Split Ends (24 page)

A gym trainer with a serious ego problem and an antiquarian who could eat me intellectually for lunch. In the real world, these men wouldn't look twice at me, and I'm hoping the mentoring group will provide some answers as to the why before I let myself get carried away into a sad Hollywood ending I've seen too many times on the pages of
People
.

The mysterious Mercedes is out front when we come out of the salon, and Ann ushers me in. “Good evening, ladies.” The driver turns around and he's a dead ringer for a younger George Clooney. This entire town seems to be magazine-worthy. My self-esteem is taking a huge hit. Does
anyone really want to be Mary Ann in a town full of Gingers?

There's a cab behind him, and I wonder if that isn't my ride, but the taxi simply follows.

“Sarah, this is my boyfriend, Kyle,” Ann says with no mention of the car behind us.

He reaches over the seats and shakes my hand. “Pleasure to meet you. How's being the fresh meat at Yoshi's?”

I smile. “It's not as bad as all that. I've learned there's an art to everything, even making coffee and washing hair.”

“Kyle's the chauffeur for the Wilshire. When he's not busy, he picks us up and drops us off at the complex. It's right across the street from his hotel.” She turns back to Kyle. “We think Sarah should move in with us.”

Kyle stares at me and back at the road. “Yeah, that'd be good.”

The girls, who have barely said hello to me each morning, are looking for a new roommate. Apparently, my predecessor Yoshi apprentice was fired without warning, leaving them with an extra $1,000 a month. I can't likely pay that when I'm going to go into debt if the church ladies pay for my mother's rehab, now can I?

Upon arriving—an easy walk, I might add—I see Ann and Jaime don't really live in an apartment complex at all. I believe it should be more appropriately stated as a
suite-cluster
. Yes, that's my own word.

“The apartments are available furnished or unfurnished. We have a furnished model.” Ann lowers her voice. “A lot of people come here to recuperate after plastic surgery. They go to a place that takes care of them, then move on to here when the deep healing is done. The recovery centers are only for the early days. This just gives them a chance to regroup while their bruises and scars heal. There're a few stars that stay while filming a movie,
though the really big ones rent a secluded house or stay at
the Chateau Marmont.”

“Hmm.” This is an obvious sales pitch for the third place in the apartment, and I'm broke, ladies!

“We have a maid service every week. It's forty-five dollars a person, but it would only be about thirty if you wanted in,” Ann offers. “We clean all day at Yoshi's. I don't want to smell any cleaning products when I get here.” She opens up the fridge while I pick up various photos about the room. “That's Abby. She'll be coming tonight.”

“She's beautiful.”

“She's a model.”

I'm intrigued by a photo of someone who is pretty by all standards but much less so by Yoshi standards. “Who's this?”

“That's Rock. She's a stuntwoman. She's broken her nose five times, and I think she's about to get it fixed finally. Want something to drink?”

“I'd love a water.”

She tosses me an Evian. I have to say, this stuff smells like dirt. Imagine my surprise when it tastes like dirt too. Maybe I'm spoiled in Wyoming, but I will never get the fascination with Evian. I chug it down anyway.
When in
Rome . . .
My stomach grumbles mercilessly as I do so.

The doorbell rings again and I sit down on the sofa, anxious to see what new gorgeous starlet will enter the room next. But there's a commotion at the door, and somehow I just know it relates to me. I close my eyes instinctively.

“I know she's here. I followed her here in a cab. Let me in.”

No way . . .

The door swings open and behind it is my mother. My jaw drops, and my first thought is that I hope they're not paying too much for their security guard. My second thought is that my mom looks worn and I want to help her. But selfishly, I'm thinking of my job too.

I look around the room, shamed by the fact that I don't want to acknowledge her, but all eyes bore through me with the intensity of an automatic drill.

Yes, she belongs to me!

“Excuse me, won't you?” I walk toward my mother, who smells like the back alley behind the Hideway, and pull her out the front door into the hallway, shutting the door behind me.

“Mom, are you all right? How'd you get here?”

She nods, and I notice a tear falling down her cheek.

“What are you doing here?” I whisper, praying no one else arrives for mentoring. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I can't help but feel what her presence does to me. It changes me into the caretaker, and right now I need to take care of keeping my job.

“What do you mean, what am I doing here? I came to see my daughter. My only family.”

“Right.”

“Did you think I'd stay there in Wyoming, waiting for Al to put me away once and for all? To just wait for you when you felt like coming back?”

“I didn't leave you there, Mom. I just decided to do what I wanted for a change. I'm an adult. It was time to start making my own decisions.”

“It's all about you, isn't it, Sarah Claire? You want to hang out with these shallow, beautiful people? That's what I raised you for? To ignore your mother in a room full of strangers?”

“I want to make something of myself, and I'm a great hairdresser, Mom. If you'd ever let me cut your hair, you'd see I have a gift. And I didn't ignore you.”

She scoffs at this. “In the end, family is all that matters, don't you know that? Men, they come and go, but we're here for each other.”

Here for me?
I bite my lip rather than say what I'm thinking. “I'm following my dream, so maybe it's your turn to be here for me. It was one of two coasts, and I picked the closest one. I did that for you, Mom.”

“I lost my job,” she says plainly. “Al says your thousand dollars is his since I skipped the state. Sorry about that. I'll pay you back when I find a new job.”

No, she won't. If I had a dollar for every time she said that, I wouldn't need to be in California. “Sorry about the job, don't worry about the money. I'm just glad you're safe and not with this Clyde character.”

“He didn't want me. We only got an hour or so up the road and he said his wife had just left him and he'd made a mistake.”

“Mom, there's this great rehab center not far from here that Scott told me about and—”

“Sarah Claire, I do not have a drinking problem just because I have a relaxing drink at the end of the day. Why must you make everything of crisis proportion with me? Have I ever let you go hungry? Who hasn't passed out after working all day?”

Okay, I know this argument would be obvious to normal people. I hate that we're not normal people.

“I've been looking into it. They have programs, and I think I could find a place that's affordable for us. Now that I have a job, I could get credit. This is our chance to make things different. Mrs. Gentry says—”

“Don't you dare bring up that woman's name to me.” She looks around the hallway. “I would think if you're bandying about with these types of folks, a thousand dollars feels like a lot of nothing to lose.”

“I've been here for less than a month, Mom. Do you think I found my fortune at the end of the rainbow?”

“Don't take up an attitude with me, little girl. I think you've been stockpiling it all along is what I think.”

“Mom, just go back to Wyoming and face the music. Al has always been on your side. Get this legal garbage over with so you can move on.”

My mom pats her chest. “Al has a soft heart, honey. He couldn't stand to see me go to jail. He wants me to start fresh, not waste time on a poser like Clyde.” She holds up a wad of hundred-dollar bills.

A poser. Now there's a word I haven't heard since high school. I'm feeling the sudden desire to call the IRS and turn them loose on Al's Bail Bonds. He lets my mom out of jail and gives her my money; how very generous of him. But then I remember he took her keys away, and I am truly grateful for that.

“Mom, I have no place for you to stay, and after tonight, I might not have a place to work. Do you know what Yoshi would do to me if he found out I was harboring a criminal? Image is everything in his salon.”

“Don't be such a drama queen. Your mother's visiting. I'm sure those girls' mothers come to visit all the time.”

Chances are they're sober when they do it. Maybe bring them some homemade cookies, that kind of thing.

“Mom, I can't support you here. It's too expensive.”

“Did I ask you to support me?”

“Where are you planning to stay? Scott has a full house, and you're not exactly his favorite auntie.”

“The weather's nice here, or I can probably find a friend at a local drinking establishment.”

“Sarah Claire Winowski?” Two police officers enter the hallway.

My mother points at me. “That's her.”

“Mom!”

My mother starts to run down the hallway, and the two burly men in black follow her and bring her back to the doorway as she bicycles her legs like an upturned cockroach.

“Just a few questions, ma'am.”

Feeling sick, I look into my mother's eyes. She refuses to look at me. She would have let the police take me. My own mother . . .

Somehow that changes things for me. Once and for all I realize she has totally abused and neglected me my whole life. Perhaps I'm slow that it's taken me this long, but at this moment, I feel every shred of anger I've held on to all these years rise in my throat to the point where I let out a carnal scream that is anything but human in nature.

The front door of Ann's apartment opens slowly, and Jaime peeks her head out. “You all right, Sarah?”

“I'm fine.”

At the sound of my name, the police officers come toward me. “You're Sarah Claire Winowski?” He holds out a passport with my name on it and my mother's picture.

She didn't.

“Yes, but I have a feeling you're not really looking for me. I don't actually have a passport. Never did.”

“I didn't do anything!” She points at the cop. “You can't prove anything.”

I'm thinking they can prove a fake passport pretty quickly.

Jaime shuts the door gently, an act that brings me to a full boil when I look at my mom. “You just had to do this, didn't you? You just had to ruin anything I did on my own. It wasn't enough that you had an entire town disgusted with me; you had to follow me here and ruin it all. Whoever my father is, he was right to get away from you.”

I regret it as soon as it's out. But it's out. She mumbles under her breath but doesn't look at me when she says it. “You ungrateful little minx.”

“Ungrateful? I'm ungrateful? Were you grateful when I had food waiting for you when you came home from work? When I schlepped down to the food kitchen to make sure there was food in the cupboards at ten years old? When I alphabetized the cans because I knew what you'd say if the beans weren't in front of the corn? Were you, Mom?”

“Ladies, I need to see some identification,” one of the officers says.

I'm shaking, not in fear but in distinct anger. These cops can't do anything to me that my mother hasn't already done. I stare at her antiquated beauty buried beneath the years of alcohol abuse, and I realize I've reached my limit. Enough is enough. One day at a time is one day too much at the moment. I've been an idiot, playing into all her manipulations. There's no excuse for what I've let happen! No wonder Mrs. Gentry thinks I don't speak up for myself.

“I have to get my ID in the apartment.”

I creep into the apartment as quietly as possible, but all the girls are huddled together in a circle, and their whispers stop abruptly when I enter the room. “I just need to get my purse. Thanks for the invitation, Ann and Jaime. I'll see you tomorrow.” Maybe.

No one answers me, and I pad back to the front door like a repentant child and watch as my mother is hauled off in handcuffs.

“We have our suspect, ma'am. Thank you for your cooperation.”

chapter 18

Dramatic art in her opinion is
knowing how to fill a sweater.
~ Bette Davis

I
wish I had a door to slam rather than this stupid, sliding elevator door into my cousin's condo. Sometimes a girl needs to make a statement! If I looked at the sunny side of life, I'd see that at least I know the door's combination now, and where I live, and I possess a working cell phone. Since I can spell my middle name, I can officially graduate from Kindergarten of LA and maybe even own a library card. Oh, wait a minute, still need to learn my phone number by heart for that.

“What happened to you?” Scott looks me over.

“You don't want to know.” I toss down my bag and flop on the couch next to Dane, who's reading a giant biography of a dead president. “You're not actually reading that, right? It's just hiding a copy of
MAD
magazine?”

“
MAD
? How old are you?”

“I'm telling you, she's from another era, Dane. It's like someone dropped her in a time machine of her own making. She's Doc Brown gone awry.”

“You know, Scott—” I slam my purse down. “—just one small moment of peace. Please?”

“I take it by your mood your mother found you,” Scott says. “She called here looking for you. I tried to confuse her by telling her the salon was called Ishi—you know, California's last Indian—but she had it written down.”

“How does she do it, Scott? How does she not have money to pay the water bill but manage to get out of parole, get on a plane across three states, and stumble into my mentoring group in less than twenty-four hours? Did she get me one of those dog microchips while I slept? Is this all some dire plan and I'm really the daughter of a KGB agent who poses as the town drunk? maybe I can go into a witness protection program and hide from her.”