Power Slide by Susan Dunlap Page B

less than perfect, even now.”
    “What?”
    “There you were, a kid taking honors classes, into track and gymnastics and dance and God knows what else. Half the time you didn’t even make it home to dinner. How’d you have time to get so passionate about swans? Was it Mike who fed you stories about the swan danger? So he could run into this girl?”
    “I may be naïve, but you are the master of conspiracy theory. Why would Mike go to all the trouble of doing the setup and carting me over here, on the chance of meeting a girl he liked? He was star quality. All he had to do was pick up the phone.”
    “But he didn’t. How do I know? Because that demonstration was a couple of weeks before he left. I scoured the city for the girl. I’m surprised you don’t remember me asking you what he said about her. You never saw her, remember? You took his word about her. But there was no girl.”
    “No girl you found.”
    “Will you stop! Stop believing your picture—”
    Don’t assume! Had I assumed about Mike? How much? Omigod, had I always assumed? It was too much to deal with, especially now, in the car with the brother who’d be only too ready to pounce. “You’re right.”
    “What?”
    “You’re right, John.” It shocked me as much as it did him. “Maybe there was no girl; maybe he just got sick of me and the swans.”
    “Or maybe something else.”

    “Yeah.” Game over.
    Finally he muttered, “Damn fog.”
    At least he’d stopped bitching about Guthrie. Worried as I was about him, I was thankful for this small respite. The fog was blowing thick across the windshield. The wipers were on high but couldn’t push it back fast enough.
    “Those were the days,” he said, “working with Dad. He didn’t run his own business yet, and so he was pulling in a lot of overtime. Man, were we wiped out by the time we rolled into the house. But, I’ll tell you, it was the perfect summer job. Dad offered it to Gary but after one summer he was too good to smudge his hands.”
    “Gary said he didn’t want to be accused of working a job that ought to be union.”
    “He was nineteen! And clueless! How’d he ever know he was gonna be a hotshot lawyer back then?”
    I wondered but let it drop and John seemed glad to also. For him, reliving happy family memories was a peace offering. But it was also an idealized picture of the family. I’d heard a lot of this before, but I was glad to let him settle into a better frame of mind.
    He turned into the maze that made up the Marina district. I gauged we were blocks away from our destination, but it was just a guess.
    “But by the time Mike got there, Dad was top dog. Those were the days! Running three or four crews, heaviest thing he’d be hoisting was a clipboard. You just about had to make an appointment to catch up with him. And you know Mike,” he said in that way we fell into talking about him, as if we’d seen him yesterday and he’d be dropping by tomorrow. “He gets along with anyone. He liked it so much he took the fall semester off. By the end of his time there, before the quake, he could have handled any job on the site, maybe not journeyman level, but well enough. Dad was
figuring he’d be an engineer or maybe an architect. He took it hard when Mike just walked away . . . I mean from the job.”
    As opposed to when he walked out the door and disappeared. Dad had taken that hard, too, but what with all the reconstruction after the Loma Prieta quake then, he was gone working dawn to dark.
    “Did your guy bother to mention what corner he’d be on? Unless he’s got himself surrounded by light bars there’s no way we’re going to see him.”
    The thought had struck me, too. The park’s two blocks long and another wide with a lagoon in the middle and the reconstructed Greco-Roman temple behind that. “He’ll be looking for us.”
    We turned left. The fog suddenly seemed less compressed, as if it were released from the narrow passage between buildings and was