by Cathy Lamb
“I think I’ll be in.”
“Splendid.” She high-fived me. “I love the vengeful side of myself.”
“The boat sank.”
“What?”
“The boat sank with our order on it,” Lacey said, her red curls bopping, face flushed. “The crew was rescued by an American tanker going by, but all of the merchandise is gone. Sunk. Drowned. Bottom of the sea. The bras may end up on the coast of New Zealand or China or Greenland one day, or a shark may be caught with our push-up bra wrapped around its chest. Does a shark have a chest? An octopus may be able to poke his tendril things into our thongs, but women will never wear that shipment.”
I stood up and leaned my head against the cool window of my office. Mount Hood was invisible in the distance. It was raining. It was getting colder. Soon it would be ski season. I would not be skiing. I wish Mount Hood would quit reminding me of that.
Lacey leaned back, her hands above her hips. “Shoot, shoot, shoot.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Me either. It wasn’t the whole order, though. We’ll have more come in, not a complete disaster.”
I was trying to save Lace, Satin, and Baubles.
I had a sunken ship. We were literally a sinking lingerie ship. I did not miss the sad irony.
I went to the mini fridge in my office. “I wish you could share this beer with me, Lacey.”
“Hayden!” I stood up to hug Lacey’s second-oldest child when he ambled into my office. “Now my day is wonderful.”
“Hey, Aunt Meggie!” He gave me a huge hug.
“It’s good to see you.” Hayden was wearing sky blue pants, white tennis shoes, and a white shirt. His brown hair was back in its usual ponytail, highlighting his delicate features. I felt myself getting all choked up. This was the kid who said he felt like killing himself. “How ya doin’?”
“I’m doing okay.” He looked me in the eye, then down. I felt bad. There was no reason for him to look down when he looked at me, or anyone else. “Mom told you about me, right?”
“Yes. I love you as a boy or girl, Hayden. Always have, always will.”
He sniffled, wiped his cheeks. He has the prettiest blue eyes. “Thanks, Aunt Meggie, I figured you would understand.”
“I do.” I did. A little bit I didn’t. I was struggling. You can’t accept that your nephew is your niece overnight. These things take time. It’s not the easiest thing. I stopped for a minute. If it was hard for me to fully understand, how had it been for poor Hayden?
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when you first came home, Aunt Meggie, that I’ve waited all this time, but you know I love you.”
“Hayden, it’s for you to tell me, or anyone else, for that matter, when you want to. This is your business. Come and sit down, sweets.”
After some prodding, and a few more tears from those blue eyes, he opened up. “I’ve always been a girl in my head, you know, Aunt Meggie. I didn’t want to be a boy. I remember I cried looking at my penis when I was three and I realized Cassidy didn’t have one. I didn’t want that there. I wanted to look like a girl. It was like this thing hanging between my legs, it felt weird, like it was in the wrong place, wrong body. . . . I’ve always felt in my head, like, I’m a lie.”
“You’re not a lie, Hayden. You are who you are. You were born a boy physically, but you are a girl. I’m sorry, honey, for everything you’ve been through, all this pain, the confusion, the stress . . .” And please don’t kill yourself, honey. Please. Oh, please.
“I haven’t worked out what I’m going to do. I’ve been thinking about switching schools and going to the new school as a girl, but I don’t know. With Facebook and Twitter the kids at the new school would probably find out anyhow. And I like my friends here, even though everybody thinks I’m gay.” His voice cracked. “I feel like I can’t hide myself any longer and myself is a girl, you know? I have to act like a boy and I’m not a boy. I hate the secret. I hate that I have to hide my own self every day just because other people can’t handle who I am. Does that make sense?”
“Yes. You’re an exceptionally brave person, Hayden.”
“Thanks. I don’t feel brave. Mostly I feel scared to death. I have two and a half more years of high school, and I don’t want to get beaten up all the time.”
I put my arm around his shoulders. “Take karate.”
He laughed, as I knew he would. “Yeah, karate. I can be a girl who karate chops anyone in her way.”
“Not a bad way to be, is it?”
He laughed. “Nope. It’s not.”
“I love you, Hayden.” Please. Not another thought about killing yourself. Never, please.
“Thanks, Aunt Meggie. I love you, too.”
“Tell me what you’re working on right now for the company.”
His eyes lit up. “I’ve got the best idea for this frilly nightgown. You wanna see it? I sketched it out in drama class. It’ll be fabulous, conforms to curves but lets a woman move to her own beat, too.”
Hayden is a gifted, rockin’ designer. He has an instinctive knowledge of what women want to wear when they go to bed. And no, it’s not all sexy. Most of it is comfortable, fun, and in Hayden’s words “snazzy and adorable.”
I saw the designs. I laughed. They were perfect.
Hayden thinks like a woman. I hugged him.
Honey, please don’t kill yourself. Nothing on earth is worth that. I could not live through it.
We love you. With everything we have, we love you.
Tory can be torrentially vengeful, and the revenge she planned against Scotty because he had the temerity to take a woman out on a date was, in her words, “phallically mind altering.”
“I’m not going to tell you what I’m doing, Meggie. It’s a secret. My horoscope said I would surprise even myself, and I have. You and Lacey will get a front-row seat to my deliciously medieval and evil plan.” Tory sat on top of the conference table and shifted pink silk from one hand to the other. Lacey lay back on the pink fainting couch, looking ill. Her stomach grew by the day. I put my ratty tennis shoes up and leaned back in my chair.
“How is it deliciously medieval?” I asked.
“Let’s say it’s a long lick and it sucks and leave it at that.”
“No one, like Scotty, is going to die, are they?” Lacey asked, an ice pack on her head, but she didn’t seem that worried.
“Nope. I promise. If he died, I wouldn’t be able to be deliciously medieval again and that would ruin my future revenges. You’ll both come?”
I liked Scotty. Tory would be hell to live with. She’s temperamental, difficult, and constantly needs Scotty to prove he loves her, adores her, and will never leave. She has deep-seated abandonment issues, which anyone who knows her story understands. Even Scotty understands.
She has a happy family one day, living with parents who adore her, and the next day, at five years old, she has no family, lost in a bloody, mangled car wreck, in which she’s a passenger. Her parents are dead and she’s an orphan. In her young mind, she’s been abandoned.
I remember when Tory came to live with us in my mother’s Snow White house. She slept in my bed, or Lacey’s bed, or our mother’s bed, each night for a year and cried. She clutched a purple dinosaur from her father and a yellow lion from her mother. She still has them.
My guess is that Scotty is utterly exhausted by Tory continually slamming out of their house and having to beg her to come back. He probably wants to see if she does love him and if she’s mature enough to work things out. I don’t blame him.
But Tory’s my sister, so I’ll stand by her. Besides, I was most definitely curious about the deliciously medieval and evil plan. “I’ll go with you,” I said.
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Lacey said, putting an ice pack over her face. “I bore my own self to death and this will add excitement to my life.”
I hoped the medieval and evil plan did not end in any arrests.
8
“Lance, can I talk to y
ou?”
“Sure, Meggie. Hey, how you doin’? Are you all still coming to Sarah’s birthday party on Saturday?”
I assured him that all of us, including Grandma, but not my mother, as she was still on her book tour, would be there.
“Great! Can’t wait! Your mom already called me. She sent Sarah a five-foot-tall dollhouse. Sarah loves it. I’m barbequing. Some of my army pals are coming, too. Bart recently was released from the hospital, lost his left leg, below the knee, from a bomb outside of Kandahar, but he’s up and at ’em, his wife says. You remember Bart from high school?”
I sure did. “Lance, I have a delicate and difficult question to ask you. . . .”
Hey. My name is Lance Turner.
Meggie asked me to be on this video for Lace, Satin, and Baubles, so I’m gonna do it because Meggie and I go way back, but man. Talking about bras? I’m a man. I don’t wear bras. I’m a real man. Hunting. Fishing. Football. Army. I’m an army man. A veteran.
But my wife wears pretty bras. Like pink. Blue. I don’t let her wear no white bras, though. Never. NO white bras. Not in my house, not on her. She does what I tell her on that. She knows why I don’t like it.
I like when she doesn’t wear a bra at all. She’s got the best rack. Yeah, you should show Marina this video. Hey, Marina, no bras, wife, okay? I mean, when the wife’s at home, why does she wear one? Probably the kids. She wants to look proper.
She’s the best wife, and it’s not easy being married to me with all my Afghanistan problems and flashbacks. I’ve suffered from depression, anger, anxiety, panic attacks. Shit, all of it.
But Marina, man, she knows what to do with me. I start getting uptight, my thoughts go crazy fast, I’m restless, I’m angry, she wraps her arms around me and gives me a hug, and a lot of times I get way more than a hug. She’s way friggin’ better than the counseling I was getting. That guy, he didn’t get it. He’d never even served. Made me feel like I was a specimen to study, not a man.
Marina knows I need some lovin’, her lasagna, the kids running around, that’s what’s getting me better. And the job here. No kidding. Your grandma she . . . okay, this is embarrassing. I shouldn’t start crying over your grandma, Meggie. She saved my life when she let me live with her during high school. You know she did. Give me a minute off camera. Shut it off for a sec. Embarrassing to be crying. I’m a man. . . .
Okay, I’m back. So you want a bra story for your video? I got a story about a bra. And it makes me angry. Pisses me off. It’s about a woman I saw in Afghanistan. We had a mission. It was late, dark, we were in a village. We’d heard that the enemy was convening at a house. So we’ve got all our gear on, guns are ready, and we blast into this house. Two of the men stand up and start shooting, so we shoot back.
When the dust clears, those men are full of holes, one of our guys is down and bleeding, and there are two kids and two women dead. The other women and kids are screaming and holding each other. One of the women who died, her burqa was ripped open and I could see her bra. It was pretty. Had all this lace. Bright white. Totally clean, you know? Except for the blood. The blood on that white bra. I’ll never forget it. Bright red blood, some black in there, too. One of her kids crawled up on her, crying, getting blood all over herself. The kid was probably three.
So we killed a mother. A mother. Damn. Sorry. Trying not to cry here. I regret so friggin’ much. The guys who shot back, yeah, they were terrorists. Early twenties. But they don’t know better there. There’s no education. All they do is read the Koran in school and shout, “Down with America.” That hatred is programmed. Girls are smothered. They follow some violent leader.
I try to shut off what happened over there, but I can’t. All the stuff happening in front of my eyes, the bombs and gunfire, all that I took part in because I was told it had to be done. I still hear it, still smell it, still feel it. But this is what I know: War kills whatever is in its path. It’s a killing of the body and a killing of the mind. See what happened to my head? See that dent?
We can’t force another country to change. We can’t force Iraq and Afghanistan to be us. They don’t want to be us. They hate us. We can’t force them to be modern and normal. They don’t want to be modern. They don’t know what normal is.
What we need to do is get out of there so other men aren’t haunted by a dead mother’s white bra stained with blood and her kid climbing on top of her screaming. That’s what we need to do. And that’s why my wife is not allowed to wear a white bra. Any other color, okay. Or, no bra. I think I said I like it when she wears no bra a minute ago, but I can’t remember. She can’t wear white.
That’s what I know about bras, Meggie. I feel like I’m gonna have another panic attack thinking about that mother. That’s war for you. She wasn’t a threat to us, but we were to her, and a bunch of kids have no mom now in Afghanistan. My kids have a mom who makes lasagna. Did I say that Marina bakes lasagna? But that mom won’t cook anymore for her kids. How fair is that?
Yeah, I’m crying again, so we gotta end this video now, Meggie. Right now. Tell your grandma I love her when you see her. I told her yesterday, but you tell her today. Are you coming to Sarah’s party on Saturday?
9
Lacey, Tory, and I met at my tree house on Sunday evening. It was a clear night, the moon gold and orange, the leaves hugging my house starting to turn butter yellow and scarlet red.
We drove out to Tory’s ex-home. I took my dull gray car and Tory took her car, a Porsche like Grandma’s, in case Lacey became tired and needed to leave. Tory’s home is on an acre plot in the country with white flowering cherry trees lining a long drive to the front door. Her ex, Scotty, was not home, but he would be in a few hours. He was on a business trip and his plane was arriving late.
Tory’s yellow home with white gingerbread trim all over, the one she’d slammed out of months ago, was true country style, down to the white picket fence. A white deck surrounded the front of the house, with five rocking chairs and a porch swing. She had a polygonal tower, a red front door with a glass oval cut out in the middle, and three dormer windows.
We squished into Tory’s Porsche in the driveway as she declared, “I hate Scotty.”
I held her hand.
“It was Scotty who wanted to live in the country. He loves the smell of his lavender and his tomatoes and carrots and lettuce and corn and stupid cucumbers. He loves that vegetable garden. We could have fed half of Asia. I married a farmer. Farmer Scotty, I called him. Mean man. And look at my house! I don’t get to live in my house anymore!”
“You left him and the house,” Lacey said.
“Are you sure you want to take revenge on him?” I said. “Maybe you should take him to dinner.”
“He’s already dating some other slut girl. Of course I’m sure!”
“By the way, Tory,” Lacey said. “How did you even know he had a date?”
“Because.” Tory had that stubborn expression on her face.
“Because . . .” I prompted.
“Because I know these things.”
“Someone told you?” Lacey said.
“I know these things, spiritually. I’m a Pisces. We’re intuitive. Almost prophetic. We feel things in the air, in others’ auras.”
“Ah.” It clicked. “You knew he was going out on a date because you’re a spiritual Pisces. That explains it perfectly.”
“You’re still stalking him, aren’t you?” Lacey said.
“I’m not stalking him.” She slammed a hand on the steering wheel. “I drive by the house sometimes to make sure it’s okay and to make sure no other woman is cooking in my kitchen. My kitchen, my copper pans. I designed it and I don’t want her in there.”
“I think he asked you to stop stalking him, didn’t he?” I said, but I knew the answer.
“He said if you’re going to stalk me, come home. He should be begging me. And what? He’s the boss of me? My revenge will make him think twice before he goes out on another date with a bimbo slut doctor.�
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“How do you know she’s a doctor?” I asked.
Tory glanced away. “I already said. I know because I’m a Pisces and smart with auras.”
“And the truth is?” Lacey said.
Tory tried to appear self-righteous, then gave in grumpily. “I introduced myself to his date at the French restaurant.”
“You what?” Lacey asked.
I sucked in my breath and pictured that pretty little scene. Scotty and the woman sitting down in some fancy candlelit place. Tory appearing, like a squawking bat out of hell. “You must be joking. No, of course you’re not. You stalked him. You waited for him to leave his house, you followed him to the restaurant, you watched him meet another woman, and you went and sat down at their table and said hello.”
“I’m friendly,” Tory said, chin out.
“Ah, yes. That’s the word we would all use to describe you,” Lacey said. “Along with demure and shy. Did you do anything else at the table?”
“I ordered shrimp. I like shrimp.”
“You sat at their table, with them, and ordered shrimp,” I confirmed. “Did Scotty ask you to leave?”
“Yes, he did.” Her brows drew together.
“And you didn’t,” Lacey said.
“No. His eyes were sad and I didn’t want to leave him sad. Plus, I wanted to tell the bimbo slut doctor what I thought of her.”
“Oh. You. Didn’t.” Lacey slapped a hand to her forehead.
“And you told her . . .” I said.
“I told her that Scotty was still married, and the stethoscope Barbie nodded and said she knew that we were separated. I told her that I thought her boobs were fake, that mine were much better, that her nose went off at a slant, she seemed uptight, and I didn’t like the color she was wearing.”
“What color was she wearing?” I asked.
“Red. It wasn’t her color. She looked like a blood clot.”
“You didn’t tell her that.”
Tory nodded. “I did.”