Lucy Doesn't Wear Pink (5 page)

“Yeah,” Aunt Karen said. “Look.”

She took Lucy by the shoulders and turned her to face the tile-framed mirror. Lucy had to admit she did look like she’d fallen on a box of tacks — very large tacks.

“I don’t even want to know what happened,” Aunt Karen said.

“I do,” Dad said from outside the door.

Lucy sighed at the bedraggled picture of herself in the mirror.

“I fell on my bike trying to get away from an ATV.” She shrugged for Aunt Karen’s benefit. “When it went past me, it sprayed stuff in my face, that’s all.”

“Did any get in your eyes?” Dad’s voice sounded ready to pinch off in the middle.

“No,” Lucy said at the same time that Aunt Karen grabbed her face with both hands and jerked it close to hers.

“Ow!” Lucy said.

“What? What happened?” Dad said.

Aunt Karen f lipped her hair toward the door. “She’s just whining. I’ve got it handled, Ted.”

“Does she need stitches?”

“No.” She squinted into Lucy’s face. “What she needs is a good smack upside the head.”

Lucy pulled away, wrenched the faucet on, and leaned over the sink.

“I can do it,” she said.

“We’re going to need tweezers . . . hydrogen peroxide . . .”

Lucy could hear her pawing through the basket on the table under the window.

“I can’t believe you don’t have any Neosporin.” Huge sigh. “Yes, I can.”

“What do you need?” Dad said.

Aunt Karen sighed again. “Nothing. We’re fine.”

“That’s right,” Lucy muttered. “
We
are.”

If Aunt Karen got that, she didn’t let on. “I’m going to need a latte after this,” she said. “Can you make that happen, Ted?”

“Sure,” Dad said.

Lucy heard that thing in his voice — the cut-off sound when somebody found something for him to do because they thought he couldn’t handle what the rest of the grown-ups were doing. She scrubbed at her face and refused to whimper, or even wince.

When she stood up straight, her face was raw-looking, but clean.

“Let me see,” Aunt Karen said, coming at her with a pair of tweezers.

“I got it all,” Lucy said. “Where did you get those?”

“From the bottom of that basket. Nobody around here uses them, obviously.” She lifted her eyebrows, which always reminded Lucy of very long, perfect commas. “I’ll teach you how to use these on your brows at some point.”

“Hello! No!” Lucy said. She pulled her head back, but Aunt Karen just shook hers. “I’m not going to do it now. I just want to see if you got all the rocks out of your face. Come here.”

Lucy let her peer until she finally seemed satisfied that there were no minute particles of dust in Lucy’s pores.

“I don’t think you’ll scar at least,” Aunt Karen said. “I can’t say the same for your sweatshirt — oh my
gosh!
”

Lucy tried to contract her arm up into her tattered sleeve, but Aunt Karen’s fingernails snagged the cloth so she could gape at Lucy’s cut as if her forearm were half-amputated.

“Don’t make a big deal out of it, okay?” Lucy said between her teeth. “Dad’ll just get upset.”

“As well he should be!”

But Aunt Karen lowered her voice and scoured out the wound and poured what seemed to Lucy to be half a bottle of hydrogen peroxide into it. By the time it was bandaged up with strips from an old, clean pillowcase and Aunt Karen had ranted under her breath about the lack of first-aid items in “this house,” Lucy was in more pain than she’d been in before Aunt Karen started doctoring. She hoped she’d still be able to write, because the first chance she got, she was going to add, “Because she calls OUR home ‘this house,’ ” to that list of reasons.

Just in case Dad should take a full survey of her limbs to make sure nothing was broken, Lucy donned a long sleeved T-shirt and another sweatshirt before she joined him and Aunt Karen in the kitchen. They sat across the table from each other — Dad mug-less, Aunt Karen sipping from the cup with the big butterfly on it that Lucy always drank her hot chocolate from because it had been her mother’s. She hugged her arms around herself to keep from snatching it, latte and all, right out of Aunt Karen’s hand.

“What can I get you, Luce?” Dad said.

His eyes came up to search for her. She scooted a chair close to him and rested her head against his shoulder.

“I’m good,” she said.

“Are they going to start calling you Scarface now?”

“No.” Lucy grinned. “Just ‘Klutz.’ ”

Dad chuckled. Aunt Karen didn’t.

“I don’t see what’s funny about any of this,” she said. She licked her lips. Sometimes Lucy counted how many times her aunt licked her lips in a single visit — and how many times she had to put on new lip gloss.

“She’s a kid,” Dad said. “Accidents happen.”

“Yeah.” Aunt Karen tapped the rim of Mom’s mug. “To girls who go out in the desert and play chicken with ATVs.”

“I wasn’t — ”

Aunt Karen’s hand went up like a stop sign. “You know what — we’ve had this conversation how many times?”

Lucy grunted.
Twelve hundred.

“Well, I’m done.”

Good. Me too.

Aunt Karen pushed her latte aside and covered Dad’s hand on the tabletop with both of hers. Her white-tipped, squared-off nails looked dangerous against his wrists. But her eyes went to Lucy.

“Your dad and I have been talking,” she said.

“About what?” Lucy said.

“About the fact that you don’t have a good female influence in your life on a day-to-day basis.”

Lucy blinked. “Mrs. Gomez is a female.” She didn’t add that she and her teacher didn’t talk to each other much beyond, “Lucy, do you have your homework?” and “No, my cat ate it.”

“I said a ‘good’ influence,” Aunt Karen said. “If she were good, she wouldn’t let you stay in that special ed class — ”

Lucy’s neck stiffened. “It’s not special ed. It’s called a support class.”

“It’s a lazy class you are far too smart to be in.”

Aunt Karen didn’t know what she was talking about. Mrs. Gomez didn’t think Lucy was dumb or lazy. She just left her alone.

“I know you’re probably going to pitch a fit,” Aunt Karen said, “but it’s time for you to come to El Paso and live with me.”

Lucy jerked her head up from Dad’s shoulder.

“Now just hear me out,” Aunt Karen said.

“I don’t think so.” Lucy scraped her chair back. “I have stuff to do in my room.”

She didn’t want to hear the rest of it. But she still could, as Aunt Karen said, “You’re growing up — you need a strong woman in your life — ” and Dad said, “Luce, now wait — ” and Marmalade uttered a meek meow and f led from Dad’s lap. Lucy f led too — down the hall and into her bedroom and behind the slammed door. She sank to the floor and buried her face in her arms, and over and over, she just said, “I won’t go. I won’t go. I won’t go.”

A good ten minutes passed before the Dad-tap came on the door. Long enough for Lucy to move to the bed and kick the giant soccer ball off because she didn’t want to be close to anything that reminded her of HIM right now. She was lying on her back, passing her real soccer ball back and forth between the feet she extended above her when he said, “Luce, may I come in?” She had to think about it.

After she didn’t answer, the door creaked open and Dad put his salt-and-pepper head inside. “Is it safe, or should I duck?”

Lucy looked at the stuffed soccer ball, but the urge had passed. “Come in,” she said.

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

“You left in a hurry.”

Lucy rolled over onto her stomach and stuffed the ball under her.

“I was getting bored with that conversation,” she said.

“Really.”

There were no question marks in the lines around his mouth, so she didn’t answer. It wasn’t being rude not to answer if he wasn’t actually asking her anything.

“I just found it kind of interesting,” Dad said. “Is there a clear path?”

Lucy pushed the stuffed ball out of his way with her foot and checked the floor for other debris.

“You’re good to go,” she said.

Dad made his way to the rocking chair, barely touching the wall with the tips of his fingers. When he sat down and rested his hands on his knees, he turned his face square at her, as if he could see her. Lucy was sure somehow he could — and knew she was scrunched into a sitting-up ball with her arms wrapped around her knees.

“You start,” he said, “because I can tell you’re about to crack open like an egg.”

“I’m fine.”

“Champ, I know better.”

She cracked. “How come you talked to her about me going there to live before you said anything to me?”

“Who says I talked to her about it?”

“She did.”

“She said she and I were talking, which, as you know with your Aunt Karen, means
she
was talking to
me
.”

Lucy unfolded. “She made it sound like — ”

“I know how she made it sound, and I’ve already spoken to her about that.”

“Is she gone?” Lucy said hopefully.

Dad smiled. “I said I spoke to her. I didn’t say I threw her out.”

“Oh.” Lucy let her air trail away like a tired party balloon. “She always does that.”

“Does what?”

“Tries to make me think you’re on her side.”

“I didn’t know there were sides.” Dad eased the chair back on its rockers.

“There are, and I’m not on the one she’s on, wherever that is.”

“Right now, she’s getting our Christmas presents out of her car.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean — and no, Lucy — ” Dad tilted his head to the side, eyes wavering. “I’m not going to send you off to live with her.”

Lucy melted back into her pillows like a puddle from ice. “That would be so hideous.”

“Good word,” said Dad, who liked good words. “But I’m not sure it applies here.”

Lucy snorted.

“Your Aunt Karen is just concerned that you don’t have a grownup woman in your life day-to-day.”

“For what? You and I are just fine doing the laundry and cooking and stuff. What do we need a woman for?”

“Evidently to help you with your hair and your clothes — ”

“And my eyebrows!” Lucy wriggled up to a sitting position again. “Dad — she wants to pull them out with tweezers! I bet she holds them over a fire until they’re red hot and then — ”

“Luce!” Dad laughed like sand pouring out of a bucket. “She doesn’t want to torture you. She just wants you to know what being a girl is all about.” His face went mushy. “And I can’t teach you that, champ.”

For the first time maybe ever, Lucy was glad her father couldn’t see. She didn’t want him to know that she was suddenly uncomfortable, as if he were a stranger who had just walked in on her in the bathroom. She pulled a yellow throw pillow up to her chin.

“It’s true,” Dad said. “I don’t know anything about skirts and panty hose.”

“Da-ad!”

“See? We can’t even talk about it.”

“It doesn’t matter, because all you have to do is keep telling me about Mom and I’ll grow up to be like her and I’ll be fine. That’s probably what’s gonna happen anyway, right? I look like her, so I’m probably like her in all the other ways too.”

Dad’s smile looked crumply. “You come pretty close.”

“Okay, so, there you go.” Lucy got still. “Just as long as Mom wasn’t like Aunt Karen. You said she wasn’t, right?”

“Right.” Dad passed a hand over his mouth and closed his eyes. He did that, Lucy knew, when he didn’t want her to see what he was really thinking. “Just because they were sisters doesn’t mean they were alike, trust me.”

Lucy scrambled from the bed and parked herself on the floor at Dad’s feet. “Tell me about Mom,” she said.

“For a minute.” He ran his hand over the top of Lucy’s head. “And then we need to go back out there and spend some time with Aunt Karen.”

“Whatever,” Lucy said. “Tell me again how Mom was.”

As Dad talked, she could have recited the words right along with him. For a long time when she was seven years old, after he had come home from Iraq and Mom hadn’t, he sat by her bed every night and told her how he and Mom had promised each other that if war broke out there, they would leave their posts as foreign correspondents for National Public Radio and come home to Lucy. He told her over and over how Mom wasn’t going to go there in the first place, but NPR had begged her, told her the people in Baghdad would open up to her because she was a woman, because people all over the world always did, because she was the best at finding out the real stories and the true feelings of folks in places where hard things were happening.

“In Afghanistan, in Saudi Arabia,” Dad told Lucy many times, “your mother visited women’s inner sanctums, places that were off-limits to the guy reporters. She loved you, Lucy. She delighted in you, but when she felt called to something, she became dogged and determined. She wanted you to be proud that she had courage, that she wanted people to know the truth.”