Valley of Ashes Read Free Page B

Mom, lifting the string of cultured orbs from the jewelry box atop my bureau, my third of what had been her mother’s triple-strand necklace.
    “The clasp is fine,” I said, rubbing my wet hair roughly with a towel. “The thread snapped, right near the end where it attaches.”
    She nodded. “I’ll take the girls out for a walk later and let you nap. We’ll have a little adventure and find a jewelry store to fix these.”
    “You sure Parrish is okay?”
    “Just go to sleep for a while.”
    I felt so refreshed after the bath I didn’t think I’d drift off, but I blinked my eyes a couple of times and the next time I opened them the bedroom walls were tinted blood orange, reflecting the sunset.
    Downstairs, Mom had made dinner for all four of us.
    Parrish woke up around three that night, weeping and screaming. She was hot and sweaty and crying as though she were in great pain—or being chased by rabid wolves.
    I gave her liquid Tylenol and carried her downstairs and held her as I walked slowly back and forth across the moonlit living room floor. I buried my nose in her sweet, alfalfa-smelling hair as she shrieked in my ear, humming softly until she exhausted herself back to sleep once more.
    Sitting with her cradled across my lap for another ten minutes, I gazed at her dear little face in the blue moonlight.
    She made a fist and raised her thumb to her mouth, dark lashes grazing her cheeks—so beautiful it made me ache.
    Lucky, lucky, lucky. Yes I am.

4

    M ost days I woke up brimming with a sudden terror—that I’d forgotten to do essential things, that I’d never make friends in Colorado, that my appearance as an adult in the world was only a thin candy shell hiding a tiny, rattling center of incompetent thirteen-year-old or, worse yet, nothing at all.
    That morning I was too tired to care. I came downstairs in my underwear and my favorite black E AT THE R ICH skull-and-crossbones T-shirt, toting a just-awakened child on each hip.
    Mom was in the kitchen drinking Postum, having already put away last night’s dishes and started a second load of laundry for me.
    “Does it bother you if I clean when I’m here?” she asked.
    “Are you fucking kidding?” I said, buckling the girls into their seats. “You are the goddess of the world.”
    “Daddy used to always straighten the pictures when he and Mummie came to visit. Then he’d polish the silver. Drove me crazy.”
    “Well,
I
kiss the hem of your garment.” I shook my head, starting to slice bananas for Parrish and India. “Besides which, your father was the most anal-retentive man who ever lived.”
    Mom smiled.
    I scooped up the bananas. “Whereas I am anal-
intentive
… I always mean to clean up, but never quite get around to it.”
    I knelt down to pile bananas on the girls’ respective little yellowplastic trays along with sturdy dry helpings of Life cereal, then tied on their bibs and let them have at it.
    By the time I’d filled two sippy cups with milk, Parrish had half a slice of banana up her nose and was busy mashing the remainder against India’s chubby left cheek.
    “Another fine day, my beauties,” I said, patting their silky heads.
    Mom put a yellow receipt into my hand. “I forgot to give you this last night. Your pearls should be ready Tuesday. The people in the store were very sweet.”
    “Didn’t your mother used to say that you should always make a jeweler restring them while you watch, so they can’t switch any of them out?”
    “Only for natural pearls. Doesn’t really matter with cultured,” she said.
    I boggled yet again at all the useless knowledge we’d accrued as a family since my four great-grandfathers left their childhood farms for robber-baron ascendancy in textiles, banking, bonds, and shipping, respectively.
    We could arrange flowers, navigate deb-party receiving lines, replace divots in polo fields between chukkers, and write charming thank-you notes on good stationery. Fat lot of good any of that did us