This paralysis was humiliating. I prodded my brain. I could do this. I should get…
“Lily,” said a warm, deep voice.
I followed it up, and up, to the face of my friend Bobo Winthrop. Bobo’s face had lost the element of boy that had made it sweet. He was a nineteen-year-old man.
Without a thought, I put my arms around him. The last time I’d seen Bobo, he’d been involved in a family tragedy that had torn the Winthrop clan in two. He’d transferred to a college out of state, somewhere in Florida. He looked as if he’d made the most of it. He was tan, had apparently lost a little weight.
He hugged me back even more eagerly. Then as I leaned back to look at him again, he kissed me, but he was wise enough to break it off before it became an issue.
“Are you out of school for the holidays?” I asked.
“Yes, and after that I’ll start back here at U of A.” The University of Arkansas had a large campus at Montrose, though some of the Shakespeare kids preferred the biggest establishment in Fayetteville, or the Little Rock branch.
We looked at each other, in silent agreement not to discuss the reasons Bobo had left the state for a while.
“What are you doing today, Lily? Not at work?”
“No,” I answered shortly, hoping he wouldn’t ask me to spell out the fact that his mother no longer employed me, and as a result, I’d lost a couple of other clients.
He gave me a look that I could only characterize as assessing. “And you’re here shopping?”
“My sister’s getting married. I have to go home for the wedding and the prewedding parties.”
“So, you’re here to get something to wear.” Bobo eyed me a minute more. “And you don’t like to shop.”
“Right,” I said disconsolately.
“Got to go to a shower?”
“I have a list,” I told him, aware of how bleak my voice sounded.
“Let’s see.”
I handed him the sheet of stationery.
“A shower… two showers. A dinner. Then the rehearsal dinner. The wedding. You’ll be a bridesmaid?”
I nodded.
“So she’s got your dress for that?”
I nodded again.
“So, what do you need?”
“I have a nice black suit,” I said.
Bobo looked expectantly at me.
“That’s it.”
“Oh, wow, Lily,” he said, suddenly sounding his age. “Do you ever have shopping to do.”
That evening I spread out my purchases on the bed. I’d had to use my charge card, but everything I’d gotten I could use for a long time.
A pair of well-cut black slacks. For one shower, I’d wear them with a gold satin vest and an off-white silk blouse. For the second, I’d wear them with an electric blue silk shell and a black jacket. I could wear the shoes that went with the black suit, or a pair of blue leather pumps that had been on sale. I could wear my good black suit to the rehearsal dinner. For the dinner party I had a white dress, sleeveless, that I could wear in the winter with the black jacket, in the summer by itself. I had the correct underpinnings for each outfit, and I had bought a pair of gold hoop earrings and a big gold free-form pin. I already had diamond earrings and a diamond bar pin my grandmother had left me.
This was all thanks to Bobo’s advice.
“You must have read some of Amber Jean’s girls’ magazines,” I had accused him. Bobo had a younger sister.
“Nah. That’s the only shopping wisdom I have to offer. ‘Everything has to match or coordinate.’ I guess I learned it from my mom. She has whole sections of clothes that can be mixed and matched.”
I should have remembered that. I used to clean out Beanie Winthrop’s closet twice a year.
“Are you living at home?” I had asked when he’d turned to go. I was a little hesitant about asking Bobo any questions that might pertain to his family, so strained was the Winthrop situation.
“No. I have an apartment here. On Chert Avenue. I just moved in, to be ready for the spring semester.” Bobo had flushed, for the first time looking awkward. “I’m trying to spend some time at home, so my folks don’t feel too… ditched.” He’d run his fingers through his floppy blond hair. “How’ve you been doing? You still seeing that private detective?”
“Yeah.”
“Still working out?” he’d added hastily, getting off dangerous ground.
I’d nodded.
He’d hugged me again and gone about whatever his errand was, leaving me to a saleswoman named Marianna. She’d homed in on us when Bobo had joined me, and now that he had left, she was stuck with me.
After I’d gotten over the sticker shock, it felt almost good to have new clothes. I cut off the tags and hung all the new things in the closet in the guest bedroom, spacing the hangers so the clothes wouldn’t wrinkle. Days afterward, I found myself looking at them from time to time, opening the door suspiciously as if my new garments might have gone back to the store.
I’d always been very careful with makeup, with my hair; I keep my legs shaved as smooth as a baby’s bottom. I like to know what I look like; I like to control it. But I don’t want people to turn to look at me, I don’t want people to notice me. The jeans and sweats I wore to clean houses, to bathe dogs, to fill some shut-in’s grocery list, acted as camouflage. Practical, cheap, camouflage.
People would look at me when I wore my new clothes.
Made uneasy by all these changes, by the prospect of going back to Bartley, I plunged myself into what work I had. I still cleaned Carrie Thrush’s office every Saturday, and Carrie had mentioned she wanted me to come more often, but I had to be sure it wasn’t because she thought I was hurting financially. Pity shouldn’t have any part in a business arrangement, or a friendship.
I had the Drinkwaters’ house, and the travel agent’s office, and Dr. Sizemore’s office. I still cleaned Deedra Dean’s apartment, and I was working more hours for Mrs. Rossiter, who had broken her arm while she was walking Durwood, her old cocker spaniel. But it wasn’t enough.
I did get the job of decorating two more office Christmas trees, and I did a good job on one and an outstanding job on the other, which was a very visible advertisement since it stood in the Chamber of Commerce office. I used birds and fruit for that one, and the warm, hushed colors and carefully concealed lights made the tree a little more peaceful than some of the others I saw around town.
I’d quit taking the Little Rock newspaper to cut back on expenses until my client list built up. So I was in Dr. Sizemore’s office, on a Tuesday afternoon, when I saw the creased section from one of the Sunday editions. I scooped it up to dump into the recycle bin, and my gaze happened to land on the headline “Unsolved Crimes Mean No Happy Holiday.” The paper was dated two days after Thanksgiving, which told me that one of the office staff had stuffed it somewhere and then unearthed it in her pre-Christmas cleaning.
I sank down onto the edge of one of the waiting room chairs to read the first three paragraphs.
In the yearly effort to pack as many holiday-related stories as possible into the paper, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette had interviewed the families of people who had been murdered (if the murder was unsolved) or abducted (if the abductee hadn’t been found).
I wouldn’t have continued to read the article, since it’s just the kind of thing that brings back too many bad memories, if it hadn’t been for the picture of the baby.
The cutline under the picture read, “Summer Dawn Macklesby at the time of her disappearance. Summer has been missing for almost eight years.”
She was a tiny infant in the picture, perhaps a week old. She had a little lace bow attached somehow to a scanty strand of hair.
Though I knew it would make me miserable, I found myself searching for the child’s name again, in the column of text. It jumped out at me about halfway through the story, past the mother of three who’d been gunned down at an automated teller on Christmas Eve and the engaged convenience store clerk raped and knifed to death on her Thanksgiving birthday.