away from me, the reason for her disappointment. I can’t hate her, but I can hate her voice, and the way she calls me Ella instead of Elle.Ella is a waif’s name, an orphan sitting in the cinders. Elle is classier, crisper. The name a woman called herself when she wanted people to take her seriously. She insists on calling me Ella because she knows it annoys me.
By the fourth message she was detailing how life didn’t seem worth living with such an ungrateful excuse for a daughter. How the pills the doctor prescribed for her nerves weren’t working. How she was embarrassed to have to ask Karen Cooper from next door to go to the pharmacy for her when she had a daughter who should be quite capable of taking care of her, but for the fact she refused.
She had a husband who could go for her, too, but she never seemed to remember that.
“And don’t forget!” I jumped at the suddenness of her voice ringing out from the small speaker. “You said you’d visit soon.”
There was a brief moment of hissing static at the end of her message as though she’d hung on the line, convinced I was really there and ignoring her, and if she waited long enough she’d catch me out.
The phone rang again as I looked at it. Resigned, I picked it up. I didn’t bother to defend myself. She talked for ten minutes before I had the chance to say anything.
“I was at work, Mother,” I managed to interject when she paused to light a cigarette.
She greeted my answer with an audible sniff of disdain. “So late.”
“Yes, Mother. So late.” The clock showed ten after eight. “I take the bus home, remember?”
“You have that fancy car. Why don’t you drive it?”
I didn’t bother to explain yet again my reasons for keeping a car in the city but using public transportation, which was faster and easier. She wouldn’t have listened.
“You should find a husband,” she said at last, and I bit back a sigh. The tirade was close to ending. “Though how you ever will, I don’t know. Men don’t like women who are smarter than they are. Or who earn more money. Or—” she paused significantly “—who don’t take care of themselves.”
“I take care of myself, Mother.” I meant financially. She meant spa treatments and manicures.
“Ella.” Her sigh sounded very loud over the phone. “You could be so pretty…”
I looked into the mirror as she talked, seeing the reflection of a woman my mother didn’t know. “Mother. Enough. I’m hanging up.”
I imagined the way her mouth pursed at such harsh treatment from her only daughter. “Fine.”
“I’ll call you soon.”
She snorted. “Don’t forget, you promised to come visit.”
The thought made my stomach fall away. “Yes, I know, but—”
“You have to take me to the cemetery, Ella.”
The woman in the mirror looked startled. I didn’t feel startled. I didn’t feel…anything. No matter what my reflection showed.
“I know, Mother.”
“Don’t think you can weasel out of it this year—”
“Goodbye, Mother.”
I disconnected her, though she still squawked, and immediately dialed another number.
“Marcy. It’s Elle.”
Marcy, bless her, revealed nothing but pleased surprise at my desire to take her up on her invitation to go out after work. It was exactly the reaction I needed. Too much enthusiasm would have made me rethink; too little would have made me cancel.
“The Blue Swan,” she said confidently, like she was reaching for my hand to lead me across a bridge swaying over an abyss. In a way she was. “It’s small but the music is good and the crowd’s eclectic. The drinks are pretty cheap, too. And it’s not a meat market.”
So kind of her, really, to keep assuming I was afraid of men. She didn’t know I had once slept with four different men in as many days. She didn’t know it wasn’t sex that scared me.
Her kindness made me smile, though, and we made plans for after work on Friday. She didn’t question my change of mind.
Still staring at the woman in the mirror, I hung up the phone. She looked as if she was going to cry. I felt bad for her, that woman with the dark hair, the one who only ever wore black and white. The one who might have been pretty if she’d only take care of herself, if only she weren’t smarter, if only she didn’t earn more money. I felt sorry for her but envied her, too, because she, at least, could cry and I could not.
Chapter 02
A figure in black waited for me when I got home from work on Thursday night. Black sweatshirt, hood pulled up over black-dyed hair. Black jeans and sneakers. Black-polished nails.
“Hi, Gavin.” I put my key into the lock as he stood.
“Hi, Miss Kavanagh. Can I give you a hand with that?” He took my bag before I had time to protest and followed me inside. He hung it neatly on the hook by the door. “I brought your book back.”
Gavin belongs to the neighbors on my left side. I’d never met his mother, though I’d often seen her leaving for work. I’d heard raised voices a few times through our shared walls, and it made me conscious about keeping my own television turned low.
“Did you like it?”
He shrugged and set the book on the table. “Not as much as the first one.”
I’d lent him my copy of C. S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy. “Lots of people only read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Gav. Do you want the next one?”
At fifteen Gavin was a typical Goth wannabe with his Jack Skellington wardrobe and liberal use of eyeliner. He was a nice kid, though, who liked to read and didn’t seem to have many friends. He’d shown up at my door about two years earlier, wanting to know if he could mow my grass. Since I had a patch of grass about the size of a small compact car, I didn’t need a lawn boy. I’d hired him, anyway, because he’d looked so sincere.
Now he spent more time borrowing from my library and helping me strip wallpaper and sand floors than he did on my sad excuse for a lawn, but I liked him. He was quiet and polite and far cheerier than any Goth kid should have been. He was good, too, with tasks I found too tedious to tackle, like scraping the wallpaper paste residue left behind when we peeled off two decades worth of home decor from my dining room walls.
“Yeah, sure. I’ll get it back to you by Monday.”
He followed me to the kitchen, where I put a box of chocolate cookies on the table. “Whenever you get it back to me is fine.”
He helped himself to a cookie. “Do you need any help stripping tonight?”
We looked at each other as soon as the words had escaped his lips, and I blinked. He looked stricken. I
