All the lights were on, the television in the den was blaring, and the CD player in the kitchen was blaring Erin’s current favorite music, some sort of gangster rap whose nasty lyrics made the large vein in Mary Bliss’s forehead throb in indignation.
She walked through the house, switching off lights, the television, and the CD player. She set the burglar alarm in the kitchen, put some dirty dishes in the dishwasher, and turned it on.
The bedroom was dark. She could just see the green glow of the clock radio. Twelve-thirty. She felt her way to the closet, dropped her damp bathing suit and shorts in the hamper there, and pulled on a clean cotton nightgown.
In the bathroom, she brushed her teeth and creamed her face with moisturizers, frowning at the memory of Katharine’s wrinkled neck. Mary Bliss’s mother’s skin had been magnolia-smooth until she was in her fifties, until the time the cancer began eating its way through her body and her skin grew translucent and waxen yellow. Mary Bliss peered into the mirror, to see if she could find any trace of her mother there. Her eyes were certainly Mama’s—hazel-green, dark-lashed, with surprisingly strong, dark eyebrows.
But the nose was Daddy’s—stubby, no-nonsense, a workingman’s nose—her lips full and lush, Harker lips, her mother informed her, pursing her own narrow lips, a sign that Harker lips were not a desirable family trait.
Erin was a McGowan through and through, everybody said. Meemaw had peered through the glass in the Piedmont Hospital nursery and just crowed with delight at the sight of her long, narrow granddaughter. “Look at those feet! She’s got her daddy’s feet for sure.”
Mary Bliss never said as much, but she’d done a complete inventory and found several of her own family traits in her infant daughter—the folds of her ear, the long neck, the high forehead, even Mary Bliss’s own thick, dark hair. She’d watched anxiously as Erin grew and changed, anxious that those small traces of Mary Bliss’s own family, all dead and gone now, would remain in her own child.
She switched off the bathroom light and made her way easily to her side of the bed. She pulled back the sheets on the big four-poster bed. No pillows. She smiled to herself. Parker had stolen them again. He was such a pillow hog.
“Honey?” she whispered tentatively. She pulled herself close to the warm, drowsing form in the middle of the bed. “Park? You awake?”
But the smell was all wrong. Perfume instead of antiperspirant. And long, thick hair, curled over a bare shoulder.
“Mommy?” Erin’s voice was groggy. “Where’s Daddy?”