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It was in your face, the tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry, the flesh bared, the shoes that were so far away from velvet Mary Jane flats it wasn’t funny, and I had zero fucks to give that it was.
I zipped up Lou and she moved to sit on the arm of the chintz chair to put on her own high heels, pretty silver sandals that showed off her beautiful feet but made no statement at all.
“You should be you,” I said quietly.
Lou didn’t look up from her shoes. “I need to be what Portia needs me to be.”
Dad had married Lou because she was famous for being gorgeous and she made him look to his cronies as cronies like Dad’s envisioned the world. Like he could pull a beautiful young woman due to his looks, virility and prowess, and not due to the sole fact he had billions of dollars.
What Dad saw only at the very end, was that Lou may have married him because her career was waning, and she had a life she wanted to sustain. But she’d stayed married to him because somewhere along the line she’d fallen in love with him, and she was going to stick, no matter what wasted him away.
And she did, through cancer wasting him away.
“I’m going to talk to her tomorrow if I can get her alone,” I vowed.
“You don’t have to do that,” Lou said.
“Part of growing up is learning how to treat people who’ve done not one thing to hurt you.”
At that, she looked at me. “I know it was a shock to you girls when your dad married me.”
“Louella, that was thirteen years ago. It’s time she got over it.”
“I get it. My dad spoiled me.”
I didn’t have to say her dad was a bus driver, so how she was spoiled was nowhere near the privilege Portia enjoyed, so I didn’t say it.
But I never played poker, and not only because I didn’t like gambling.
Thus, Lou read my expression.
“I don’t want you two girls fighting about me,” she asserted.
“We won’t fight.”
“It’s obvious this boy is important to her.”
“He’s not a boy. He’s a thirty-five-year-old man. And Portia is a twenty-eight-year-old woman. We’re all grown-ass adults here, Lou. It’s only that Portia isn’t acting like one.”
“I remember what it was like, that first flush of love.”
I did too.
It was a trick of hormones and pheromones, and millennia of a dizzying number of behavior patterns, all designed so we’d find someone with whom to procreate to make sure we didn’t allow the human race to die out.
Sadly, that first flush of love could hide what would someday become searing rivers of hate.
I just hoped my sister wasn’t following in my mother’s footsteps.
Or mine.
“What it shouldn’t be like, is losing yourself to the guy you like and trying a different look because he likes more feminine clothes. He either likes Portia as she comes, or he doesn’t. We’re going to find out soon which way that goes.”
“This, I can’t debate,” Lou replied, again appearing anxious, but not about our sojourn to the bucolic north and a possibly haunted house, but that perhaps Daniel Alcott wasn’t the right man for Portia.
There was a knock on the door. I went to open it.
It was a uniformed maid, not the one who’d asked about my hair and makeup, nor one of the two who had brought in tea. She was the one who’d escorted us to our rooms in the first place.
