“You need a ride?” I asked. “How will you get home?”
“Dad’ll get me.”
Milo had moved back into our mother’s house with Lolee. He was fixing up a lot of the wiring and things that had gone to shit in my father’s absence. The rugs were steamed, the sheets were washed, and he’d somehow tamed the overgrown backyard with the help of a borrowed lawn mower. His next project was tackling the leaky roof over the back porch.
My mother spent early mornings with Milo, supervising the cleanup, and then met me around noon at the shop. We’d sit up front and eat the sandwiches she’d prepped—me chewing on the pickle spears she’d packed in wax paper next to the ham on rye, her digging out the tomatoes she’d put on both sandwiches even though she hated them.
Then we’d head to the back.
It was weird; there was no other way to describe it. I still wasn’t sure about the things my mother was creating. The kind of work she envisioned didn’t speak to me, for a number of reasons, foremost being that it dealt so closely with my father and his sexuality. It made me uncomfortable, which made me wonder about discomfort in general. What about sex made me feel as if it couldn’t be connected to emotion? Why was it something that made me cringe? I asked my mother questions about her work and, when I felt too overwhelmed, drank a beer or just went out to the lake. Tried to focus on what it was that made me shut down.
For so many years it had been only my father there, a strong, silent presence. Then suddenly it was my mother. We shared the tools and the workstations. Sometimes we put on music. I scraped and gutted, prepped and stitched. She went through bins of preserved animal parts and brought over big tubs full of crafting gear: plastic beads and strings of multicolored party lights, sequins, aluminum foil, old CDs. There were also boxes of art we’d done in elementary school, birthday cards she’d saved, family photo albums, and pictures of my father when he was younger than Bastien. It was strange to see him in those shots, looking so much like Milo. In one of my mother’s favorites, he had a full head of dark hair and straddled a motorcycle in my parents’ front yard.
When our hands cramped and we felt sick from the fumes wafting off the tanning solution, we’d take a break. Sometimes we wandered out to the front walk, lounging on metal folding chairs, soaking up the sun as we shared a cigarette. We’d face the store, checking out whatever new display my mother had come up with for the week. I’d encouraged her to take over the front; she could use it as a trial run.
“Are you sure you don’t mind?” she’d asked, looking from the small, bare space in front of the window to my face. Back and forth, as if determining whether I really meant it. “You don’t care what I put up?”
“It’s your shop too. You get a say.”
“You’re right.” Her eyes had turned sleepy, how they always got when she was focused on what was happening in her head: forming the structures, placing the animals, choosing the backdrops and furniture. Theme, she said, was the most important part. Everything else came second. I wondered why my father hadn’t utilized her more in the shop. She was creative and good at putting things together. Even the stuff that made me uncomfortable made me think.
“It’s a good thing when you can’t stop thinking about a piece,” she said. “That’s when you know it’s done the work. When you can’t get it out of your head afterward.”
That sounded right to me.
I kept the bearskin. I loved how alive it looked, even without the stuffing. Though it would have brought a good price, I couldn’t stand to sell it. I spread the skin out over a couple of sawhorses, trying to decide how it looked best. My mother said theme was what mattered, but for my father it had been display. Display, he said, was the most important part of the process. It was the finishing touch to weeks of work put into an animal. If you didn’t mount it correctly, it wouldn’t matter that you’d sewn the skin perfectly or that the eyes were set exactly right. The mount meant that the animal had a place to live; it had a home. If the mount was wrong, everything looked fake. It took you out of the magic. Mount it right, my father said, and you gave your audience something to believe in.
The bear’s face was well rendered. I loved to stare at the glinting red maw of its mouth, the sharp canines so perfectly placed beneath its curled lip. Its claws were fine and shiny, smoothed down to yellow points. I looked at it from every conceivable angle—sat upright like a floppy stuffed animal, pinned to the wall and snarling down at me, flat across the floor with limbs outstretched, as if reaching for every corner of the room at once. There was no way I posed it that I didn’t like it; the bear was a companion and a pal. It looked at me with its glistening black eyes and seemed so alive I could almost hear it snuffling and breathing.
I took it home to my apartment and spread it on the couch, then moved it to my bedroom. The skin covered the entire mattress. That was where it looked best, welcoming me back every night. After long hours spent curled over the table with my needle and thread, scraping out the insides of things, I always had a friend waiting to greet me.
Lucinda Rex, her name already bigger than life, refused to leave my brain. Though I didn’t call, I thought of her. I’d see her card on the counter beside the shop register or find her chicken-scratch handwriting in the bottom of my purse, notes about things to pick up from the store: eggs, bacon, sharp cheddar cheese. At my mother’s house, invitations from the showcase migrated from the front of the fridge to the kitchen counter, even into my childhood bedroom.
When I went out, I drove past places I thought Lucinda might be: the bar where we used to spend our evenings, the seafood restaurant near the lake where she’d told me they had the best fried shrimp. I thought about her body in vague, ghostly ways that made me sad and aroused at the same time. At a moment’s notice, I could conjure the smooth skin of her forearm and the hard, sharp jut of her jaw. The curly mass of her hair when she lifted it into a ponytail after sex, the smell of her neck when she was sweaty. She clenched her teeth so hard when she came, hard enough to break the skin of her lip and draw blood that tasted coppery when I kissed her. There were two moles dotting her right temple and three at the base of her spine, right above her ass. In the back of my mind she hovered, sometimes slipping out in the patterns of my speech or in how I set my hands on my own skin. I thought of her when I touched myself in bed at night. Afterward, I looked at the bear and wished she were there with me.
When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I sat next to my mother in the kitchen as she basted a chicken and tapped a finger against another copy of the outdated invitation. It had somehow ended up in the breadbasket, poking out from where we kept the dinner rolls.
“Do you think we have everything?” I asked, tapping at the basket until it scooted along the countertop. “Is there anything else you’re missing? Someone we should ask for help?”
My mother threw open the fridge and pulled out half a stick of butter, a tub of sour cream, and some bacon bits in a little plastic pouch. She slapped everything down beside the raw chicken. “All the pieces I have are good enough.”
“Okay.” I slid the card along the counter, back and forth. Lucinda’s name glinted gold in the light, winking at me.