The Tin Horse: A Novel by Janice Steinberg Page A

go as often to Aunt Sonya’s. Still, every Monday afternoon, when Sonya had “the girls” over to play cards, Mama carried Audrey, and we walked there. All of the women brought their children. They put the babies down in Sonya and Leo’s bedroom, and the rest of us played in the yard. By August, the house where I’d hidden was completed, and a family moved in. I walked by and watched for my boy, Danny, but I never saw him. He had appeared so fleetingly, with his cat eyes and his air of mystery, that I thought I might have dreamed him, except that when Barbara had taken me back to get my shoes, I saw that he’d left his sack; it held a few pieces of scrap wood and some nails, and I took one of the nails. I hid it in my treasure box, a gift from Aunt Pearl.
    I might have dreamed jolly Papa, too. Now, on the nights he camehome for dinner, he gave us lessons again or sat in his chair, absorbed in the newspaper. Occasionally, if Barbara or I asked very, very nicely, without pestering, he took us for a walk, but he no longer called out to people or whistled. And he paid little attention to baby Audrey.
    He lost interest in the garden. Barbara and I kept on taking care of it, with Zayde’s help. We had green thumbs, Zayde said. He said we grew the best tomatoes and cucumbers in Los Angeles.

I SIT FLOATING ON MEMORY AS THE AFTERNOON GIVES WAY TO DUSK. And then the pull of the past is done with me … or maybe it’s just my eighty-five-year-old bladder that insists on yanking me back to the present. After using the bathroom, I gather up Mama’s daughter memorabilia to share with Harriet.
    Everything except Philip’s card, one more piece of detritus that Mama saved simply because she couldn’t throw anything away. I pick up the card to drop it in with the recycling, but didn’t Josh say that something was written on the back?
    Kay Devereaux

Broadmoor Hotel, Colorado Springs
    The handwriting looks like Philip’s, but I’ve never heard of Kay Devereaux. I wonder why Philip gave the card to Mama. Maybe this Kay was a lead who didn’t pan out, a chorus-girl friend of Barbara’s; the name sounds like a stage name.
    And then a memory slams me: I see Barbara and me painting on our scarlet Coty lipstick—the precious tube we shared, hidden in the toe of a shoe—and making up movie star names for ourselves.
Diane Hollister. Priscilla Camberwell. Nola Trent
was my favorite, a no-nonsense type who’d had a brilliant New York theatrical career and only did films with clever repartee.
Kay Devereaux
is just the kind of name Barbara would have chosen. Could Philip have found her?
    I run for the phone, call information, and ask for Kay Devereaux in Colorado Springs. Even as I recognize—and loathe—the prickly feeling surging through me. It’s the charge I felt the first year or two after she left, every time I raced for a ringing telephone or snatched up the mail, or we got a tip that someone in Hollywood or San Francisco or Tijuana had spotted her.
    We searched for her like crazy back then, no matter that in her note she’d said not to worry and that she was fine. As Aunt Sonya never tired of saying, an eighteen-year-old girl on her own—or worse,
not
on her own—how could she be fine? Look at the job she’d had, singing and dancing in the chorus at a Hollywood nightclub, her legs and everything on display and her silly head filled with dreams of breaking into the pictures. “A girl like that doesn’t have the best judgment, does she?” Sonya said again and again, until one day Mama screamed in her face.
    We talked to every one of her friends and ran personal ads in the newspapers in the biggest cities in California. Papa went to the police, too, but they didn’t do anything, not when they heard about the note and her job at the nightclub. We tried one more time when Philip offered to help, though by then she’d been gone for two years. (I didn’t lie to Josh. I
did
work for Philip, but it was a trade, a way for my