The Most Dangerous Thing by Laura Lippman Page A

become the kind of person who made rice and heart-shaped waffles. She knows herself better now, what she can do and what she can’t. She even likes herself. Perhaps more than she should, but she’s all she has.
    Her mother used to warn her—indirectly, then directly—that life was hell for an attractive woman once she ceased to be attractive. McKey isn’t buying it. For one thing, she isn’t like her mother, relying on men to support her. Besides, her looks are holding up surprisingly well. Not smoking, keeping her weight constant, avoiding the sun—it all adds up. She looks good. Not good for her age. She plain looks good. Every male who boards her flight checks her out, a particular triumph in this polyester getup. Men will always look at her, she has decided, and it isn’t conceited to recognize this fact and even exploit it. Did anyone ever say that someone was conceited about money, another commodity to which some people were born?
    And she is clear on this: her beauty is a commodity. She uses it to get what she wants or needs. She is not cruel with it, not anymore. She does not wield it like a weapon. She uses it. So what? Everyone uses what they have in this world.
    Take Gwen. She isn’t as pretty as McKey, but she has this saucer-eyed, you’re-so-wonderful thing going on, which boys ate up sideways with a spoon when they were kids. To give her credit, she seemed to come by it naturally, and she didn’t use it only on boys. She cast those looks on her parents, on McKey when they first met, eventually on Sean, although never on Tim, not really, and definitely not on Go-Go. The youngest Halloran always made Gwen a little nervous, although perhaps that was her parents, talking through her, especially Tally Robison. Everyone thought Gwen’s mom was so saintly, especially after she died. A well-timed death could make a saint out of anyone, as McKey would have reminded the others if they were in touch. But McKey, then Mickey, saw Tally Robison differently. Oh, yes, she was kind to Mickey, sitting down with her in the kitchen in the afternoon, waiting for Gwen to return from school, feeding Mickey the treats that Gwen had chosen for her. But Mickey quickly realized that Mrs. Robison was being kind, and there is no real kindness in obvious magnanimity. Oh, wasn’t she the bighearted grand lady, dispensing candy and cookies and Hi-C to the poor little girl who lived in Purnell Village, with her waitress mother and her not-quite-stepfather. Wasn’t she enlightened? Wasn’t she democratic?
    But if an eleven-year-old girl could figure that out, imagine what the rest of the world intuited. They saw Mickey being pitied, that was what, which wasn’t fair at all. Mickey’s mother might have been a little on the trashy side, but she was pretty steady for a divorced woman who needed a man around. And Rick, the stepfather of record for most of those years, was a good guy. Too good for her mother. He was sincerely kind to Mickey, not fake kind, and when baby Joey arrived, he did what he could to keep her from feeling left out. If anything, he went out of his way to make her feel even more like his daughter. Even after he left, he stayed in touch.
    Then, when Mickey was going on nineteen and Rick long gone, an attorney had contacted her. “About custody,” he said, and at first Mickey had this crazy feeling that Rick wanted to adopt her all these years later, make official the status he had sworn was hers all along. Rick had done okay for himself, maybe there was some money coming to her.
    It turned out that Rick had hired the attorney because Rita was now saying that Joey wasn’t his and he was trying to figure out if he could recoup the child support he had been paying her. Legally, the case was kind of interesting, sort of like the Solomon story in the Bible, only instead of offering up a baby that would be sliced in half, it was an all-or-nothing decision about the relationship between Rick and Joey. Rick could have