Lust, Loathing and a Little Lip Gloss (30 page)
Read Lust, Loathing and a Little Lip Gloss Online
Authors: Kyra Davis
27
Nature loses its beauty when we try to perfect it. The same can be said about the ones we love.
—The Lighter Side of Death
EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE THE WEATHER COOPERATES WITH WHAT IT IS
you want it to do, and this was one of those days. Not that it could have stopped us. Nothing was going to keep my family from having our Sutro Heights picnic. But the fact that the clouds were high and dispersed sparingly around a blue sky certainly made the experience more enjoyable.
Leah sat on her knees, ready to spring up if Jack took off running. At the moment, he was entertaining himself by pulling up small weeds and sticking them down his pants. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to do that, but Jack had always been something of an enigma.
Mama, who reportedly hadn’t sat on the ground in decades and didn’t intend to start now, was in a portable lawn chair, and I was sitting cross-legged on a blanket as green as the grass beneath it, spreading hummus on a rice cake.
“How long before your floors are finished?” Leah asked as she plucked a grape from its stem.
“Another week,” I said with a sigh. Only a week had passed since both Kane and Lorna had been arrested and it was fair to say that the dust was still settling. In fact, that was a rather literal truth since Lorna’s decision to wash my floors in gasoline had effectively destroyed them. I was staying with Anatoly in the meantime. He still hadn’t agreed to move into the house with me, but I was confident he would.
“Such a mess,” my mother said with a click of her tongue. “And to kill a man with a scythe, no less. Not that I blame her for wanting to do him in. If any man had dared to lay a hand on my girls I would have fixed him good! Believe you me! But a scythe? What’s the matter, a gun isn’t fancy enough for her?”
“She bought into Kane’s whole thing about how everyone in the séance had to be a believer,” I said. A ladybug landed on my knee and I tried to keep still so as not to disturb it. “She figured that if she could make it look like Enrico was killed by a ghost she would have her revenge, and if she was lucky her husband, Al, would start to buy the whole ghosts-walking-among-us deal and the two of them would be able to make contact with their daughter.”
“Good God, it’s amazing she wasn’t committed years ago,” Leah said. “Have you heard anything about her family? She has a son, doesn’t she?”
“His name’s Zach. Al’s not doing so well and he doesn’t really know how to help Zach with all this. Then again, he’s never been very good with Zach from what I understand. But Zach’s found himself a big brother of sorts.”
“Oh, do you know him?”
“Well, yeah, it’s Marcus.”
Leah leveled me with a stare. “Marcus is going to be chaperoning a fifteen-year-old? Isn’t that like telling your child to make a role model out of Charlie Sheen?”
“Marcus is being a very good influence. He’s vowed not to pick up men while he’s with Zach and he’s already convinced Zach to dye his hair back to its natural color and stop wearing makeup.”
“Marcus told a boy to
stop
wearing makeup?”
“Give Marcus a break. He’s playing Professor Higgins, minus the weird sexual undertones that existed between Higgins and Eliza.”
“Ah, but what about the sexual undertone that existed between Higgins and Colonel Pickering, hmm?” Mama asked. “If you ask me those two were up to some hanky-panky!”
“Mama!” Leah exclaimed as I bent over laughing.
“Relax, I’m just teasing,” Mama said with a wicked grin. “Marcus is doing a good thing. So what about that no-goodnik ex-husband of yours? What’s he up to now?”
I shrugged. “I haven’t really talked to him. I know it’s over between him and Venus, and I think he’s found an apartment in the Marina, but that’s the extent of my knowledge. There’s only one man I need to keep track of these days.”
“Unlike Dena,” Leah scoffed. “How many boyfriends did you say she’s faithful to these days?”
“Only two. For her, that’s downsizing. And you know what, it really seems to be working for her.”
“Two men!” Mama said. “Who ever heard of such a thing? How does she find the time?”
“Well, she shares them with this girl, Amelia. I mean, I couldn’t handle the arrangement, but I’m not Dena.”
“Yes, there’s only one Dena, and thank God for that,” Leah mumbled. I smiled and spread some more hummus. Leah and Dena would never be best friends, but beneath the acidic rhetoric they had a begrudging respect for one another. It was just another weird way in which my world seemed to fit together.
“Do you have to go to the Specter Society anymore?” Leah asked.
“By contract, I’m required to attend at least two meetings a month for the next twelve months, but all the other members of the Specter Society are either going to prison, a mental hospital or they’ve just quit. So yes, I have to go to the meetings, but that’s kind of a moot point since I’m now the only member.”
Leah laughed appreciatively. “My therapist says that people who believe in ghosts are often people who don’t know how to fully connect with the living.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” Mama said as she stretched her legs out in front of her. Jack tried to stick a dandelion up her sandal, but Leah managed to get it away from him.
“You believe in ghosts, Mama?” I asked.
“I believe there are things that we don’t understand, but unlike some people I’m not in such a big hurry to understand everything. A little mystery is not such a bad thing.”
I smiled and ran my fingers over my lips. For the first few days after the incident with Lorna I had worn the Strawberry Shortcake lip gloss, but then I had tucked it away in a keepsake box and gone back to Clinique. I didn’t need to wear a child’s lip gloss to feel the presence of my father.
I knew Dad could no longer be the linchpin that held our family together, but I was okay with that now. In my dream he had told me that he was going to stand by me one last time. It was possible that Lorna had been the one to mess with my father’s picture and put the lip gloss on the mantel. She was crazy enough to have done that and then convince herself it had been a supernatural event. But I chose to believe something else. As far as I was concerned that was my father’s last stand on earth. He was free now.
I
had finally set him free. Every once in a while I could think about him and miss him, but I didn’t have to obsess over his memory any more than I had to deny it. I could move on with my life. With my family.
This
family, composed of a colorful Jewish mother, a sister with a
Good Housekeeping
fetish and a nephew, who my friends had justly nicknamed the Destroyer. And then there was my cat, who liked to sleep on my head, and my man, who I was constantly arguing with. It was, as far as I was concerned, the best family in the world.
Mama regarded Leah and me thoughtfully. “Such beautiful women you two grew up to be. And smart! Your father would be proud.”
“You know what?” I said, “I’m proud of us, too.” I lifted a can of Hansen’s soda. “To us!”
Leah and Mama lifted their cans, too. Jack held up a clod of dirt. “To us,” Mama and Leah chimed in.
“And to Sophie’s new dream home,” Leah added.
I chugged down the rest of my soda. It really was a perfect day.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-3392-2
LUST, LOATHING AND A LITTLE LIP GLOSS
Copyright © 2009 by Kyra Davis.
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, MIRA Books, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
MIRA and the Star Colophon are trademarks used under license and registered in Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, United States Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.
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