camphor mixture that helped launch Banning Oil into the petroleum by-products industry and gave Victor Gaylord Banning enough money to buy up a chunk of Newport’s exclusive Lido Isle with hardly a dent in his bank accounts.

      It was a Thursday afternoon, maybe three o’clock, and Victor was home in the middle of the day, facing a wall of windows—all that stood between him and the civilized edges of the wide blue Pacific. He stared at his reflection in the glass, seeing only the physiognomy of the one person he vowed he would never become. His father had been weak, unable to succeed in anything except failure.

      Victor grew up in a house of discontent, with only his sister, Aletta, as champion against a mother whose elusive approval he could never capture, because she saw in Victor only his father standing there in miniature, a constant reminder of her bad choices. It was Aletta who paid the biggest price for their father’s failures. She died a useless death when there was no money to save her, and Victor was abandoned by the one person he depended upon.

      For his mother, Aletta’s death was complete devastation. She couldn’t bear to look at the only child left, so she would lock him in the closet for hours. Eventually she saw suicide as the only release from her agony. She didn’t want to live in a world with only her weak husband and his look-alike son, who, try as he might, would never be a substitute for the girl child she truly loved. To Victor’s complete dismay, he cried for days after his mother killed herself, unable to control his emotions. The Banning legacy was jagged and sharp and part of him, no matter how he tried to prove otherwise.

      Today, his cheeks and eyes were proof that sleep escaped him. He hadn’t shaved since yesterday, when he went to identify the bodies of his son and daughter-in-law, filed in long stainless steel cabinets at the LA morgue. Until a few days ago, he hadn’t seen or spoken to his son, Rudy, in almost ten years. His only source about anything in Rudy’s life had been Rachel. What Victor was feeling at that very moment—had he allowed it inside—would have brought him to his knees. Grief was crippling. Allowed in, it made the strong weak.

      At the sound of his Town Car pulling in, he moved to a narrow window where he could see the driveway through the waxy leaves of a fat camellia bush.