A Disguise to Die For (14 page)

We walked to the exit and looked at the trailer and then at Ebony's Cadillac. The Caddy was twice as long as the trailer. “She probably won't even notice,” I said.

“Notice what?” she said, surprising me. I jumped.

“We're taking the trailer. Can you help Don hitch it to your car while I say good-bye?”

“There's nothing crazy in that trailer, is there?”

Don and I looked at each other. “Nothing too far out of the ordinary,” he said.

I went back inside. My dad's head was turned to the side and his breathing was even. I approached the bed and put my hand on top of his. “I'm going to make everything okay,” I said.

He looked up at me, and for a flash, it felt as if I were the parent and he was the child. I swatted at the fresh set of tears that ran down my cheeks, kissed him on his forehead, and left.

*   *   *

IT
took Ebony five miles to get the feel for the additional weight hitched to her car. Every once in a while the trailer swayed. Each time she muttered under her breath about the idiocy of carting interplanetary species along behind us.

Ebony was more superstitious than most people. Not only did she avoid ladders and black cats, she had her tarot cards read weekly, took feng shui to a new level, and knocked on wood a
lot.
She even maintained that her medallion had special powers of protection. I wasn't up on the superstition handbook, but I had a feeling towing a trailer filled with relics that had heretofore been stored in the highly secret Area 51 made her nervous.

The Caddy and trailer combination evened itself out
around mile twelve, not that I was counting. That's when Ebony relaxed enough to talk. “It's nothing bad,” she said.

She could have been talking about anything from my dad's health to the slightly aggressive noise her engine made every time she accelerated past sixty miles an hour, but I knew instinctively that she was talking about her history with Blitz. I suspected she knew I knew it.

“I didn't think it was,” I said, confirming what I thought she thought I thought.

“People will talk. They always do. But it's nothing I should be ashamed of,” she added. “The truth is, there is a history there. One that not many people know about.”

“A history with Blitz?”

“A history with his family. What most people don't know is that I had a relationship with Blitz Manners's dad long before Blitz was ever born.”

I SAT VERY
still. Ivory squirmed in my lap and I ran my open hand over his fur to calm him down. He turned around and hung his head out the window. Soot slept by my feet.

“My mother worked for Mr. Manners's father when I was a little girl,” she said. She reached up to her throat and ran her fingers over her clavicle until they found the chain that held her medallion. She followed the chain to the pendant and rubbed her thumb and forefinger over the smooth brass surface while she spoke. “This would be Blitz's grandfather. It was the '60s and it was hard for a single mother to find work. Mama took odd jobs—laundry, cleaning, cooking, whatever she could get hired to do. She brought me with her to these jobs and a lot of people had a problem with that. Truth was, there was no place else for me to go.”

“How old were you?”

“Five. Blitz's dad—Brody Manners—was a teenager at
the time. He sure was popular. Girls were always around the house to flirt with him. I remember one time a couple of cheerleaders hung around while he washed his car. They said they'd wash it for him and he said no, that he wanted to teach me how to do it. They didn't believe him. Truth? I didn't believe him either until he handed me the hose and asked me to rinse off the bubbles. Imagine that—a rich white boy and a poor black girl washing a car together in 1965.” She smiled to herself more than to me, and I could tell the memory was one she cherished. “The whole family was like that. They treated me and my mom like we were no different than they were.”

“Where are they now?” I asked.

“They moved to Palm Springs after Brody graduated from college. That must have been '72, I think. I was twelve. You know what Brody did? He gave me a set of keys to his Mustang. He told me to find him when I turned sixteen and he'd teach me to drive. I think he really planned to keep his word too.”

“But you didn't seek him out,” I said.

Ebony's mother had gotten sick when she was in high school. It was one of the reasons Ebony stayed behind in Proper City after her graduation. Her classmates moved away, and she started Shindig. Somewhere in the six years between Blitz's father promising to teach Ebony how to drive and Ebony graduating from high school, her life had been turned upside down and nothing, not even the promise of being taught how to drive on a 1965 Mustang, was going to make it right.

“My mama taught me to drive. It's one of the last things we did together before she got sick. She died two weeks after I graduated. I was officially on my own and nobody
was going to take care of me but me. I did odd jobs myself and saved up what I could. I started Shindig when I had enough money.”

“And it's a good thing too, because Shindig is the best party planning company in Nevada,” I said. “You have a knack for it.”

Ebony's ringtone—the opening bars to “Shaft”—sounded from her handbag. She fumbled around inside her oversized hobo bag for it, glanced at the screen, and dropped it back into the bag. Almost as soon as the ringtone ended, it started again. This time she ignored it.

Conversation lapsed into silence. Even Ivory and Soot seemed to understand that we were in serious mode. I stared out the passenger-side window, wishing we were passing something interesting instead of miles upon miles of flat, brown desert, but that was the trouble with Nevada. Most Vegas-adjacent towns were either blinged out with garish casinos and neon signs or left as undeveloped stretches of dirt roads occupied by geckos and prairie dogs.

“I should have gone to the bathroom before we left the hospital,” Ebony said. “We're going to have to make a pit stop.”

She took the next exit and glided into a fast-food restaurant at the first intersection. Before she got out of the car, I put my hand on her arm.

“Ebony, you don't owe me any explanations. We don't have to talk about any of this.”

“You're right, we don't have to talk about my bathroom break, but you might have gotten suspicious when I took the exit. You want anything from the restaurant? Chicken nuggets? Apple pie?”

“French fries,” I said. “And Ivory and Soot want to split a burger.”

Ebony grabbed her handbag and left me in the car. She
had her phone in her hand before she reached the doors to the restaurant.

Bathroom break, my aunt Fanny.

I got out and stretched my legs. Ivory relieved himself on a rusted metal trash can. I checked the time on my phone and saw that I'd missed two calls from Bobbie. She left a message the second time that told me to call her as soon as I could.

Ivory extended the length of his leash to sniff around the exterior of the building. Inside the fast-food restaurant, Ebony was next in line. I kept an eye on her while I called Bobbie back.

“Margo! Jeez, where have you been? The store's closed and you're not answering your phone. I got scared that something happened to you.”

“Not to me, to my dad. He had another heart attack.”

“Is he okay?”

“For now.” Conversation with Ebony had effectively pushed concerns about my dad from my mind, but now the fear came rushing back. I dropped into the passenger seat. Ivory, sensing the tug on his leash, returned to the car. He jumped in and put his dirty paws on my knees. “He's in a hospital outside of Proper City. Ebony and I drove out this morning. They think he's going to be okay, but I'm still scared.”

“If the doctors say he'll be okay, then he'll be okay,” Bobbie said with unjustified certainty. “You have to have faith.”

“Faith in what?” I said. My temperature rose and anger at the unfairness in the world took over. “Faith in the world that took my mom from me the day I was born? Or faith in the world that took Blitz Manners on his twenty-sixth birthday? Or how about my dad, who's in the hospital for a
second heart attack? Where am I supposed to put my faith, Bobbie? Everywhere I look, I see people suffering who shouldn't be.”

“Listen to me,” she said. Her voice was steady and strong. “Focus on the sound of my voice and listen to me, because I have something important to say to you and I want to make sure you hear it.” Bobbie had always been the one person who could adopt a calm tone to counter my emotional outbursts, and today was no different. “Are you listening?”

“I'm listening.”

“Okay. Here's what I want you to think about: the universe gives you the lessons you're supposed to learn.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning there's a reason this is happening. You're in a class called Life and this is a midterm. Figure out what you're supposed to learn, and then everything will make sense.”

“But none of this is about me,” I said.

“It's your life, Margo, and that makes it partially about you.”

The doors to the restaurant opened and Ebony walked out. She balanced a cardboard drink carrier loaded with two beverages and three bags on her hip. Her medallion swung from side to side. Large sunglasses were propped on her head on top of the copper scarf. It had gotten too dark for sunglasses, and as I suspected, she'd been wearing them to hide the now-visible redness around her eyes.

“Bobbie, I have to go.”

“Wait. There's something you should know before you get back.”

“What?”

“Tak Hoshiyama was looking in the windows of your store when I went out there to check on you. He was worried about you too. I think maybe you and he should talk.”

“I don't see that there's anything to talk about.” Ebony pulled open her door and set the food and beverages inside. Ivory smelled the food. He charged across the front seat, putting his paws on Ebony as she bent down. His paw got caught in her chain.

“I have to go,” I said again.

“Call me when you get home.”

I stole a glance at Ebony. She'd freed Ivory's paw and was now feeding him a piece of hamburger patty. I looked in the other two bags and found my French fries. As healthy as I tried to be (don't let the Fruity Pebbles fool you—they're gluten free and high in vitamin D), I had a weakness for potato products. Potassium, I told myself.

Ebony finished her own burger and Ivory and Soot nibbled on theirs. We wasted twenty minutes in the backing-up-with-a-trailer process before leaving the parking lot and getting back onto the road. Ebony found her rhythm behind the wheel faster this time. The mile markers told me we were fifteen miles outside of Proper.

“You haven't told me everything, have you?” I asked.

“No.”

“Are you going to?”

She put on her blinker and checked her side mirror several times before changing lanes. Three cars passed us on the wrong side. “Can't see with those darn aliens on our tail,” she muttered.

“Ebony,” I prompted.

“I think we've had just about enough with the trip down memory lane for tonight,” she said. “Besides, what good is it going to do?”

I sat back against the leather seat. Soot and Ivory had curled up on the seat between us. The excitement of a road trip had tired them out enough that they coexisted in sleep. I stroked
one, then the other. Something had happened when we were at the rest stop. Ebony had been moved to confide in me after our visit with my dad, but now she was closed up again.

It was the phone call. It had to be. But who had called her? And why? And what did it have to do with her connection to Blitz Manners or his family?

Ebony pulled her Caddy up to Disguise DeLimit and let the engine idle. I was about to ask her if she wanted to come in when she spoke quietly.

“It was the early '90s. I almost lost Shindig,” she said. “I was in debt up to my eyeballs. Living on advances from my credit cards so I could keep the store afloat. People were turning to big chain stores to get whatever they wanted for their parties and all of a sudden, having a novelty party store in a small town wasn't the best investment in the world. I had two choices: close my doors and sell off everything I owned or ask an old friend for help.”

“You went to Brody Manners,” I said.

She nodded. “He and his wife were in that big house on Christopher Robin Crossing. Blitz was just a kid, maybe four years old. He was a little devil, that one. One minute he was running around the place screaming at the top of his lungs, the next minute he was hiding behind the sofa, waiting to jump out and scare you.”

And suddenly Blitz's comment the day he walked into Disguise DeLimit—the opinion of a spoiled four-year-old boy that had been cemented in his mind ever since—made sense.

“Blitz saw his dad give you money.”

“Blitz and his mother both saw. They overheard Brody say that it was for old times' sake, that nobody had to know what happened in our past. The two of them suspected the worst. They didn't know the circumstances and they
wouldn't listen to me. I haven't been welcome in that house ever since.”

“But if Blitz held a grudge against you, why would he hire you to plan his party? And why would he hold that knowledge over your head?”

“Seems the little devil finally reached a point of maturity. Blitz hired me because he finally got tired of not knowing the truth.”