Picture Perfect

by D. Anne Love

  Picture Perfect

  Also by D. Anne Love

  Semiprecious

  The Secret Prince

  The Puppeteer’s Apprentice

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by D. Anne Love

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Book design by Krista Vossen

  The text for this book is set in Baskerville.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Love, D. Anne.

  Picture perfect / D. Anne Love.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: When her mother leaves her family suddenly to take a new job, fourteen-year-old Phoebe tries to deal with her own confused feelings and, in the process, learns some things about love and the complicated ties that bind families together.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-87390-4 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 0-689-87390-5 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-442-40725-1

  [1. Family problems—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Family life—Texas—Fiction. 4. High schools—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction. 6. Texas—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.L9549Pic 2007

  [Fic]—dc22

  2006003508

  For Sarah

  Heartfelt thanks once again to the entire creative team at McElderry Books, and to my agent, Maria Carvainis.

  A week after my fourteenth birthday my mother, who sold lipsticks, moisturizers, and soaps for Bee Beautiful Cosmetics, submitted the winning entry in the company’s product-naming contest for a new conditioner. Like all of the Bee Beautiful products, it featured honey as a main ingredient. Besides the honey it was chock-full of vitamins and natural herbals and was supposed to tame even the most unruly head of hair. Mama named it “Bee-have!” The president of the company called Mama to give her the good news, and after that she was on her way to the annual Bee Beautiful convention in Las Vegas, all expenses paid.

  I went with my daddy and my brother, Zane, to take Mama to the airport. My sister Shyla, a chronic overachiever who had set a goal of becoming the youngest lawyer in Texas, was at the university down in Austin, churning out her prelaw course credits and working as a barista at Jazz-n-Java, a coffeehouse on Sixth Street that Shyla said was interesting as all get-out due to the clientele. On any given night she might be serving double espressos to state senators, local musicians, cross-dressing head cases, or aging hippies who had moved to Austin way back in the 1960s and never left.

  “It’s too bad Shyla couldn’t come,” Mama said as we neared the airport. “I miss my girl.”

  Mama looked prettier than ever in her Bee Beautiful makeup and a jonquil yellow suit with a sparkling diamond bee pin on the lapel, the prize she’d won the year before for selling more Bee Beautiful products than any other beauty consultant in Texas. And despite missing my sister, Mama seemed all keyed up and thrilled to pieces to be heading off for her prize trip.

  “Shyla will be home in a couple of weeks,” Daddy reminded her. We pulled into the short-term parking lot. Daddy parked the car, and he and Zane dragged Mama’s four oversize suitcases to the baggage check-in.

  “Jeez, Mom,” Zane complained as the suitcases rumbled and bumped over the walkway, “how come you need so much stuff? You’d think you were going away forever.”

  Mama laughed. “Five days is a long time when you need outfits for half a dozen meetings and dinners.”

  We got to the baggage check-in. Mama showed her e-ticket receipt and her ID to the attendant, who tagged her bags, handed her a boarding pass, and wished her a good flight.

  “Well,” Mama said to us, “I guess this is it.”

  Daddy kissed her cheek, being careful not to smear her makeup. “Have fun, Beth. You deserve it.”

  “Oh, I’m going to have a fabulous time!” Mama said, pulling Zane close. “Zane, honey, you look after your sister, and don’t drive that car too fast.”

  “I won’t.” Zane squirmed away before Mama could kiss him.

  She pointed her finger at him, and I recognized the shade of her nail polish. Reckless Rose. It had arrived in the April shipment of Bee Beautiful products along with Tangy Tangerine and Perfectly Peach. “Remember to fasten your seat belt. Every single time, Zane. I mean it.”

  “O-kay! I’m not an idiot.”

  “I know. But you haven’t been driving all that long. It doesn’t hurt to be reminded.”

  She turned to me. “Phoebe darling, I’m just as sorry as I can be to miss the mother-daughter tea, but I promise to make it up to you if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Pulling me close, she kissed the top of my head. I leaned into her, closed my eyes, and breathed in the familiar smells of Bee Beautiful perfume and breath mints. If I had known what was about to happen, I’d have held on to that moment a little longer, but I pulled away and said, “Bye, Mama. See you next Saturday.”

  Daddy said, “Beth, you’d better go. The security line is getting long, and you don’t want to miss your plane.”

  I stood there with Daddy and Zane, smiling and waving until my arm about fell off. Mama stepped onto the escalator and rode up to the departure area, leaving behind nothing but the faint scent of her perfume.

  Daddy took Zane and me to lunch at a steak place near the airport, and we drove home to Eden, never dreaming that all our lives were about to be changed forever.

  The following Thursday, Mama called and said the big shots at Bee Beautiful wanted her to stay a little longer to talk about a wonderful opportunity, and that she’d be home in another week. When that week stretched into two weeks, Daddy tried to pretend that she’d come rolling into Eden at any moment and everything would go back to normal. But after Mama called again to say she’d accepted a fabulous job in Las Vegas as a national Bee Beautiful spokeswoman, and to please box up her clothes and send them out, he stopped pretending.

  That afternoon I found him sitting on the floor in the middle of their bedroom, Mama’s shoes and skirts, and the fur jacket he’d given her last Christmas, piled around him, looking so bewildered, so full of hurt and loss, that I wanted to cry. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my mother a lot, but ask anybody in Eden and they will tell you I’ve been a daddy’s girl from the get-go. Even Mama herself said that Shyla was her girl but I belonged to Daddy. She said that when I was a baby, I’d sit in my high chair and cry for him after he left for work in the morning. Maybe I could tell even then that I’d grow up to be tall like him and somewhat of a natural on the basketball court. I lost interest in playing in seventh grade and hadn’t gone out for a team since, but I still loved hanging out with Dad and watching his beloved Chicago Bulls on TV. even if they weren’t quite the same after Phil Jackson left to coach the Lakers and Michael Jordan retired to star in commercials for hot dogs and underwear. Basketball was the way we connected; it was the part of Daddy that was all mine.

  He patted the floor and motioned me down beside him. “Hey, Feebs.”

  “Hey, Daddy.” Ever since my twelfth birthday I’d been trying to train him to stop calling me Feebs and use my real name, but under the circumstances I wasn’t going
to correct him.

  He picked up Mama’s jacket. “Remember last year? Remember how she pretended to faint when she opened the box on Christmas morning?”

  Of course I remembered, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to remember anything.

  “She’ll come back,” I said. “Once she gets Las Vegas out of her system.”

  “Yeah,” Daddy said, even though he didn’t believe it either. “This spokeswoman job is good for your mother. She’s been feeling sad lately.”

  “Lately” was really the two whole years since Shyla had graduated from Eden High and moved to Austin. My sister was nineteen now, and Mama could see her firstborn going out to meet her future, moving farther and farther away. More than once I’d wanted to tell her that me and Zane were still here trying to survive teenhood and needed her more than the überstudent Shyla ever had. But I hadn’t said anything, and now Mama was gone for who knew how long.

  I helped Daddy fold Mama’s things, and we got some boxes from the attic and packed everything up. Then he went into his study, where he kept his law journals and casebooks, and shut the door.

  Now it was June. School was out for the summer and Mama was still gone, still running around all over the country teaching other women how easy it was to Bee Beautiful.

  There wasn’t much to do in the summer in Eden, Texas. Zane and I planned to spend our vacation driving around in the ten-year-old Ford my daddy the judge had given Zane for his sixteenth birthday, swimming at the lake, and just hanging out while we waited to grow up so our real lives could begin.

  Daddy spent most of his time downtown in his courtroom, where he had developed a reputation for sorting out all kinds of disagreements. People said that no matter how complicated and messy a case became, Sumner Trask could think on it and figure out what should be done to make things right. But when his wife went AWOL, leaving him to deal with two teenagers all by himself, he was at a total loss. I guess it’s always easier to fix other people’s problems than your own.

  It was a hot Saturday and I was home alone. Daddy was playing golf with a couple of lawyers, and Zane was down at Threadgill’s Garage, supposedly repairing the dents in the Ford, but I suspected it was mostly to hang out with Mr. Threadgill’s daughter, Ginger. She was in Zane’s class at school and had been our neighbor until last year, when her daddy moved them to a house out on the Dallas highway to be closer to the garage. Ginger was a strawberry blonde, not fat, but not thin, either. I guess you’d say she was solid. Zane said she could fix a flat tire without even breaking a sweat and was the only girl he knew who could explain rack and pinion steering, or tell the difference between a socket wrench and a screwdriver.

  I made myself a glass of iced tea and took it out to the porch. The full weight of summer in Eden was settling in; cicadas whirred in the trees, the air was heavy and still. Normally I loved summer, but this year, with Mama Lord-knew-where, Shyla consumed with her prelaw summer school classes, and Lauren Braithwaite, who had been my best friend since third grade, living in Atlanta because her dad had taken a new job there, I was left to face the entire summer without anyone who understood what it was like to be a fourteen-year-old girl.

  A black car pulled into the driveway of the vacant house next door, where our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Archer, had lived until she broke her hip and had to go stay with her daughter in Houston. Now there was a FOR SALE sign in the weedy yard, and I’d made a habit of checking out the potential buyers. I watched as a real estate saleslady ushered her client up the front steps and unlocked the door. I was ready for something exciting to happen. I hoped that whoever moved into Mrs. Archer’s house would shake things up and change my life.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Another boring Saturday arrived. Daddy got up early to take the Lincoln to Threadgill’s for an oil change. Zane left for a swim meet right after Dad, banging the door on his way out, gunning the Ford’s engine as he pulled onto the street. After they left, I switched on the TV and flipped through the channels while I ate a bowl of Wheat-O’s, but there was nothing on except cartoons and a gloom-and-doom announcer talking about the death of more soldiers in Iraq. I don’t know why the news always has to be so negative. Just once I’d like a day in which nobody gets shot, no kids go missing, and no country starts the morning off by blowing another one to kingdom come.

  A delivery truck pulled into our driveway. The driver got out and unloaded a bunch of bright yellow boxes. Mama’s monthly shipment of Bee Beautiful products had arrived. I went out to the porch, signed for them, and carried them into the hall. The sight of those boxes made me miss her so much I could hardly stand it.

  I left the Bee Beautiful invoice on her desk in the den. The phone rang and I picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Good morning!” said a woman in the relentlessly cheerful voice required of all Bee Beautiful consultants. “I’d like to speak to Beth Trask.”

  “Me too,” I said, and hung up.

  Just then a commotion started up outside, and I went out to the porch. A moving van had pulled up in front of Mrs. Archer’s house, and right behind it was a baby blue convertible piled high with suitcases.

  A pretty, dark-haired woman wearing an enormous pair of sunglasses, pink shorts, a white blouse, and sneakers got out of the car. She ran up to Mrs. Archer’s door, unlocked it, and motioned to the men in the van. They started carrying in furniture: a white sofa, a couple of yellow-and-white-striped chairs, and a coffee table with a glass top that reflected the blazing Texas sun.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” said a honeyed voice that made me jump. I’d been so intent on watching the furniture parade I hadn’t noticed that the woman had crossed the yard and was standing at the bottom of our porch steps. She pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head and smiled up at me. She had a killer tan and eyes the color of violets. She looked so perfect that it was hard not to stare.

  “Ma’am?”

  She swept one arm toward Mrs. Archer’s porch, which was now buried under a mountain of boxes. “Amazing how much stuff a person accumulates in a lifetime. I don’t need half of it, but I couldn’t bear to throw it out.” She held out her hand. “Beverly Grace.”

  “Hi.” I shook hands with the woman with two first names. “Phoebe Trask.”

  “Phoebe! What a beautiful name.” She looked past my shoulder. “Is your mother home? I’d like to meet her.”

  “She isn’t here.”

  “Too bad. I was hoping she could give me some advice on where to shop. I’ve been out of the country for so long I’m out of touch with all things American.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Italy. A little town just outside Florence.” Beverly shaded her eyes and watched the moving men staggering up the porch steps with a stack of flat wooden crates. “Oh, I hope they don’t drop my paintings!”

  The men made it inside, and Beverly said, “They hate me.”

  “Who, the moving guys?”

  She nodded.

  “How come?”

  “Book cartons,” she said as the men returned to the truck for another load. “There’s nothing heavier than books. I gave away a ton of them before the move, but there were certain ones I couldn’t give up, you know?”

  I nodded. Up in my room was a complete set of Nancy Drew and Anne of Green Gables books I hadn’t cracked in years, but I liked knowing they were there in case I ever wanted to. Beverly leaned against the porch railing like she had nothing better to do. The moving men went back and forth, taking in box after box. When the house filled up, they started stacking boxes on the porch.

  “You want a soda or something?” I asked.

  “A soda would be lovely,” she said. “Thanks.”

  I went inside and got two cans of cola, filled our glasses with ice, and took everything outside on one of Mama’s white wicker serving trays. Beverly poured cola into her glass and took a long sip, watching me over the rim of her glass. I smoothed my hair and hoped I didn’t have a milk mustache or a piece
of dried cereal stuck to my face. I was dying to know why anybody would give up an exciting life in Italy to move to a nowhere town like Eden, but I didn’t want to be rude.

  Beverly rattled the ice in her glass and, like she could read my mind, said, “I was born in Fort Worth and lived there until I was ten. When my daddy died, my mother and I moved to Georgia to live with my grandparents. After college I worked in New York for a while and then moved to Italy.” She smiled. “When it was time to come home, I just felt like Texas was where I belonged.”

  “How come you picked Eden?” I asked.

  Just then the van driver waved a stack of yellow papers and yelled, “Hey, lady! We’re all done here.”

  Beverly handed me her glass and stood. “Will you excuse me, Phoebe? I need to write these guys a check. But I’d love to meet your mom later.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Later.”

  She ran back across the yard just as Daddy drove up and got out of the car. “Hi, hon. New neighbors?”

  “Her name is Beverly Grace.”

  Daddy watched Beverly take her purse from her car, then lean over the hood to write a check. Her silver pen flashed in the light. She said something to the van driver, and he laughed. Maybe I should have seen trouble coming then, from the way Daddy’s eyes followed her as she walked back to the house, but I didn’t.

  Beverly went inside, and Daddy unlocked the trunk of his car. “Help me with these groceries.”

  We carried everything in and later boiled hot dogs for lunch. After we ate, Daddy poured himself another glass of tea and switched on the TV. The Texas Rangers were playing an afternoon game; it was the top of the sixth inning, and they were up five runs to four. He scooted over to make room for me on the couch, but I never was much of a baseball fan because the game unfolds so slowly. I loved the quicker pace of basketball, where one fast break, one jump shot at the buzzer, can spell the difference between a loss and a win.

  “Where’s your brother?” he asked, fiddling with the remote.

  “Swim meet at the Y.”