U Is for Undertow

gave me the photograph of my mother and then sent me the family album. I’ll admit I was touched by that. So here’s what worries me. Am I just being stubborn for the sake of it? What do they call that, ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’? I mean, most families want to be close. I don’t. Does that make me wrong?”
    “Not at all. You’re independent. You prefer being alone.”
    “True, and I’m pretty sure that’s considered the opposite of mental health.”
    “Why don’t you sleep on it and see how it looks in the morning.”

3

    DEBORAH UNRUH

    April 1963

    Deborah Unruh hated the girl on sight. Her son Greg had dropped out of Berkeley in his sophomore year, claiming his academic courses were irrelevant. Since then, he’d hitchhiked across the country, calling home when his funds were low and he needed money wired to the nearest Western Union office. Deborah and Patrick had last seen him the previous fall, and now, without warning, he’d reappeared, driving a big yellow school bus with a girl named Shelly in tow.
    She had a gaunt face, a mass of dark tangled hair, large hazel eyes, and barely visible brows. She wore heavy eye makeup, a black turtleneck sweater, and a long gypsy skirt, the hem of which was torn and gray from trailing on the ground. When she wasn’t barefoot, she wore black tights and ragged tennis shoes. She had a little boy with her, Shawn, who was six years old. She was quick to tell Deborah the child wasn’t Greg’s. When Deborah made the mistake of asking about her ex-husband, Shelly told her she had never been married and had no idea who the boy’s father was. Her tone implied that only uptight middle-class bores would be concerned with an outdated concept like paternity.
    Deborah let the matter pass without comment, but the girl’s brazen attitude netted her a black mark in Deborah’s eyes. Greg took their welcome for granted, offering no explanation of why they’d come or how long they meant to stay. Deborah offered them the guest room, but he and Shelly declined. They preferred to sleep in the bus, which they parked out behind the garage.
    The vehicle was little more than a shell. They’d removed all the seats and outfitted the interior with beds, a low table and chairs, and a camp stove, though Shelly never lifted a hand when it came to meals. They used a milk crate to hold canned and dried goods and had cardboard boxes for everything else. Shawn slept on a tatty futon behind the driver’s seat while Greg and Shelly occupied a double-bed mattress at the rear. An Indian-print bedspread was hung between the two beds for privacy. The bus was left close enough to the pool house that the three could use the toilet and shower out there, not that any of them ever bathed as far as Deborah could tell.
    They hadn’t been in the house five minutes before the little boy had peeled off his clothes and was running around naked. Deborah knew better than to raise an objection because Shelly was already warbling on about how our bodies were so precious and nothing to be ashamed of. Deborah was appalled. Greg had gone off to college, clean-cut and polite, and here he was back again, promoting this trashy little upstart whose values were equivalent to a slap in the face.
    At the first opportunity, Deborah excused herself, went up to the master bedroom, and called Patrick in Los Angeles. He was a sportswear manufacturer and he spent Tuesday morning through Friday afternoon at his plant in Downey. She didn’t dare let him come home for the weekend without telling him what was going on. He listened to her description of Shelly, patient and bemused. He made sympathetic noises, but she could tell he thought she was exaggerating.
    “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she sang.
    Patrick’s reaction to Shelly was just as swift as hers. He was more analytical than Deborah, less intuitive, but just as quick to recoil. At forty-eight, he had wiry hair, layered gray and white, cut short, wavy over his ears where the hair was slightly longer. His eyes were brown, his eyebrows a washed-out gray. He was color-blind, so Deborah selected his clothes. His everyday attire was chinos and sport coats that she kept in a range of pale browns and grays. His shirts were a crisp white, open at the collar since he refused to wear ties except on the most formal occasions. He was slim and kept fit doing five-mile runs when he was home on weekends. Deborah was four years younger, a honey-blond wash