The kitchen is a comfort, a place to hide. By the time the first lunch orders come in, the fryer is bubbling. There’s a rhythm to it—the dip, shake, and fry. The way the chicken or fish spins to the surface of the oil when it’s battered perfectly and the temperature is just right. Dorian can lose herself in the details, the ideal cut of the fish to make it curve slightly when crisped, the uniform golden brown of each strip of chicken, the way to make shrimp retain their shape when battered.
At six o’clock Willie, who helps her out on the weekends, sticks his head into the kitchen. “Time to get the big one going.”
For nearly as long as the fish shack has been running, or as long as Dorian has been working it, an order has come in on Saturdays for a long-standing dice game. Twenty dinners, shrimp, catfish, whiting, sand dabs, and chicken with assorted sides. Everything except french fries, because everyone knows they don’t travel.
Willie cocks his head. “You forgot?”
Instead of responding, Dorian pulls down twenty Styrofoam containers.
Willie taps the doorframe. “I’ll tell ’em food’s gonna be late.”
“Don’t you dare,” Dorian says.
She works hard. It’s tempting to crowd the oil to get the fish done faster. Dorian knows adding even one extra piece will result in a mess as the fillets bump against each other and the breading falls off. Eventually, with loose coating and fish overcrowding the fryer, the temperature of the oil will fall and she’ll have to clear the whole thing out, change the oil, and start over. So she works slow, one dinner order at a time in the four fryers. Everyone knows fried food is better hot, but for nearly two decades the dice game hasn’t complained about delivery.
It takes Dorian half an hour to prep all the meals. Willie helps her pack up the sides family style. Together they load everything into the wheeled cart that Willie uses for the delivery.
The rush of cooking over, the anxious feeling that Dorian has been sidestepping all day is back. She feels jumpy. She needs to do something, to somehow rewind to the morning and instead of letting Julianna vanish, chase her, or even better, keep her at the table, forbid her from getting that smoke. She looks down at the cart full of food.
“I’ll take it,” she says.
Willie raises an eyebrow. “How’s that?”
“I’ll take this.” Dorian grabs the cart. “What’s the address?”
“How long they’ve been ordering this dinner?” Willie asks. “And you don’t know the address.”
“I cook it,” Dorian says, “I don’t walk it.”
He scribbles something on the back of a grease-stained receipt. Dorian squints at his scratchy writing. “Twenty-Ninth Place?”
“Between Cimarron and St. Andrews.”
“You sure it’s place not street?”
“Who’s been making this delivery for the last seventeen years?” Willie looks down at the containers loaded into the cart.
“But you’re sure it’s place?” Dorian asks again.
“Place,” Willie says. “Place.”
Dorian’s staring at him, not because she doesn’t trust him, but because she doesn’t trust herself. Because here’s the past coming charging in, destabilizing her.
“Dorian? Dorian?”
Twenty-Ninth Place between Cimarron and St. Andrews is Julianna’s block, the house where Lecia used to babysit. The last place she was seen alive.
Willie’s shaking her arm. “Dorian, where’d you go?”
Julianna. Reborn as Jujubee. Julianna whom Dorian lost to the driver of a strange car. A man she chose over Dorian. Danger over safety. Unknown over known. The things that happened on her watch.
“Why don’t you let me take it,” Willie says.
“I’m going.” Dorian grips the cart. “I was just thinking it tastes better fresh out of the fryer.” She can already sense the perfectly battered fish going limp.
“They don’t complain. But they will if you don’t get moving.” Willie holds the gate open so she can wheel the cart out.
“How come we never got a delivery bike?” she asks.
“Now you want to ride a bike?” He lets the gate close.
As Dorian wheels the cart to the corner of Western at Thirty-First she wonders, not for the first time, if Lecia’s death had something to do with Julianna’s transformation from little girl who hid behind stuffed animals into a firecracker bursting high and bright in the night. Not that Dorian knew exactly what Julianna got up to. She’d heard the rumors. She asked around, even knocking on Julianna’s parents’ door once a few years back only to be told by her father, Armando, “She’s gone downtown.”
Like that was an explanation.
It’s nearly dark when Dorian turns onto Twenty-Ninth Place. With the light goes the warmth. Thirty-five years in Los Angeles and she still can’t get used to the temperature swings of a SoCal winter day—83 at lunch, 53 by dinner. A city that just can’t make up its mind about anything.
Only one block off Western and it’s a different world—quiet residential streets lined with colorful Craftsman bungalows cast into shadow by the final stand of the sun. Look close and you can see the change everyone’s been going on about. A few new family cars—silver SUVs and minivans. Freshly landscaped yards in the drought-resistant style that’s both trendy and necessary. New paint jobs and repointed brick porches.
It’s not as if Jefferson Park was derelict. People here might not have the cash to restore their houses according to historic standard, but for the most part the houses have always looked neat.
From the end of the block she can see the red house where Julianna grew up, made all the more visible by its treeless front yard surrounded by a motorized iron fence painted cream.
Dorian slows as she passes it. Like many families who lived here before the riots, Julianna’s parents still have bars on their windows and a metal gate in front of their door. This must look ugly to the newcomers, who probably think the bars are a sign of bad taste and a bad attitude. But the recently arrived weren’t around for the chaos that tore down Western in the aftermath of Rodney King, or for the mistrust and suspicion that settled in after the fires and gunshots died away. They can’t imagine that this bungalow community was adjacent to a six-day war zone. And they can’t quite see the lingering signs of gang activity that once surged through these seemingly quiet streets.
Dorian stops in front of the red house. Paint is peeling on the siding and window frames. Strands of Christmas lights sag from the eaves. Unlike the houses on either side, the yard is untidy—there’s a Ford Pinto up on blocks in the driveway and another car behind it that looks stripped bare. There are rusted tools, auto parts, and car mags scattered on the ground. Three folding chairs form a semicircle around a wooden box strewn with beer cans.
The wind has picked up—a resurgence of the Santa Anas that have been raging all week—knocking the empties to the pavement and turning the pages of the magazines. Dorian cranes her neck, trying to see if there’s any movement in the dark windows behind the bars.
Someone is approaching from up the block—a light shuffle step. Dorian moves away from the gate. She waits, but no one approaches. She strains to hear—nothing.