Like Mandarin - Kirsten Hubbard [56]
“Can we go in the water now?” she begged. “Please oh please?”
I shook my head. “I’m not going in.”
“I won’t splash your face this time. I promise.”
There was absolutely no way I was going to wedge myself into the mass of townspeople crowding the pool. “Momma will take you.”
We both glanced at Momma. She was having trouble unbuttoning her poncho. She’d scrunched it up over her shoulders, like one of those ruffled collars from the nineteenth century.
Taffeta looked back at me, her eyes wide.
“I thought I saw Polly Bunker over there,” Momma said, emerging at last. “Can’t you take her in the water while I go say hello?”
“I’m feeling a little crampy,” I lied, clutching my middle.
She sighed. “Watch our stuff, then.”
Alone at last, I leaned back on my elbows, the way I thought Mandarin might in a bathing suit—not that I’d ever seen her in a bathing suit. She wasn’t exactly the type to bob in the water alongside the grandmothers. Posing like her was getting easier, though. As long as I refrained from looking down at my body, because then I’d blush and want to sit up and the whole impression would be spoiled.
In the pool, kids screeched and splashed among old ladies with baked-potato skin. Kate Cunningham sat in the lifeguard tower with her arms crossed strategically under her chest, trying to manufacture cleavage in her one-piece lifeguard suit. Tyler Worley was perched at the deep end, ignoring Brandi Shelmerdine and her friends, who were obviously cavorting for his benefit.
Nobody even glanced at me. As if without Mandarin, they found me uninteresting.
I should work on being interesting on my own.
After half an hour or so, Momma returned without Taffeta. Her suit was wet up to her belly button. She sat beside me with her legs bent off to the side, like an old-fashioned pinup model. Thank goodness she didn’t try to put on her poncho.
“Where’s Taffeta?” I asked.
“With Miriam. Her brother said he’d look after them for a bit.”
“He did?” I rose to my knees and peered through the masses of winter-bleached limbs. There in the pool bobbed Davey Miller with one arm around Taffeta and the other around Miriam. He caught my eye. “Grace!” he called.
I sat back down.
“Did someone just call your name?” Momma asked.
I shook my head, willing Davey to stay in the pool.
Momma opened a Ziploc bag of oatmeal cookies and handed me one. I concentrated on plucking out the raisins, collecting them in a little pile on my stomach.
“So how’s school?”
I glanced up at Momma, startled. It was as if she’d spoken Japanese. “What do you mean?” I asked warily.
“What do you mean, what do I mean? It’s a simple question.”
“I don’t know.… It’s fine, I guess.”
“Anything new at all? With you and your friend?”
Like I’d ever tell you. “Not really.”
“Well, I’ve got some news for you.”
I braced myself for pageant gossip.
“So Polly Bunker was talking to Della Bader’s niece, Sheryl—you know, the one who dropped out of school in the eighth grade—and you’ll never guess who she ran into at the Fremont County flea market.”
“I have no idea.”
“You’ll never guess. She was looking in the old clocks section, searching for one of those vintage ones, the hickory-dickory-dock ones. Anyway … She found one she liked, and she went up to the lady running the booth. You’ll never guess who it was.”
“I give up, Momma. Who was it already?”
She paused for emphasis. “Mandarin Ramey’s mother!”
I sat upright, spilling my raisins. “That’s impossible.”
“It was her, all right. Sheryl went to school with her down in Cheyenne before she came to Washokey. Kim Ramey. Or actually, I don’t know if she ever married Mandarin’s dad. I heard Kim was short for another name, maybe an Indian name. She’s fifty percent Shoshone, did you know?”
I began to have cramps for real. “She’s dead, Momma.”
“Dead? No, of course she’s not, Grace. Sheryl even spoke to her—”
“She’s dead!” I exclaimed. “She killed herself, and Mandarin told me how. All right? It must have been some other woman. Someone who looked like her. But Mandarin’s mother