Mothers and Other Liars by Amy Bourret Page B

porch to the front door, flops down, whimpers.
    “He misses her,” Molly says.
    Margaret nods. “We all do.”
    The Ms communicate a coherent paragraph to each other in a look. They bracket Ruby like the sandwich brackets the soup, make idle conversation—salon gossip, the latest art gallery buzz. Ruby devours the sandwich, a bowl and a half of soup, two glasses of milk. It is a certifiable fact that a grilled cheese sandwich tastes better when someone else makes it for you, but this, this food is biblical.
    She wipes her mouth with the cloth napkin, another remnant from Mrs. Levy, sets it beside her plate. “Lap-kin” Lark called it, which makes more sense given where it is used. This memory burns but doesn’t char.
    Finally, she speaks. She tells them about the phone call the first night, Lark sobbing across the miles. They call her Tyler. They eat in the dining room. Her room is fancy, blue and white, what sounds like toile from her description. White carpet everywhere. She misses Clyde. She misses the Ms. She misses Ruby. She misses Home.
    While Lark was talking, Ruby heard a voice in the background. “What is that? What are you doing?” Then a click, and silence. Still.
    “They have to understand,” Molly says. “They can’t just cut you out of her life, pretend the last nine years didn’t happen.”
    “They don’t have to understand anything,” Margaret says.
    After the meal, the Ms leave Ruby with a stocked fridge and promises, threats really, to come get her if she doesn’t show up for work tomorrow. Clyde sighs his best doggy sigh, drags his chin down the hall and back into Lark’s bedroom. Ruby follows him and makes a halfhearted attempt to straighten the bedding. As she tucks the blanket under the mattress, her hand brushes something. She reaches a bit farther and pulls out a wadded plastic bag.
    Ruby extracts a ball of bright green fabric from the bag and unfurls it with a shake. On the front of the T-shirt, the Girls Inc. logo stamped over the left breast. And on the back, a silk screen, text with a border of kid-drawn flowers and dogs and cats. “ I AM, ” it proclaims in Lark’s unmistakable purple print.
     

    I AM
    a bug-loving bookworm
    a baseball fanatic
    a tree-climbing poet
    an old-movie addict
    I like art and science
    I like to dance and meander
    I am a tomboy girl
    I am Lark Leander
     

    Ruby sits at the foot of the bed and hugs the shirt as the words Lark spoke when Ruby was outside the window blast through her head. I don’t know who I am.

FORTY
    This strange magnetic quality seems to have come upon Ruby overnight, as if the Sandman sprinkled her with charged metal filings instead of fairy dust. If she weren’t so uncomfortable, she might find it all funny, heads jerking toward her like a dance team doing a domino routine.
    Ruby remembers the doorbell ringing several times during the days of fog, and Antoinette left a message to warn her that the local court stringer had picked up the story.
    Santa Fe has a reputation of being a town out of touch with reality, out of touch with the world. People might rally around a hot topic like Israel or gay rights, but there is supposed to be an air of not caring, even disdain, for the everyday news. Unless that news is a sordid tale about one of their own.
    When she walked into the coffee shop two doors down from the salon to get a cup of herbal tea, she first checked to see that nothing disgusting hung from her nose, that her pants were zipped. In the swirl of whispers, as intoxicating as the aroma of coffee it seemed, Ruby finally got it; she has joined the rarified ranks of celebrity.
    Even here in the salon, her magnetic pull is inescapable. The salon is a homey place; Margaret wanted to steer clear of too-trendy austere and sleek, and, despite the kitschy name, from too-cute poodle pink as well. Instead, Molly painted the walls with columns and friezes in soothing tones of gold and amber and bronze. The space looks like a cozy corner