Ashley Bell: A Novel Read Free

thumbs.” Even as she made that declaration with unabashed pride, Nancy realized that it was less than eloquent, even a little silly. Whatever the source of Bibi’s talent for language, it hadn’t come with her mother’s genes.
    “It should have been a bestseller,” Heather said.
    “She’ll get there. If that’s what she wants. I don’t know if it is. I mean, she shares everything with me, but she’s guarded about her writing, what she wants. A mysterious girl in some ways. Bibi was mysterious even as a child. She was like eight when she made up these stories about a community of intelligent mice that lived in tunnels under our bungalow. Ridiculous stories, but she could almost make you believe them. In fact, we thought for a while
she
believed in those damn mice. We almost got her therapy. But we realized that she was just Bibi being Bibi, born to tell stories.”
    As an ardent consumer of magazines that chronicled the lives of celebrities in plenty of photos and minimal prose, Heather perhaps had not heard Nancy after the third sentence of that long ramble. “But, gee, why wouldn’t she want to be a bestseller—and
famous
?”
    “Maybe she does. But it’s not why she writes. She writes because she has to. She says her imagination is like a boiler that’s all the time building up too much pressure. If she doesn’t let out some of the steam every day, it’ll explode and blow off her head.”
    “Wow.” Heather’s face in the mirror, above Nancy’s face, loomed wide-eyed and chipmunky. She was a cute girl. She would have been even cuter if she’d had her upper incisors brought into line with braces.
    “Bibi doesn’t mean that literally, of course. Her head isn’t going to explode any more than there were intelligent mice living under our bungalow back in the day.”
    Heather’s insistent teeth lent a comic quality to her expression of concern. She was adorable.
    Murph had once declared that if a girl was cute enough, some men found an overbite sexy. Ever since, Nancy had been wary of any attractive woman in her husband’s life who needed orthodontal work. Murph had never met Heather. If Nancy had anything to say about it, he never would. Not that he cheated. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. Maybe he didn’t believe that his wife would castrate him with bolt cutters, as she’d sworn she would, but he was smart enough to know that the consequences of infidelity would be ugly.
    “Close your eyes,” Heather said, and Nancy closed them, and the spray bottle of water made a spritzing sound. Then a little fragrant mousse. Then a final blow-dry and shaping with a brush.
    When her hair was done, it was perfect, as always. Heather was such a talented cutter, she wouldn’t refer to herself as a beautician or a hairstylist. Her card identified her as a
coiffeuse,
and that little pretension, so Newport Beach, was in her case justified.
    Nancy paid and tipped. She was assuring her
coiffeuse
that she would pass along the good review of
The Blind Man’s Lamp
to the author when she was interrupted by her phone’s current ringtone—a few bars of that old Bobby McFerrin song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” She checked the caller ID, took the call, and said, “Bibi, baby.”
    As if from beyond some barrier more formidable than distance, Bibi said, “Mom, something’s wrong with me.”

Bibi was sitting in a living-room armchair, her purse on her lap, trying to dispatch the creepy head-to-foot tingling sensation with positive thinking, when her mother burst into the apartment as if she were leading a style-police SWAT team intent on ferreting out people wearing unimaginative coordinated ensembles. Nancy looked splendidly eclectic in a supple-as-cloth black-leather sports-jacket-cut men’s coat from St. Croix, an intricately patterned ecru top by Louis Vuitton, black Mavi jeans with subtle and carefully crafted areas of wear, and black-and-red athletic shoes by some designer whose name Bibi could not recall.
    She