was running his hand up and down Sky’s arm and if he kept at it much longer, he was going to leave her with no skin. There was no doubt about it. He had taken possession of her. And Sky seemed pretty happy to be possessed. She had a slightly goofy expression on her face and a bruised, trampled look about her. When I sat down at the table, she held out her hand, palm up, in a Ta-da gesture and said, “Lucy Madison, Max Kinghorn.”
So this was the guy who had hired Sky to manage the store, the famous boss from Seattle. I peered rudely.
Max didn’t bother to stand up on my arrival as I might have expected from such a tidy polite-looking person. He must have sensed my hostility. He laughed a nervous, whiny, slightly nasal laugh and went back to the arm stroking as if his life depended on it.
I stretched out my hand to shake his, and to stop him from doing all that damned stroking.
“Sky’s told me all about you,” I said, forcing myself to smile.
He whinnied again.
She had told me all about him. She’d gone into quite a lot of gory detail.
Max Kinghorn was the owner of the Retro Metro Boutique, but he lived in Seattle where he had other vintage boutiques. He was a strange bird. A vulture, to be precise. He stocked his stores by reading obituaries published up and down the West Coast, from California to B.C. He was always ready to swoop down on the defunct’s family and offer to take the horrid burden of dusty antiquated clothing, furniture and knickknacks off their hands. As vintage vultures go, I gathered he was the best in his trade. But Sky, I wanted to scream, Oh Sky, what about that little thing you told me about Max, that one, really important detail?
Max shifted, gave a few last frenzied strokes, then pecked Sky demurely on the cheek. “Well, I’m sure you ladies have a lot to talk about. I’ll get going. I have business in Port Townsend.” Then he whispered to Sky, “Ciao, liebchen, I’ll call you.”
I could picture it already, Max hovering and slavering as he waited to pick over the corpse down in Port Townsend, offering condolences to the bereaved family along with his certified cheque.
I watched him leave then glared at Sky across the table. “That’s Max, Sky? The infamous Max?”
She glared back at me. “Don’t get worked up about it. I told you I thought he was interesting.”
“I didn’t realize you thought he was that interesting.”
“Just what do you mean by that?”
I held the menu high in front of my face. “I really shouldn’t be having all this fried stuff but I just can’t help myself. It’s all so yummy and tempting.”
“Don’t try to change the subject, Madison. Just spit it out.”
Sky looked fierce. She was already a dark, scrawny, pointy little person with spiky techno-punk black hair, and when she became fierce, she was like a Jack Russell terrier, hanging on to the object of her passion until she had ragged it to death.
“I love you, Sky. You’re my best friend in the world, but if Max handcuffed you to the bed, beat you with rubber hoses, then drove over you with his car and left tire tracks, you’d still look better than you do now. He’s been staying at your place these last few days, hasn’t he?”
Sky blushed, and she’s not a blusher.
“He’s so…so…”
“Gay?”
“That’s one facet of Max’s personality. Besides, he’s celibately gay. For the last few years anyway.”
“That’s a good one. Celibately gay. Except for the fact that he had sex with you. Or am I presuming too much? Did you have sex with him, too? It was sex he had with you last night, wasn’t it?” I stared at a bruised area on her neck and raised my eyebrows.
Sky looked even fiercer. “Don’t get worked up about it, Madison. In case you haven’t noticed, men aren’t exactly leaping out of the woodwork these days. Men I have something in common with, I mean. I’m as surprised as you are that he’s good in the sack. But it’s not just the sex either. It’s a business relationship, too. He’s looking at other boutiques around Vancouver. We might be…you know…expanding and consolidating.”
“I think I need to start worrying about you.”
“You don’t get it. I don’t really count. I’m unofficial,” said Sky.
“Ooo, ouch. Let me think on that one for a minute. YOU DON’T REALLY COUNT. It’s time you started listening to your mother, Sky. All those talks of hers about self-esteem and so on.”
“You’re not listening to me, Luce. Shut up for a minute. What I mean is, I’m something new for him. I’m exotic. By comparison, I mean. You know, by comparison to being with men.”
“Sure you are, dear,” I said in the voice my mother used on me when I was eight.
“And Christ, Lucy, you should see the way he looks in a suit.”
I wanted to see the way he looked in a suit. A suit of armor. Dropped into the ocean, with him in it.
Sky always had been a sucker for a nice garment. Her degree is in theatrical costume design. We met when the university theater department roped me into doing a little set painting for a production of Peer Gynt. During that particular show, she was fighting with the director, who’d slept with her then refused to acknowledge her. She took revenge by using weak seams in strategic places. A few belly dancers accidentally bared their nipples during the dance sequence and some trolls had codpiece problems while trogging around in the Hall of the Mountain King. We giggled like idiots from backstage. Apart from that, it was an uneventful production.
Sky had had a lot of boyfriends back in the university days, but none of them had left her with the day-after evidence that Max had.
“I can’t resist him.” She shook her head, then grimaced and stuck out her tongue at me.
“When are you seeing him again?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Of course I don’t know. Why would I know? He’s a busy man. So stop asking me trick questions.”
I didn’t remind Sky of that drunken evening just after I’d gotten rid of Frank. The one where Sky and I started out delicately sipping white wine and ended up falling headfirst into gallons of tequila sunrise, sloppily guzzling and making a lot of drunken Never Again promises. Never Again would we go out with men who were lechers, men who were leeches, men who were misogynists, men who were polygamists—our list was quite long and we pretty much eliminated half the human race.
After all the Never Agains, and since Mr. Perfect still hadn’t shown up, it was just a question of choosing one of the guys off the Never Again list.
I said, “Let’s forget about him for a minute. Let’s not let men ruin our lunch.”
“Good thinking.” Sky suddenly looked like her old self again.
I launched
