The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (25 page)

Fiona knit her pale brows, as if considering the possibility that she might have been one of them.

She was so pretty, and Leroy was so endearingly spiky and unusual; Maggie felt how thirsty her eyes were, drinking them in. It was like the early days with her children, when every neck-crease, every knuckle-dent, could send her into a reverie. Look at Fiona’s hair shining like ribbons, like bands of crinkle gift ribbon! Look at the darling little gold studs in Leroy’s earlobes!

Ira, speaking into the grille of the appliance, said, “This thing really do much good?” His voice rang back at them tinnily.

“So far as I know,” Fiona said.

“Fairly energy-efficient?”

She lifted both hands, palms up. “Beats me.”

“How many BTUs does it give off?”

“That’s just something Mom runs in the wintertime to keep her feet warm,” Fiona said. “I never have paid it much heed, to tell the truth.”

Ira leaned farther forward to read a decal on the appliance’s rear.

Maggie seized on a change of subject. She said, “How
is
your mother, Fiona?”

“Oh, she’s fine. Right now she’s at the grocery store.”

“Wonderful,” Maggie said. Wonderful that she was fine, she meant. But it was also wonderful that she was out. She said, “And you’re looking well too. You’re wearing your hair a little fuller, aren’t you?”

“It’s crimped,” Fiona said. “I use this special iron, like; you know bigger hair has a slimming effect.”

“Slimming! You don’t need slimming.”

“I most certainly do. I put on seven pounds over this past summer.”

“Oh, you didn’t, either. You couldn’t have! Why you’re just a—”

Just a twig, she was going to say; or just a stick. But she got mixed up and combined the two words: “You’re just a twick!”

Fiona glanced at her sharply, and no wonder; it had sounded vaguely insulting. “Just skin and bones, I mean,” Maggie said, fighting back a giggle. She remembered now how fragile their relationship had been, how edgy and defensive Fiona had often seemed. She folded her hands and placed her feet carefully together on the green shag rug.

So Fiona was not getting married after all.

“How’s Daisy?” Fiona asked.

“She’s doing well.”

Leroy said, “Daisy who?”

“Daisy Moran,” Fiona said. Without further explanation, she turned back to Maggie. “All grown up by now, I bet.”

“Daisy is your aunt. Your daddy’s little sister,” Maggie told Leroy. “Yes; tomorrow she leaves for college,” she said to Fiona.

“College! Well, she always was a brain.”

“Oh, no … but it’s true she won a full scholarship.”

“Little bitty Daisy,” Fiona said. “Just think.”

Ira had finished with the appliance, finally. He moved on to the coffee table. The Frisbee rested on a pile of comic books, and he picked it up and examined it all over again. Maggie stole a peek at him. He still had not said, “I told you so,” but she thought she detected something noble and forbearing in the set of his spine.

“You know, I’m in school myself, in a way,” Fiona said.

“Oh? What kind of school?”

“I’m studying electrolysis.”

“Why, that’s lovely, Fiona,” Maggie said.

She wished she could shake off this fulsome tone of voice. It seemed to belong to someone else entirely—some elderly, matronly, honey-sweet woman endlessly marveling and exclaiming.

“The beauty parlor where I’m a shampoo girl is paying for my course,” Fiona said. “They want their own licensed operator. They say I’m sure to make heaps of money.”

“That’s just lovely!” Maggie said. “Then maybe you can move out and find a place of your own.”

And leave the pretender grandma behind, was what she was thinking. But Fiona gave her a blank look.

Leroy said, “Show them your practice kit, Ma.”

“Yes, show us,” Maggie said.

“Oh, you don’t want to see that,” Fiona said.

“Yes, we do. Don’t we, Ira?”

Ira said, “Hmm? Oh, absolutely.” He held the Frisbee up level, like a tea tray, and gave it a meditative spin.

“Well, then, wait a sec,” Fiona said, and she got up and left the room. Her sandals made a dainty slapping sound on the wooden floor of the hallway.

“They’re going to hang a sign in the beauty parlor window,” Leroy told Maggie. “Professionally painted with Ma’s name.”

“Isn’t that something!”

“It’s a genuine science, Ma says. You’ve got to have trained experts to teach you how to do it.”

Leroy’s expression was cocky and triumphant. Maggie resisted the urge to reach down and cup the complicated small bones of her knee.

Fiona returned, carrying a rectangular yellow kitchen sponge and a short metal rod the size of a ballpoint pen.
“First we practice with a dummy instrument,” she said. She dropped onto the couch beside Maggie. “We’re supposed to work at getting the angle exactly, perfectly right.”

She set the sponge on her lap and gripped the rod between her fingers. There was a needle at its tip, Maggie saw. For some reason she had always thought of electrolysis as, oh, not quite socially mentionable, but Fiona was so matter-of-fact and so skilled, targeting one of the sponge’s pores and guiding the needle into it at a precisely monitored slant; Maggie couldn’t help feeling impressed. This was a highly technical field, she realized—maybe something like dental hygiene. Fiona said, “We travel into the follicle, see, easy, easy …” and then she said, “Oops!” and raised the heel of her hand an inch or two. “If this was a real person I’d have been leaning on her eyeball,” she said. “Pardon me, lady,” she told the sponge. “I didn’t mean to smush you.” Mottled black lettering was stamped across the sponge’s surface:
STABLER
’
S DARK BEER. MADE WITH MOUNTAIN SPRING WATER
.

Ira stood over them now, with the Frisbee dangling from his fingers. He asked, “Does the school provide the sponge?”

“Yes, it’s included in the tuition,” Fiona said.

“They must get it free,” he reflected. “Courtesy of Stabler’s. Interesting.”

“Stabler’s? Anyhow, first we practice with the dummy and then with the real thing. Us students all work on each other: eyebrows and mustache and such. This girl that’s my partner, Hilary, she wants me to do her bikini line.”

Ira pondered that for a moment and then backed off in a hurry.

“You know these high-cut swimsuits nowadays, they show everything you’ve got,” Fiona told Maggie.

“Oh, it’s becoming impossible!” Maggie cried. “I’m just making do with my old suit till the fashions change.”

Ira cleared his throat and said, “Leroy, what would you say to a game of Frisbee.”

Leroy looked up at him.

“I could show you how to make it go where you want,” he told her.

She took so long deciding that Maggie felt a pang for Ira’s sake, but finally she said, “Well, okay,” and unfolded herself from the floor. “Tell about the professionally painted sign,” she told Fiona. Then she followed Ira out of the room. The screen door made a sound like a harmonica chord before it banged shut.

So.

This was the first time Maggie had been alone with Fiona since that awful morning. For once the two of them were free of Ira’s hampering influence and the hostile, suspicious presence of Mrs. Stuckey. Maggie edged forward on the couch. She clasped her hands tightly; she pointed her knees intimately in Fiona’s direction.

“The sign’s going to read
FIONA MORAN
,” Fiona was saying. “
LICENSED ELECTROLOGIST. PAINLESS REMOVAL OF SUPERFLUOUS HAIR
.”

“I can’t wait to see it,” Maggie said.

She thought about that last name: Moran. If Fiona really hated Jesse, would she have kept his name all these years?

“On the radio,” she said, “you told the man you were marrying for security.”

“Maggie, I swear to you, the station I listen to is—”

“WXLR,” Maggie said. “Yes, I know. But I just had it in my head that that was you, and so I …”

She watched Fiona set the sponge and needle in the rowboat ashtray.

“Anyway,” she said. “Whoever it was who called, she said the first time she’d married for love and it hadn’t
worked out. So this time she was aiming purely for security.”

“Well, what a ninny,” Fiona said. “If marriage was such a drag when she loved the guy, what would it be like when she didn’t?”

“Exactly,” Maggie said. “Oh, Fiona, I’m so glad that wasn’t you!”

“Shoot, I don’t even have a steady boyfriend,” Fiona said.

“You don’t?”

But Maggie found the phrasing of that a bit worrisome. She said, “Does that mean … you have somebody not steady?”

“I just barely get to date at all,” Fiona said.

“Well! What a pity,” Maggie said. She put on a sympathetic expression.

“This one guy? Mark Derby? I went out with him for about three months, but then we had a fight. I bashed his car in after I had borrowed it, was the reason. But it really wasn’t my fault. I was starting to make a left turn, when these teenage boys came up from behind and passed me on the left and so of course I hit them. Then they had the nerve to claim it was all my doing; they claimed I had my right-turn signal on instead of my left.”

“Well, anyone who’d get mad about
that
you don’t want to date anyhow,” Maggie told her.

“I said, ‘I had my left-turn signal on. Don’t you think I know my left from my right?’ ”

“Of course you do,” Maggie said soothingly. She lifted her left hand and flicked an imaginary turn signal, testing. “Yes, left is down and right is … or maybe it’s not the same in every model of car.”

“It’s exactly the same,” Fiona told her. “At least, I think it is.”

“Then maybe it was the windshield wipers,” Maggie said. “I’ve done that, lots of times: switched on my wipers instead of my blinkers.”

Fiona considered. Then she said, “No, because
something
was lit up. Otherwise they wouldn’t say I was signaling a right turn.”

“One time I had my mind elsewhere and I went for my blinkers and shifted gears instead,” Maggie said. She started laughing. “Going along about sixty miles an hour and shifted into reverse. Oh, Lord.” She pulled the corners of her mouth down, recollecting herself. “Well,” she told Fiona, “I’d say you’re better off without the man.”

“What man? Oh. Mark,” Fiona said. “Yes, it’s not like we were in love or anything. I only went out with him because he asked me. Plus my mom is friends with his mom. He has the nicest mother; real sweet-faced woman with a little bit of a stammer. I always feel a stammer shows sincerity of feeling, don’t you?”

Maggie said, “Why, c-c-certainly I do.”

It took Fiona a second to catch on. Then she laughed. “Oh, you’re such a card,” she said, and she tapped Maggie’s wrist. “I’d forgotten what a card you are.”

“So is that the end of it?” Maggie asked.

“End of what?”

“This … thing with Mark Derby. I mean suppose he asks you out again?”

“No way,” Fiona said. “Him and his precious Subaru; no way would I go out with him.”

“That’s very wise of you,” Maggie told her.

“Shoot! I’d have to be a moron.”

“
He
was a moron, not to appreciate you,” Maggie said.

Fiona said, “Hey. How’s about a beer.”

“Oh, I’d love a beer!”

Fiona jumped up, tugging down her shorts, and left the
room. Maggie sank lower on the couch and listened to the sounds drifting in through the window—a car swishing past and Leroy’s throaty chuckle. If this house were hers, she thought, she would get rid of all this clutter. You couldn’t see the surface of the coffee table, and the layers of sofa cushions nudged her lower back uncomfortably.

“Only thing we’ve got is Bud Light—is that okay?” Fiona asked when she returned. She was carrying two cans and a sack of potato chips.

“It’s perfect; I’m on a diet,” Maggie said.

She accepted one of the cans and popped the tab, while Fiona settled next to her on the couch. “
I
ought to go on a diet,” Fiona said. She ripped open the cellophane sack. “Snack foods are my biggest downfall.”

“Oh, mine too,” Maggie said. She took a sip of her beer. It was crisp-tasting and bitter; it brought memories flooding in the way the smell of a certain perfume will. How long had it been since she’d last had a beer? Maybe not since Leroy was a baby. Back then (she recalled as she waved away the potato chips), she sometimes drank as many as two or three cans a day, keeping Fiona company because beer was good for her milk supply, they’d heard. Now that would probably be frowned upon, but at the time they had felt dutiful and virtuous, sipping their Miller High Lifes while the baby drowsily nursed. Fiona used to say she could feel the beer zinging directly to her breasts. She and Maggie would start drinking when Maggie came home from work—midafternoon or so, just the two of them. They would grow all warm and confiding together. By the time Maggie got around to fixing supper she would be feeling, oh, not drunk or anything but filled with optimism, and then later at the table she might act a bit more talkative than usual. It was nothing the others would notice, though. Except perhaps for
Daisy. “Really, Mom. Honestly,” Daisy would say. But then, she was always saying that.

As was Maggie’s mother, come to think of it. “Honestly, Maggie.” She had stopped by late one afternoon and caught Maggie lounging on the couch, a beer balanced on her midriff, while Fiona sat next to her singing “Dust in the Wind” to the baby. “How have you let things get so
common
?” Mrs. Daley had asked, and Maggie, looking around her, had all at once wondered too. The cheap, pulpy magazines scattered everywhere, the wadded wet diapers, the live-in daughter-in-law—it did look common. How had it happened?

“I wonder if Claudine and Peter ever married,” Maggie said now, and she took another sip of her beer.

“Claudine? Peter?” Fiona asked.

“On that soap opera we used to watch. Remember? His sister Natasha was trying to split them up.”

“Oh, Lord, Natasha. She was one mean lady,” Fiona said. She dug deep into the sack of potato chips.

“They had just got engaged when you left us,” Maggie said. “They were planning to throw a big party and then Natasha found out about it—remember?”