Poppy has as many reasons to earn “dollar, dollar bills” as I did when I was sixteen, though I didn’t think I had a say in whether I should pump gas at a station where the manager sold pills or referee soccer games in front of angry fathers who didn’t consider it abuse if it wasn’t their child.

Calling our break with Poppy a truce would be misleading, so after we all stopped yelling, I walked outside to marvel at the thin sheet of water leaking (flowing would be misleading, too) down the Santa Fe River. The value of summer jobs still hung in my mind and, as I absentmindedly yanked some grass from between two stairs, I thought of the first day I worked the lawn crew for Steve Kidney’s landscaping company 30 years ago. My best friend Arnold’s older sister had dated Steve, so he nicely hired us on. Steve’s business was split into two crews: landscaping and lawns. On most days, Arnold and I rode landscaping, which offered harder but more varied work that included boulders, ticks, and an assembly of tools, both human and manufactured. Lawns, the veterans said, was easier on your back but more monotonous, which is why they had two supposedly crazy men running that crew.

Lex was a short, portly man with a messy beard and crackly laugh who reminded me of prospectors I saw in Westerns. He drove the rumbling truck, large enough to hold all the mowers, attachments and tanks of gas and oil. Sitting shotgun was Mark, a Vietnam vet whose moods would change in ways that made me feel unsteady. One minute he’d be laughing about something Lex had said (and I did not understand), and the next he’d stare right through me. I sat on the hump in the middle, the gear-grinding stick-shift rattling between my legs. At the first house, I was taught to set the planks that served as a makeshift ramp for the heavy John Deere mowers. Lex and Mark piloted those huge oily machines, their width extended by attachable rotating wing cutters. My job was simple: trim. I pushed a crappy mower over roots and along driveways, places where it was deemed too difficult for the Deeres to maneuver. So while the two men kept flawless seams on the acres of dew-soaked turf, my shins were peppered by wood chips and gravel.

After the first house, Lex said we needed to make a pit stop. He pulled the truck up to a small liquor store in Fairfield. Mark trotted out with a six-pack of Mickey’s Big Mouth, a half-dozen squat green bottles of malt liquor. It was 9:30 in the morning, and we were already sweating. Mark pulled two tabs and hung them on a line strung across the roof of the truck along with countless others.

“Big Mouths for big mouths,” Lex said, draining his beer in one go.

“Giddy up,” Mark said and followed suit.

Both men tucked their glassware under the seat where it would rattle around all day. In my memory, that day was long and hot with the kind of humidity that Poppy has never experienced. Each house we visited seemed to grow in acreage. The two men had been servicing these clients for so long that they knew without the aid of a watch exactly how many minutes every house should take. When my mower stalled after overheating, they showed me that when you dip a spark plug in gasoline, it can help encourage a reluctant motor.

I don’t know how that day on the lawn crew shaped me as a man or what I’d tell Poppy about such lines of work, but I do remember shutting off the motors on the last house. It was after five, and the homeowners weren’t due back from wherever the hell they were until the weekend. Sticky from sweat and covered in dirt, oil and lawn clippings, my arms ached in anticipation of loading the winged beasts back into the truck bed. Lex and Mark stood on the other side of a clear swimming pool where the pure grass grew like a putting green. The machines ticked as their engines cooled down.

“Shall we?” Lex asked Mark, calling his partner a nickname that my memory lost.

“Indeed, maestro,” Mark said.

Both men stripped off their stained jeans, work shirts, and boxers. Together, they leapt into the coolness of the water.
“Come on, kid,” they yelled, waving me in. Wish I could say that I joined them.

“Why is she called Pilates?” my student asked, referring not to the man who washed his hands of the hot mess as the bewhiskered messiah was carted off to Calvary; the Santa Fe born-and-bred teen was referring to a prop-based exercise regimen developed in the 20th century by a German who has yet to be confirmed for sainthood by throngs in Zumba pants. My student pronounced the character’s name Puh-lot-ees, instead of Pie-let, the way I was taught by Sister St. Ignatius in her first grade classroom.

“Does anyone know who Pontius Pilate is?” I asked, a nub of chalk pinched between my fingers.

One hand shot up.

“How many of you know what Pilates is?”

A forest of arms grew suddenly before my eyes.

“I wonder if they have this problem in Detroit,” I said out loud. No one laughed.

In the novel, Pilate makes a conscious choice to live isolated outside of town and her granddaughter, needing connection, community and a decent place to get her hair done, suffers greatly from this relocation decision. As I stood there, my back against a board teachers started using 200 years before I was born, I thought of my decision over 20 years ago to flee the East and relocate to a town where the clouds are shaped like yoga mats and the tap water smells faintly of kombucha tea.

This “how did I get here?” idea of an unimagined future turning into an actual life followed me like a hungry ghost all week. At the Zia Diner, I asked two friends if they would have ever guessed that one day they’d actually have children and take them to a place called Santa Fe Soul Health and Healing Center when the flu ran through their house. Or that, when their kids had nightmares, instead of telling them to “go back to sleep, goddammit” like my own father did, they’d drive them across town to an office with a tinkling koi pond so a beautiful lesbian could stick needles in their tiny arms? They laughed, said “no,” and then we all took bites of our green chile cheeseburgers and let the juice run down our chins.

I couldn’t let go of trying to connect that terrified boy in a school uniform at Sacred Heart Elementary, struggling to memorize the stations of the cross, with the 40-something Santa Fean who has working knowledge of mystics, Feldenkrais practitioners (JFGI) and healers who mention nothing in their pastel-colored brochures about the holy hippie in robes who helped give Samarian lepers a salt glow.

I was grading papers in the newly opened Betterday Coffee shop across from my friend K, also grading, who teaches in Texas. K and I were bemoaning our choice to plow through pages and pages of student prose on Saturday when we could have been enjoying the juicy landscape and rejuvenating sunshine of the 505. Two young women asked to share our longish table and soon they were deep into their own conversation about astrology, tinctures and some sort of spray that whisks away excess estrogen. I know one of the women, and my wife really enjoyed the few times they’ve chatted at art festivals and the like. I like her, too, but that didn’t keep me from eavesdropping. I kicked K under the table to get her to tune in, but the Betterday is long and cavernous, and the baristatti have a nasty habit of cranking up the music when they’re feelin’ it. I leaned in, and it was as if I had entered the heart of New Agey Santa Fe, even more so than talking to my friend who was taught by dolphins to cure menopause.

These women to my right swallowed concoctions and spoke quickly, exposing an intense and intimate friendship. I looked over to K, who was steadfastly marking essays like a cloistered nun. Then I heard one of the women say, “You know so and so! She’s my sister!” What she really meant was soul sister since they had been discussing past life regression. Then the woman I know had an epiphany that could have been spotted with the naked eye. “Soul sister! I’m her aborted child!” she said. “We figured it out.” They reached across the table to clasp hands. They were so happy.

Just after the abandoned former dictator’s school, I ask Poppy to turn, and it happens. “Wreck on the Highway” by Bruce Springsteen fills the cabin, and we are now facing Old Las Vegas Highway, a road that took the lives of two of my former students, Kate Klein and Alyssa Trouw. A road that I swore Poppy would avoid. I don’t believe in signs or fate or that everything happens for a reason, but behind my sunglasses, I well up because I miss those girls, only a year older than Poppy when they left and because, like the speaker in the song, “Sometimes I sit up in the darkness/and I watch my baby as she sleeps” and because all the wrecks I’ve witnessed or participated in scroll across my mind like a relentlessly grim banner: ruptured radiators, shattered windshields, blood bubbles. And yet those goddamn beautiful mountains like fat lightning rods for the sun’s white rays won’t let me tell Poppy to pull over so I can take the wheel or grab a bottle at the gas station to gulp in front of the Patriots game.
We approach the patch of dirt near the highway that people call Sticks and Stones, where we once haggled for a crooked Christmas tree. Mark and Keira live across the street, their dog recently mauled by a runaway pit bull. I almost tell Poppy to slow down so we can swing by for a visit, but I’ll just spook her with my last-minute request, so I keep quiet and think of how the bull terrier’s owner did the right thing by paying for the vet and putting her pet down—and how Mark and Keira got a new puppy from the breeder and the girls named it Pepper. My teeth unclench a bit as I recall Cora’s smile when she uttered those two syllables—”Pep-per”—and I cannot help but remember the way my daughter said her own name when she was Cora’s age: ”Pop-py.”

“Dad,” my driver says, annoyed, “which way?”
We are at an intersection of a major highway, a minor highway and an ancient road. “Wherever you want, darling,” I say and try not to close my eyes.

London’s gift had a more direct connection. Earlier in the year, he’d written a report on Lawrence of Arabia and treated his subject and environs with the same level of obsessive curiosity as he did with other childhood heroes such as Hellboy and Sherlock Holmes. Since our friend couldn’t smuggle a curved dagger (khanjar) through Homeland, she brought a thobe and ghutra instead. When London tore open the gift wrap and spotted the familiar robe and head scarf, he declared, “I am so wearing this for free dress,” referring to the one day in the week students at his school are allowed to practice fashion freedom.

“Really?” my wife Lala asked. “Kinda looks like a dress.”

“I know,” London said with the authority of a man who had done his due diligence.

“Maybe he should wear it to Grandpa’s party in June,” Poppy said, smirking. We’d been talking about the Wilder family reunion and, more specifically, a cocktail party my dad insists on throwing on the last evening of our gathering. For me, mixing my father’s girlfriend’s family, my stepgrandmother and her boyfriend, octogenarian pals from various condos and water aerobics classes, and our extended family (including manic rug rats and easily bored teens) in a house as childproof as a glass museum seems like an idea that will have no other choice but to end badly.

But as I imagined London strolling in like a traditional Arab to a party hosted by a former banker who hands out copies of the Bill of Rights as party favors, my mind raced back to the last time I was in my father’s apartment. It was during spring break and, as always, I tried to ignore the bunting of flags that adorned the old man’s car and his front door, as well as inconspicuous items like pencil holders and cordless telephones.

After all, I am accustomed to his frequent emails on the death of health care, the rise of socialism and the threat of radical Islamists. No, the thing that truly frightened me that day was uncovering a newsletter claiming that our current president’s social security number belongs to a dead woman in Connecticut.

My father’s politics have always leaned heavily to the right, but I recall one Christmas Eve in 1988 when I had hope that his leanings wouldn’t make him completely topple over.

Having just completed my first five months at a Manhattan advertising agency, I’d invited a few work friends, including a junior and senior executive from the company’s Japan office, to our annual Christmas Eve party. The junior exec couldn’t make it, but the senior, Katsumi, rolled up in a limo and a tux, a young Japanese woman in a long black dress draped on one arm, an expensive bottle of bourbon nestled in the other.

My father graciously welcomed Katsumi and his friend into our split-level ranch. I was happy but dumb. It was the tail end of the Reagan years and, as I learned later, the mumblings of trade deficits and military buildup quickly circulated through the party and, for some of my father’s friends, the smell of World War II still lingered in the air like wood smoke. There were suspicions from the Catholics in gaudy Christmas sweaters about this visitor’s marital status back home in Tokyo, but the question repeated most was “Who invited him?”

I’m still not sure whether it was out of loyalty to me or to the Christian holiday, but my father used the same booming rage that now vilifies teachers’ unions to defend Katsumi as a guest in our home. I know the comparison is not pure, yet when I think of my old friend in his tux and bowtie, I see London draped in his kandoora, a hattah tied neatly to his head. My father stays in the picture, too, somewhere in the background.

I expected little. I frequent my Albertson’s and Sunflower Market, hit the co-op when I feel all eco-local-friendly, dare to go to the Whole Foods Market when I have extra dough and drop in to say hi to Sam’s Club at least once a month to stock up on items that can only fit on a sled. What could any store, especially outside the 505, do for me?

When I walked into Pro’s Ranch Market, I dropped to my knees and, once I stopped weeping, called my wife Lala to tell her to pack her bags. Imagine Sam’s and Whole Foods had a threesome with a handsome Mexican dandy on their honeymoon in Cancún. Ranch Market would have been the miraculous offspring. The store pipes in festive mariachi music, and the shiny streamers hanging from the ceiling fans make the place look like an oversized fiesta.

“We can never leave,” I told Connie as we passed the little café where entire familias were feasting. Women in white pounded fresh corn and flour tortillas on a hot griddle, so you could either take them home or eat them there in a carnita taco with freshly made pico de gallo or salsa verde. Even though we had just finished breakfast, I almost ordered one for my brothers in white-bread America who would never even get a chance.

Across from La Cocina sat a bamboo-themed shack offering “Aguas Frescas”—a goddamn juice bar.

“This can’t be happening,” I said to Connie, watching people sip fresh beet and carrot juice or more traditional Hispanic drinks such as horchata and tamarindo.
“It gets even better.” Connie led me to the meat counter, which was twice as long as any butcher’s in pinche Santa Fe and 10 times sexier. First thing I spotted was a pig formed completely out of chorizo and then, in the case next to it, a whole cow’s head, complete with eyeballs and a thick tongue sticking out of its mouth. We staggered down the line of cuts—beef and pork and chicken—to the mother lode: hot and cold running lard. You could take your fat home in tubs or white blocks or, if you’re fixin’ to fry, still warm in pints and quarts.
“God bless Mexamerica,” I said and crossed myself.
I can’t go to any store and not think of my father, who taught me to zoom in on price per pound or ounce. I knew that, with a little cultural sensitivity training, my dad would love Ranch Market the way I do. Six pounds of yams? One American dollar. Freshly fried tortilla chips and some homemade salsa to go? Half the price of most places in this stupid fancy hamlet where I choose to reside.
They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but to get to this man’s stomach, you need to go through his wallet. I grabbed what I could eat in 24 hours, sadly bypassing the baby squid in the best seafood section east of Pike Place Market. And like any good lover, I forgot what I had originally come for. Eggs were not in my basket, but their absence gave me a good excuse to turn the car around and visit one more time.

As I walked up to the student body lining the streets, I vaguely recalled London telling me that he had earned the Hulk-themed rubber duck that hung from his neck by sending postcards to his uncles, aunts and grandparents, encouraging them to renew magazine subscriptions and purchase off-brand candy online. That much information was hard enough to process, but as London had catalogued the types of ducks one could earn through brisk sales (princess, ninja, soccer star) and how many of each his classmates won (2, 6, 16), my brain had automatically gone to sleep. The end game to this kiddie capitalism was a BMX show during which, according to my budding salesman, a real bike would jump over a live teacher. Kids were already placing bets, he’d said.

Before I got close enough to see the scruffy riders straddling their gearless bikes, I heard a familiar nasal tone ramping up in volume. When I was London’s age, I would have said that the stylized voice belonged to the announcer for Raceway Park, a track near my home, which featured smash-up derbies, drag races and other fun things to which my dad would never dream of taking us.

This voice was telling the kids about a horrific accident he had “on this very ramp,” which had shattered his ankle, even though he was wearing the “very same safety equipment” he had on today. He might have said something like “be careful,” but his message was as lost on me as it was on the youngsters. If this hero on two wheels savagely hurt himself after taking all the necessary precautions, why would he continue to jump his donorcycle on portable lifts in front of kids who were still learning to spell? The voice never said, but we had front row seats to the next installment.

One of my father’s favorite expressions is “Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining.” If you want kids to have fun, let them have fun. If you want them to learn, let them learn. Same with raising cash. My problem with the whole fundraising deal is all the misdirection and subterfuge. The BMX show was not just a joyful spectacle of soul patches, wool caps and possible fractures. Embedded inside each tire rotation was promotion, sponsorship, inside baseball and a confusing reward.

“Here’s Toby!” the voice would roar. “He’s included in the BMX rankings elite system male category with 465 points, competing at the Red Bull Pump Riders exhibition, the Gatorade Free Flow Finals BMX Park Primer in conjunction with the Mountain Dew Dew Tour. He’s from Provo, Utah, and wants you to stay in school and thinks you did a totally awesome job raising money for your totally rad school.”

Imagine you are 7 or 8, your stomach still bubbling with chocolate milk from lunch. What the hell do you make of that sentence, especially when it’s delivered with rising volume and seems to end with the intonation usually given to a question?

Oh yes, the voice knew to ask the kids to “make some noise,” and there were the requisite tailwhips and Supermans, and even though this boneshaker circus was meant to be a reward for everyone, the kids knew by the attention they received or the ducks they collected who sold more and deserved extra praise. I left early, well before the bikes orbited the art teacher, but saw London after school. “How’d it go?” I asked him.

“OK.”

His tone reeked of disappointment. “Why just OK?”

“Leina won a signed poster.”

I imagined that she’d guessed the weight of one of the riders or had started her own paddling of canards. “What for?”

“She’s a really loud screamer.”

1.    Not bad, not bad. Maybe she could be a decent driver.
2.    Watch out for that assneck pulling out of her driveway.
3.    That abrupt stop did not help my headache. I might hurl.
4.    I would classify that as a California stop. Unequivocally.
5.    Weren’t you just 7 dressed in a pink tutu?
6.    I should turn on the radio to distract me.
7.    Don’t turn on the radio; you’ll distract her.
8.    She needs to learn to handle distractions. Radio on.
9.    Mailbox, mailbox. Don’t scratch the car. Mom will kill us.
10.    She will never drive on Old Las Vegas Highway. No F-ing way.
11.    Kate and Alyssa. Kate and Alyssa. Jenny and Alice. Eli.
12.    Who ever thought any of this shit up?
13.    Maybe she will be the sober one who drives drunks home.
14.    Turn signal, turn signal, turn signal.
15.    That turn: way too wide, yo.
16.    Don’t stop in the middle of the road. Check your rearview.
17.    Leaves are turning yellowish-orange. My knuckles are white.
18.    I got into a near-fatal crash in the fall of 1983.
19.    A station wagon was going too fast and slid on wet leaves.
20.    I should show you the scar along my hairline.
21.    I shouldn’t show you the scar. What would you learn?
22.    No way to avoid the collision.
23.    My girlfriend had just gotten breast-reduction surgery.
24.    None of it was pretty.
25.    Truth: I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt.
26.    If I ever catch you not wearing a seatbelt…
27.    If I ever catch you texting or talking on your cell…
28.    What would I do?
29.    Hypocrite.
30.    Truth: I got a citation for using the cell in the car.
31.    OK, I talked the judge out of a ticket.
32.    OK, I stopped being the assneck who talks while driving.
33.    Let that driver go. You need to wave her on. Wave her on!
34.    I want: her driving on some country road with her best friend.
35.    No narcotics. This is not Fear and Loathing.
36.    Freedom.
37.    We are all mortal.
38.    Please don’t let her die.
39.    Please don’t let her kill anyone else.
40.    She will drive her little brother. Oh no.
41.    That was a much better turn.
42.    She’s very careful in her own way. Let her have her own way.
43.    She has moved beyond my conception of her.
44.    She is so little.
45.    She is so old.
46.    Watch out for that guy with the toupee; he looks wasted.
47.    Drive like everyone’s drunk, all the time.
48.    I am so proud of you.
49.    Are you riding the brake? (Mechanic’s bills forthcoming.)
50.    Insurance premiums double soon.
51.    I know someday I will cherish this…
52.    Slow down. Slow down. Slow down!
53.    OK, OK, OK, we’re fine.
54.    This car is automatic. How will we ever survive manual?
55.    Put it in park. Nicely done. Exhale.

We were staying in a condo three minutes’ walk from Uncle Duke’s, and during our time there, my wife Lala and I frequented the place.

One night, Lala begged off and I made the trip alone. Things were already moving when I arrived. A gaggle of young, overdressed women huddled to the left while the main bar hosted an older and more mixed crowd.

Surfers in bare feet mingled with a few salty dogs while a man in a pressed white guayabera and matching pants chatted with a tall older woman who shimmied to an Incubus song blaring on the jukebox. I sat down at the corner of the bar next to two drunk men in the middle of an argument.

“You know what we’d do to you in southern Florida,” one said threateningly. His face was cast in shadows, but I could still make out his ruddy skin and thin eyes.

“You know what we’d do up north,” his buddy answered.

“Come on, man, you tried to hit me with your car!”

I leaned in to eavesdrop when the dancing woman plopped down on the stool to my left, literally rubbing shoulders. She had on a fitted tank top with a skull logo and a mess of African crosses and milagros hanging from silver pearl necklaces around her sinewy neck.

“What’s your story?” she asked me.

“Fresh out of stories,” I said, smelling trouble. She said her name was K, as in special, a joke she had obviously told a million times before. K never stopped moving, drumming the bar with fingers wrapped in more precious metal, and when she grew tired of percussion, she shook her bare shoulders or clapped. Her antics were hard to ignore.

“What? I’m hyper,” she said to me in mock defense.

“I thought it was coke,” the man representing southern Florida said, now alone.

On his way to the bathroom, the dandy dressed like a Mexican waiter leaned in and planted a kiss on K’s cheek. “Happy birthday, baby,” he said.

“It’s your birthday?” I asked.

“Not for two days.”

My father taught me early not to ask a woman about her age, weight or past indiscretions, but I was curious.

“I’ll be 45,” she sighed.

“So you were born in 1966, like me,” I said, ready to propose a toast to the year the Black Panthers formed or Ronald Reagan became governor of California, depending on her political leanings.

“No, I was born in ’65.”

“Then you’ll be 46.” I took a pull off my beer.

That’s when her body stopped moving and her eyeballs rolled around her head in pursuit of simple math. “Oh, man.” Her tone had darkened considerably. “This can’t be true. Not ready for 46. I was OK with 45. Hell, you don’t know nothin’.” She poked a finger in my chest. South Florida chuckled.

“It’s easy,” I explained. “2011 minus 46 is 1965.” Her face held a mix of chagrin and confusion. “Or just 11 minus 6 is 5, as in 1965.”

“No way. I gotta tell my brother.”

In my experience, when a drunk and angry woman mentions the existence of a brother, you retreat.

“Listen,” I said, “you can be any age you want.”

“If I’m turning 46, then he’s turning 51. He won’t like that at all.” She turned on her high-heeled boots and headed toward the other end of the bar.

“Suppose math wasn’t a strong suit in that family,” South Florida said, raising his glass to me.

“Guess not,” I answered, and returned his salute.

“In a second, buddy,” I said. The sun was strong and I thought I should probably reapply sunscreen but getting up would take effort and effort was something I’d been applying far too intensely before we’d left New Mexico in a cluster of packing, cleaning  and getting the hell out of Dodge. Now I just wanted to blend in with the “no shoes, no shirt, no problem” vibe of the Encinitas locals and chillax.

Like a kitchen timer, London returned in ten minutes holding two boogie boards like he was selling them. My teenage daughter Poppy bobbed in the water, happy to surrender her board if it removed her dad from his first relaxed state in weeks. The water was a brisk 70 degrees but once I submerged fully, it felt almost transformative. The summer back home had been hot, dry and smoky and unwittingly I had fallen into a coma of sorts that only a body of water could sort out.

“Give me that board,” I said to London and sprinted out to grab the next wave. Feeling like a kid again, I whooped and hollered, racing Poppy and London in categories ranging from fastest wave to longest ride, worst wipeout to best collision. Toward the end of our session, a gang of surfers walked down off the beach. I guess they’d been watching us as they waxed their boards because on their way in, one of them said to Poppy, “How are you related to that guy?” When he’d pointed at me, I’d been yelling about victory with my arms in the air. I then realized (after the guy insulted me) that my skin was lobster red and the combination of humidity and salt water had turned my hair into a helmet exactly like Gene Simmons’. And that surfers rarely yell. And that Poppy couldn’t wait to tell her mother and revel in my embarrassment.

The next day, we decided to enjoy a walk and I told myself to lay low, let my wife Lala make all the decisions, and try not to draw attention to myself. Our stroll took us south along the coast where we marveled at a colorful variety of plants and flowers that would wither and die in the high desert of New Mexico. Every ten minutes or so, we’d walk up a dead end to gaze at the ocean view. I spotted a line of surfers coming off the beach so I followed their path backward to a spot where many cars were parked. I passed a man with a thick mustache and sunglasses drinking in his car, the radio playing softly inside. A cooler rode shotgun.

“I think the beach entry is over here,” I called back to Lala and the kids, but as I got closer, all I found were forbidding fences and signs asking people not to climb on the fragile bluffs. Retreating, I made the turn around sign by spinning my finger in the air, and the guy in the car called out.

“Where’s the beach?” he asked me.

“I’m not sure. Maybe over there.” I nodded toward a gap between two tall condos.

“Over there?” Laughing, he crossed his arms over his chest and pointed in two opposite directions.

“Even the drunks are mocking me?” I asked no one in particular as I walked away. “That guy probably sleeps in his car.”

“Yeah,” my wife Lala said, laughing along with her two stooges, “but he’s got you pegged.”