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you want your life to be. My best advice is to give yourself some time to heal, then jump back in with both feet.”
PRECIOUS AND I STOPPED
by Salon de Paolo on the way home. This was easy, since I lived in the apartment over it. In some roundabout way involving a trust my father had set up, I would eventually own both the salon and the apartment. Right now I paid a reduced rent on the apartment in return for keeping an eye out for potential shampoo robbers below.

This arrangement had always really bothered Craig when we were married. Craig’s wife had bought out his half of their house when they divorced, and Craig had bought a small condo in Boston. He started renting it out when we got married.

We’d had many discussions over the years about whether my father should sign the building over to me, so Craig, as my husband, could get his name on it, too. Not that Craig had ever gotten around to putting my name on his condo.

Craig thought my father was controlling. My father thought Craig was a salon hunter. I supposed it was true poetic justice that Sophia lived over another of my father’s salons and Craig wouldn’t be able to get his name on that one either. In a couple of centuries, I might even think it was funny that he’d ended up with her.

I unlocked the door to Salon de Paolo and switched Precious to my other arm so I could reach the lights. After work today I’d gone through the junk drawers in the back room of Salon de Lucio, where we kept our airbrush equipment and most of our makeup. I found a few things for my kits, including a big box of clear plastic pop-top containers. As soon as I Summer Blowout

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figured out what to put in them, I could paint
B
s for
Bella
on the top of each one with chocolate brown nail polish.

I was rifling through one of the shelves in the back room when I hit the jackpot: four sixteen-ounce bottles of wholesale generic foundation ranging from porcelain to chestnut. They’d never been opened. They’d probably been sitting here for years, since they were sandwiched between a box of old metal bobby pins and a basket of hair crimpers we probably hadn’t touched since 1993. Maybe Mario had picked them up at a makeup show to use as backup, and then he’d forgotten all about them.

The foundation had separated a bit, though as soon as I shook it up, it was as good as new. I opened one of the bottles to check for an off smell, but it was fine. Apparently foundation didn’t spoil the way lipstick did. Most people don’t know that they should always sniff their lipsticks before they buy them.

Even though it still looks the same, lipstick gets a funny taste and smell once it’s past its prime. When we were kids, we all used to fight about who got to keep the old lipstick, since we couldn’t sell it after a couple of years. You just learned to breathe through your mouth and not to lick your lips when you were wearing it.

I’d found enough foundation to make maybe a hundred kits, which would save me a ton of money. I could mix the shades together, and give each person a little pop-top container of her own custom-blended foundation as part of their kit. Celebrities paid big bucks for this kind of thing. Even at a college fair, I should be able to get at least $29.95.

I called Precious, and she came to me right away. It was amazing how quickly she’d become a good dog once we’d started hanging out together. She hadn’t nipped at anybody or peed on the floor once. I wondered if it worked both ways.

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Maybe eventually I’d become a better person, too. One could always hope.

I turned out the lights and locked the front door. Precious followed me around to the side of the building. I unlocked the door to my separate entrance, and we headed up the stairs to my apartment. My sister, Angela, had helped me pick out a rich beachy color called Coral Essence for the front door. The stairway walls were just a shade or two lighter.

For some reason, even though I’d studied art in college, I was much better at picking out colors for people than I was for walls. But the right door color could make you glad you were home, and Coral Essence did that for me. Angela and I had never had much in common. She was usually busy driving her two kids to their soccer games, so we didn’t spend much time together. She worked a few days a week for my father, but her real life was all about P.T.O. meetings and dinner parties, and neither was exactly my cup of tea. But I could always count on her in a decorating crisis. And she’d never once put the moves on my husband.

It was so quiet when I pushed the door open to my apartment. I hadn’t gotten used to that yet. I wished we had a techno geek in the family, someone who could wire the front door so that an excited voice exclaimed, “Bella! Welcome home!” every time I entered my apartment. Maybe the fireplace could light, too. And a garden fountain, something in a tasteful copper with a nice verdigris finish, could turn on out on the balcony.

I put Precious’s big shopping bag on the floor in the kitchen and filled up her ceramic water bowl. While she lapped happily, I carried her new wardrobe down the hallway to my bedroom. I couldn’t manage to hang her tiny T-shirts Summer Blowout

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on my hangers, since the armholes were too close together, but I folded them over the bottom rungs of the hangers and spaced them evenly across Craig’s side of the closet. I took a step back and tried to decide whether Precious’s clothes made Craig’s side of the closet look more or less sad and empty.

I washed my face. I brushed my teeth. I moisturized. I flopped down on the right side of my bed.

Sleep is our best friend. While we sleep, our bodies go into repair mode. Sleep regenerates our skin, which is why dark circles under our eyes are the first sign of sleep depri-vation.

As I stared up at the ceiling, I knew better than to count sheep, because contrary to popular belief, all that math actually stimulates the brain. The calcium and tryptophan in the milk I’d had earlier should be helping me relax, but I wasn’t feeling it.

I closed my eyes. I felt around on my bedside table until I located my Burt’s Bees Replenishing Lip Balm with Pome-granate Oil. I massaged it slowly into my lips without opening my eyes.

Precious came running into the room, her toenails clicking on the oak floors. I wondered if she needed them trimmed.

She might even enjoy some polish. She jumped up on the bed and snuggled in beside me.

When my cell phone rang, I felt like I was underwater and didn’t have the energy to kick my way to the surface. I let it ring until it stopped. My house phone rang next, on the table, right beside my ear. I couldn’t see the caller ID from this position. I thought about twisting around so I could see it, but it felt like way too much effort. It rang again. And 86

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again. Precious jumped on my stomach and gave me a worried look.

“Okay, okay,” I said. I reached over and picked up the phone. “Bella’s Beauty Bag,” I said, just to try out the sound of it for my kits.

“Bella,” the voice on the phone sobbed. “It’s Lizzie,” she added, as if I wouldn’t know Craig’s daughter’s voice anywhere.

I sat up fast, and Precious went sliding off me like I was a ski slope. I reached out to pet her, so she’d know it was an accident. “Lizzie, honey,” I said. “What’s wrong?” For a second I had this crazy idea that Craig was dead, though everything in me knew I couldn’t get that lucky.

She kept sobbing. I’d known her long enough to just wait it out. “I’m right here, Lizzie,” I whispered.

Finally, she took a deep, ragged breath. “My mother sucks,” she said.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“At school.”

“Already? That’s early.”

“Whatever. She thinks I should be on the premed track, but whose life is it anyway. And I totally know what I want now.

They have the best culinary arts major here. I could have my own show on the Food Network. I even have a name for it—

Radiator Ramen Noodles and Other Rad Recipes for College Survival.
” She sniffed loudly in my ear.

“Wow,” I said carefully. “That’s a really interesting idea.”

“I knew you’d get it,” she said. “Can you talk to my dad about it? He’s being such a loser.”

Craig had moved out over a year ago. I knew teenagers were self-absorbed, but she had to have noticed we weren’t together anymore. “Lizzie,” I said. “I don’t think I’m the best Summer Blowout

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person to talk to your dad. Maybe . . .” I reached hard for a maybe.

“Don’t even say it,” Lizzie said. “Sophia’s a total bitch.” She sniffed again and let out a little sob, possibly a bit forced this time. “Please?” she added in the little girl voice I’d never been able to resist.

• 12 •

TULIA BROUGHT HER KIDS TO THE MEETING EARLY,
and settled them in chairs, since all three of them needed haircuts. Today both Tulia and the kids were dressed in jeans and white T-shirts, so possibly she’d gone from color coding her children to creating a full family uniform. I made a mental note to ask Mario for his opinion on this later.

A few of the stylists had come in before the meeting started to practice some new twists on French braids. One of them, who had tiny seashells hot glued to hairpins and worked into her braid, was poking chopsticks through a braid she’d just finished on the stylist in front of her. I listened to them buzzing about The Best Little Hairhouse in Marshbury while they worked. I wondered if any of them would head across the street to find out if the grass was greener. Hairstylists are almost as nomadic as gypsies.

Sophia and her mother, Linda, aka ex-wife C, showed up early, too, and Sophia was doing a full foil on her mother’s hair. A timer went off, and Sophia opened a foil to check the progress, then began taking out the rest of them.

“Are those lowlifes?” one of the stylists asked.

I looked at Sophia. “You betcha,” I said before I thought it through.

Sophia gave me a dirty look. “Takes one to know one,” she said.

“Ooh,” I said. “That’s mature.”

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“Low
lights
,” Sophia’s mother, Linda, said, pronouncing it carefully, as if she were teaching the stylist a new language.

Mario, Angela, and I used to imitate just this sort of thing when we were younger. “Low
lights
” I could imagine us mouthing behind her back. We’d never understood what my father had seen in her. Tulia’s flaky mother, Didi, had been a lot easier to take when she came along a few years earlier. She didn’t try to teach us a thing. She ignored us and hung out with our father, which was just fine with us.

My father had been single again for years. Life went on, and both Tulia’s and Sophia’s moms were remarried and back working for us. I didn’t think much of it until I’d gone off to college and was sitting around with some new friends, describing our families.
Wow
, they all said,
and I thought my family was screwed up
.

“Every family has something,” my social worker mother said when I mentioned it to her at fall break. “And, believe you me, most of my clients would trade places with you in a heart-beat.”

It’s hard to mess up a haircut on thick, wavy hair, but Tulia was managing it. Her daughter Maggie’s hair was now shoulder length on one side only. Tulia had the dark hair and pale skin of the rest of the Shaughnessy clan, but she sure hadn’t inherited the hand-eye coordination. As soon as she finished trimming Maggie’s hair, Angela took her niece by the hand to another chair to even it out.

Tulia moved on to her oldest child, Mack. After just a few snips, one of his ears was half covered with hair, and the other one was completely visible. His bangs tilted downhill from left to right.

Mario walked over and casually took the scissors out of Tulia’s hands.

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“What?” Tulia said.

Mario just shook his head and started doing damage control. Mack looked so much like Mario had at that age. Whenever I saw them together, I felt like I was watching one of those split-screen computer projections showing what a child will look like when he grows up. I hoped Mack turned out to be as good a big brother to Maggie as Mario was to me.

My father made his grand entrance through the breezeway door. His black, black hair was moussed and stretched evenly over his scalp. His Cover Your Bald Spot Instantly was living up to its promise. My father, who prided himself on having a new look at each meeting, was wearing black leather pants, a black T-shirt, and a salmon cotton sweater tied around his shoulders.

“Are you sure he’s not gay?” Todd whispered to Mario.

“Focus,” I whispered. We’d all worked hard on our notes, and we were ready for our hair intervention. The plan was to let him start the meeting and then jump in when he asked if we had anything else to bring up.

My father walked right over to Sophia’s mother, Linda. He reached for her hand and bowed from the waist to kiss it.

“
Carissima
,” he said, still holding her hand. “You get more beautiful every time I see you.”

She smiled up at him. “Oh, you,” she said.