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“I already struggle with the science. Like right now we’re learning all the bones, with all their divots and ridges and stuff. It’s excruciating and not coming easily to me,” Tabitha said. “And now I’m screwing up the massages. I’m starting to think I’m just not cut out for it.”Just like I’m not cut out for this bike shop, she didn’t add. She already knew Delaney had given her the job out of pity. No need to shine a spotlight.
“Sounds like the bonesarecoming easily to you,” Nora muttered as she collected today’s paperwork from the counter and started to file it away. “You’ll be the most requested massage girl in the county. I don’t see what the big problem is.”
Delaney stifled a laugh. “Don’t listen to her. Ask Red about it later. We have the Halloween party, remember?”
The party.Tabitha died a little inside. “Right. The party. Tonight.” But Delaney was right. Tonight she could ask Constance, “Red” for short, the famous massager of humans and dogs alike, about the erections. See what advice she had to give. She’d been the one to talk Tabitha into massage school in the first place, claiming Tabitha had a gift for connecting with people. She was connecting, all right. Just not in the way she meant to.
Delaney grinned and slapped her on the shoulder. “Go home and get some Smoosh Time with your dog, Steele. Rest up. We’ll figure out the boners later.”
The house was quiet when Tabitha got home. The kitchen was empty, devoid of supper smells, like shepherd’s pie or chicken and dumplings—two of Tabitha’s favorites, one of which she was sure Auntie El would’ve fixed for her birthday. Auntie’s crossword lay on the table, half-done, and her glasses rested in the little wooden holder Tabitha had bought her at a craft festival one Christmas.
“Auntie El?” Tabitha moved through the rooms, calling her name. “Auntie?”
Tabitha found the door to the den—converted to Auntie El’s bedroom a few years ago when she decided she was done climbing stairs on a daily basis—ajar. She poked her head in and saw Auntie El asleep on the bed, atop the covers, television running on a game show at low volume, curtains drawn to keep out most of the sunlight. Her chest rose and fell deeply. Tabitha backed out and pulled the door almost shut.
Well, it wasn’t like she was a five-year-old and needed to be entertained with a moon bounce and a piñata. Not that Tabitha had ever got those things on any birthday, but Auntie El usually at least made that chicken and dumplings and a pan of brownies with her age drawn in cheap tube icing.
Tabitha sighed. No big deal. She’d just have a sandwich before she got ready for the Halloween party. Auntie El loved to cook, and loved even more to make sure Tabitha ate good, healthy food, but lately she’d been cooking a little less and napping a lot more. She’d been eating less, too, now that Tabitha thought about it. Though Auntie El had never been a small woman, her clothes had been fitting a bit looser these past few months.
Tabitha stood outside the bedroom door, closed her eyes and listened to the silence. She could hear a clock ticking from the living room. The neighbor’s dog was yapping in the yard. Auntie El’s television program was ending, the theme song playing while the audience cheered. Tabitha opened her eyes again and brushed aside the gnawing feeling in her gut.
She went up to her room, pulled her Dorothy costume out of her closet and tossed it on the bed. There was still a chance to back out of going to this party. Who would really care if she was there or not? But then Tabitha thought about spending the evening sitting on the couch with her dog, worrying whether or not everything was okay with Auntie El.
She stripped off her clothes and took the gingham dress from the hanger. Might as well put on another costume. Navy chaplain’s assistant. Massage student. Motorcycle shop cashier. Dorothy. Auntie El’s adopted daughter.
They were all costumes in Tabitha’s world. Just Tabitha, pretending to be someone else for a while. Putting on hats, sliding on skins, hiding inside her perpetual Halloween of various identities.
Because Tabitha wasn’t, technically, Auntie El’s kin. Auntie El had raised her from infancy but Tabitha’s birth mother had left her with Reverend Stokes when she was nothing but a few days old. The reverend had found Tabitha behind the altar, in the bottom half of an old pet carrier, wrapped in blankets. “I was worried you were ill, or worse,” Reverend Stokes said, every time he told the story. “Because you were so quiet. But when I unwrapped the blankets, you peeked out at me with wide-open eyes. You made no fuss. You were just peacefully waiting for me to find you. Like a little angel.”
Tabitha had never been a crier. Not because she was tough, but because she just didn’t like to draw attention to herself. Auntie El had taken her home as a foster, and even though she had three other foster kids at various ages at the time, Tabitha was the only one who had stayed on with Auntie El forever.
Tabitha eyed herself in the mirror in the Dorothy dress. Her slender build—a hundred pounds with rocks in your pockets, as Reverend Stokes liked to say—didn’t really fill out the dress like Judy Garland had, but Tabitha thought her brown skin made the blue-and-white gingham pop. She wasn’t going to bother putting her black curls into braids, but the ruby-red slippers would leave no doubt who she was supposed to be. Which left Tabitha wondering, as she often did, who she really was. Not who her parents were—despite her earlier thoughts on what her relationship with her birth mother might’ve been like, Tabitha had never put much stock into who had given her up. They had their reasons and Tabitha certainly wasn’t going to go looking for the people who left her in a dog crate at church. But she did sometimes wonder what her actual, real birthday was. If she was really born on Halloween—the best approximate date given by the doctor who examined her as an abandoned infant—or if she was born somewhere around Halloween. Tabitha’s money was on Halloween because both that date and the fact that she was left behind the altar had defined early on who she was going to be. A quiet, abandoned question mark, trying not to make a fuss. Tabitha already knew she was no Wonder Woman. Dorothy—unassuming, soft-spoken and very lost—suited her just fine.
Maybe, like the character, it would take a tornado to shake her world.
