“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” demanded her mother. “I could have made salad.”
“Mom, it’s okay. I don’t want salad. I had a cheeseburger at Rusty’s.”
“Cheeseburger! Don’t you know how much fat and salt they put in those things! No wonder you’ve put on so much weight.”
“Oh, thanks. I think I’ve lost a couple of pounds as a matter of fact.”
“You don’t come for three weeks and now you come and you don’t even tell me you’re coming.”
“Well, I’m here now. What are you complaining about?”
Mrs. Mulligan fussed around the living room, picking up TV Guides and plumping cushions. She shooed her ginger tomcat, Marcus, off the couch because she knew that Bonnie didn’t like it. The cat smelled rancid and had a terrible cackling hiss.
She was a short, full-figured woman, Mrs. Mulligan, with huge, white bouffant hair like a ball of cotton and tiny little hands and feet. She looked like Bonnie, if Bonnie were to blow out her cheeks and squeeze her eyes tightly shut. She lived in Reseda in a house that looked like every other house in Reseda: respectable, tidy, with a well-trimmed lawn and china ornaments on every available square inch of shelf. Bonnie’s late father looked down from the living room wall with a strangely unbalanced grin that always reminded Bonnie of Alfred E. Neuman. It was a canvas-effect photograph in a gilded frame, with his fire department medals framed below.
Bonnie’s five older brothers appeared in shoals of other framed photographs. Daryl when he graduated from the fire department academy. Robert when he got engaged to Nesta. Craig when he won the high school swimming trophy. Barry when he bought his first car. Richard when he broke his leg. Mark Hamill had signed the cast, and Mrs. Mulligan still had it in the garage.
The only picture of Bonnie was when she was twelve, at her first communion. Bonnie looked so sweet and innocent in her white silk dress that she could look at herself as a child now and she could almost cry for her. So trusting, so full of hope.
“The job I have to keep this place tidy,” said her mother. “Richard leaving his socks everywhere.”
“Mom, as usual, it’s immaculate.”
“You should have told me you were coming. I could have cleaned up.”
“Why doesn’t Richard put his own socks away?”
Her mother looked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. Socks? Richard? His own? Away put?
In the kitchen, Bonnie said, “I feel like going to Hawaii.” Her mother was arranging a plateful of butterscotch brownies and coconut squares. “Just me. By myself. I feel like packing a bag and going to Hawaii. I want to stand on a hill and watch a volcano erupting.”
“A volcano? What about your family?”
“What about me?”
Her mother carried the tray of coffee and cookies into the living room. “You shouldn’t have started that dreadful cleaning business. It’s not healthy.”
“It gives me satisfaction. It gives me the feeling that I’m making a difference.”
“What difference? It’s enough to make you feel ill.”
“Isn’t that a woman’s role in life? Cleaning up? Look at you. You’ve spent your entire adult life cleaning up.”
“Yes, but people’s bodies. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“I don’t clean up bodies, Mom. The coroner’s department does that. Well, sometimes I clean up bits of bodies. Hair, teeth, stuff like that. I found seven toes the other day, underneath a tumble dryer. Guy killed his girlfriend with a chainsaw.”
Her mother flapped her hand in disgust. “I don’t want to think about it. If that Duke would get up off his backside and find himself a job, you wouldn’t have to do it. By the way, how is Duke?”
“Pretty much the same. He went for an interview at the Century Plaza. Bar work.”
“I could never understand what you saw in that man.”
“I know you didn’t. You never stopped telling me. Even now you don’t stop telling me.”
“What about your other job? The cosmetics thing?”
“I think I lost it. Maybe it was too … menstrual.”
Bonnie’s mother stared at her. “I’m sure I don’t know what on God’s good earth you’re talking about sometimes, Bonnie Mulligan.”
Bonnie carefully set down her coffee cup. “Mom … what would you do if a rich and famous TV personality invited you to a party?”
“What? What are you talking about now? Party?”
Bonnie had promised herself that she wouldn’t tell anybody about Kyle Lennox because she desperately wanted to keep it a secret. She felt that, if she told her mother or Duke or Ray or any of her friends, it would turn out that she had misunderstood what Kyle Lennox said, or maybe the party would just turn out to be a big disappointment, with nobody famous there at all, and she would end up looking like a fool.
But she was so excited about it that she had to talk about it somehow, to somebody.
“A party. Like, you know, just some TV actors, and some TV producers, people like that. Not formal. Just a kind of a poolside thing. Champagne, maybe. Swimming.”
“Who’s going to invite me to anything like that?”
“A famous TV personality.”
“I don’t know any famous TV personalities.”
“I know. But supposing you did. Supposing you knew—I don’t know—Kyle Lennox?”
Her mother stared at her for a long time, steadily chewing a cookie with her false teeth. “I can’t understand a word, Bonnie. I swear to God.”
Bonnie looked up at the picture of her father with his cheesy smile. He had shot himself in the garage when Bonnie was fifteen and she could remember his blood being hosed down the driveway. And nobody had understood why.