The Mural. Michael Mallory
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been a fire house at one time looked freshly tuck-pointed. Jack had never thought of central California as a bastion of the Old West, but these days, old towns did whatever it took to bring in the tourists. Three men ambled out of a feed store connected to a towering grain elevator on the main drag as Jack drove by, each one in jeans and a white lacquered straw cowboy hat. Jack pulled his truck into a space in front of an old brick building whose bottom floor housed a bar and grill. Next to it, in a small, recently remodeled store front, whose design contrasted with the Victorian-era buildings around it, was an ice cream shop, and when Robynn saw it, she dropped Mr. Booty on the floor and started to try and unbuckle herself from the car seat.
“Whoa, whoa, punkin, hang on, you can’t do that yourself,” Jack said, reaching over and unfastening the buckle. “We’ll get there in plenty of time, wait for me.”
“I want p’stacio nut.”
“We’ll see if they have it.”
The two of them were the only customers in the ice cream shop, which unlike practically every eatery in Los Angeles except the major junk food chains boasted of a public restroom. Jack got the key from the bored-looking teenaged girl behind the counter and opened the door, but Robynn went in on her own.
She was getting so big.
It turned out the place did not have pistachio nut, but it did have bubble gum, which appealed to Robynn even more. Jack ordered a bottle of water for himself and the two retired to one of the small, wobbly tables in the shop. While Robynn was happily licking her cone, Jack pulled out his cell phone and called Dani to tell her that he was coming up, but got her inbox. “Hey, it’s Jack,” he said into the phone. “Don’t be shocked, but I’m on my way back up to San Simeon. The second set of pictures at Wood City didn’t turn out either, so I’m going to take another set. I may need to get a new camera, though. I have my daughter with me. I’m going to be staying at the same place. You’ve got my cell number if you need it. Bye.”
“Who were you calling?” Robynn asked.
“Oh, just a friend,” Jack said. Putting the phone back into his shirt pocket, he started staring silently at a poster that had been taped up on the wall of the place, showing a triple-decker Neapolitan ice cream cone, with a scoop of vanilla on the bottom of the stack, strawberry in the middle, chocolate on top. The colors were somewhat off, so that the strawberry was more flesh tone than pink and the chocolate was a dark almond. It did not take much imagination to get a skin tone out of it as well, a bronzed, beach-tan skin tone. Jack kept looking at the join between the flesh and the bronze, the way they almost melted into each other, and he began to see two bodies: his and Dani’s. Jack was the pink layer and she was the bronze, rubbing wetly up against him, glistening with the sweat of passion. It was the most sensual thing Jack Hayden had ever seen in print, far more erotic than any girlie magazine.
He continued to stare, transfixed, for who knew how long? Everything around him seemed to disappear except for the flesh colored images. Finally he shook his head and broke his gaze away from the poster. His lip was perspiring and he was hard. He took a drink of his water. Sneaking a look back at the poster, he now saw only a triple-decker ice cream cone. Jesus, did simply hearing Dani’s recorded voice on a cell phone greeting really have that big of an effect? Even if it had, what exactly he would be able to do about it now that he had his five-year-old in tow? You just sit there and watch Elmo, punkin, while Daddy and Dani go into the bathroom and get all bare nakedy and rub up against each other and make funny noises until they scream. Oh, and don’t say anything to Mommy, okay?
“What the hell am I doing?” he asked the poster. He knew he should call Dani back right now and tell her that he had committed a terrible lapse in judgment having rushed up here with Robin in tow. Shit, maybe Elley was right all those times she’d rail about how he was nothing more than a fifteen-year-old in the body of an adult. He turned back toward Robynn to tell her that it was time to go. But no words came out of his mouth, only a gasp.
Robynn was not there.
His daughter was gone.
“Robynn?” he called out inside the ice cream shop, but he could clearly see that she was not there.
Leaping up from the table so forcefully that he nearly knocked it over, he demanded of the girl behind the counter where his daughter had gone.
“I dunno,” the girl shrugged.
“Maybe she’s in the bathroom.”
“Nope, key’s right here.”
“Well didn’t you see her leave?” Jack demanded.
“It’s your kid, not mine.”
Jack had a sudden impulse to slap her, but he held it in check. Then he saw the girl look behind him through the window. “Hey, isn’t that her out there on the sidewalk?”
Jack turned around and saw Robynn standing near a concrete-and-board bench on the street, her half-eaten scoop dripping down her fingers, chatting amiably with an old woman, who was seated on the bench. “Jesus,” Jack exhaled. He ran out of the door of the shop. “Robynn!” he shouted, and the girl turned to look at him.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said.
He knelt down and grabbed her arms tightly.
“Ow!” she cried, nearly dropping her cone.
“Why did you leave like that?” he demanded. “You know better than to go off on your own!”
She looked frightened now. “Sorry, Daddy, but this lady needed help.”
Jack looked up into the face of the woman seated on the bus bench. She was old and had snowy hair, a lined face, and clear hazel eyes that right now looked a bit confused.
“I didn’t mean to do anything bad,” Robynn was saying, now near tears.
“Okay, punkin, it’s okay,” Jack said, loosening his grip and managing to turn it into a hug. “I just got scared because you weren’t there and I couldn’t find you at first. We’re in a strange town so if you got lost, I wouldn’t know where to look.”
“I hope I haven’t caused any trouble,” the old woman said.
“No, no, it’s just that we try to teach her not to wander off, you know.”
“You and your wife?” the woman asked absently.
There was a pause before Jack answered, “Yes, and usually she’s pretty good about it.”
“Oh, well, you know how kids are,” the woman went on, seeming to clear. “Nobody really looked after me like that when I was young. Today it’s different, of course.” She looked at Robynn and smiled. “I think she’s the one I’m supposed to meet.”
“I’m sorry?”
The woman looked at Jack. “I was told to meet a girl here. Why here, I don’t know, but there she is.”
Jack was now convinced he was dealing with some poor, senile woman who had wandered off from home, or perhaps from a care facility, and had gotten hopelessly lost. Robynn, in her innate sweetness, probably saw the woman walking around in circles with a puzzled look on her face through the window of the ice cream shop, and slipped out to see if she could help her when Jack was not looking.
When he was looking at pictures of ice cream and turning them into sexual fantasies.
“No harm done,” Jack said to the old woman. “My name’s Jack Hayden, by the way, and this is Robynn.”
The woman looked at Robynn and smiled. “Oh, like the bird?”
“Actually, it’s with a y and two n’s,” Jack said. “My wife’s idea. Look, is there some way I can help you?”
“I don’t know, actually. My name is Althea Kinchloe. I guess you could say I’m visiting here too. I’m really from Vancouver.”
“Canada?” Jack asked, amazed he had managed to get so far