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Then he pulled it strand by strand across the top of his head.

Finally, he filled in with a spray designed to “Cover Your Bald Spot Instantly.” Maybe his shiny brown eyes and the swagger in his step took your attention away from the fake hair on his scalp, since he’d still managed to attract three ex-wives.

“Is Mom going to the wedding?” Angela asked.

I held my breath, the way I always did when my mother was mentioned in front of my father.

“She’s the grandmother. Of course she is,” Mario said. “At least I think she is.”

My father grabbed his
cornicello
. He really believed it Summer Blowout

27

warded off the evil eye. “Okay, that’s enough,” he said. “Back to business.”

Tulia pushed the front door open. Her three kids came running in to hug their grandfather around the knees. Mack was wearing a red T-shirt over his bathing suit and carried a red toy train. Maggie and her doll were both dressed in blue sundresses. Myles and the wagon he was pulling were both yellow. I leaned over and whispered to Mario, “Is she actually color-coding her kids, do you think?”

“Maybe. I’m surprised Dad didn’t try that with us, he’s such a control freak. I’d be the one in therapy, saying, ‘It all started because everybody but me got to be a primary color.’ ” Todd laughed, and he and Mario exchanged one of those married looks I vaguely remembered. “It would make a great memoir,” Todd said. “
I Was a Secondary Color: A Shocking Story
of Sibling Abuse
.”

Tulia’s mother came in right behind her and headed for a chair. “Sorry,” Tulia said. “Mike had to work late, and I forgot it was Mom’s week for the meeting.”

“No skin off my nose,” my father said. “They’ll be working here soon enough anyway.” He peeled the kids off him, and they headed over to the kiddie area.

When people first meet us as a group, we probably should give them a diagram. Even then they might not be able to get us all straight. It’s just the way it is with big, messy families. I tell everybody to take notes—there might be a test later.

It didn’t help that we all looked so much alike. My father’s children all had thick brown hair and pale skin, plus big eyes and, most of the time, big smiles. His ex-wives looked pretty much the same, except for the hair, which ran the gamut from gray to gold.

Sometimes when I was explaining my family to people, I’d 28

C L A I R E C O O K

call my father’s ex-wives A, B, and C to simplify things. Mary, who was Angela’s, Mario’s, and my mother, was A. Tulia’s mother, Didi, was B. Linda, who was Sophia’s mother, was C.

It also simplified things that, after a rocky transition from B to C that included some minor hair pulling, Didi and Linda worked in separate salons and went to the weekly meeting on alternate Fridays. My mother didn’t go at all. She lived a few towns away and had gone back to school to become a social worker as soon as she left my father, which was shortly after he started fooling around with Didi, his second wife-to-be.

My father was looking particularly dapper these days. This probably meant his fourth ex-wife-to-be was somewhere in the wings. I just hoped if she ended up working for us, she at least knew how to give a decent haircut.

“Now where were we?” my father asked.

“Nowhere yet,” I said.

“Angela,” my father said. “Sophia. I mean Bella. You’re a beautiful girl, but you have to learn to watch the big
bocca
talk.”

“That would be mouth,” Mario whispered.

I elbowed him.

“How’re we doing in the moolah department, Toddy?” my father asked.

“Not bad, Lucky, not bad at all,” Todd said. When it came to handling his father-in-law’s political incorrectness and annoying nicknames, he’d come a long way. “We’ve got most clients booking their next appointment before they leave the salons. We could use some more action in product sales though.”

“People don’t want to pay the prices,” Angela said. “
Project
Runway
killed us. I mean, how do you convince people that Aveda hairspray is worth the money, when they were on TV

raving about a two-dollar can of Finesse Très Two?” Summer Blowout

29

“I don’t know,” I said. “It can work both ways. Everybody knows Maybelline Great Lash is the best mascara, but I spray paint the outside gold before I put it in my case, so my clients think I’m using all high-end products.”

“Do you really?” Mario asked. “I didn’t know that. That’s a great idea.”

I struck a pose. “Lots more where that came from,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” Angela said.

“Bella knows everything,” Tulia said. “Hasn’t she told you yet?”

“Sure she does,” Angela said. “She even managed to airbrush an entire crowd at once this week.” I wondered if all big families who traveled in a pack turned on their own like this. I knew enough to wait it out and not rise to the bait. Eventually they’d start picking on somebody else. I probably would even have kept my big
bocca
shut, except I caught a glimpse of Sophia. I really wanted to wipe that smirk off her face.

“Well,” I said. “I know enough. In fact, someone approached me this week to see if I wanted to create a makeup kit.” I reached for details. “You know, to be sold.”

“You mean that guy hitting on you at the college fair?” Mario asked.

“If anybody does a kit, my Tulia should do a kit,” Tulia’s mother, Didi, said.

“He was so not hitting on me,” I said. “He just thought I was talented.”

“Sure he did,” Angela said.

“That’s not a bad idea,” Todd said. “I bet we could get the companies to kick in some product samples. I mean, why not, it would be free advertising for them. They might even pay for placement.”

30

C L A I R E C O O K

“What if we added recipes?” Angela asked. “You know, spa cuisine?”

My father was snapping his fingers again. “I’m loving this,” he said. “The Salon de Lucio Beauty Kit. All soft and Romany, maybe tied up like a toga. When they open the box, it’ll be like they died and went to Italy.”

I cleared my throat. “Excuse me?” I said.

“Sophia can add something about celebrity makeup, since she’s got all the high-profile clients,” my traitor brother Mario actually said.

“Bath salts and massage oils would be good, too,” Tulia said. “And I love that gel that turns hot when you rub your hands together.”

I jumped up, since nobody seemed to be hearing me.

“Hello-oh,” I said.

“I have a great recipe for lemon mayonnaise. You can use it for a hair mask. Or eat it, obviously,” Angela said.

“Stop,” I yelled. “Stop, stop, stop. Stop.” Everybody stopped.

“I’m sick and tired of everyone taking everything away from me,” I heard myself saying. “It’s
my
beauty kit. It’s
my
life. It’s
my
. . .”—I looked right at Sophia—“. . . husband,” I said.

And then I ran out.

• 5 •

THE TEARS I WAS FIGHTING DRIED RIGHT UP AS

soon as I saw Craig in the parking lot.

Craig started up his Lexus as soon as he saw me coming.

I bent down and picked up a rock.

In his haste to get out of the salon parking lot, my ex-husband burned some serious rubber. That couldn’t possibly be good for his little leased tires.

“Go lease a brain,” I yelled after him. Finding my inner bully was surprisingly exhilarating, so I threw the rock at his car. It bounced off his rear license plate with a satisfying clunk. I brushed my hands off and headed for my own car. The sign in the front window of the salon mocked me: summer blowout. Ha.

“They’re not your kids, Bella,” I said to my rearview mirror.

“Forget about them.”

I pulled out of the parking lot and took a right. I’d been repeating this over and over to myself like a bad mantra ever since Craig had said it.

It was the thing that really got to me. I mean, I’d written off Sophia. I’d written off Craig. But I wasn’t sure I’d ever forget about the kids. For almost ten years I’d spent Wednesday nights and every other weekend with Craig’s kids. And every other holiday and every other school vacation and half the summer. I’d caught colds from them and helped them with their homework. Craig and I had taken them on almost all our 32

C L A I R E C O O K

vacations. We’d decided not to have kids of our own pretty much because of them. Actually, almost completely because of them. Neither of us thought it was fair the way fathers just moved on to the next set of kids.

At least my father had never done that. He’d just rolled us all into his next family. Except my mother, who was the only one who’d resisted, who’d carved out a new life of her own. But, idiot that I was, I’d gone along with Craig. I’d even managed to convince myself that Luke and Lizzie were essentially my kids, too.

Ha. They’d blown me off completely as soon as their father dumped me. Luke had another year of college left, and Lizzie would be heading off to her freshman year soon. I could have helped her pick out things for her dorm room. I had much better taste than her real mother. I could have helped her shop for clothes. And makeup. Lizzie’s hair was probably a mess by now. Anybody could be cutting it.

Wait. Sophia was probably cutting Lizzie’s hair. I put on my blinker and pulled over to the side of the road. Sophia was cutting Lizzie’s hair.

I just sat there, on the side of the street, for a while. Maybe five seconds, maybe five minutes, maybe an hour. I didn’t bother to notice, because it didn’t really matter. I mean, it’s not like anyone would have missed me.

I knew I needed to get a grip. Wallowing like this was not my nature. I was strong. I was confident. All my life you could practically hear me roar. I wasn’t even all that freaked out when, a little over a year ago, my husband of ten years packed his bags and told me he needed some space.

There was a part of me that was relieved I didn’t have to be the one to say it. We’d been drifting apart for a while, making lots of snide remarks, just not really liking each other much anymore.

I thought some of it might have to do with Lizzie getting ready to Summer Blowout

33

graduate from high school. Craig’s kids had preexisted our relationship, so they’d always been part of the deal. Now we’d have to figure out what, if anything, we were without them.

Looking back, it was odd that Sophia started spending more time with me then, not less. You’d think I’d be the last person on earth she’d want to be around once she’d set her sights on my husband. But in the months both before and after Craig moved out, she stopped by and she called. A lot. Maybe if she couldn’t be with him openly yet, the next best thing was being with the person who was still technically married to him.

And that’s how I found out. Craig had been gone for less than a month. Sophia and I were out shopping together. I stayed in the car while she ran in to pick up some dry cleaning. Her cell phone rang. I picked it up without thinking and said hello.

It was Craig. I guess he wasn’t expecting me to answer, and Sophia and I had always sounded a lot alike. “So, are we on for tonight?” he asked.

“Not if I can help it,” I said. And I hung up.

“How could you?” I asked when Sophia came back to the car.

“What?” she said.

“That was Craig.” My heart was beating like a maniac. I could hear blood pounding in my ears, and I wondered if Sophia could, too.

She reached back and hooked the hangers over the handle in the backseat of her car, then turned around and put both hands on the steering wheel. She didn’t look at me. “No it wasn’t,” she said. “It must have been someone else.” I looked straight ahead. I reached into my bag and pulled out a lipstick, a sheer muted grape called Damage, and put it on in quick, ruthless strokes. “He told me,” I lied. “He said you’ve slept together at least twelve times.”

“We have not,” she said. “It was only—”

34

C L A I R E C O O K

“Ha,” I said. I smacked my lips to blend the color.

“Gotcha.”

They’d both sworn up and down that nothing had happened until after Craig and I had split up. Oh, puh-lease. And it didn’t really even matter. A sister is still a sister, even if she’s a half sister, and a husband is still off limits to everyone who loves you, even if he’s on his way to becoming an ex. I thought these were basic rules everybody followed.