“It’s like an iceberg.” I took a small sip and let it sit at the back of my throat for a minute. “Does it make it taste better? The special ice?”
She took it back, put her lips where mine had been. “It tastes better now,” she said. We took turns sipping from the drink until it was gone. My nerves calmed a little, but I still felt electrified, like I’d rubbed my shoes against a carpet and at any moment I might touch a piece of metal and shock the both of us.
“What’s that?” She pointed to the plastic grocery bag, which sat next to my chair on the floor. I leaned down to pick it up but couldn’t quite reach the handle. Lucinda caught it with her big toe and held it out to me that way—leg extended, skin smooth and beautiful. I took it from her and she left her foot there, on the edge of my seat. I swallowed, took out the two items, and laid them flat on the countertop for her to see.
Lucinda dragged the invite in front of her. Unlike the ones she’d ordered for the gallery opening, these were simple and cheap. Printed on cardstock, bold font, with the Morton’s Taxidermy logo on the front. “I’m supposed to come to this?”
“I’d like you to see the work.”
“I thought you didn’t like that kind of work.”
I shrugged, touched a fingertip to her toenail. It was shiny and lacquered red. “I haven’t known what I like for a very long time. Just now figuring it out.”
“Why do you think I’d come?”
“I know what happened.” I stroked up her leg. The skin was smooth, like satin. It was odd to feel skin so soft after dealing with furred pelts that made my own hands rough and cracked. “What you did. Or Donna, I guess. The gallery.”
She shrugged. “It is what it is.”
“Are you going to get into trouble?”
“Who knows. They’re still looking into things. But I don’t care.”
She set down the card and picked up the other object, a tissue-wrapped ball closed with Scotch tape. “And what’s this?”
I let her open it, waited for her to see and decide. Unwrapping it on the countertop, she held up the object. I’d brought her the carapace, the cicada shell so perfectly preserved.
“Something else about cicadas. They live underground for most of their lives.”
“Really.”
“Yeah. They leave these shells when they first come out, the last time they molt as adults. But it takes them a really long time. They live mostly blind, coating themselves. Waiting to emerge.”
She cupped the shell in her palm and let it roll there, back and forth, tilting it to see better in the light. Then she closed her fingers, pressing down hard, harder, until I heard the crunch. When she opened her hand again, the husk lay like shards of broken plastic.
“Where’s Donna?” I asked.
“Moved out.” She dusted her palm, and the shards fell down into the carpet, dusty and inconsequential. “With the advance, I was able to buy out the condo. We could split everything. What we’d wanted.”
I took her palm and licked the remnants. I felt her muscles give way, her arm moving to embrace me. I let her lead me to the bedroom, and this time I stayed with her the whole night. I wanted to. She didn’t even have to ask.
As she hovered over me in the morning light, I watched her finger trace a line from my face down the naked center of my body. “Where’s your seam?” Finger tickling, searching. “Where do you crawl out?”
I put her hand where I wanted. We kissed and she searched for the place where I’d break open. When she finally found it, my insides shook and all my skin felt replaced with something new. Lucinda stayed there with me, hand smoothing down my side, pulling me out of the wreck.
We invited all our close friends and neighbors and put up a sign in the shop: free admission for the first day. My mother put Lolee in charge of greeting guests. She’d been stationed outside at a card table and sat in a little sequined dress my mother had sewn for her.
While people milled around in front of the shop, we made lemonade in the gallon plastic jug and set up a stack of Solo cups. There was a cooler of beer and a couple of strawberry pies, one lemon meringue, and a peanut butter, for Milo, who loved peanut butter more than anybody I knew.
Lolee sliced them up and set them out on plates with plastic forks stabbed into their backs. People parked over by the Dollar General and wandered over to talk and eat. We all had pie, standing next to the plate-glass window where my mother had set up her latest display.
Though the temperature outside hovered in the mid-eighties, inside was frosted like a cake—spray-on snow and white cotton batting covered every surface. Glitter topped it all, little slivers of icy plastic that looked like bright diamond shards. In this winter wonderland sat Santa and Mrs. Claus. Two foxes, arctic and fluffy white. Except Mrs. Claus was wearing a teddy and propped up suggestively against a pillowy snowbank. Santa had his back turned to the window, his coat thrust wide open.
It was our single collaborative effort. I’d asked for the specifications of the animals—how my mother wanted them posed, how she saw them standing or leaning, what their limbs should look like. After that work was done, I gave them to her and let her take the reins. It was bizarre, to see how she’d taken the animals and anthropomorphized them, but I was starting to understand. At least a little bit. So much of who my mother was and who she was becoming was lodged in the past. It made her happy to make those pieces because she felt a wild kind of freedom that she’d never had access to before.
Vera Leasey, recently back with her husband from a two-week Norwegian cruise, leaned in and snagged a bite of strawberry off my mother’s plate. “This setup right here looks really artistic. Saw some stuff like it when we went off ship. Europeans are very particular about their art.”
“Maybe I should go on a cruise,” my mother said.
“Oh, you definitely should! They got a lot of singles’ cruises too.”
Lolee took my mother’s empty plate, and I followed her inside the shop. It was a relief to escape the sun and all the gathered people. I felt a little queasy, but I always felt queasy when I did new things. Every day lately made me feel like I was gonna puke, and that seemed like it was better than before. Like maybe I was actually living my life.
I brushed back Lolee’s hair from where it had fallen at the side of her face. The cut looked very cute on her, even though I thought it made her look too old. It brought out the angles in her cheekbones. She looked very much like her mother.
Milo came in and tapped his watch. “Come on. Let’s get this started.”
Inside the new place was festooned in black bedsheets, which covered up the windows and gave the place a more intimate feel. The path to the back was lit with a variety of lights we’d culled from everyone’s Christmas stash. Overhead blinked white, red, and green, twinkling. We’d taken out the rusted stairs in the back and replaced them with a new set. I followed up after the guests, my mother leading the way.
The chorus of oohs and gasps that came from the group was satisfying to hear. My mother preened under the attention. She stood to the side, watching everyone take in the displays. There was a lot for people to look at.
“Oh, Libby . . .” Vera leaned into the first box, a panorama of two caveman-styled possums making love next to a papier-mâché woolly mammoth. “This is so gorgeous.”