1969

In the late sixties, the counterculture had discovered the beauty of rustic Malibu and settled in along the mountains. The beaches were overrun with surfers on their brand-new shortboards—cooler and more aerodynamic than their older brothers’ longboards. Teams of young dudes and the honorary dudette took over the water, running in packs, claiming coves for themselves, rushing poseurs out of town.

The air smelled like Mary Jane and suntan oil. And yet, still, you could smell the sea breeze if you took a moment.

Mick Riva’s career—rocky tabloid headlines, a new hit album, a sold-out world tour—had taken off like a rocket, leaving hordes of young women screaming his name, millions of car radios playing his music as they sped down the freeway.

And so, to his children, he was both inescapable and never there.

Nina, Jay, Hud, and little Kit knew their father as a ghost whose voice visited them over the loudspeakers at the grocery store, whose face peered out at them from their friends’ parents’ album collections. He was a billboard in Huntington Beach on a road trip. He was a poster in the record stores their mother never wanted to go to. When he tried his hand at acting, he was a movie they never saw. But they almost never thought of him as theirs—he was everyone’s.

And so, they never thought of the smell of whiskey on his breath, or the way his smile had once made them smile, or the way their mother used to blush with his kiss.

It was hard to remember their mother had ever blushed at all. To them, June was stress and bone.

In their second divorce, Mick had paid off the house and granted it to June. And he was supposed to resume the child support and alimony payments of their first divorce. But months after their divorce was finalized, June kept going out to the mailbox every day, looking for the checks and leaving empty-handed. None ever came. June suspected it was an oversight. She was almost positive that if she picked up the phone and called him—reminded him what was owed—he’d have an assistant or an accountant set up the recurring payments as he’d been instructed.

But she couldn’t bring herself to ask him for one goddamn thing. She refused to let him see her squirm, to see her need.

When he finally came back to her again, he was going to respect her. He was going to bow at her feet and grovel, in awe of her strength.

So, instead of asking Mick to pay for the needs of his own children, June finally turned to her parents. She took a job at the restaurant.

June ended up in the exact place she had hoped Mick Riva would save her from.

• • •

By the summer of 1969, June’s father had been dead two years. It was now only her and her mother running Pacific Fish. Nina was almost eleven. Jay and Hud were nine. Kit was six. And every day during the summer, they came with June to the restaurant.

One particular July morning, it neared a hundred degrees. People were coming in out of the sun in droves. They wanted cold beers and big sodas and shrimp rolls. The kitchen staff was overwhelmed and June, in a moment of crisis management, took the busboys off duty, put them in the kitchen to help out, and handed a rag to Nina, asking her to clean the tables.

Hud and Kit were playing Go Fish on a bench on the side of the restaurant by the parking lot. Jay was trying to flirt with a twelve-year-old girl, not above invoking his father’s name in order to get a hello and a smile. And Nina was inside, watching the customers, making her way to their tables to clean up before they had barely left their seats.

Nina worked fast, with a sense of duty and pride in a job well done. She was efficient rather than perfect, just as her mother had instructed. And, without being asked, Nina grabbed a bin and pulled empty plastic baskets and cups and brought them over to the dishwasher. She was a natural. Born to serve.

As June rang in orders on the second register next to Christina, she looked up from the sea of customers to spot her daughter, wringing out the rag and getting to work on a just-vacated table. Nina’s long brown hair had golden highlights from the sun just like June’s had when she was a child, and her eyes were big and brown and open, just like June’s had always been. Watching her daughter standing there, scrubbing down a table, June saw herself, only twenty years younger, and suddenly had the feeling she was going to jump out of her skin.

“Nina!” she called to her. “Take your brothers and sister to the beach.”

“But—” Nina began to protest. She wanted to clean the tables because who else would clean them?

“Go!” June said, her voice impatient.

Nina thought she was in trouble. June believed she was setting her free.

• • •

Nina gathered her brothers and sister and pulled their swimsuits out of the back of the Cadillac that was now over a decade old. The four of them changed in the bathrooms behind the restaurant. Afterward, Nina took Kit’s hand and the four of them stood on the side of the Pacific Coast Highway, waiting for an opportunity to cross over to the beach.

Nina was wearing a navy blue one-piece. She had sprouted that summer, now tall and lanky. She’d already begun to notice the way people looked at her, a second or two longer than they used to. The suit was now just a bit too small, the straps making indentations into the terra-cotta burn of her shoulders.

Jay, refusing to come inside all summer, had turned downright bronze, a fact made that much more apparent by his yellow swimming trunks. And Hud, faithfully beside Jay all season, had a sunburn, as always, and a new crop of light freckles across his nose and cheeks. His shoulders had begun to peel.

Kit, all of six years old, had begun insisting upon wearing T-shirts over her bathing suits because she didn’t like boys looking at her half-naked. She stood on the side of the road with a yellow Snoopy T-shirt hiding a pink flowered suit, purple flip-flops on her feet.

Each one of them held a towel over their shoulder.

Nina held her siblings back from the road with one arm outstretched, forcing Jay and Hud to wait to cross the highway until she gave them the go-ahead. When she nodded, the four of them ran across, holding one another’s hands. When their feet hit the hot sand, they pulled off their sandals and dropped their towels. They ran as fast as they could toward the water. And then the four of them came to an abrupt stop as their toes hit the foam, eight little feet sinking into the cold wet sand.

“Kit, you have to stay right next to me,” Nina said.

Kit frowned but Nina knew she would do as she was told.

“All right,” Jay said. “Ready? Set. Go!”

The four of them charged into the ocean like soldiers heading into battle.

They swam out, past the small breaking waves that were gently rolling onto the shore, preparing to bodysurf to the sand. The ocean was something they had lived in their entire lives. In the water outside their home, they had swam while their mother cleaned the bathrooms, done somersaults in high tide as she made dinner, tried to find fish as June poured herself another Cape Codder. The Riva kids lived with water-clogged ears and salt-crusted faces.

Jay claimed the first good wave coming in. “Hud,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Right behind you,” Hud called.

They took off. Jay’s long, gangly arms paddled as fast as they could, Hud’s thick legs kicked with all of their might. They coasted through the water, side by side, each one inching ahead and then falling behind.