Free Bonita Avenue by Peter Buwalda

him toward his hotel. On the one hand he believes his suspicions say more about himself than about Joni, that what he has seen is a projection of his own fears; but on the other hand he is just a bit too familiar with adversity to be entirely sure. As different as his daughters are from each other, he has never doubted their respectability, their decency: it is a question a man with a son in the Scheveningen penitentiary never gets around to asking. He would put his life on the line for Tineke’s daughters, Janis and Joni, whom he regards as his own—the elder, who has everything going for her, who will breeze through life: she is quick on the draw, witty, ambitious, above all engaging—“take the plunge with me,” it’s written on her forehead in glittering gold letters—and on top of it those damnedgood looks, her extraordinary beauty, so no, the father of a criminal does not worry about a daughter like Joni. If they have any worries about Tineke’s girls they are for Janis, who is altogether another matter. The younger daughter has made it her life’s work
not
to engage, she harbors a programmatic, often intolerable, loathing for everything that in her eyes is not genuine, she fights a one-woman guerrilla war against everything that is insincere, fake, hypocritical. That is why she refuses to diet, that is why she wears boys’ clothes, that is why she so vehemently abhors money, meat-eaters, Hollywood films, saddled horses, universities, vacations. She shreds Christmas cards sent by aunts and uncles. Deodorant: Tineke had to force her to use deodorant, as a teenager Janis insisted it was a lie to mask your own odor, it’s deceitful, deodorant is bourgeois. At least she’s honest, he and Tineke told each other.
    The heavens open, downpour turns into hailstorm, the deafening drumroll is so loud that the traffic appears to glide noiselessly forward. Sigerius has no choice but to take refuge under a sodden awning. Packed together with other pedestrians, he picks up a scent that reminds him of the sweaty judo mats of long ago. One of the men points to the bouncing ice balls, maybe he’s never seen hail before, at least not on May 13th.
    For a couple of years he was the jogging coach for Joni’s gymnastics class; after returning from America she joined a club in Enschede called Sportlust, and one day she asked if he felt like coaching them. Sounds good, he said, and it did sound good: a weekly run with thirteen thirteen-year-olds through the Drienerlo woods. Shortly before his summer holidays, the chairwoman and the head coach sat in his living room discussing the details; soon thereafter, every Wednesday evening the farmhouse overflowed with beanpoles with braces and tracksuits, an arrangement that Joni soon regretted because all the girls canceled now andagain—homework, illness, being under the weather—something she could never get away with. He laid out a not-too-girlish route of about four kilometers. They ran southward down the Langenkampweg, cut across the campus, including the motorcycle club’s dune (“Oh,
noooo
, sir, not the loose sand!”), after which they continued through the woods until coming out at the farmhouse, where Tineke served them glasses of elderberry cordial.
    Joni was still young enough to be proud of her athletic father, and he too would have looked back with pleasure on the training if it hadn’t been for that incident. Sportlust participated, as it did each year, in a door-to-door fund-raising drive for cancer research, and Joni and Miriam, a small but pert girl who jogged with her blond curls flattened under a headband, spent two long afternoons canvassing the houses and apartments in Boddenkamp for donations. “A neighborhood where you can expect them to be generous, just like in previous years,” remarked the chairwoman the evening he phoned her because Joni had come home from try-outs and—first stammering, then crying—told him she’d been accused of stealing money out