Page 19 of Malibu Rising

“The restaurant’s doing OK,” he said to her as they walked. “You know that, right?”

Nina shook her head from side to side, a yes and a no. “It’s thekeepingit doing OK that I worry about,” she said, as they both sat down and began to go over the numbers. It was a complicated endeavor.

The building was old, the kitchen had needed to be brought up to code recently, business ebbed and flowed with the seasons.

Fortunately, it had been a good summer. But the off-season was approaching and last winter had been brutal. She’d had to keep the place afloat with an influx of her own cash back in January, just as she’d done a few times before.

“We’ve pulled it out of the red from the top of the year,” Nina said, turning the book toward Ramon for him to see. “So that’s good. I’m just a little worried we’ll fall back in once the tourists dry up.”

It occurred to her at times that she was using modeling to subsidize a restaurant in which people came to take her photo and often didn’t even buy a soda.

But she loved the staff, and some of the regulars. And Ramon.

“Regardless, we will figure it out. We always do,” she said.

She wasn’t going to be the one, three generations in, to let Riva’s Seafood go to shit. She just wasn’t.

“Can we stop at home before we head to the restaurant? I want to take a shower,” Kit said, over the sound of the road.

“Totally,” Jay said as he put on his blinker to turn down the street they’d grown up on.

Jay and Kit were the only two Rivas still living in their childhood home. Nina was in the mansion at Point Dume and often traveling for photo shoots. Hud liked living in his Airstream. But Jay and Kit stayed in the beach cottage they had grown up in, the one their father had bought their mother twenty-five years ago.

Jay had taken over the master bedroom. But he traveled a lot, too. He was often at surf competitions all over the world, with Hud by his side.

Soon, the two of them were supposed to leave for the North Shore of Oahu. Jay was scheduled to compete in the Duke Classic, the World Cup, and Pipe Masters. Then they’d be off to the Gold Coast of Australia and Jeffreys Bay in South Africa. O’Neill would foot a lot of the bill and have their name plastered across Jay at every turn. Hud would be snapping photos of him all the while.

The two of them were due for another cover, were planning on selling off the rights for posters and calendars. But to do so, they had to roam the earth. The life of a professional surfer and his entourage required a light foot, a sense of spontaneity. Jay’s and Hud’s passion, their livelihood, their lives, depended on chasing the ever-changing, unpredictable combination of wind and water.

And so, as much as Jay considered California his home, lately he didn’t think of himself as necessarily living anywhere.

Kit, meanwhile, was still sleeping in her childhood bed, looking at a junior year at Santa Monica College, spending her nights and weekends behind the register at the restaurant. The only bright spotshe could see would be when she could ditch to take trips with her friends up to the breaks in Santa Cruz. The waves were big up there, some double overhead. But that was about as far as Kit’s life was taking her right now, just a few hours up the coast.

Her siblings were out there seeing the world while Kit was still slinging crab cakes.

She wanted some of the glory, too. Some of the glamour of Nina’s life, some of the thrill of Jay’s and Hud’s. She had spent so much of her childhood following them all into the water. But she suspected that even if none of them had ever picked up a surfboard, she still would have.

She was great on a board. She could be legendary.

She should be out there, getting accolades, too. But she wasn’t taken as seriously as her brothers and she knew she wasn’t as gorgeous as her sister, so where did that leave her? She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure if there was a spot in the limelight for someone like her. A chick surfer who wasn’t a babe.

Jay pulled up in front of the garage and let Kit hop out.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

“Wait, where are you going?” she asked. She had gotten a tiny bit of a sunburn on the apples of her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. It made her seem younger than she was.

“It’s going to take you forever to shower and I need to get gas,” Jay told her. He looked at his gas gauge to see whether he was even telling the truth. The indicator was hovering at just under half. “I only have a quarter tank.”

Kit gave him a skeptical look and then left, heading into the house through the garage.

Jay pulled the car back onto the road and put his foot on the pedal a bit heavier than he needed to. The car roared over the barely paved street. He checked the clock on the radio. If he sped, he had time.

The Pacific Coast Highway was the most comfortable place on land for him and practically the only road in town. There were small offshoots of neighborhoods dotted along the highway, canyonsbranching out, shopping centers nestled in one direction or the other. But you could not go anywhere, could not do anything, could not visit anyone in Malibu, without your wheels hitting the pavement of PCH. Your ability to get to a restaurant, shop at a store, make a movie on time, claim your patch of sand, take your spot in the waves, all depended on just how many other people were pulling onto the same road as you every day. It was the price you paid for the view.

Jay navigated traffic as best he could, sped up through changing lights, stayed in the left lane until mere seconds before he needed to be in the right one, and soon, he pulled onto Paradise Cove Road.

Paradise Cove was a startlingly gorgeous inlet hidden from PCH behind palm trees and valley oak. Jay turned right onto the narrow road and slowed. Once his Jeep rounded the corner, a cove of blond sand came into view, surrounded by magnificent cliffs and clear blue skies.

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