Page 14 of Find Me in California

“Bye.” She disconnects. Slipping her phone into her pocket, she flips the book to read the gold embossed title on the cover.Magnolia Blu.

Magnolia Blu was the name of the landscaping business Mama Rose started in her twenties and sold for a considerable amount in her early sixties. Her client list and the personal phone numbers that came along with it were Hollywood gold. Although similar looking to the dozens of ledgers Julia had boxed and stored in the attic, this book isn’t filled with Magnolia Blu business orders, numbers, and accounting categories, but rather pages of journaling. Names leap out at her as she skims, and one in particular snags her breath. Liza Holloway.

Julia gapes at the bookcase.Are you serious?This couldn’t be the diary. That was too easy. The book practically fell into her hands.

If Mama Rose were here, she’d make a quip about the law of attraction or shuffle her tarot deck to see what it all meant.

Julia and Mama Rose had been very close. She’d say that she knew everything about her grandmother. But the bold, provocative woman reflected in the few paragraphs Julia skims is not the same woman who raised her—a biscuit-scented, flower-loving, eccentrically dressed woman with an endless capacity to love.

She reads one particularly sordid entry and, eyes wide, slams the journal closed.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Mama Rose.

Her skin flames from chest to forehead, and her eyes dart around the room as if Mama Rose might catch her reading her most private thoughts.

But Julia isn’t going to read any more.

Okay, maybe a few pages, like a passage or two to find out how Mama Rose and Liza know each other. Then she’ll stop. The diary is personal. It’s none of her business. But it’s tempting. By far more interesting than tonight’s original plans of studying their bank accounts and revising their budgets.

She’ll worry about their finances tomorrow.

Julia refills her wineglass, gets comfy on the unwieldy couch, and settles in to read.

CHAPTER 7

MAGNOLIABLU

June 18, 1972

Five years ago, I left behind two things when I ran away from home in Arizona to a commune in southern Colorado with Sam: my name and my fiancé.

Ruby Rose Hope had been raised to be a good, obedient wife. She’d marry Benjamin Stromski, the freckle-faced boy next door who’d been admitted to Yale on scholarship and aspired to have a respectable career as an accountant. They’d have three children and raise them to be upstanding citizens. Ruby would be loving and supportive of her family. She’d be compliant and amenable toward her husband. In other words, she’d keep her opinions to herself and her sexual kinks ... Well, she wouldn’t have any.

That was the future my parents had planned for me.

I love my parents. But Blanche and Leonard Hope are the product of an obsolete generation and outdated mindset, and I am not, nor could I ever be,thatRuby Rose Hope. And much to my parents’ disappointment, Benjie and I were not well suited.

Apparently, Sam and I weren’t either. We only lasted five years.

Five years of sharing a bed, meals, weed, and partners. Life with Sam at the commune was filled with love and peace and pleasure until it wasn’t. I’d left my home, my fiancé, and my name to find my true self separate from the person my parents had tried to mold me into, only to lose myself further.

Nothing had belonged to me in the commune. Everything was shared, including me.

So I took Sam’s van—technically, it was my van too, because: communal ownership—and drove west. For five years I’d been dreaming of California, where I could freely express myself and love openly. Live by my rules. Five years and over a thousand miles later, I finally made it. Just me, my flute, and this journal that Sam found at a flea market. He thought the notebook’s title,Magnolia Blu, was a more suitable name for me than Ruby Rose Hope.

Then, on my first day here, I met her: Elizabeth Holloway.

She blew into the Ralph’s parking lot in her aquamarine convertible Mercedes and salon-colored platinum hair. I had heard movie stars shopped at this grocery store. Some were inside walking the aisles, pushing shiny carts, filling them with fancy foods. But I had no idea who this woman was as she hurried toward where I sat on the curb playing my flute with a small basket at my hip where several kind souls had parted ways with their coins. She wore tennis whites—a sleeveless knit shirt, pleated miniskirt, and sneakers just as bright—and an aura that beckoned the attention of anyone she rushed by on her way into the store.

She barely spared me a glance, yet like everyone else, I couldn’t stop staring at her.

I couldn’t stop thinking of her either while I waited for her to come back outside.

Everything about her was presented with intention—that was the impression she gave me. She was movie-screen ready, Hollywood dazzling, and Beverly Hills glamorous.

My parents would have loved her. They would have wished I’d grown into someone like her.

Maybe that was why I suddenly became obsessed with her. So many people had walked by me that day, ignoring me and my music, their faces unremarkable and their glances fleeting. But her ... I had to know more.

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