“Does Elwood ever go on vacation or do anything just for fun?” she asked.
Frank laughed. “I don’t think Elwood has ever been on a real vacation. He and I drove down to San Diego a couple of years ago—right after he bought the Malibu house—and I took him to Tijuana and we had lobster and cerveza on the beach, and a mariachi band was playing and beautiful women waited on us. I had a great time and he couldn’t wait to get home. Being that far from home didn’t really relax him, I guess.”
They made their way west on Highway 10 through the urban stretch of Los Angeles and toward the sea until June finally saw on the horizon the sapphire ribbon that was the Pacific Ocean, and then Frank turned north. Half an hour later they were exiting the coastal highway in central Malibu and climbing a residential street where both big and small houses had been perched at whatever angle might afford its occupants a view of the ocean. Frank took a couple turns on curving asphalt roads and then began to climb a hill. She read the street sign as he made the turn:
Paradise Circle
Frank continued up the road and then stopped at a brown-and-white, two-story Craftsman at the top of a cul-de-sac. Potted daisiesgraced the covered porch, bougainvillea climbed the fence, birds-of-paradise flanked a matching garage, and a young jacaranda tree in the center of the front lawn still had a few straggling lavender-hued blossoms clinging to its branches. The house looked like an idyllic place to live with its peekaboo view of the ocean. June could smell the sea when she opened the car door.
Frank had no sooner rung the bell when the door opened and a slightly thinner version of Frank stood before them. Elwood was nearly the same height but a good twenty pounds lighter. His hair was the same color—toasty brown flecked with hints of gray—but Elwood’s waves had been gelled into submission. The eyes, the nose, the chin, the cheekbones—they were all like Frank’s.
Along with a plain white shirt, Elwood wore a bow tie and a sweater vest, two articles of clothing June had never seen on Frank’s person. Or in his closet.
Elwood’s khaki pants were freshly pressed.
He appeared glad to see them on his doorstep but not exceedingly so.
“Hey, Woody!” Frank crossed the threshold, pulled his brother into a hug, and clapped him on the back. Elwood seemed to startle slightly at the intensity of Frank’s embrace.
Frank released his brother and stepped back. He then ushered June into the tiled entry with his arm around her waist. “And here is my Junebug.”
June smiled and put out her hand. “It’s just June.”
Elwood smiled politely and put his hand out, too. “Hello, Just June. It’s just Elwood. Only Frank gets away with calling me Woody.”
She laughed. Elwood’s voice was cashmere soft, and he seemed at ease, other than having paused a second before taking her hand. She wondered what Frank had meant earlier when he said his brother was uneasy around women.
They walked through the main part of the house—nicely furnished and clean—to the patio in the backyard, which was drenched in the September afternoon sunlight. Elwood had laid out pretzels, coupe glasses, and a cut-glass pitcher of a cocktail he called a Picador, a drink June had never had before, concocted of tequila, triple sec, and lime juice. Elwood poured the drinks and then he and Frank fell into easy conversation as they discussed sports teams, studio scuttlebutt, and—when Frank realized June was merely a spectator—their childhoods as sons of a barbershop owner. Frank said she could ask them anything about their growing-up years.
As they talked and sipped the tart and tangy drink, June watched Frank’s brother whenever she could do so without being obvious.
There wasn’t much about Elwood to notice and assess, she discovered. His was a serene, unremarkable presence. He didn’t lean back in his chair and toss his head back and laugh when a funny moment was shared between the three of them; he merely smiled and gave a quick nod of his head, as if to calmly agree that, yes, that was comical. He filled their glasses without comment when they were empty, took in with quiet gratitude the compliments Frank gave him about the latest movie they had seen where the screenplay credit had been his, rose to check on a roast he had in the oven, and easily deflected an offer for help in the kitchen with a simple “Just enjoy yourselves on the patio.”
Frank did most of the talking, and Elwood didn’t seem to mind. Frank steered every conversation, too, and Elwood didn’t seem to mind that, either. When he was asked a question, he answered it without hesitation—succinctly and quickly—and when he posed a question in return, he listened intently to the answer without interruption.
When they moved indoors to eat the supper Elwood hadprepared—beef tenderloin, a green salad, roasted carrots, seeded rolls, all accompanied by a plummy red wine—June decided all of Frank’s best qualities Elwood possessed, too, but he simply exercised them with exponentially less volume. She could see where, with Elwood’s quiet personality, he might come across—mistakenly—as inattentive or broody or maybe even self-absorbed, especially to a woman who expected to be put on a pedestal.
She wouldn’t see Elwood’s funny quirks—his need to arrange things just so, the way he liked to play the same record album over and over, not immediately recognizing when she or Frank were sad—until much later. By that time she would see Elwood’s peculiarities as just the uncomplicated inverse of Frank’s intuitive, highly easygoing nature.
June married Frank in the summer of 1939, and Elwood paid for the small ceremony and their honeymoon on Catalina Island as his wedding gift. June had been surprised and touched by that generosity. When she looked back on it, this gift of his had been the beginning of her deeper affection for him, though at the time she did not know it. Frank’s cheerful devotion and happy-go-lucky attitude made for a lighthearted, enjoyable life. But Elwood? His careful, methodical ways made her feel safe. Secure. She’d spent the first ten years of her life not knowing from one minute to the next where home was. Or if she actually had one.
When Frank and June moved into the Malibu house after the accident to care for Elwood, it was the first time she felt she lived somewhere where she belonged.
And yet that she felt that way made no sense to her. No sense at all.
Everything about that arrangement was terrible and unfortunate.
That she loved living in Elwood’s house and caring for him set her mind to spinning because she should’ve loathed what brought her and Frank there.
She should’ve mourned that Elwood could not bring himself to step out the front door.
She should have hated it.
14
The call from the hospital the night of Elwood’s accident tore June away from a dream of her mother.
She’d been back at the little one-room cottage in Venice Beach, inside the closet that, when she was little and her mother left her alone overnight, she’d wished was a time-travel machine that could vault her forward to the moment when Lorena would return. In the dream, Lorena was inside the closet with her and they were both adults. June had been about to ask her mother why she was there when a ringing phone yanked her awake.
