Part 10 (1/2)

”Plus tip,” I agreed, and stepped into his arms.

He pulled me close, careful, trying to be gentle with my healing body, but I sucked his bottom lip into my mouth and bit down, hard enough to sting. It felt good. I ran my claws down his back, sc.r.a.ping his skin, then put my hands flat against his chest and shoved off, hard and fast enough to surprise him. I pulled free from his arms. He reached for me, but I turned and ran naked away from him down the hall. He followed me, as he had always followed me.

I turned at the bedroom door, let him catch me. I kissed him again, not sweet, plenty of teeth. He lifted me up, walking me back into the bedroom with my feet dangling. He threw me backwards, so I was briefly flying, the cool air a pleasure on my naked hide. I landed, bouncing against the mattress. Then he was on top of me, and I wrapped my legs around him, dug my heels into his a.s.s, and pulled him into me. I bit down hard into the meat of his shoulder. He reared back and I dug my heels again, drawing him in.

We rolled in the middle. I got on top and rode him like a pony. When I came it was like the sound of thick gla.s.s shattering in me, a cras.h.i.+ng, and then I was full of bright shards that chimed against each other as they slivered up my insides with a sound like jagged bells. Then it was his turn, and I rode him down till he was nothing, till he was lying in a heap, deflated, his eyes half-closed and no one home behind them.

He took the s.e.x as if it were simple and delicious and carried no message, and then he slept. He didn't even know it was good-bye. I lay beside him, smiling but not pretty. I felt it as a broad stretch of my mouth that showed my whole, panting tongue to the air, and the air tasted warm and full of musk.

From then on, every time I took him to my bed it was good-bye like that. Just as every time he hit me was a reminder of how permanently I was going to say it.

CHAPTER 8.

THE NEXT DAY, as soon as Thom left for work, I gathered up Ro Grandee's floaty skirts, her sheer, fitted cardigans, and her lace-trimmed blouses and bundled them into the washer. I added a packet of red Rit fabric dye and started the machine. Heavy-duty. Hot water. Extra spin cycle. I left Ro Grandee's wardrobe to ruin itself and walked over to Mrs. Fancy's in my Levi's and the s.h.i.+rt I'd worn to Artisan.

I was lifting my hand to knock when the door sprang open. Mrs. Fancy let out a peeping yip noise and hopped back. Ro would have jumped back, too, like a moving echo, but I didn't so much as twitch. I lowered my arm and waited. Mrs. Fancy put one hand to her chest, breathing in, then covered her mouth. Her eyes got bright and her shoulders shook, and I could tell she was laughing behind her hand.

”Lordy, Ro, you like to give me a heart attack,” she said when she could speak. ”Look at your hair. I didn't even recognize you. Why, you're lovely all bobbed.”

I'd been missing morning coffee for more than a week now, but she didn't ask. She never asked. It had made her Ro Grandee's perfect friend, but it made me angry now. Angry enough to feel just fine about all the ways I planned to use her. Even angry enough to steal from her.

”You're going out?” I asked.

”I was heading to my reading club up at church. Did you-” She stopped talking and peered at my face. ”Did you need something?”

”I need to borrow your phone,” I said.

”Oh, has your phone gone out?” Mrs. Fancy asked. She peered around the door frame to look at my house like a concerned owl, blinking against the morning sunlight.

”No,” I said. ”I need to make some calls, long-distance. I'll pay you for them, of course, it's just not something I want Thom to see.”

”A surprise?” said Mrs. Fancy.

”Oh, yes,” I said, utterly truthful. ”I'm planning a surprise.”

She leaned back, and her spa.r.s.e eyebrows came together. ”Come on in,” she said. Her papery hand closed around my wrist, and she towed me across her threshold. Her living room had a square of parquet by the minifoyer, too, but the carpet surrounding hers was blue. We stood on the fake wood island, and now she was looking at my clothes. ”Spring cleaning day?”

I shook my head, trying to sound sorry instead of triumphant. ”A pair of Christmas socks got in my laundry.”

”Oh, honey!” she said. ”What are you going to do?”

I waved it away. ”Trinity Methodist runs a good secondhand store downtown. I'll get some things.”

She tutted and said, ”That store is run by a bunch of dirty hippies. I bet those clothes are full of lice.”

”I'll wash them,” I said, impatient. ”May I use your phone while you're at book club?” I came down hard on the last two words, reminding her she had someplace to be.

”You'll want to use bleach, or a color-safe bleach alternative,” Mrs. Fancy prattled on, completely unreminded. ”Lice eggs are so hardy.”

”Mrs. Fancy,” I said, ”I know how-”

She grabbed my arm and interrupted, her gaze bright. ”You know, we're of a size. I bet I have some things you could wear!”

That derailed me, the idea of heading into my gun store s.h.i.+ft later in one of her old-lady pantsuits, stretched out in the b.u.m and with matching sweaters that had three-dimensional, sequined scenes of forests in the fall and snowmen at Christmas.

It must have showed on my face, because she started laughing. ”Not what I wear now, you silly. I've kept my favorite things for years now. You'd look darling in my old peasant blouses or my mod minidresses. I see girls your age in outfits like the ones I've saved all the time. The stores call it vintage, but that's only so they can charge more.”

She seemed perfectly content to natter on about fas.h.i.+on until I grew old and withered up too much to wear a minidress.

”I'd love to try your things on,” I said, and I grabbed the edges of my s.h.i.+rt and pulled it off over my head. She stopped talking. Her gaze flicked to my soft cotton bra, then lower, taking in the slow-fading patterns, olive and mustard and palest sunrise blue, that were still mapped across my b.r.e.a.s.t.s and belly.

Her gaze skittered off me sideways, and she put one hand to her throat. I half expected her to close her eyes and loudly chant a recipe for fruited Jell-O mold or tell me how to get wine stains out of the carpet, some small, domestic spell to ward away the ugly story my skin told.

Instead she said, ”Come away from the windows, or you'll be giving the postman a treat.”

She walked away from me, through the den and down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. I followed in my jeans and bra, my old T-s.h.i.+rt crumpled in an angry ball in my left hand, saying, ”You're missing your book discussion.”

”Never you mind,” she said, and went on into the guest bedroom. Phil came in with me, and he jumped up on the flowered comforter. He yowled at me, sensing the tension that Mrs. Fancy was delicately ignoring.

She opened the closet and started pus.h.i.+ng things aside. ”I haven't saved much of anything from the last ten, fifteen years. My knees put me in ugly shoes about then, and I stopped caring. Anyway, eighties fas.h.i.+on is like jumbo shrimp or pretty ugly-what do you call those things, where it can't be both? But the seventies, that was a fun time for clothes. Look at the colors! I have quite a few dresses from the fifties and sixties, too.” She flipped through the hangers until she came to a row of brightly colored blouses. She pulled out a poet's s.h.i.+rt in bright blue floaty cotton and turned to me. I reached for it, but something on my face made her hug the blouse to her chest.

”You're different, Ro.” It was more than Ro Grandee's own husband had noticed, even when I was naked and riding him. Points for that, at least.

I steeled myself, and then, more for expediency than for Mrs. Fancy's own sake, I pulled Ro Grandee's face on over mine, blanking my eyes and upping the wattage of my smile. My body curved into her good-girl's Catholic posture. Immediately I felt the mistake. I could not empower her this way. Ro was suicide, and slipping her skin on was as delicious and fatal as the first drag off a cigarette after days of being quits. If I did it enough, I would no longer be able to help it.

In a single moment of looking through the tissue-thin filter of Ro's eyes, I recalled what it felt like to love Mrs. Fancy. I could see how each thing she had felt regularly had put lines in her face, all her favorite feelings permanently remembered by her skin. Now her eyes crinkled up, and the vertical creases around her mouth deepened. These particular lines were so fixed that she must have made this face at least a million times before I met her. It was concern, tempered with such love and ready mercy that it had to have originated for her children. She was making it for me now.

I shook Ro off me, fast, and said, ”Let me try that s.h.i.+rt on.”

She took the blouse off the hanger and held it out to me, but she did not let go. We stood joined by it, each holding a shoulder.

She searched my face, and then she said, ”You're leaving your husband.” She spoke quietly, but her tone was plain: She was crowing.

”Do you see me packing?” I said. Good Lord, what an awful choice of words. ”My things, I mean. I am not packing my things.”

But Mrs. Fancy's mind was not on guns and double meanings. Her fingers clutched her half of the blue blouse and she said, ”Who are you calling that you don't want him to see, long-distance? Someone you can go to? When you leave him?”

”I'm not leaving him,” I said, but her eyes were as bright and round and hopeful as a spring robin's. ”I'm thinking things over, is all.” Her reaction made me ashamed to be taking advantage of her. But not enough to stop me. A lie came to me then. It wasn't a lie I'd planned. I'd heard something like it on Oprah Oprah once, and it tumbled down out of my memory straight into my mouth. I opened wide and let it out. ”I want to talk to some people back in Alabama, the ones who knew me before I met Thom. I want to remember who I was before.” once, and it tumbled down out of my memory straight into my mouth. I opened wide and let it out. ”I want to talk to some people back in Alabama, the ones who knew me before I met Thom. I want to remember who I was before.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. ”That sounds like shrink talk.” She didn't sound like she held with that. She probably didn't hold with Oprah Oprah, either.

I said, ”I don't have the money for a shrink. I've been... talking to my pastor.” The pastor at the Grandees' church was a wobbly-necked fellow who dyed his hair shoe-polish black. His office smelled like tuna fish and ranch dressing, and Joe and Charlotte Grandee's t.i.the paid a goodly piece of his salary. He was a social club Presbyterian whose sermons were written to b.u.t.ter open the wallets of his wealthier congregants; a drunken barn cat could fart out better advice than I would expect to hear coming out of the other end of that man.

Still, I could tell Mrs. Fancy liked this idea, even though she said, ”Are you sure your pastor hasn't been talking to a shrink?” She still held tight to the blouse with one hand. The hanger dropped from her other hand to the floor, and she didn't even notice. ”At least there's some G.o.d behind it. I don't trust that muddled-up Freud stuff. Such a pervert! Ladies wis.h.i.+ng they had p.e.n.i.ses. Why, I never heard of such. The only p.e.n.i.s I ever wanted was properly attached to Mr. Fancy, where I could get some good use out of it.”

A m.u.f.fled squawk of laughter got out of me. She'd surprised me for the second time in as many minutes, and she didn't look a bit sorry. She had a sly smile pulling up one corner of her mouth. She leaned in and smoothed back a piece of my hair, tucking the end behind my ear so she could look me directly in the eye. My surprise held me still for it.