Be Strong & Curvaceous (11 page)
“Uh, she pays someone?”
Mac slanted a look at me. “Very funny. But you hear what I’m saying. He could be out front pretending to be one of them right now.”
“I don’t think ignoring him is the right thing to do.”
“And I think it is.”
From the set of her mouth and the expression in her eyes, which was going from miserable to combative, I caved. “At the very least, print every message you get from him before you delete them, okay? And keep them somewhere. At least then we’ll have hard evidence if we need it.”
I sounded like Gillian, who owns possibly every
CSI
episode ever aired, plus bonus footage. But maybe sounding like her wasn’t a bad thing.
Mac nodded and hit Print, and with relief I pulled it off the wireless printer we shared in its cubbyhole under my desk. “You deleted all the other ones?”
“Of course. I couldn’t stand to look at them. He never says anything bad. They’re mostly kind of pathetic. But they made me angry and scared and it felt good to just wipe them out of existence.”
“Well, don’t wipe any more, okay? We might need them.”
“I’ve said I would, and I will. And what’s this
we
business?” I stared at her, confused. We? Wii?
Oui
? “This is not your problem. You are not involved.”
I tried not to feel hurt. “I got involved when he took my picture with you. Try to think, Mac. It must be someone you know. How else would they know about you coming here?”
“Carly, didn’t you hear me?”
“I can’t hear you when you sound like my mother.”
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I only meant that it could be dangerous. I don’t want any of this to hurt you.”
“But it’s okay if something happens to you?”
“It’s my problem. I’ll deal.”
I thought of Lissa braving the Benefactors’ Day Ball and getting out there under that spotlight, despite the giggles and murmurs I could hear in the audience. And of Gillian, facing down her abusive ex-boyfriend in the school cafeteria and inciting a food fight.
People didn’t have to solve everything alone. They could ask for help. And if they couldn’t or didn’t know they could ask God for it, there was always the second option.
Us.
“You don’t have to deal alone,” I said. “Fine, you can keep it to yourself if you want. But I’m here if you need me.”
She looked down her aristocratic nose. Her gaze measured me from head to foot. I braced myself for another crushing put-down.
And then her eyes filled with tears.
But it was like she was frozen in her seat. As if getting up and taking one step toward me would make her crack and all her feelings would come oozing out.
Before she could take a breath to say a word, I crossed the room and bent down to where she sat in front of her laptop. I gave her a hug.
“You are the nicest person I’ve ever met,” she choked, and began to cry for real.
From: [email protected]
Date: April 23, 2009
Re: Settling in?
Hello darling. I hope everything is going well for you at this new school. I knew Natalie Curzon when we were children; it seems strange to think you and she are in the same place now, so far away. I’ve never been farther west than New York.
All is much the same here. I saw Lily Allen at a movie premiere and she wanted me to remind you that you promised her a weekend in L.A. I’ve no idea what that’s about, but there you are. Saw Wills and Kate and Harry at the Goldsmiths’ Hall and they send their regards.
Everyone misses you, darling, me most of all. Have you heard from your father recently?
Love, Mummy
“DON’T FORGET—prayer circle tonight.” Gillian paused on the wide second-floor landing and let her fifty-pound backpack slide down to rest on her instep. If she ever got mugged, she could use the thing for a lethal weapon. “You’re coming, right?”
I opened my mouth to say yes and then remembered. “I—I can’t. I have something else I need to do.”
I tried not to squirm under that dark-eyed gaze. “But you always come. And fellowship is important. What have you got going? Extracurriculars? Or wait.” She held up a palm. “The committee’s having a meeting.”
I shook my head. “Nothing like that.” I turned to go up the next flight of stairs. “See you tomorrow.” I’d already run up half a dozen when she said, totally confused, “But, Carly . . .”
How to feel completely lame in one easy lesson.
Gillian deserved a better reason than that. And it wasn’t like I didn’t want to go. I did. There was something about praying out loud with my friends that made me feel . . . I don’t know. Safe. Deeper. More solid. It’s hard to explain.
But I had to go to work, and I’d already missed the three-fifteen bus.
I threw on a pair of cargo pants and a T-shirt, then popped on a Marc Jacobs linen jacket over it. I took a couple of extra minutes to dash down the first-floor corridor to the dining room and snag a sandwich and a bottle of Odwalla strawberry lemonade from the refrigerator case. It would be warm by the time I got my dinner break, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. Then, stuffing them into my tote bag, which already held my math homework, I pelted across the field and made the three-thirty bus with seconds to spare.
Luckily, I was used to hiking up and down the steep streets around here. I was hardly even breathing fast as the bus pulled away from the curb and headed downtown. It dropped me on the opposite side of the street from Piccadilly Photo, and I was in the back of the shop pulling on my lab coat by five minutes to four.
Philip finished writing up what looked like thirty rolls of someone’s vacation pictures and walked the lady to the front door.
“Doesn’t she know about digital cameras?” I gathered all the rolls up in a wire tray and got them into the development queue. All my pictures were online so I could share them with my family.
I’d already washed and waxed the floors over the course of a couple of days last week, so today’s task was to polish all the display cabinets—again—and find a way to jazz up the displays of Nikons and Canons and their lenses. After that, Philip had promised to teach me how the developer worked. It was kind of intimidating to me, but once I knew how to develop pictures myself, he could take a break once in a while and leave me to run the shop on my own.
“I’m glad she doesn’t. The cameras may pay the rent, but I do like a bit of jam with my bread and butter.” By which, I gathered, he meant that he liked the income from the photo development, too. “Have you thought of any ways to make all this hardware more visually appealing?”
“If you’re in the market for a camera, it’s pretty appealing already.”
“Most people, Carly, don’t know they’re in the market for a camera. They have to be reminded. Hence my question.”
Not even Mr. Milsom, terror of the science labs, used a word like
hence
. Only one of the reasons I thought my boss was either a few cards short of a full deck, or one of the coolest old guys I’d ever met. I couldn’t decide which.
I got out the Windex and a pile of clean rags. “My father says that ninety percent of marketing is making someone want what they don’t need.”
“A man of sense.”
“He is. I don’t know what my mother was thinking.” I stopped myself and got back on topic. “So what we should do maybe is not show people the actual stuff as much as what they’ll get when they have it. You know. Benefits instead of features.”
“Which are?”
I scrubbed at a stubborn nose print until the glass squeaked. Ew. People should wipe off their kids before they brought them in here. “Well, where do people have good times? At a wedding. Or a holiday. Like that lady who just left. Show people having fun with their cameras.”
“Make it part of their experience. Hmm.” Philip’s face took on a faraway expression. “We could blow up some good shots and display them with the equipment that produced them.”
“You could have workshops on how to get pictures like that. Do them online, even. This place has a Web site, right?”
“Er, no.”
“Philip, Philip.” I shook my head with mock despair and gave him a smile. “How am I going to drag you into the twenty-first century?”
“With as little pain as possible, I hope. You must allow I’m getting there at my own pace, snail-like though it may be.”
“The point is, there are lots of ways to get people involved with their cameras, which means they’re involved with Piccadilly Photo, right?”
“Right. How have I stayed in business this long without you?”
I grinned at him. “It’s a mystery.”
He was silent for so long, I figured he was planning out his marketing campaign. I’d actually finished polishing up the longest display case, which ran down the side of the shop, when he spoke again.
“What was that you said about your mother?”
I stopped. “Huh?” My arm ached, so I switched the rag to the other hand.
“You said something about your dad having sense, but you didn’t know what your mother was thinking. What was that about?”
I ducked down and began at the bottom of the next case. “Nothing.”
“I think it is something.”
“It’s a long story.”
“We have a long evening ahead of us. Punctuated, one hopes, by the arrival of customers.”
I sighed. “Philip, you can’t possibly be interested in my boring problems or my boring family.”
“Since the latter managed to produce a fine young woman despite what you say, I think I’m very interested. Provided you want to tell me. You can always just ask me to mind my own business.”
I’d never been very good about keeping things to myself. I’d always had someone around to talk things over with—Papa, my mother, Alana. Even now I talked to Shani more than anyone—just not about family business. But Philip was different. He was an adult. He’d been around. And best of all, he was completely separate from the rest of my life.
So I told him. About the divorce, about us kids living in three different cities, about our family going from one big happy Mexican-American hive to all these rootless little satellites, their orbits intersecting only once in a while.
“And now my mom tells me she’s engaged to this doofus who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He put a diamond ring in her dessert last weekend. Be still, my heart. She wants me and my sister, Alana, to be her bridesmaids.”
“And will you?” Philip took a rag and squirted Windex on the other side of the cabinet I was working on.
“Are you kidding? The last thing I want to do is stand there in a big poofy dress, watching her vow to love, honor, and cherish. She didn’t do that for my father, did she?”
“Maybe she did, in the beginning.”
“Yeah, well, there’s more to a marriage than the beginning. There’s the middle, too.”
“That is the hard part.”
“My dad isn’t hard to live with. He’s never there, for one thing.”
“Which may have contributed to the problem.”
Both of us were crouched down, looking at each other over the Canons as we polished the panels of glass. “What do you mean?”
“It’s difficult to love, honor, and cherish someone who isn’t there.”
“They could talk on the phone. Or IM or something.”
“People do grow apart. Maybe that’s what happened.”
I caught my reflection in a metal strip and tried to smooth out the grumpy frown lines in my forehead. “How can you know that?”
“I don’t, of course. But possibly you don’t know the whole story, either. I’d want to shield my children from as much as possible, if it were me.”
I looked up. “Do you have kids?”
“One son. He’s a teacher in Vermont.”
“And your wife?”
“Gone.”
“Gone how?”
I’d meant divorced, left, whatever, but he said simply, “In the usual way. She passed in 1985, when Kimball was still a child.”
The smell of ammonia went up my nose. I realized my hand was pressed to my mouth, as if it were preventing one more whiny, complaining word from coming out of it. “Oh, Philip. I’m so sorry.”
“I am, too.”
“I didn’t mean to go on about my dumb stuff when you’ve had worse things happen.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I wanted to hear about your ‘stuff.’ You might think about doing this thing for your mother, Carly. I can tell you from experience that chances to do things for each other can be taken away, just like that. And then you spend the rest of your life wishing you’d had just a few more minutes.” He stared through the glass at the Sony videocam on its pedestal, without seeming to see it. “Just to say yes. Or to bring them a glass of cold water. Or to give them a kiss to say you love them.” He looked up, and I had no doubt that he saw me in every glaring detail. “Or to catch a bouquet that they threw just for you.”
S
O MUCH FOR professional distance.
As I rode back to school on the eight-twenty bus, I regretted telling Philip all the stuff I had. After all, when you tell somebody something, it isn’t to hear what you already know. It’s to get a different perspective, right? Or find a different way of solving the problem.
Going to the wedding and doing what my mom wanted was, in Philip’s mind, the right thing to do. But it just seemed wrong to me, when she’d never done anything us kids had ever wanted. Nobody had asked us when she’d left, had they? Nobody wanted our opinion about her going back to her parents in Veracruz—who, incidentally, lived in a beautiful house my dad had paid for. He’d done that out of love for her, and what had she done for him?