When it was your first time, of course you thought it would last till the end of time. They’d gone to a wedding not long after they got together: a couple of her friends were tying the knot. A high school English teacher of hers who was there had asked them what they were going to do. Bryce remembered that very clearly.
He remembered what he’d answered, too: “We’ll live happily ever after.” And he remembered how that English teacher had laughed her ass off. He’d been pissed. Vanessa had been furious—almost furious enough to make a scene at Jack and Katarina’s reception.
Well, prune-faced Miz What’s-her-name got the last laugh. Happily ever after Bryce and Vanessa did not live. As for Jack and Katarina, they broke up before Vanessa showed Bryce the door. Shit happened. Boy, didn’t it just?
The bus stopped, liberating Bryce from his gloomy maunderings. The doors hissed open. He got off and looked around. If the guy wasn’t here . . . Well, that was why God made cell phones—when the power let them work, anyhow. Today, it was on.
But a stocky man in his late thirties who’d been standing in the little bus station came forward with his hand stuck out. “You’re Dr. Miller, aren’t you?” he said. “I went to your Facebook page to see what you looked like. I’m Vic Moretti.”
“I’m Bryce Miller, yeah.” Bryce shook hands with Moretti, who, by his grip, might have been a construction worker when he wasn’t teaching. He wasn’t comfortable with Dr. Miller at the DWP, and he wasn’t comfortable with it here, either. After a longish pause, he managed “Good to meet you.” If this guy wanted small talk from him, he was in trouble.
“And you.” Moretti seemed very much at ease in his own skin. Maybe that was personality, maybe just years. Whatever it was, Bryce envied it. The older man went on, “My car’s right around the corner.”
It was a Prius. Bryce envied that, too. The less gas you used these days, the better. But some of the envy went away when he got into the hybrid. His knees banged the glove compartment. He might have been able to fit his legs around the steering wheel. He didn’t think he could have got them under it.
Moretti chuckled as he fastened his seat belt and started the car. “Helps if you’re not a big tall guy,” he admitted. “Me, I’m five-nine, and I’m fine in here.” He pulled out into what traffic there was. “So how much do you know about Junipero High?”
“Not a whole lot.” Bryce was sandbagging a little; he’d done his online homework, too. No point not showing that: “Your Web site says you’re one of the leading Catholic high schools in the West Valley. And Craigslist says you’re looking for somebody who can teach Latin and history. I can do Greek, too, if you want me to.” He liked Greek much better than Latin, though he wasn’t about to say so when Junipero was looking for a Latin teacher.
“Well, we can look into that a little further down the line,” Moretti said smoothly. He had to mean something like Greek? In a high school? You’ve got to be shitting me. Bryce didn’t get his bowels in an uproar about it. No matter how interesting he thought Greek was, only a handful of prep schools did offer it.
The Prius purred west. The Valley looked like any other part of the Los Angeles urban sprawl: houses, apartment buildings, shops, strip malls. Some of the billboards were in Spanish. So were some of the ones in San Atanasio.
Moretti took a couple of turns that got him off the big streets and onto little ones. Mountains loomed against the western horizon: not great big mountains, but a lot closer than the smudges on the horizon that were all you saw in the South Bay. Those couldn’t be the Santa Monicas. What were they, then? The Santa Susanas? Bryce realized how little he knew about the local geography. Back East, this might easily be a state or two away from him. Here, it was in the same county. The scale on this side of the country was different.
“Here we are.” Moretti swung into a parking lot. He stopped the car under the overhanging boughs of some pines that sprouted from the grass by the lot. When Bryce got out, he heard woodpeckers drumming in the trees. He glanced around. Some of the buildings looked as if they’d gone up earlier this morning. Others had probably stood there for fifty years or more, which made them ancient by Southern California standards.
“Nice campus,” he offered.
“It is, isn’t it?” Moretti agreed. “That’s one of the compensations for teaching here.” Bryce knew exactly what that meant: they paid bupkis. He’d have to take a serious cut if he bailed from the DWP.