Free The Truth About Delilah Blue by Tish Cohen Page A

Victor slammed his foot down on the brake, narrowly avoiding being T-boned, his heart hammering in his chest.
    The shock of it disoriented him.
    The light was red now. Victor sat in the middle of the intersection, frozen, unable to remember what he was meant to do in this situation. There was a rule, but it eluded him. Should he execute his turn? Back up? One shouldn’t be in the middle of an intersection on a red light. At a standstill. He glanced hopefully in the rearview mirror only to discover that backing up was not an option—there were too many cars lined up behind him. The light on La Cienega turned green and now traffic approached from both sides. Horns wailed and honked as Victor struggled to organize his thoughts. To breathe. He needed to act, to do something to get out of the way. But what? Everything had happened too quickly for him to react.
    More honking, then traffic veered around the Datsun, people shouted out their windows at him, honking, crowding, coming at him from left and right.
    A few more minutes of panic and the lights changed again. Sweating now, Victor made his left, dodging downthe first side street, where he pulled to the curb, turned off the engine, fought to calm his pounding heart. He dropped his head onto the steering wheel and exhaled while the sun coming through the windshield seared the back of his neck.

Eight
    When a child spends a lifetime, or close to it, waiting for one specific moment, something magical and faraway with the power to set her entire world straight, she imagines that someday from up, down, and sideways. She thinks of the moment taking place here or there, the clothes she’ll have on, what song may or may not be playing on a fortuitously placed stereo. She pictures the weather; wouldn’t have to be perfect—a raging thunderstorm can provide a theatrical, you-and-me-against-the-world sort of backdrop. And she thinks about what she will say. Oh, the witty and poignant things she will say!
    But there’s a fact about someday that you can’t possibly understand until it has settled upon you. Someday was doomed the moment you wished it into existence. You’ve already ruined it. By imagining it even once,you’ve created an expectation someday cannot possibly live up to.
    About an hour later, Lila and her mother stood on the roadside looking down upon the cabin. Elisabeth raised one arm to shield her eyes from the sun and her blouse shifted to bare a tiny shoulder wrapped in relaxed muscles and toasted skin. There was a raw physicality to the woman that Lila had forgotten. Her sensuality and comfort in her own limbs was what you noticed before anything else. She moved with near-liquid ease. “So this is where you’ve been all these years?”
    “This is it.”
    Her mother squinted down at the hillside and frowned into the late-afternoon glare. “Is that a pile of steak bones?”
    “There’s a coyote.”
    Elisabeth sucked the back of her teeth in disapproval. “This place isn’t fit for a child.”
    “I chose it.” She hadn’t, though. Victor’s boss had come across the private sale while visiting his great aunt all those years prior. But something unexpected happened on the drive home with her mother. The numbness Lila had been filled with, the bubble of the moment she’d floated inside of back in the studio, had been replaced by something else. Anger. She watched her mother cringe.
    “I’m sorry,” Elisabeth said quickly. “I don’t mean to insult the place. Must have been fun to grow up around such urban wilderness.”
    Lila nodded, pointing out the bridge over the cactus growing in the dry riverbed. “I used to play Three Billy Goats Gruff down there with a housekeeper’s daughter who didn’t speak English. And there’s this impossibly tiny in-ground Jacuzzi—it’s hard to see because of the bushes—where Dad used to let me take bubble baths under the stars. I used to think they were winking at me. Later Dad told me it was the smog swirling