Then suddenly, as if the intensity of the moment had grown entirely too powerful, she turned her head. Patrick blinked rapidly. He felt thick-tongued and light-headed.
Girls, most girls, triggered a strange anger in him. They flaunted themselves, got off on how boys watched them, mocked and ridiculed, whispered to each other as if circulating a dirty secret. But not Destiny. Of course, she wasn’t a woman yet. She never wore makeup, and rarely anything frilly, and didn’t play Barbies or crap like that. She could run, and catch, and hit, and climb better than most of the guys. Her breasts had yet to develop, although the swellings were beginning to push at her blouse. He didn’t feel dirty when he looked at her, the way he felt when he looked at most women. He felt something else, something that he couldn’t put a word to.
“Ah … Destiny? Want to ride down to Mom’s shop?”
Her mild smile suggested that she was mirroring his thoughts. She nodded.
She rubbed Shermie and Lee’s hair, and grabbed her bicycle, pacing Patrick as he headed down the mountain. “See you guys later!”
And of course, the inevitable reply: “Not if we see you first!”
* * *
Patrick and Destiny bumped their bikes down the path, sharing focus and effort in a comfortable silence. He let her get a little ahead of him, eyes narrowed as he watched her. Something about the way she bounced her hair confused him, but it was a good confusion. Sun and shadow played on her, filtering down from the trees like green netting. People complained about the rain, especially visiting Californians. But then, they always loved how green everything was. Jeez. As if you could have the one without the other!
Then they hit a long level stretch and she had to pump the pedals. She stood up, and he had a chance to look at the long, strong muscles along her spine stroking and pumping smoothly and evenly. The skin exposed by her halter-top was darkened by genetics as well as sun, smooth and lovely.
He just couldn’t seem to tear his eyes from that single square foot of bare skin. He stared until he almost missed the branch coming at his face, slid sideways in a frantic attempt to avoid it, and tumbled off his bike. Destiny stopped, and looked back at him. Before she did it, she tossed her hair over her shoulder. Again, his eyes were riveted, the pain in his skinned shin forgotten.
“Why don’t you watch where you’re going?” She jumped off her bike. Destiny walked it up to him, and stared down.
Strange. She had always seemed so familiar, and now she was like something alien, as if she were branching off to become another species.
He began to phrase an awkward explanation, when another sound cut him off. That bike sound, from the southeast now. They looked at each other, and wondered.
This was private property. In all probability, that motorcycle was driven by someone who knew the landlord. The kids, on the other hand, were trespassing.
Was it Cappy? There were lots of motorcycles in the Claremont area, but only two real clubs. There was a bunch called Senior Cycles, in their fifties and sixties but still road masters.
Then there were the others, most pointedly Cappy Swenson and his scurvy crew. And although he felt a secret fear at the possibility that Cappy was nearby, he was uncertain if the trill down his back was fear or curiosity.
But there was another instinct that said, Don’t go down that path, and said it loudly enough to surprise him.
“Come on,” he said. “I don’t like it here.”
Maybe it was time for their club to relocate. Something was wrong here, and he wasn’t interested in finding out exactly what it was.
He had the sense that they were being watched, and that sense, bubbling inside him like a cauldron, drove him on.
They hit River View Road a moment later, skewing out to the border of the yellow-marked bike lane, risking a brush with traffic. He pedaled like a fiend, chest thundering. Without realizing it, he had left Destiny behind him. Her bike chains rattled and whined as she fought to keep up. Finally, he slowed down, and she pulled up next to him. He planted his feet firmly on the pavement, and stopped.
“Hey, idiot,” she panted. “What was that all about?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just felt something…” As the temporary flash of panic faded, his sense of absurdity increased, followed by shame.
Patrick hiked himself back up on his bike. Without another word they continued to pedal down River Front toward town. To their left, across the road, the blue-green waters of the Cowlitz sparkled at them through the trees. Adrenaline still seared his chest and stomach, but at least he was finally back in control. The embarrassment began to erode his sense of self-preservation, his deepest instincts, and even as he pedaled south along River Front, he chuckled ruefully to himself, already beginning to wonder what all the freaking nerves had been about, anyway.
What a wuss you are, Emory. Glad that it was only Destiny who saw that one.
4
Costumes, Period was set on the ground floor of a two-story mini-mall at the eastern edge of Claremont’s downtown business district. If you hadn’t seen the Yellow Pages ad, heard the word of mouth, surfed its web page or read a flyer jammed under your windshield wiper, you would probably never find it.
The nearest landmark was the Beefhouse steak joint just across the road. Patrick had stuffed countless flyers under the windshield wipers of cars parked there in front of the Beef-house, soliciting customers for his mother’s shop.
In fact, in recent months he had been buzzing with different techniques for increasing her business. They’d instituted Coupons, and Twofers, and Bargain Clubs, and convinced other neighborhood businesses to advertise cooperatively. He’d had those, and so many other ideas that finally his mother threw up her hands in exasperation, asking him how in the world he had concocted such a bewildering profusion of ideas, and would he please give her a minute to think?
Patrick and Destiny parked their bicycles at the back of the shop, next to the beat-up Ford station wagon with the Back Off, I’m a Goddess bumper sticker. He chained his bike to its bumper, while Destiny attached hers to a cyclone fence separating the mall from a humming, truck-sized electrical power transformer.
They shucked backpacks before reaching Costumes, Period’s front door. “Knock knock,” he called, and then pushed it open. The bell tinkled, announcing him.
Costumes, Period was crammed to the rafters with clothing and costuming of all types and descriptions: hats, masks, props ranging from witch’s brooms to chrome steel samurai swords. Vivian Emory carried every kind of foot apparel from glass slippers to brogans, oil and water-based makeup, patterns and assorted do-it-yourself kits, tuxedos and other formal rentals, signs and sign-up sheets for sewing classes, and anything else that a fertile mind could cram into 1500 square feet of storage space.
He knew better than to disturb his mother, who was currently seated on a low stool, pinning a dishwater blonde customer into a Morticia Addams outfit. The costume was pure black down to the roots, and the blonde reminded Patrick of a black-handled bottle-brush. He whispered the observation to Destiny, and she made her famous piggy face in return: front teeth bared, nose flattened, snuffling for truffles. He managed to suppress his giggles: strange as Mom’s customers sometimes seemed, they paid the biggest chunk of the rent. When you came right down to it, that was what really mattered.
He waited patiently for her to look up, and when she did, he chirped: “Hey, Mom!” She sighed and smiled at the same time. In the shop’s fiat overhead light, the bones seemed too prominent in Vivian Emory’s mocha-latté oval of a face. Responsibility and woe were grinding her down. He could already see how his mother would look when she was old. That image seemed to hover around her, translucent but visible, like a ghost trying her bones on for size.
There were too many nights when she was up until three working at her Singer on some piece of costuming needed by nine in the morning. The extra double and triple-time money was just too useful. Those extra dollars paid for Christmas, and birthday present
s, and holiday vacations.
Most of the year was kind of slow, but New Year’s and Halloween were spectacular. December and October Patrick was lucky to have dinner with his mother twice a week.
Nobody said much about it, but he sometimes suspected that she had really started hiding in the costumes when things went to hell with the marriage, when Dad started hitting the booze too heavy, and having job troubles at the mill. Sometimes Dad’s hours got cut back. When that happened, Otis Emory could get mad. He had yet to take it out on his son or wife. Dad loved them both far too much, but some nights he tiptoed back through the door with bruised knuckles and sometimes a black eye, and at least twice Vivian had bailed him out of jail. The arguments had grown horrific the weeks before she finally asked his father to move out.
When the Morticia clone minced back to the fitting room, Vivian Emory sighed and gave both the children bone-creaking hugs. Patrick leaned deeply into her. She smelled of perfume and dust.
“How’s business, Mrs. Emory?”
“Need two more arms, Destiny.” She cast a worried glance at the street-front window. “Or a way to make my new cashier a little prompter.”
“Got the new flyers?” he asked.
Vivian Emory reached under the desk and brought out a box marked Qwik-Copy, five hundred Xeroxes of the new advertising stuff. She divided them between the kids. “Now, you be careful. And I don’t want you hanging around that coffee shop.”
She took a closer look at the girl. When Destiny shifted her eyes away, Vivian seemed to guess that something was wrong. Mom radar. “Destiny? What’s the problem?”
“No problem,” she said.
“Have you been over to the Inside Edge recently?”
“Not for weeks, Mrs. Emory.”
“There’s some kind of trouble going on over there, and I don’t want you involved.”
“Trouble?” Patrick asked. “What’s going on?”
Vivian busied her hands with folding and hanging, but her eyes were worried and distant. “Just a story I heard. Your friend over there—”
“Manny? Rowan Matthews’s kid?”
She nodded. “Yes. Manny got hurt last night. He’s over at Mercy.” Queen of Mercy was Claremont’s town hospital, built by the mill owners back in the thirties.
“What happened?” Manny went to Cowlitz High, competed statewide on the wrestling team, and was karate whiz Trask Matthews’s younger brother. Manny was tough, and good-looking in a toothy, Jake Busey kind of way. He was a Baja Bug racer, always good for a short loan or a dirty limerick.
“Some kind of accident. Maybe.” She seemed doubtful. “People are being kind of quiet.” A racing accident? The stripped-down, balloon-wheeled Volkswagens called “Baja Bugs” could flip out on the beach where the older kids raced every weekend. It wouldn’t be the first time … but something in his mother’s face told him he was thinking in the wrong direction. “You aren’t passing out flyers for them, are you?”
“Not right now,” he said. Two months before, a once-famous folk singer had played a little gig at the Edge. Patrick and his friends had earned a few dollars stuffing leaflets under windshield wipers, and helped the coffee house pack the room.
“I don’t want to have to worry about you. All right?”
“I won’t go anywhere near it,” he said.
Vivian looked at him, and then at Destiny. For a moment it looked as if she wanted to challenge him, and then she nodded. “Good. Well, back to work. Say ‘Hi’ to your mother, Destiny.”
“I will, Mrs. Emory.” Under Vivian Emory’s doubtful eye, they scooted out the door, carrying a load of leaflets.
Out in the parking lot, Destiny pressed her handful of flyers against her chest and challenged Patrick. “Do you think we should have lied to your mother?” Her voice said that she already had an answer to the question.
He shrugged. “Do nothing which is of no use,” he said.
“Do not think dishonestly,” she countered.
“I wasn’t thinking dishonestly,” he said defensively. “I knew I was lying. Just seemed the right thing to do.”
“You’re such a shit sometimes.” Destiny twirled her bike’s combination. She tossed her hair at him in a way that made him want to hit her and kiss her all at the same time. Honestly, she was just a girl, after all. There wasn’t anything to get all excited about.
Before anything could be said that couldn’t be unsaid, Destiny hiked herself up on her bike and zipped past him. “Tag!” she said. “You’re it!”
And they went whooping off together, down the concrete walkway between the shops.
5
Vivian Emory’s client was Mrs. Lolly Schmeer, a middle-aged lady with a fine, unlined face, a head of unbleached blond hair and a Tae-Bo body. Her husband Kiefer taught history at the junior high school, and was generally considered the dullest human being still sufficiently animated to draw breath. Vivian’s husband Otis had never warmed to Kiefer, but Lolly was one of Vivian’s best friends.
Lolly returned from behind the slatted white dressing room door with the Morticia costume on a hanger. “I like this costume, but could you raise the neckline a bit?”
“I’m sure I can,” Vivian replied, and immediately began to plan her modification. The Addams costume was one of her favorites, a slinky, delicate piece of work, jet-black silk and cotton with fur trim at wrists and throat, fully fit for either Halloween or Friday the 13th. Neither was looming on the horizon, and she had an instinct about the aerobicized Lolly Schmeer.
She ran her fingers along the costume’s neckline. Yes, she knew just the scrap of fabric. “No problem. You want this by Thursday?” She jotted the note on a scrap of paper. “Costume party?”
Mrs. Schmeer giggled. “No. Sometimes I just like to surprise Kiefer. Our therapist said it would put some spice back into our marriage.” She was turning a lovely beet red as she said it.
“The plural of spouse,” Vivian offered.
Lolly stared at her blankly. “What?”
“Spice. The plural of spouse.” Lolly blinked, and then gave the horselaugh Vivian found disconcerting and endearing at the same time. “Never mind. You go on there, girl,” Vivian said. “You might try the Teknique makeup base, though,” she said, and put a bit of a growl into her voice. “It’s edible.”
There was a bit more girlish giggling, and some negotiations, after which money changed hands.
Vivian Emory sighed heavily. She was thirty-three years old, looked five years younger and felt ten years older. She loved her son, and her work, but every month it seemed harder to repress the sense that life was passing her by, like a train pulling out of a station. Moving slowly at first but gaining momentum with every empty day, rocketing along immovable rails toward a predetermined future.
There was the shop, which she had purchased from Mrs. Weatherly after six years’ hard apprenticeship, performing the lion’s share of the needlework. Mrs. Weatherly’s retirement had been perfect timing, really. Vivian had always loved sewing, had learned it from her mother and aunt and grandfather (a master tailor), who had bought dolls for her to dress and collect for every birthday from her third to sixteenth.
And there was her very nearly ex-husband Otis, once the best right tackle Claremont High had ever seen. So her husband had earned his varsity letter, and the hand of the lightest-skinned black girl in Claremont. Pretty enough to turn heads in any part of town, and light-skinned enough that her own mother, who was similarly colored, had once whispered to her that she was lucky not to have to make “the worst decision in the whole damned world,” namely, whether or not to pass for white.
The glory days of Claremont High varsity pigskin were far behind Otis now. When high school ended he had been forced to choose between a small midwestern college (the only scholarship offered), and a job at the mill. Kansas meant the academic grind, maybe a degree in Phys. Ed., and a teaching job down the road. There would be no pro ball: bad knees were an Emory family curse. And leaving Claremont m
eant leaving Vivian.
Working the mill meant floating his kidneys at Brogan’s bar after work, still seeing his friends every day. Maybe landing a cushy desk job somewhere down the line.
The mill won by a length. Claremont Mill, built at the turn of the century by a man with the unlikely name of Enobarbus Claremont, was a place where half the old football team still hung together, remembering the glory days, still trying to pretend that time had not moved on, as it had. As it always did.
If Vivian was satisfied to live in the trailer park, satisfied to live the life that had thrilled her when she was a young girl just out of high school, everything might have been fine. But she wasn’t, and it wasn’t. There was more to life than that.
And that yearning for something more had eventually destroyed their marriage. She had to confess: there’d been no real feelings of love for Otis for almost two years, although for Patrick’s sake she hadn’t quite admitted the truth until just four months ago, when Otis’s drinking went from bad to worse, and she finally had an excuse to kick him out.
Some day soon, just as soon as she could work up the courage, she was going to demand a divorce.
She examined the costume dropped off by a twenty-something Beefhouse waitress. It was a fine thing, a bangled and tassled Sheena Queen of the Jungle miracle of thrift-store ingenuity. Part zebra, part lion, and part Raquel Welch One Million B.C. peep show. One might easily have thought it a custom piece designed by Broadway wizards with all of the resources of a major theater company.
Vivian Emory had a gift, and upon that foundation she had built her life. When she first worked for the Weatherlys, she was a shy, fragile junior high school girl, with nimble fingers and a mind surpassing theirs in agility. She had cleaned shop for her employers, sewn repairs for them, and in time they had let her construct minor pieces. Once that threshold was passed, she was on her way. Because if there was a single area where Vivian’s genius manifested most completely, it was in the minor miracle of turning trash into treasures.
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