Fragile by Lisa Unger Page B

the light, the position of a mirror that gave him a different perspective.
    In the evenings and on weekend afternoons, he’d stand there, fussing and musing over this detail and that. Sometimes she’d watch him. More often, she’d just walk past, knowing he saw little and heard less when he was engaged in a canvas. She could set the house on fire and hewouldn’t notice until he was engulfed in flames, maybe not even then. As a teenager, she took full advantage of the freedom this absorption offered her. She didn’t remember ever resenting it, or wishing for more attention.
    Often, out in the garbage, she’d find a canvas her father had spent weeks working on—a beach scene, a stand of trees, an apple and vase placed just so on the table—discarded with the rest of the trash they generated. And when she did, she’d feel a rush of anxiety and sadness, have the urge to rescue the canvas, hide it in the attic—which she often did. She remembered thinking it was like throwing away time, time he’d have too little of anyway, time spent with his back to his wife and daughter. It wasn’t even as if there was any joy or passion to it, not that she could see. Because, for her father, it was all about the end result, the precision, the skill, getting it right. And if it wasn’t “right,” it belonged in the trash, away from his exacting gaze. Art was about more than getting it right, wasn’t it? And even though she knew it was, she couldn’t bring herself to put a brush to canvas.
    The air inside Maggie’s Lincoln Navigator was thick with heat and tension. Melody gnawed at the skin on her thumb, stared straight ahead blankly. She’d been shivering when they climbed into the car, so Maggie had cranked the heat. Now there was a sheen of sweat on her brow. She reached to turn it down a bit, noticed that the dash had a thin layer of dust. She hated it when the car wasn’t spotless. Jones’s car was always filthy—soda spilled in the cup holders, crumbs in the creases of the seat, the reek of fast food. She didn’t know how he could stand it.
    Melody hadn’t said a word since she listed off the names of friends Charlene might have run to, people she claimed to have called already. Tiffany Crowley, Britney Smith, Amber Schaffer. Maggie knew them all. Britney had struggled after her mother’s second divorce and had spent a year seeing Maggie once a week, but was doing better now. Ricky had taken Tiffany to the movies once in junior high. Amber was a gifted child who’d been in all Ricky’s advanced placement classes, whom she’d seen at various parties of Ricky’s and parents’ nights at school. A nice girl. More like the kind of girl she’d hoped to see Ricky dating.Someone who would not be missing on a school night after a fight with her mother. She knew their mothers, too. They’d all attended Hollows High together.
    Melody and Maggie had had an English class together as juniors in high school. Then, Melody was regarded as a burnout, someone who hung around the breezeway smoking. She wore her hair long, almost to her waist, and seemed to have an endless collection of rock concert tees. Someone who’d slept with a couple of the popular boys, was generally regarded as trashy but could still be found at all the cool parties, might be seen with one of the beefy, beautiful football players leaning against her locker. She’d lived in a rambling old house with her single mother, a hippie artist who everyone knew dealt weed on the side. Maggie remembered envying Melody a kind of freedom she seemed to have, a lack of concern about the opinions of others. She carried herself with a pride uncommon in teenage girls, as if she already knew who she was and didn’t need to look about for validation. But somehow the years had robbed her of that. Now she wore her hair in a suburban, middle-aged bob and dressed without care in formless old sweaters and T-shirts, faded, tapered denims. Years of smoking had caused the skin on