Between Us Girls Read online

  “Excuse me.”

  Sam turned toward the voice. It belonged to a teenager with long blond hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a long deep crease between her brows. Sam said, “Hi.”

  The girl gave a quick nod. “Would you mind telling me what you did?”

  “What I did?”

  “Here.” She swept her arm in a wide arc.

  The gesture encompassed the building behind Sam, a playground, a parking lot, shrubbery, fences, housetops peeking over them, and the cloudless Southern California blue sky.

  What had she done there? Well, she had shaken hands politely, per Randy’s instructions. She had pronounced the name of her firm clearly into the microphone as she said thanks for the certificate of appreciation. She let others cut the ribbon. She had her picture taken countless times with a couple dozen strangers. She had even tried to smile.

  “I mean…” The girl pushed at the bridge of her glasses and did not hold direct eye contact. “I mean, your work.”

  Sam watched the girl’s face turn hot pink and saw herself fifteen years ago, blushing and stammering in front of a stranger.

  The woman had been a guest at her high school’s Career Day. Typically a collection of locals spoke, people the kids saw at work every single day of their lives. The Arizona town was too remote for outsiders to bother with. Except that one time. Irene Hibbs blew in like a puffy white cloud, a thing of amazement that hovered long enough for Sam to dare to approach.

  She was the only one who had cared to approach the woman. Classmates were bored silly and acting like it. No surprise. The video player was on the fritz. No surprise. It was monsoon season and water plopped loudly into buckets around the room. Even the woman’s laptop seemed jinxed. She had resorted to passing around a coffee-table book.

  The girl standing before Sam now said, “Did you…did you build it?”

  It was the same question Sam had asked Irene Hibbs. Did you…did you build it? She had referred to a Chicago skyscraper photographed in the book. The girl referred to the structure behind Sam. The answer, though, would be the same as the one she had heard.

  “What do you think?”

  The girl blinked and nudged her glasses upward again. “They said you’re an engineer with Collins and Creighton.”

  “Yes.”

  She exhaled. “Really?” The word rode on her breath, as if Sam were a thing of amazement.

  Inwardly Sam squirmed. That was no skyscraper behind her, only a simple community center, its most remarkable feature a gym. She wanted to slink off. But the girl’s reddened cheeks and avoidance of eye contact was doing a number on her.

  “It just takes a lot of math and science.”

  “But you built it.”

  “If we don’t count architects and construction people.”

  “Their work wouldn’t happen without yours.”

  Sam’s mouth twitched. “How do you know?”

  “My little sister draws pretty pictures and my little brother plays with Legos. Sometimes I put them together.”

  “And you get an aesthetically pleasing structure that doesn’t fall apart.”

  “Not always.” She shrugged and met Sam’s gaze at last, her expression an unabashed desire for knowledge she had not yet been able to acquire.

  Sam understood. “Do you want to take a tour behind the scenes? I’ll tell you about base isolation and what we did with the beams and columns that allows energy to dissipate during an earthquake.”

  The girl’s eyes did not glaze over.

  Sam went on. “I can explain why we put the gym on the north side and the kitchen on the east, how the passive and active fire protection systems were designed.”

  The girl nodded. She was hooked.

  It was Sam’s turn to blink. If she still wore glasses instead of contact lenses, she would be adjusting them on her nose. She’d met a soul mate. “Sound fun?”

  A more vigorous nod.

  “Okay. Keep in mind that there’s a whole team of us. I’m still doing entry-level stuff. I only worked on the beams and columns.”

  Another nod and a tentative smile.

  Sam put out her hand and shook the girl’s. “I’m Sam Whitley.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Lisa Kingman.”

  Kingman? As in…“Are you related to Mayor Kingman?”

  “He’s my dad.”

  Sam nearly burst out laughing, but she only smiled, a genuine expression this time. She was schmoozing the mayor’s daughter.

  That might be worth two boosts up the ladder.

  Three

  March 17

  Valley Oaks, Illinois

  Between the lunch and dinner shifts at the Flying Pig Rib House, Jasmyn sat in a corner booth in the empty dining room and wrapped silverware place settings in thick paper napkins. Muggy, summerlike air floated through the open door. The late winter day was so warm she wore black capris with a short-sleeved white blouse and had even bicycled to work.

  She sang along with the Dixie Chicks, using her own country-girlish twang that she thought was pretty good. Not that she could hear it very well above the music blasting from the speakers. Quinn liked the volume on extra loud.

  The kitchen door swung open now and Quinn backed out through it, singing in her clear, full soprano. She bopped around, a large tray of salt and pepper shakers in her hands. None of them rattled. With the graceful ease of a gymnast who taught dance exercise classes, she made her way to the middle of the room and set the tray down. “Sing it like you mean it, Albright.”

  Jasmyn continued her quiet sing-along. Although she liked the tune, the message had never made much sense to her, so singing like she meant it was out of the question. The words were all about wide open spaces and leaving home to find a dream. She already lived smack-dab in the middle of wide open spaces, and why would she leave her comfy home?

  According to the ladies, the answer was to find a dream. Well, she had that too. She wanted to pay off medical bills left by her grandparents and mother. Strokes and cancer were expensive affairs. After that, maybe she would visit Chicago again. She had liked the Shedd Aquarium that one time she’d gone with Quinn.

  When she wanted to get really wild and crazy, she dreamed of being the owner’s right-hand helper. Assistant Manager would be going too far because Danno Johnson had no need of one.

  The Flying Pig was an old establishment, built in the early 1900s of brick, like many of the buildings in town. The dining room walls were paneled in dark fake pine. Windows lined one side, a booth beside each one. At the far end French doors led to a screened-in porch. The decor consisted of Valley Oaks school team photos: sports, academics, and band members from throughout the years. The kitchen had been updated in the ’80s.

  Still, it was Jasmyn’s home away from home and she adored it.

  Danno, longtime owner and creator of the amazing barbecue sauce that had put Valley Oaks on the map, welcomed her twenty years ago. She was still in high school, in need of a part-time job and—she understood now—a place to hide. Surprisingly, she was a natural at waitressing. She effortlessly memorized orders and anticipated diners’ needs before they voiced them.

  The job became her great escape from the rest of life. That third-grade year as a pokey Panda had been only the beginning of school issues. Sunshine aside, she was forever Awkward Jasmyn on the sidelines when it came to friends and decent grades. But at the Pig…she smiled now. Well, at the Pig, everyone agreed Jasmyn ruled.

  The Chicks faded into Johnny Cash, and Quinn plunked salt and pepper shakers on her table. “Andrew has a friend.” She shimmied in her black Bermuda shorts to the next booth.

  Jasmyn shook her head. Andrew was Quinn’s current heartthrob. He might even be the One. Quinn believed that Jasmyn needed a guy too, a heartthrob and potential the One. Jasmyn did not agree. She’d been there, done that, and got the T-shirt. Or crushed heart.

  “Oh, man.” Quinn paused in her work and put her hands on her hips. “Look at him out there.”

/>   Jasmyn followed her gaze to the French doors and saw Danno dragging plastic chairs and large round tables across the concrete floor. She shrugged. “Everybody at lunch wanted to sit out there and griped because the tables weren’t set up.”

  Quinn scrunched her nose, lips, and eyes together until she resembled a dried apple with short, curly blond hair. “Honestly, it’s just way too early in the season for this.”

  “That’s what I told Zeb, but it really is warm enough to sit outdoors. Danno is going to be ready for the dinner crowd. You know how he loves to keep his customers happy.”

  “To a fault. It’ll probably snow next week and then he’ll have to redo it all again. The guy is sixty-five years old. He should slow down. Or he should hire the part-timers now instead of waiting for summer—”

  Woo-ooo…the air-raid siren shattered the calm. It drowned Quinn’s voice and Johnny’s. Woo-ooo…

  The sound crescendoed and faded out. There was a brief pause, like a screamer stopping to take another breath. Then the wail came again. Woo-ooo…

  Quinn said loudly, “Rats. I wanted to run over to the pharmacy before dinner—”

  Woo-ooo…

  Jasmyn said, “You’ll have time. This will blow over.”

  “Ladies!” Danno barreled down between the tables like a bull. “Let’s go!”

  In Valley Oaks, the threat of tornados was a way of life. Springtime and summertime meant bone-rattling thunderstorms and wild clouds. Every Midwesterner had stories to tell about green skies and moments of eerie quiet.

  Hours were spent in dank basements with flashlights and battery-operated portable radios, listening to weather updates, waiting for a tornado watch to turn into a tornado warning. A watch meant conditions were ripe. A warning meant one had touched down. Air-raid sirens wailed so everyone knew that it was seriously time to take cover.

  Although winds had wreaked their damage throughout the years, no one could recall that a tornado had actually hit the area. Still, old-timers like Danno took the possibility for real every single time. He ushered them into the kitchen, pausing to close windows. Quinn headed down the basement stairs. Jasmyn went to shut the back door and stopped.

  Set a few steps above the gravel parking lot, the doorway offered a view from the edge of town. The angle flattened acre after acre of rolling hills. Open farmland stretched forever before a true horizon showed up.

  Jasmyn’s farmhouse sat about two miles out, as the crow flew. She could see it from where she stood, a tall white-framed structure with a few outbuildings, all little more than specks behind a stand of oaks in front of a patch of pines.

  No breeze stirred. The air felt empty, as if it had been drawn out somehow, encasing the world in a vacuum. A translucent curtain of algae green hung over everything.

  The siren kept up its incessant cry.

  Barometer’s dropping. Was that what Zeb had said?

  “Jasmyn!” Quinn screamed.

  She didn’t budge. She could not leave the sight before her.

  In the distance, a funnel touched the earth like a finger of God. It twirled silently, spinning along a path from her left to her right.

  In the middle, between the left and the right, sat her farmhouse.

  Suddenly the roar of a freight train drowned out the siren. It engulfed her. It slammed against her ears.

  “Jasmyn!” Danno shouted. “Get your keister down here!”

  If not for her boss’s big arms lifting her away from the door and setting her on the top basement step, she would not have moved.

  “Go!” he yelled in her ear, clutching her elbow and pressing her down the old wooden steps before yanking shut the door behind him.

  They sat, the three of them, on old stools in the northeast corner. Cases of canned food were stacked against the concrete block walls. Bare light-bulbs shone from the ceiling’s crisscross of two-by-fours.

  The freight train noise was dulled underground.

  No one spoke. Quinn bit her nails, Danno wheezed, and Jasmyn shook, her heart pounding.

  She was glad for her boss’s presence. She had often wished he was her father. He was a bit older than her mother, Jerri, would have been, but like her he was born and raised in Valley Oaks. When she asked her mother if she and Danno had ever dated, Jerri had laughed and laughed and said the name of his restaurant fit him every which way and then some. He was a total pig.

  Jasmyn begged to differ. There was something solid about him. Sober and nicotine-free for decades, he wore plaid shirts in size triple-X. Compliments, he said, of his own good cooking. He kept his hair buzzed, the style he’d worn since his army cooking days in Vietnam.

  The lights winked off.

  Danno flipped on two camping lanterns. “No worries, ladies.”

  Then everything shuddered.

  And Jasmyn knew deep in her bones that there were indeed going to be worries.

  Four

  March 17

  Seaside Village, California

  Sam sat at her kitchen table after a long day that felt longer than long because of the public relations stint followed by a surprise chat with her boss.

  She wore flannel pajamas, ate homemade meatballs and spaghetti, and watched an evening newscast on the small television that sat next to the toaster oven on the countertop.

  Yes, pj’s, a made-from-scratch dinner, and a portable television in a kitchen that featured an avacado green stove. It all seemed old fashioned for a young professional, which, according to age and income brackets, she was.

  She worked with people who got the news on their smartphones and ate takeout and trolled clubs on a nightly basis. They lived in high-rise condos with ocean views and direct-deposited rent checks to a faceless management agency. They did not live in a compound of stucco cottages built in the 1920s, in the old San Diego community of Seaside Village, three blocks from the beach. Their landlady did not live on the premises and hand out her homemade dishes like a jolly Santa with toys and a dozen good boys and girls.

  But it suited Sam. She sometimes wondered why the Casa de Vida complex, aka House of Life, remained her sanctuary after four years and a monthly salary that surpassed what her mother had ever seen in a year. It could be that deep down she was still simply Samantha the Weirdo, bucking the system without really trying.

  She hoped the girl she’d met earlier in the day, Lisa Kingman, would not be saddled with that same moniker for the next twenty years. Maybe having a dad as mayor would make a difference.

  At least her boss, Randy, accepted her for whatever she was. That afternoon, when she had told him about the PR session ending with the Lisa Kingman personal tour, he stood and reached across his desk to give her a high five.

  “Way to go, Sam!” His grin had been unbelievable.

  “Yeah, well, thanks, but don’t send me again anytime soon, okay?”

  “Okay.” He had paused, keeping eye contact in his way that both unnerved her and made her feel safe.

  She liked Randy Hall a lot. Forty plus years, marriage, and fatherhood were attractive on him. His three towheaded boys looked like mini versions of their dad, minus the expanding waistline. He understood engineering inside out and always had her back.

  She had seen his eye lockdown thing before. He was concocting some wild plan. He wanted to color outside the lines. Somehow, she was involved.

  “Sammi.”

  Oh, no. He used the nickname. It was a dead giveaway.

  He blinked away the lockdown and his hazel eyes shone. “I have an idea.”

  No kidding.

  “Here, take a look at this.” He spun his laptop around.

  The screen showed a page from UC Berkeley.

  She bit her lip and reminded herself that once in a while his schemes did not see the light of day.

  “Trust me,” he said. “See this?” He clicked and scrolled, clicked and scrolled. “Six weeks and you’ll have these two courses under your belt. You haven’t taken these, right?” Not bothering to wait for an answer bec
ause he already knew it, he went on. “It’s perfect for Collins and Creighton. You’re already our go-to person for environmental remediation, but the firm is still lagging. Just six weeks out of your summer—and wow. You’re on your way to another master’s, maybe a PhD, and you make us look good, really good.”

  He wasn’t talking about a boost up the ladder. This was serious business impacting the firm. She had earned her master’s in civil engineering at UCLA. The environmental side of things intrigued her. She’d dabbled in it enough to pad her credentials.

  But…summer school? Out of town?

  It was way worse than the PR gig at the community center.

  “Randy, I can do it online.”

  “And lose your sanity.” He glanced at her. “Sam, you already give us twenty-four/seven. Besides, there’s no hoity-toity factor in that.”

  In spite of herself, she smiled. Prestige was C and C’s middle name. Randy liked poking fun at it.

  “And it would take too long.”

  “Too long for what?”

  He gave a one-shoulder shrug.

  The gesture indicated something was up, something big, but he couldn’t discuss it with her. “Think of it this way. It’s not PR.”

  She muffled a groan. “Berkeley?”

  “You’ll love it there. But don’t pack your bags yet. I have to run this by Collins. Ever been to San Francisco?”

  Now, in her cottage, she groaned out loud and opened another plastic container from her landlady. No, she’d never been to San Francisco. Not interested. Not interested in a PhD, either.

  She took out a brownie. Cream cheese filled. Ooey-gooey milk chocolate frosting.

  Who was going to feed her at Berkeley? More importantly, where would she sleep? She did not want to move, even temporarily. She was home. Casa de Vida was the best home she’d ever had in her life.

  Sugar melted on her tongue as she watched the news. A video was running from the Midwest. Frame after frame after frame of rubble.

  She swallowed and placed the brownie back in its container.

  What would it take to construct a completely tornado-resistant school or house? Maybe she’d learn that at Berkeley.