The Tin Horse: A Novel by Janice Steinberg Page B

family to pay him for looking for my sister.)
    Along with the prickle of hope, I got used to the crash that followed, when the mail contained no word from her, or the “Barbara” spotted working as a waitress in Newport Beach turned out to be a middle-aged Mexican woman, and the man who’d given us the tip had vanished with his twenty-dollar reward.
    Within a few months, even a hint of hope and I was already plummeting. The pattern became so fixed in my nervous system that it kicks in now,more than sixty-five years later, when I ask the recorded voice for Kay Devereaux. And of course, there’s no listing. She would have married and changed her name. Moved. Died.
    I could check the Internet. I jump up to go to my office.
    “Stop it!” I say it out loud and will myself to sit down.
    What the hell does it matter what happened to a woman named Kay Devereaux? That woman can’t be Barbara, because if she were, Mama and Papa would have told me.
    I pour myself a Scotch. It’s almost time for
Jeopardy!
. I should get myself some dinner and get settled in front of the television. But for just another moment, I’m drawn back to the May Company box; there are things I haven’t looked at yet, below Barbara’s dance programs and Philip’s card. I get to the bottom without finding anything else about the mysterious Kay—not that I was hunting for anything, of course not. But to think that the box sat for decades on the closet shelf and I never opened it.
    And Josh brought in just two department store boxes, but he said there were more. What other riches did my mother squirrel away? I go into my office. Josh left a chair just inside the closet. I hop up on it … and wobble. Oh, no! Gripping the back of the chair, I plant both feet on the ground. I can’t afford another broken leg like last year, or, kiss of death, a broken hip. That’s the main reason I’m moving to Rancho Mañana, so I won’t have to worry about stairs, and so in case anything does happen, my kids won’t have to put their lives on hold to take care of me. Carol did that when I broke my leg; she came down from Oregon for a month.
    I should put some food on top of the Scotch. The refrigerator yields half a turkey sandwich, left over from going out to lunch yesterday. I take the sandwich into the den, turn on the TV, and match wits against the contestants on
Jeopardy!
.
    Once I’ve eaten (and aced Final Jeopardy!), I brave the chair again. I find another three department store boxes, one so heavy it almost sends me tumbling. No wonder, the box is filled with books. “Papa!” I murmur. I can almost smell him as I lift out the poetry anthologies he had us recite from, and his beloved histories of Los Angeles, everything friablewith decay. I open one of the poetry books, glimpse a title, and discover I can recite the poem by heart. I wonder if Harriet will be able to do that, too.
    She has to see this! I call and invite her to come over for lunch after our water aerobics class tomorrow.
    I LEARNED TO SWIM at Venice Beach—Papa taught me when I was little—and there’s still nothing I love more than to walk into the ocean, out to where the waves lap just above my waist, and then dive in. The exhilaration of that first cold immersion! The bubbly tickle of salt water on my skin and the blurry (without my glasses) vastness ahead of me. A whiff of the beach, and my nose still comes up like an eager dog’s. The first time I swam in a pool, when I was a student at USC, I felt claustrophobic and my skin itched for hours. Since then, I’ve come to appreciate the unique pleasures of pool swimming—in particular, that the pool at the Westside Y, where Harriet and I take water aerobics twice a week, is blissfully warm.
    I don’t see Harriet in the locker room. My baby sister, twelve years my junior, has probably come early to swim laps. Sure enough, when I go out to the pool, I spot her cutting through the water, a zaftig seal in her fluorescent green suit and