The Last Beach Bungalow by Jennie Nash Page B

You tell the truth and then Christmas becomes something else entirely.
    “How are you feeling?” I asked, when Jackie came out of her room the morning after the incident with the broken finger. It was 7:00 A.M. and she was dressed for school: jeans, flip-flops, two layered T-shirts, eyeliner, lipgloss.
    “Fine,” she said, giving me a wiggly-fingered wave.
    “You’re OK to go to school?”
    She shrugged her shoulders— why not? —then said, “We’re finishing our card sale today,” as if this fact made it obvious why she had to go. The cards were part of her midterm project in history. She and three other girls had been conducting a lunchtime fund-raiser. For three dollars, students and teachers could purchase a holiday card, an envelope, postage and the address of a soldier in Iraq. There was a big bucket of pens at the table, and right there, without having to even think about it, they could send a holiday greeting to a soldier overseas. With the money they made from the cards, the girls were going to buy chocolate bars to send with each box of greetings. So far, they’d collected 250 pieces of mail.
    “I can come pick you up before practice,” I said.
    “I’m staying for practice.”
    “Jackie, don’t be ridiculous.”
    “I can run, I can do sit-ups. The doctor said that if it doesn’t hurt in a week, I can hit, so I’ll probably be able to play the Holiday Classic.”
    I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. It’s hard to argue with a child who is a patriotic, vegetarian, straight-A student who exercises every day and cares about the working poor. It’s hard to argue when you feel as if your child has her life more together than you do. “Fine,” I said, “but promise me you’ll call if it starts to hurt.”
    “I promise,” she said, in a sing-song voice. She gave me a quick hug and then waltzed out the door.
    After Jackie left, I pulled the stack of pilfered papers out of my purse. I slipped the Town & Country piece into a folder marked “Ideas” and spread the newspaper ad out on my desk. Who would sell a house like that in a contest? And what did it mean, Bring your stories ? I did a Google search on “house contests, Los Angeles, beach cities,” and came up with a list of organizations that had raffled off million-dollar homes as fund-raising stunts. For the price of a raffle ticket— $150—you could gain the chance to win a home in Palos Verdes, Santa Barbara or Malibu. Farther down the Google list, there was a series of entries about a contest for a Manhattan Beach house that had ended in a lawsuit when it was revealed that the winner was the husband of the owner’s niece. On page three, there was an entry about a guy in Venice Beach who was going to raze a nine-hundred-square-foot bungalow built in 1906 and was offering it free to anyone who would move it, serious inquiries only.
    I remembered driving North to the Boundary Waters one summer when I was a kid, living in Minnesota. We had a station wagon that year, and I liked to count the other station wagons we passed along the way. As I watched from the backseat we rolled by a flatbed truck whose cargo was half a house. The house had been sliced completely in half, like a cake, and I could see inside the walls and the floor, under the skin of that house. I held my breath until we were completely past, and then I turned around and craned my neck to watch it behind us.
    “Did you see that?” I asked. “There was a house on a truck. They cut it in half.”
    “You’re such a doofus,” my brother said, shoving me in the stomach with his elbow. He was blessed with the ability to read in the car and had his head buried in a comic book.
    “They unbolt it from the foundation,” my dad explained, “and lift it right off for transportation.” He was a manager at a company that manufactured furniture. The year before that, he had been a manager at a company that made china plates and cups. In a few years, he would be a manager for