If he had to, would he screw up his relationship with Jay for her? Was he capable of it? Both possible answers scared him.

He shut the door tight and he got to work.

1971

June drank Screwdrivers in the morning like other people drank orange juice. She drank Cape Codders at lunch in the break room.

She had sea breezes with dinner, she and the kids sitting around the table eating meatloaf or a roast chicken. The cups on the table were always the same. Milk for Kit, soda for Jay and Hud, water for Nina, and a highball filled with vodka cut with the coral hue of ruby red grapefruit juice and cranberry cocktail poured over ice for Mom.

Nina had begun to notice the alcohol after they had to evacuate the year before. There were fires in the canyons, people’s homes were burning, and you could smell the smoke in the air.

June woke them up early in the morning and calmly but firmly told them to each grab the things they absolutely could not live without.

Each one of the kids asked to strap the surfboards to the car roof. Kit brought her stuffed animals. Jay and Hud brought their comics and baseball cards. Nina brought her favorite jeans and a few records. June packed up the family albums. But then, as they all got in the car, Nina noticed June had grabbed the vodka, too.

Days later, when they returned to their home, unscathed except for some soot covering the countertops, Nina noticed that there was a new, fuller bottle of vodka in her mother’s purse. Nina watched as June snuck it into the freezer, the very first thing she unpacked.

These days, June had started falling asleep on the couch in her nightgown, hair in curlers. She never quite made it to her bedroom after spending her nights in front of the TV with that bottle.

But she still kept her charm and wits about her. She kept her smile. She got the kids to school on time, showed up for every single one of their plays and games. She made their Halloween costumes by hand. She ran the restaurant with diligence and honor, paying her kitchen and service staff well.

It was the beginning of a lesson her children would learn by heart: Alcoholism is a disease with many faces, and some of them look beautiful.

• • •

Christina died of a stroke in the fall of 1971, at the age of sixty-one.

June watched the nurses take her mother’s body away. Standing there in the hospital, June felt like she’d been caught in an undertow. How had she ended up here? One woman, all alone, with four kids, and a restaurant she had never wanted.

The day after the funeral, June took the kids to school. She dropped Kit off at the elementary building and then drove Nina, Jay, and Hud to junior high.

When they pulled into the drop-off circle, Jay and Hud took off. But Nina turned back, put her hand on the door handle, and looked at her mother.

“Are you sure you’re OK?” Nina asked. “I could stay home. Help you at the restaurant.”

“No, honey,” June said, taking her daughter’s hand. “If you feel up for going to school, then that’s where you should be.”

“OK,” Nina said. “But if you need me, come get me.”

“How about we think of it the other way around?” June said, smiling. “If you need me, have the office call me.”

Nina smiled. “OK.”

June felt herself about to cry and so she put her sunglasses over her eyes and pulled out of the parking lot. She drove, with the window down, to Pacific Fish. She pulled in and put on the parking brake. She took a deep breath. She got out of the car and stood there, staring up at the restaurant with a sense of all she had inherited. It was hers now, whatever that meant.

She lit a cigarette.

That goddamn restaurant had claimed her from the day she was born and now she understood that she would never outrun it.

Some of the lights on the sign were broken. The whole exterior needed a power washing. That was solely up to her now. She was all this restaurant had left. Maybe it was all she had left, too.

June rested against the hood of her car, crossed her arms, and continued smoking, taking stock of the new shape of her life.

She was overworked and overtired and lonely. She missed the parents who had never truly understood her, missed the man who had never truly loved her, missed the future she thought she had been building for herself, missed the young girl she used to be.

But then she thought of her children. Her exhausting, sparkling children. She must have done something right if life had brought her the four of them. That much seemed crystal clear.

Maybe she had done something with her life after all. Maybe she could make something of what she had left.

June put out her cigarette on the ground, crushing it with the toe of her black flat. And then, as she looked up at the Pacific Fish sign, June Riva got a wild idea. She’d earned her name through heartbreak and consequences—wasn’t it her right to do with it anything she wanted?

Two weeks later, three men came to put up the new sign. Bright red cursive: RIVA’S SEAFOOD.

When it was done, June stood by the front door and looked at it. She was drinking vodka out of a soda cup. She smiled, satisfied.

It was going to bring in a lot more customers. It might even get her some press. But more important, when Mick finally came back, he was going to love it. June was sure of that.

• • •

Soon, Jay and Hud also began to understand that she was an alcoholic—even if they didn’t know the word for it or didn’t know it was something with a word at all.

Their mom always made more sense first thing in the morning, tired and sluggish but lucid. She made less and less sense as the day went on. Jay once whispered to Hud, after June told him to “go bath and shower,” that “Mom starts acting nuts after dinner.”

It got so that by 6:00 P.M., the kids all knew to ignore her. But they also tried to keep her home, lest she embarrass them in public.

Nina had even started pretending to love the idea of driving at the young age of fourteen. She would ask her mom if she could drive them all to the store, if she could take the boys to the movie theater instead of June dropping them all off, if she could chauffeur Kit and Vanessa to the ice cream stand so June could stay home.

Nina was actually terrified of driving. It felt overwhelming and nerve-racking, trying to merge onto PCH with all of those cars flying by. She would white-knuckle the steering wheel the whole way, her heart racing, her confusion rising as she tried to time her turns. When she eventually got them all to the chosen destination and got out of the car, she could feel the tension she’d been holding in between her shoulder blades and behind her knees.

But as afraid as Nina was of driving, she was more afraid of her mother behind the wheel after lunch. Nina sometimes couldn’t fall asleep at night, tallying June’s surging number of near hits, her slow reactions, the missed turns.

It was easier, despite how hard it was, for Nina to drive them all herself. And soon it started to feel to Nina that it was not just easier but rather crucial that she prevent what felt like an inevitable calamity.

“You really like driving,” June said, handing over the keys one evening, after June realized they were out of milk. “I don’t get it. I never liked it.”

“Yeah, I want to be a limo driver one day,” Nina said, immediately regretting the pathetic lie. Surely she could have come up with something better than that.