Its small engine and tiny whitewall tires could only get up to forty mph, but its 1960s bones had been fully restored.
“It’s your getaway vehicle,” Dad had said proudly when he brought me out back to show it to me the rst time. “I knew you had to have something to get to work this summer. And you can drive yourself to school in the fall. You don’t even need a special license.”
“It’s crazy,” I’d told him. And gorgeous. But crazy. I worried I’d stand out.
“?ere are hundreds of these things in town,” he argued. “It was either this or a van, but since you won’t need to haul around surfboards, I thought this was better.”
“It’s very Artful Dodger,” I admitted.
“You can pretend you’re Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.”
God, he really knew how to sell me. I’d seen that movie a dozen times, and he knew it. “I do like the retro leopard-print seat.”
And matching helmet. I therefore christened the scooter Baby, as a nod to one of my all-time favorite lms, Bringing Up Baby— a 1930s screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn as a mismatched pair who become entangled by a pet leopard, Baby. Once I’d decided on the name, I committed. No going back now. It was mine. Dad taught me how to use it—I rode it up and down his street a million times after dinner—and I would eventually nd the nerve to ride it around town, come hell or high water or drugged-out jaywalking surfers.
Dad apologizes for having to work the next day, but I don’t mind. I spend the day unpacking and driving my scooter around between jet-lagged naps on the porch hammock. I message Alex a few times, but keeping up the illusion of what I’m doing with my summer is a lot harder than I thought it would be. Maybe it will be easier once I’ve gotten my sea legs here.
After my day of rest and a night with Dad playing ?e Settlers of Catan, our favorite board game, I’m forced to put my newfound independence to the test. Finding a summer job was one of my misgivings about coming out here, but Dad pulled some strings. ?at sounded ne enough when I was back in DC. Now that I’m here, I’m sort of regretting that I agreed to it. Too late to back out, though. “?e summer tourist season waits for no one,” my father cheerfully tells me when I complain.
Dad wakes me up super early when he goes to work, but I accidentally fall back asleep. When I wake again, I’m running late, so I get dressed in a tizzy and rush out the door. One thing I didn’t expect when I moved out here is all the morning coastal fog. It clings to the redwoods like a lacy gray blanket, keeping things cool until midmorning, when the sun burns it away. Sure, the fog has a certain quiet allure, but now that I have to navigate a scooter through my dad’s wooded neighborhood, where it’s occasionally hanging low and reaching through branches like
ngers, it’s not my favorite thing in the world.
Armed with a map and a knot in my stomach the size of Russia, I face the fog and drive Baby into town. Dad already showed me the way in his car, but I still repeat the directions in my head over and over at every stop sign. It isn’t even nine a.m. yet, so most of the streets are clear until I get to the dreaded Gold Avenue. Where I’m going is only a few blocks down this curvy, traffic-clogged road, but I have to drive past the boardwalk (Ferris wheel, loud music, miniature golf), watch out for tourists crossing the road to get to the beach after blimping out at the Pancake Shack for breakfast—which smells a-m-a-z-i-n-g, by the way—and OH MY GOD, where did all these skaters come from?
Just when I’m about to die of some kind of stress-related brain strain, I see the cliffs rising up along the coast at the end of the boardwalk and a sign: THE CAVERN PALACE.
My summer job.
I slow Baby with a squeeze of the hand brakes and turn into the employee driveway. To the right is the main road that leads up the cliff to the guest parking lot, which is empty today. “?e Cave,” as Dad tells me the locals call it, is closed for training and some sort of outdoor fumigation, which I can smell from here, because it stinks to high heaven. Tomorrow is the official start of the summer tourist season, so today is orientation for new seasonal employees. ?is includes me.
Dad did some accounting work for the Cave, and he knows the general manager. ?at’s how he got me the job. Otherwise, I doubt they would have been impressed with my limited résumé, which includes exactly one summer of babysitting and several months of after-school law paperwork ling in New Jersey.
But that’s all in the past. Because even though I’m so nervous I could upchuck all over Baby’s pretty 1960s speedometer right now, I’m actually sort of excited to work here. I like museums. A lot.
?is is what I’ve learned about the Cave online: Vivian and Jay Davenport got rich during the rst world war when they came down from San Francisco to purchase this property for a beach getaway and found thirteen million dollars in gold coins hidden inside a cave in the cliffs. ?e eccentric couple used their found fortune to build a hundred-room sprawling mansion on the beach, right over the entrance to the cave, and lled it with exotic antiques, curios, and oddities collected on trips around the world. ?ey threw crazy booze- lled parties in the 1920s and ’30s, inviting rich people from San Francisco to mingle with Hollywood starlets. In the early 1950s, everything ended in tragedy when Vivian shot and killed Jay before committing suicide. After the mansion sat vacant for twenty years, their kids decided they could put the house to better use by opening it up to the public as a tourist attraction.
Okay, so, yeah, the house is de nitely kooky and weird, and half of the so-called collection isn’t real, but there’s supposedly some Golden Age Hollywood memorabilia housed inside. And, hey, working here has got to be way better than ling court documents.
A row of hedges hides the employee lot tucked behind one of the mansion’s wings. I manage to park Baby in a space near another scooter without wrecking anything—go me!—and then pop the center stand and run a chain lock through the back tire to secure it. My helmet squeezes inside the bin under the locking seat; I’m good to go.
I didn’t know what was considered an appropriate out t for orientation, so I’m wearing a vintage 1950s sundress with a light cardigan over it. My Lana Turner pin curls seem to have survived the ride, and my makeup’s still good. However, when I see a couple of other people walking in a side door wearing ip- ops and shorts, I feel completely overdressed. But it’s too late now, so I follow them inside.
?is looks to be a back hallway with offices and a break room. A bored woman sits behind a podium inside the door. ?e people I followed inside are nowhere to be seen, but another girl is stopped at the podium.
“Name?” the bored woman asks.
?e girl is petite, about my age, with dark brown skin and cropped black hair. She’s also overdressed like me, so I feel a little better. “Grace Achebe,” she says in the tiniest, high-pitched voice I’ve ever heard in my life. She’s got a strong English accent. Her tone is so soft, the woman behind the podium makes her repeat her name. Twice.
She nally gets checked off the list and handed a le folder of new-hire paperwork before being instructed to enter the break room. I get the same treatment when it’s my turn. Looks to be twenty or more people lling out paperwork already. Since there aren’t any empty tables, I sit at Grace’s.
She whispers, “You haven’t worked here before either?”
“No. I’m new,” I say, and then add, “in town.”
She glances at my le. “Oh. We’re the same age. Brightsea or Oakdale? Or private?”
It takes me a second to realize what she means. “I’ll start at Brightsea in the fall.”
