Hanging by a Thread

“So are you and Luke,” I say through a thick throat. “And you damn well know that—”

The kitchen chair nearly topples over, she gets up so fast. “I’m sorry, I thought maybe, once I got here, I’d feel better, I’d be able to do this. But…I don’t know, maybe it’s hormones or something.” She’s slipped her coat back on, the same faux leopard job she had on the other night. “I’ll call you, I promise,” she says, then vanishes out the back door.

The woman is going to drive me nuts.

But then, I think as I rejoin the madness in my living room, I apparently don’t have far to go. Elissa, Heather’s size 24 cousin, corners me with a plea to steer Heather away from choosing a sleeveless attendant’s dress; I say I’ll do what I can, only to find myself nose-to-chest with the only redhead in the bunch besides me, some friend of Heather’s I only know by sight, making an impassioned case against magenta.

And suddenly, don’t ask me why, I’m up for the challenge. Of course, four months from now may be a totally different story, but at the moment, I actually think this might be kind of fun. If nothing else, I’ll be too busy to worry about things I can’t control.

Dressing these chicks for the biggest day in Heather Abruzzo’s life—now that, I can control.

Across the room, Heather lets out a shriek, clamping her hand to her chest like she’s just been shot. “Ohmigod! Ohmigod! I found it!”

After I elbow my way back over, kohl-smudged eyes lift to mine, shimmering with a mixture of hope and dread. Hands shaking, she holds out the picture, as if offering up her first-born. Sixteen sets of eyes fasten on my face as I take the open magazine from her. Sixteen sets of bosoms collectively hitch with bated breath.

The girl has chosen well, I must say. We’re talking enough tulle to outfit an entire “Swan Lake” corps de ballet, but the beading is minimal, there’s no lace, and—with a few adaptations to camouflage the, shall we say, weaker aspects of Heather’s figure—the pattern’s a piece of cake.

“I can do this,” I say at last, and a roar of joy goes up from the crowd.

Power’s a heady thing, you know?

I may have to resort to a tranquilizer dart to get my daughter to sleep tonight. Since I put her to bed an hour ago, she’s been back up three times. Like one of those trick birthday candles you can’t blow out. By this time I’m in bed myself, although I never have been able to go to sleep as long as she’s awake. Unfortunately, the little monkey knows this.

Floorboards creak behind me. “Mama?”

I keep my eyes shut, breathing so deeply I nearly hyperventilate.

“Ma-ma!” Starr climbs up onto the bed and flings herself over my shoulder, her hair tickling my face. “I know you’re awake!” I grunt when she scrambles over me, bony little elbows and knees landing where they will as she turns on the bedside lamp. Great. Now I’m bruised and blinded.

“Honest to God, Starr!” I shield my eyes, blinking in the glare. “Did you get into the Diet Cokes?”

She vigorously shakes her head. “I just can’t sleep. Guess I’m overwrought.”

Her word of the week, ever since she heard somebody say it on some TV show. Last week’s was evocative. I kid you not. Can you imagine what she’d be like if I’d started shoving flashcards in her face when she was six weeks old?

“C’n I look at this?”

I yelp as a fifty-pound something whaps me in the arm. “What?” I peer at the weapon, which turns out to be an abandoned Martha Stewart Weddings. Starr knows she doesn’t have carte blanche to look at everything that comes into the house, not since the day she walked in with one of my Nora Roberts books and asked, “Mama, what’s he cupped her mean?”

That freethinking, I’m not.

“Yes, that’s fine,” I say, entertaining a sanguine hope that she’ll haul her find back to her room. Instead, I nearly bite my tongue when she yanks my extra pillow out from underneath my head and wads it up against the headboard.

“Uh, Starr? You’re doing this in here because…?”

“’Cause there’s no monster in here.” Damn. I have really got to get rid of that thing. She pushes her glasses farther up onto the bridge of her tiny nose. “Oh, this is a pretty dress.”

This from the kid who screamed bloody murder when I tried to get her to wear a dress to somebody’s wedding last year. I squint at the picture, giving in to the inevitable. Never again will I take for granted the luxury of going to sleep when I’m tired. “Yes, it is,” I say on a yawn.

She skootches closer to me, smelling like watermelon shampoo. “It looks like fun, getting married.”

“It can be, I suppose.”

“Will I get married when I grow up?”

“Maybe. That’s not something anybody can predict.”

After a minute or so critiquing a spread on wedding cakes that cost more than my first year of college, she says, “Why’s Tina so sad?”

Not what I was expecting. But then, that pretty much describes my life these days. “She’s got a lot on her mind right now.”

“Like what?”

“Grown-up stuff, Twink. Nothing that would make sense to you.”

“Mama. I’m not a baby, geez.”

I stifle a chuckle. This kid was never a baby. A memory surfaces from several weeks before her fourth birthday, of Starr with her head in her hands, moaning, “Why am I still three?”

“I know you’re not, sweetie pie. But you’re not a grown-up, either. And I am—” maybe if I say it with enough conviction, I’ll believe it “—so I get to make the decisions about what you need, or don’t need, to know.”

“That is so lame.”

“And you so have to deal with it.”

She slams shut the magazine, her sharp little eyes meeting my bleary ones.

“You weren’t married to my daddy, were you?”

I have long since given up trying to figure out my daughter’s thought progressions. Fortunately, I’m too pooped to flinch. “No, baby. I wasn’t.”

“How come?”

You know, I always swore I’d never put her off, never dismiss her questions. But for some reason, I’d always pictured her being older and me being awake. And that I’d have answers that actually made sense. To at least one of us. Why is life so freaking messy?

I pull her into my arms. “Would you be really mad at me if I told you I can’t answer your question right now, but I promise I will one day?”

“Why can’t you tell me now?”

Why couldn’t I have had a kid content to ask me why the sky’s blue? Or, since we live in New York, snot-colored?

“Because, baby, I just can’t.”

“Like you can’t about Tina?”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“Well, that just blows,” she says, and I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I burst out laughing.