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“He’s kind of a miniature chauvinist. He won’t talk to you.”

“That’s okay. You talk to him. You get, like, tons of footage, and I’ll edit it. We’ll put both our names on it.”

I help her pack up the camera. I like talking about this. She’s not just a cute rich girl from the right side of the tracks, and I’m not just a spaz. We’re filmmakers with problems that filmmakers have. Problems we can probably solve. The minute I picked up the camera, I stopped thinking about anything else.

We trudge toward the stable gate. I’m tired and my hip hurts. Big pickups driven by little men filter out of the gate.

In the parking lot, the seagulls she’d scared driving in are standing around her car.

“All we need is Rod Taylor,” she says.

“And Tippi Hedren.”

“And Suzanne Pleshette.”

“And let’s not forget the great Jessica Tandy.”

We’re talking in shorthand about Hitchcock’s
The Birds.

As she unlocks a back door and we stow the gear, she says, “My dad’s kind of like Rod Taylor was in that movie.” She looks at me. “His name was Mitch, right?”

“Mitch Brenner.”

“A little cold. No funny business:
Let’s board up those windows and block the fireplace.
So Mom and I are Jessica Tandy and Suzanne Pleshette, just hanging around, waiting for crumbs of affection.” She fiddles with her keys. “Too much information?”

I shake my head. “No.”

She loops around to the driver’s side. I climb in and put on the seat belt. But when it looks like we’re good to go, she doesn’t start the car.

“This is none of my business, Ben, but . . .” She studies the speedometer. “Are you and Colleen together?”

Was that a snowman driving that bus?

Did that nun just drink a bucket of brine?

That’s the line reading she gave her question: Stupefied. Amazed. Maybe even impressed. She can barely get her mind around it. That Colleen would like me. Would want to be with me. Or that I would want to be with her, maybe. Or that I even could.

I tell her the truth, some of it, anyway. “She’s just staying with Grandma and me a couple of days.”

“But are you together?”

“Sometimes.”

A.J. puts the key in the ignition. Her key chain has a little LED light on it for those dark nights outside the mansion. That, and a little two-inch bear. She leans against the steering wheel. Puts her head on it like she’s sleepy.

“I’m kind of with Conrad,” she says. “I don’t know why. We never have any fun. And he’s either just mean or super-careless and totally self-absorbed. Like, he’ll call me on Friday and say he wants to do something. I’ve got plans but I cancel them. Then he doesn’t show up. So I watch anything on TV and eat bag after bag of Cheetos.” She turns my way. “How stupid is that?”

She leans toward me, one hand out. I start to give her my gimpy one, the runty one, the ugly one. Then I remember that only Colleen touches me all over. So I bring my right hand across.

A.J. half whispers, “You and I just made kind of a good team in there, that’s all.” She puts her other hand on mine, covers it up with both of hers like it’s a little fire she’s trying to keep alive. And then she leans some more and kisses me.

Thanks to Colleen, I know how to kiss, but it’s nothing like that. It’s okay, though, and I’m flattered and curious. Somebody else’s lips — amazing!

But this kiss never goes anywhere. It doesn’t get warmer or messier. It’s the kind of kiss that would just put Snow White into a deeper coma.

There I am with a cute girl who likes me, at least a little. We’re into some of the same things. Or at least the same big thing — movies. I don’t have to worry about getting arrested; she’s not going to run off with some stranger and smoke a joint. A.J. swears about once a month, and her skin, at least what I can see of it, is a perfect, blank canvas. And when Grandma sees her, she doesn’t make a face.

So why am I thinking about Colleen?

WHEN A.J. DROPS ME OFF, it’s about ten. Grandma’s car is gone. Colleen isn’t outside, but she’s not in her bedroom or the bathroom or any other room. I’m just about to call her cell when she bursts through the front door.

“Big news!” she says. “Huge news. I found your mother!”

All I can do is stare.

“And I’m staying with Marcie for a while, but that’s nothing.”

“My mother is at Marcie’s?” I gasp.

“No, she’s in Azusa!” She holds an envelope right in front of my eyes, and I read Grandma’s address and then, up in the left-hand corner, hers:

“Where . . . ?” I’m having trouble catching my breath. Colleen takes my face in both hands and kisses me. Breathes into me. Makes me breathe. It’s not sexy; it’s resuscitation. Finally I can wheeze, “Where did you find this?”

“In your grandma’s bedroom.”

“What were you doing in there?”

“Snooping around. You don’t look in people’s medicine cabinets when you go to their houses?”

I point the envelope at her. “This wasn’t in Grandma’s medicine cabinet.”

“So it was on her desk.”

“She doesn’t leave stuff on her desk.”

“In a drawer, then. Jesus. What’s the difference? Now we can find your mother and beat her up.” She grabs my good hand and tugs.

“Now?”

“Sure.”

“We can’t just go out there.”

“Why not?”

“We just can’t.”

“Do you want some guy in gold pants and a trumpet to announce your arrival?”

“She doesn’t know we’re coming.”

“We’ll catch her off guard. See the real her.” She pulls at me and I let her.

“This is crazy.”

“I don’t know about you, Ben, but I can’t wait to see the heartless bitch who left you on Granny’s doorstep like a sack of flaming dog shit. I’ll leave Grandma a note.”

“Since when are you so concerned about my grandma?”

“Since we had breakfast together about an hour ago. She’s kind of a cool old lady.”

Colleen crosses the double lines and gets into the carpool lane of the 210 freeway. I tell her, “I don’t feel too good.”

She glances over, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Colleen smokes like somebody in a gangster film, the tough chick who gets killed in a shoot-out so the misunderstood hoodlum can marry the pretty librarian.

I take a few deep breaths as we whiz past Monrovia. I want to think about anything except where we’re going. “So how did you end up at Marcie’s?”

She takes one last drag on her cigarette and flicks it away. It carries and makes an arc of showering sparks. Robert Mitchum couldn’t have done it better.

“I called a few people I know, and in that warmhearted way of drug addicts everywhere, they told me to get lost. So I go out to my car, where I think I’ve got some more phone numbers, and there’s Marcie, working in the yard. She asks me how I’m doing, one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know, I’ve got the Virginia Woolf suite. So I’m set for a little while.” She reaches over and rubs my face. “Now we’ll find your mom and tie up a few loose ends, okay?”

We blow by the Baldwin off-ramp, the one A.J. and I took just a few hours ago when we left the racetrack. I think about her life, all planned out, starting with Paris or New York. How she said we made a good team. That lukewarm kiss in the parking lot.

Colleen and I ride for a while. People check us out, guys, mostly. Alone in their cars with fifty-two payments to go. They’re wearing their nice shirts and ties. They’re on their way to shake somebody’s limp hand. I’ll bet they’re thinking,
I wish I was in high school again. I wish I was that guy.

I tell her, “My alleged mother probably isn’t going to be home. You know that, don’t you?”

“So we’ll come back.”

“She could be food shopping or working or out with friends.”

“Did she have friends before? Did she have a job?”

“I don’t remember. Grandma says she had a real-estate license but never sold anything.”

“Relax. We’ll do some recon: find her house, check out her car. If she’s got four or five Mexicans in the trunk, she’s a smuggler.”

“Even if she is home, I can’t just go to the door and say, ‘Hello, I’m your son,’ then throw my one good arm around her and weep.”

“Why not?”

“Colleen, she doesn’t want to see me, not really. If she wanted to see me, she would. We live twenty miles away from each other, okay? Maybe that’s all I want to do today — see her. Just look at her.”

“Fine. So we’ll take a look at her. But don’t forget: you live twenty miles away from each other
now.
What’s that note say again?”

I open the envelope and read out loud:

Colleen says, “See? She’s getting situated. She might’ve moved to be closer to you.”

“And today’s prize for unbridled optimism goes to the lady in the blue Vans, Colleen Minou.”

Colleen careens across three lanes, exits way too fast, slides around the corner, and finally comes to a stop at a big intersection with a barbecue joint on one corner and a Chevron station across the street.

“You’re the worst driver I’ve ever seen.”

“Ed and I used to have to run from the Mexican mafia.”

“You should be making movies, not me.”

Colleen looks both ways a couple of times. Then lights a cigarette.

I suggest, “Want to ask at the gas station?”

“Look at the Thomas Guide. It’s down there under all those In-N-Out Burger wrappers.”

I find it and pry the sticky pages apart. Colleen’s arm is across the back of my seat, rubbing my shoulder. A.J. could drive me out here. Or Grandma or even Rane, but they couldn’t keep me from just jumping out of the car and running right back the way we came. Colleen knows me. She really knows me.

I tell her, “Looks like left here a couple of blocks and then right on Magnolia.”

“Good work, Magellan. Now let’s go and find your mommy.”

Two blocks and one turn later, we come to Magnolia and then to 111. My mother — how weird are those two words? — lives in a court. Not a trailer court, thank God. Little units, six on a side, fill up a deep lot. Not like the three-story building next door with a hundred apartments that hogs the sun.

One eleven is a little seedy, like in
Day of the Locust,
the ultimate movie about Hollywood the way it used to be. The light that falls on it looks like weak tea. The kind you might make for a sick person, and then add a piece of toast cut into a triangle.

Colleen peers from across the street. “So if she’s in D, and I can see A from here, she’s in the fourth one up on the left.”

There’s one uncomfortable-looking chair on the tiny porch.

We just sit. Colleen smokes. I take deep breaths and let them out with a
whoosh.
Finally I say, “If this was a movie and we were staking this place out, she’d open the door and walk straight to her car. They never show the twelve hours the cops sat there drinking coffee.”

Colleen points. “Bingo!”

Somebody comes out of unit D. Somebody in a blouse and skirt. Carrying a purse and one of those little insulated lunch bags.

My heart rate shoots up.

Colleen slaps me on the arm. “Am I gonna have to call the paramedics?”

I shake my head. “Oh, my God. Is that her?”

We watch her walk toward the street, eyes down. Her hair is stringy, still damp from a shower, probably.

I gasp. “She’s kind of fat. She didn’t used to be fat.”

“Yeah, she hasn’t been going to the gym much, that’s for sure. And she’s not smuggling illegal aliens, either. Coyotes make a lot of money.”

She gets into an old Sentra. The blinker comes on, she looks over her shoulder, then pulls away from the curb.

“Driver,” Colleen says to herself, “follow that car.”

We make our way down Azusa Avenue, tailing my mother’s dusty Nissan.

I tell myself over and over:
That’s your mother in that car. Your actual mother.

I point. “Wait. Look. She’s slowing down.”

“How can you tell? If she drives any slower, we’ll be parked.”

But she doesn’t stop. She’s just super-cautious. A quarter of a block away, there’s a mom with a four-year-old, standing on the curb and talking into her cell. My mom acts like the kid might dart into the street.

We speed up a whole five miles per hour. Colleen lights another cigarette.

“Why do you smoke so much?” I ask her.

“Oral fixation.” She waggles her eyebrows at me.

“That’d be a lot sexier if you didn’t look like Groucho Marx.”

I glance around. Azusa looks like the kind of place that’s semiclose to places that are actually close to Disneyland or L.A. or the beach. There’s a row of motels like Super 8 and Best Western. In the parking lots, people who travel slightly off season to save money pack up the minivans and yell at their kids.

We pass signs for a country club, a river trail, and the Burro Canyon Shooting Park.

Colleen points. “I think I was out here with Ed once. He wanted me to know how to use a handgun in case things got dicey in the marijuana business.”

“Remember ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire’?”

She glances down. “These are new pants, too.”

“Why do you think my mom picked this place to live?”

“Why does anybody do anything? It’s cheap. That little shack of hers would be called a charming cottage in South Pasadena, and it’d go for thirteen hundred a month. I’ll bet it’s not eight out here in the middle of nowhere.”

I adjust the bucket hat Grandma wants me to wear so I won’t get skin cancer. “So she moves down here from God knows where, finds a cheap place to live, drives twenty-two miles an hour and signals four blocks before she wants to turn. What’s up with her?”

“We’ll trap her in a corner. You cry and yell at her for leaving you on Grandma’s doorstep, and every now and then I’ll ask, ‘And by the way, why do you drive so slow?’”

I look over at Colleen. I put my sick hand on the wheel, right beside hers. “I’m glad you’re here. I couldn’t do this without you.”