“But counterfeiters can go to jail.”
“Counterfeiters put a designer’s label in their stuff. They claim it’s the original goods. Dressmakers don’t claim it’s anything but a copy. That’s the only difference.”
“So it’s the difference between an honest copy and a dishonest copy.”
“Exactly. And if you ask me, the people who get stung by a counterfeit copy sort of ask for it. It’s all about ego. They think having a big designer’s label in their shirt makes them more important. You see people going around wearing scarves with designer’s names on them, or carrying handbags with the designer’s label on the outside. What’s that about, for God’s sake? If I’m going to put a name on something I wear, it’ll be my own name.”
She put her elbows on her sewing machine and leaned her chin on her folded hands. “Dixie, why don’t you let me make you something nice to wear? You’ve got your mother’s figure, but you hide it under all that droopy stuff.”
I felt my whole body blush. “I’m a pet sitter. I have to wear this droopy stuff.”
“I’m talking about when you go out. I’d like to see you in something wrapped in front, fitted close at the waist, with a deep cleavage. A dark rose color, I think.”
My mind immediately went to shoes with ridiculously tall heels in which I stood beside Ethan at a nice restaurant where the tables were covered in starched white linen. Ethan’s fingertips were on the small of my back. My dark rose, tightly wrapped back that was behind my deep-cleavaged front.
I said, “I don’t go out much.”
As if continuing a different conversation, she said, “How is your mother, anyway?”
While I was still registering the fact that it had been Ethan’s fingertips on my back and not Guidry’s, I said, “I haven’t seen my mother since she came to my grandfather’s funeral. She left right afterward, and we never heard from her again.”
I didn’t add that we’d never heard from her before Granddad’s funeral, either, or that she’d left as soon as she’d learned that all my grandfather’s assets, including the beachfront property, had been left solely to Michael and me.
“So you don’t know where she is?”
“Not a clue.”
“That’s too bad.”
I shrugged.
“Dixie, your mother wasn’t a bad person. She just wanted more than the life she had here.”
I thought of Briana saying, I would have followed the devil himself to get out of that little town.
I said, “She had two kids here.”
“She knew your grandparents would take care of you. It wasn’t like she put you out on the street.”
And suddenly I was a child, walking down a long hallway where my mother’s collection of hats covered an entire wall. The hats had hung on pegs the way some people display masks picked up in exotic locales. There hadn’t been anything exotic about my mother’s hats, and she’d bought most of them in Sarasota, but they formed a pleasing mosaic of colors and shapes on the wall. Every morning, Mom would come out of her bedroom still in her nightgown and walk back and forth in front of the wall of hats until she’d found the one that fit her mood for the day. Then she’d clap it on her head and disappear to dress in something that did justice to the hat she’d chosen.
When she left us, she didn’t take her hats, so for a long time my brother and I had expected her to come home. We couldn’t imagine how she’d manage to know how to feel without a hat on her head to direct her. It took me a long time to understand that she’d known all along how she felt. The hats had merely given her a daily role to play so nobody else would guess who she really was.
Mrs. Langham got up and came toward me with a tape measure in her hands. “Stand still, let me get your measurements.”
She was a pro. Before I had time to tell her I didn’t really want her to make me a dress with plunging cleavage, she had measured me.
“I’ll get the fabric and notions. Stop by next week and we’ll do a fitting.”
I wanted to tell her I had plenty of notions of my own, but I had a feeling she meant notions of a different kind.
I left her smiling to herself as if she knew some funny secret. As I drove away, I felt a sudden and totally unexpected stab of longing for my mother.
The rest of the afternoon went smoothly. No pet had peed on a rug or knocked over a potted plant. Every tail was raised in satisfaction when I left. After my last call, I went to the Trillin house to see how much progress the crime-scene cleaners had made.
I parked in the driveway behind their blue and white hazmat van. The front door was open, and I could hear the sound of a vacuum inside. I stuck my head in the front door and saw a man in a blue jumpsuit backing toward the door. He was pulling a vacuum hose that seemed to be sucking up moisture from the floor.
I waved my arms and yelled over the noise, and he turned his head to look over his shoulder. He wore a surgical mask. He turned off the machine and turned to face me, but he didn’t remove his mask. With his hazmat gloves and boots, he looked like an extra on a movie about an invasion of aliens from outer space.
Through his mask, he said, “You can’t come in here.”
“I know. I just wanted to know what you’d had to do about the tile.”
He hooked the mask with a finger and pulled it below his chin.
“Most of the fluids were in a rug, so the crime-scene techs must have got here fast and removed the body. The rug looks like an expensive Oriental, but I imagine it’s a total loss. We didn’t have to replace the tile.”
“So when can the owners come home?”
“Cupcake Trillin lives here, doesn’t he? I saw the photographs.”
I smiled. “I just take care of the cats.”
He nodded understanding. “They can come back tomorrow morning.”
He pulled his mask up and turned his machine back on, and I hustled back to the Bronco and headed home.
The sun was already below the horizon when I drove down my shelled lane, the lane that curves to the place I’ve called home since I was nine years old. Except for the years I was away making a life as a deputy and a wife and a mother … But I try not to think about those years. The memory is too sweet.
I smelled smoke from the grill when I got out of the Bronco. The western sky was flushed with coral and pink light, and the air under the trees moved with a touch of coolness.
Michael opened his kitchen door and yelled, “Heat’s almost ready!”
He meant that he had been sticking his hand over the grill to test its intensity and that he was beginning to be able to hold it still for a second or two without getting third degree burns. People who cook over open flames are masochists.
I hollered, “I’ll be down in ten minutes!”
I really would be, too. I’m the world’s fastest shower taker. Turn water on, get under it, squirt bath gel on a sponge, rub on body, stand a second, turn, stand another second, turn water off. That’s it. And I can air-dry while I dash to the office-closet for clean clothes. No wasted time rubbing with a towel, no sirree. Just jump into clean cotton, shove my feet into flip-flops, run a brush through my hair and a tube of lip gloss over my mouth, and I’m ready. Not ready for Massachusetts or New York or Idaho, maybe, but ready for Florida.
Downstairs, Michael stood with a tray of marinated meat, gazing with adoration at his hot grill. Ella Fitzgerald sat on a chaise gazing at Michael with adoration. She wore her cotton harness attached to a leash attached to the leg of the chaise. Ella has an adventurous streak, and after Paco spent hours searching the woods for her, he decreed that she would henceforth be tethered when she was outside.