“Where was she institutionalized?”
“We lived in San Francisco then.”
“When?”
“Over two years ago. I was seven going on eight.”
“Who did you live with while she was hospitalized?”
“Dr. Doom. They’ve been together four and a half years now. See, there’s even kismet for crackpots. Anyway, the headshrinkers shot like nine hundred thousand volts through old Sinsemilla’s noggin, unless you want to nitpick my figures, and it didn’t help her any way whatsoever, though the feedback of lunacy from her brain probably blew out power-company transformers all over the Bay Area. Great pie, Mrs. D!”
“Thank you, dear. It’s a Martha Stewart recipe. Not that she gave it to me personally. I took it down from her TV show.”
Micky said, “Leilani, for God’s sake, is your mother always like that — the way 1 just saw her?”
“No, no. Sometimes she’s simply impossible.”
“This isn’t funny, Leilani.”
“You’re wrong. It’s hilarious.”
“The woman is a menace.”
“To be fair,” Leilani said, forking pie into her mouth as she talked, “my dear mater isn’t always drugged out of her mind the way you just saw her. She saves that for special evenings — birthdays, anniversaries, when the moon is in the seventh house, when Jupiter is aligned with Mars, that kind of thing. Most of the time, she’s satisfied with takin’ on a joint, keeping a nice light buzz, maybe floating on a Quaalude. She even goes clean and straight some days, though that’s when the depression sets in.”
Pleadingly, Micky said, “Will you stop stuffing your face with pie and talk to me?”
“I can talk around the pie, even if it isn’t polite. I haven’t belched all evening, so I ought to have some etiquette points to my credit. I’m not going to miss out on one bite of this. Old Sinsemilla couldn’t bake up anything this good if her life depended on it — not that she’s ever likely to face a pie-or-die threat.”
“What sort of baking does your mother do?” Geneva asked.
“She made an earthworm pie once,” Leilani said. “That was when she was deep in a passionate natural-foods phase that stretched the definition of natural to include things like chocolate-covered ants, pickled slugs, and crushed-insect protein. The earthworm pie sort of put an end to all that. I’m absolutely sure it wasn’t a Martha Stewart recipe.”
Micky finished her coffee in long swallows, as though she had forgotten it wasn’t spiked, and though she most definitely didn’t need a caffeine jolt. Her hands were shaking. The cup rattled against the saucer when she put it down.
“Leilani, you can’t go on living with her.”
“With who?”
“Old Sinsemilla. Who else? She’s psychotic. As they say when they commit people to the psychiatric ward against their will she’s a danger to herself and others.”
“To herself, for sure,” Leilani agreed. “Not really to others.”
“She was a danger to me in the yard, all that screaming about hag of a witch bitch and spellcasting and not being the boss of her.”
Geneva had risen from her chair to fetch the pot from the Mr. Coffee machine. She poured a refill for Micky. “Maybe it’ll settle our nerves, dear.”
With no pie left on her plate, Leilani put down her fork. “Old Sinsemilla scared you, that’s all. She can be as scary as Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and Big Bird all rolled into one, but she’s not dangerous. At least as long as my pseudofather keeps her supplied with drugs. She might be a terror if she ever went into withdrawal.”
Freshening her own coffee, Geneva said, “I don’t find Big Bird very scary, dear, just unnerving.”
“Oh, Mrs. D, I disagree. People dressing up in big weird animal suits where you can’t see their faces — that’s scarier than sleeping with a nuclear bomb under your bed. You have to figure people like that have real issues to resolve.”
“Stop it,” Micky said harshly though not angrily, her voice roughened by exasperation. “Just, please, stop it.”
Leilani pretended puzzlement. “Stop what?”
“You know very well what I mean. Stop all this avoidance. Talk to me, deal with this situation.”
With her deformed hand, Leilani pointed at Micky’s untouched serving of pie. “Are you going to eat that?”
Micky pulled the plate closer to herself. “I’ll trade pie for a serious discussion.”
“We’ve been having a serious discussion.”
“There’s half a pie left,” Geneva offered cheerily.
“I’d love a piece, thanks,” Leilani said.
“The half that’s left is off-limits,” Micky declared. “The only pie in play is my piece.”
“Nonsense, Micky,” Geneva said. “Tomorrow I can bake another apple pie all for you.”
As Geneva rose from the table, Micky said, “Aunt Gen, sit down. This isn’t about pie.”
“It is from my perspective, said Leilani.
“Listen, kid, you can’t come around here, doing your dangerous-young-mutant act, worming your way—“
Grimacing, Leilani said, “Worming?”
“Worming your way into …” Micky fell silent, surprised by what she had been about to say.
“Into your spleen?” Leilani suggested.
For longer than she could remember, Micky hadn’t allowed herself to be emotionally affected by anyone to any significant degree.
Leaning across the table as though earnestly determined to help Micky find the elusive word, Leilani said, “Into your gall bladder?”
Caring was dangerous. Caring made you vulnerable. Stay up on the high ramparts, safe behind the battlements.
Geneva said, “Kidneys?”
“Worming your way into our hearts,” Micky continued, because saying our instead of my seemed to share the risk and to leave her less exposed, “and then expect us not to care when we see the danger you’re in.”
Still armored in drollery, with a full bandolier of cheerful banter, Leilani said, “I never thought of myself as heartworm, but I guess it’s a perfectly respectable parasite. Anyway, I assure you with all seriousness — if that’s what it takes to get the pie — that my mother isn’t a danger to me. I’ve lived with her ever since she popped me out of the oven, and I’ve still got all my limbs, or at least the same odd arrangement I was born with. She’s pathetic, old Sinsemilla, not fearsome. Anyway, she is my mother, and when you’re a nine-year-old girl, even an unusually smart one with a gift for gab, you can’t just pack your bags, walk out, find a good apartment, get a high-paying job in software design, and be tooling around in your new Corvette by Thursday. I’m sort of stuck with her, if you see what I mean, and I know how to cope with that.”
“Child Protective Services—“
“Well-meaning but useless,” Leilani interrupted. She seemed to be speaking from experience. “Anyway, the last thing I want is for old Sinsemilla to be put back in the nuthouse for a refresher course in ear-to-ear electrocution, because that’ll leave me alone with my pseudofather.”
Micky shook her head. “They wouldn’t leave you in the care of your mother’s boyfriend.”
“When I call him my pseudofather, I’m indulging in wishful thinking. He’s my legal stepfather. He married old Sinsemilla four years ago, when I was five going on six. I wasn’t reading anywhere near at a college level then, but I understood the implications, anyway. It was an amazing wedding, let me tell you, though there wasn’t a carved-ice swan. Do you like carved-ice swans, Mrs. D?”
Geneva said, “I’ve never seen one, dear.”
“Neither have I. But the idea appeals to me. And so right after he married Sinsemilla, he said that even though he hadn’t actually adopted me and Lukipela, we should start using his last name, but I still use the Klonk I was born with. You’ve got to be mad to be Mad-doc — that’s what Luki and I used to say.”