The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

Part Two.

We arrived at dusk, which seemed to be the time we always arrived in Sacramento. We'd been making summer trips our entire lives, always in August. What we had come to count on during those trips was threefold: the air conditioner would overheat and die, we'd sleep in musty, ancient sleeping bags lined with a flannel pattern of stags and guns, and we'd play hours of Clue off a board from the early 50s--Clue games in which Jenny would scitter down intense notes of strategy and I would resort to desperate off-key humming in a lazy attempt to throw off her game.

Really, that was what Sacramento meant. That and a frightening hoard of relatives--cousins and second cousins, a breed who loved, from what I could ascertain, storytelling, eating and standing up. It was the strangest family trait--whereas my father's family gatherings involved pods of relatives in expensive velvet sweatsuits lounging (always lounging...we were always told, or rather admonished, to 'just be comfy,') my mother's family stood, solid, in circles and in lines, with nothing, not even a sideboard to lean on, shouting stories over one another. Chairs were for the weak, the boring and the quiet. If food was served, it was balanced in hands. Sturdy German legs, I supposed.

The summer would be different. There was no tottering Grandpa Kamp to meet us in the dusky driveway, there was no sea-creatureish Beverly beside him, and I was praying that perhaps, seeing as I was nearly 17, I would graduate from the vintage hunter's sleeping bag to the spare bedroom's hide-a-bed.

So there was nothing to greet us, just the intense peace of the Peter-Pan streetlights and the quiet sloped sidewalks that always give Land Park its dignity.

Mother went straight in the house, and the rest of us went and got some dinner. She appeared a bit overcome by the emotion of it all; selling her childhood home, cleaning it out alone (she kept saying alone, alone, and I knew better than to point out the reality of my presence.) We (Jenny, Dad and I) drove to Marie Calendar's, where we munched on nondescript dinners and watched an inordinate number of people order pies to go.

"Ten pies," Dad observed, "the does seem a bit odd."

"Bizarre," we agreed, watching a dark, scruffy man with a Raider's tat on his neck stagger out under his impressive load of pastries.

"Perhaps," he suggested after a few minutes of silent chewing, "perhaps they are not really pies at all."

The rest of dinner we constructed elaborate speculations as to the true contents of the pie boxes. We settled on drugs. As if to corroborate our theory, the pie line continued to swell with unsavory patrons, people who just could not possibly enjoy that much pie. When the waitress asked if we'd like to finish with some blueberry pie ala mode, we all found her tone ladened with double entendre. Dad, face razor-straight, told her we'd prefer one to go.

She replied, with a wink, "excellent choice."

----

We did bring a pie home, and everybody ate it, but nobody began convulsing or got the giggles or saw any dead people or anything at all exciting. It was, disappointingly, just pie, and we ate it in relative silence as the last light left the windows and the old, dusty 60 watt bulbs sputtered their glow. I looked around at my summer world--the stacks of junk mail, German trinkets, large-screen TV from the 70s, my grandmother's piano, a framed photo of the Steinkamps shaking Reagan's hand in front of the Capital, and a rather iconic 1920's circular mold of Jesus, just his face, in browns and golds, looking off into the distance as if posing for his senior yearbook photo.

Jenny and Dad would head back on a plane in the morning. Jenny, a college senior, had a summer job back in LA and Dad his post as manager of a DMH clinic. The only ones suspended in this time warp would be my mother and I. I eyed her warily in the dim light. She looked exhausted and alone, aimlessly swirling her fork on her plate, stirring the berry seeds she'd picked out of her pie. I moved my chair a bit closer to her, almost imperceptibly closer, and thumbed through a thick pile of bills. Each had been slit open with a sharp knife on the right side of the envelope, then neatly filed with rubber bands, compressed into dense packets. The table was littered with piles just like this one. An endless sea of pointlessly salvaged Thrifty's fliers and church bulletins.