Lexi raised a hand and summoned her into the great room. That’s when Alex noticed the blond white woman sitting across from her grandmother. “Alex, this is Star Sign.”
Alex didn’t balk anymore at the LA woo-woo parade in and out of her grandmother’s house. Sometimes she got lucky and the energy worker that her grandmother was working with was just a Goopy massage therapist. Sometimes she was not lucky and ended up having to use a package of sessions with her grandmother’s new shaman friend who spread a substance that smelled remarkably like manure all over her body before chanting off-key in a spectacle of cultural appropriation that was uncomfortable for everyone involved.
“What is Star Sign doing here on a Friday night?” Alex narrowed her eyes at the woman. Lexi was a kind and open soul who happened to have made a lot of money touring and selling jazz records over the past forty years. Although she’d had some down times during the eighties and nineties, a few of her songs had become hits again after she did a duets album with a wildly famous pop star. Lexi’s financial security and her openness made her vulnerable. Since Alex’s father had died—although he likely would have been at Lexi’s door with his hand out—Alex felt as though it was her responsibility to protect Lexi.
“I called her after you said you were coming over,” Lexi said, as though that explained why a practical stranger was here to greet her. “Your chakras seemed out of order, and I thought she could help.”
“My chakras are fine.” Alex didn’t have a spiritual problem. She was just thrown by the fact that her ex had found someone to marry before she’d even gotten it together to go on a single date after their breakup. “I was just upset.”
Lexi stood up and crossed the room in her usual elegant float. Alex had met a lot of famous people because of her grandmother. LA was a small town, and it got smaller when you were related to a legend. Some of those famous people had stage presence but seemed to fade into the background when the stage lights weren’t on. Others, like Lexi, couldn’t or wouldn’t turn it off. All the light in every room seemed to fall on Lexi’s face wherever she went.
Her grandmother led her to one of the couches and touched her shoulder until she sat down. Then Lexi pointed her long fingernail to a steaming cup of tea. “Drink that.”
“What is it?” After accidentally ingesting magic mushrooms from the manure shaman, Alex didn’t drink or eat anything at her grandmother’s house without ascertaining its origins.
“It’s wild sweet orange tea, with a little bit of bourbon.” Lexi rolled her eyes. “One bad trip, and it’s like you don’t trust me anymore.”
“I ran around in my underwear at a party you were throwing.” Alex was still mortified thinking about it. “And I was a teen.”
“It was the most interesting thing that happened that night.”
Alex nearly choked on her drink. After the mushroom trip and the underwear incident, another interesting thing had happened that night. Alex’s face heated thinking about it, but Lexi didn’t know—could never know.
“You still haven’t explained what Star Sign is doing here.” Alex turned to the woman, who gave her a broad, seemingly genuine smile. “I don’t need my chakras aligned, and I imagine your nights and weekends rate is quite high—”
“Oh, I’m here on my own time.”
Alex raised her eyebrows, ready to toss this woman out on her ear.
“I invited her over, Alex. Don’t get your panties bunched. Although maybe bunched is what you need. Bunched on the floor after some hot guy has ripped them off—”
“Shhhhhh!” Alex wanted to find a piece of furniture to crawl under. It wasn’t necessarily embarrassing to have a grandmother who had a legendary number of famous lovers because she’d moved to Los Angeles in 1970, when quaaludes and cocaine had loosened the already loose morals of hot young famous people. But it made Alex feel like a total square. And it didn’t help that she was already feeling something she couldn’t yet name about the fact that she seemed to be all her exes’ final stop before happily ever after.
“I’m just saying that you need to loosen up. You haven’t gotten any since you and that incredibly hot man broke up.” Lexi and all Alex’s friends had agreed that Jason was the hottest guy she’d ever dated. And it had bewildered Lexi when Alex and Jason called it quits—she simply didn’t understand why Alex would let someone that good-looking slip away.
Although Lexi was a pro at offering emotional support, she sometimes lacked understanding of the dating problems of mere mortals. Lexi had never been dumped. Eight husbands, and she had always been the one doing the dumping. Once, Alex had asked whether Lexi had preprinted prenuptial agreement forms at the ready in case she got in the mood to get married on whim.
“I really thought you should have married that man.” Lexi wasn’t going to let this one go.
“I hear you, Grams. He is very hot.” That wasn’t a lie. To make matters worse, she’d finally felt like she had a real partnership on her terms with Jason. They were both focused on their careers and didn’t feel like they needed to get married to be secure. They’d had an understanding, or so she thought. “I thought that I’d finally met my match.”
“I don’t know why you’re so afraid of getting married,” Lexi said, as she moved to mix another drink. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It’s just not something I feel like I need.” What Alex left out was that she felt like needing it was somehow wrong. Her parents’ marriage had been more like a business partnership, and their split hadn’t been particularly acrimonious.
Both of them were professors and found dramatic displays of emotions gauche. Alex and her sister had come home from school one January afternoon to find that their father no longer lived with them. He’d moved out of their Minneapolis craftsman, and their mother had announced that he had taken a teaching job at USC.
He was so far away that they didn’t spend nights and weekends with him. They didn’t see him again until the summer, when their mother had a monthlong research trip and dropped Alex and her sister off at Lexi’s house.
And even then, they hadn’t seen their father much. He didn’t really have any interest in entertaining little girls when there were papers to publish and panels to speak on. Alex and her sister were only trotted out when he needed to put forth a family-friendly image. Alex’s sister thought she was being uncharitable and that she should give their father more credit. But the man had pawned them off on Lexi every chance he could.
And it wasn’t all bad. Lexi was the coolest grandmother on the planet and always made time to hang out with her granddaughters—even taking them with her to tour in Japan once. True, she didn’t bake cookies and make tea that didn’t contain booze or drugs, but she called over her personal tarot card reader and mixed a mean martini when Alex was in a crisis.