Taking Back Mary Ellen Black

I snorted now. A sound I hadn’t thought I could make. “God no, I just don’t want another husband.”

“A new do won’t get you a marriage proposal,” Lorraine began.

“But it might help you find some young stud for hot sex,” Jenna chimed in distractedly as she flipped through the folder of Lorraine’s financial records.

Hot sex sounded good. But maybe that was just the allure of the unknown. It had been good with Eddie for all but the last couple of years. But I don’t think I’d ever had hot sex. The possibility of getting some lured me to the chair. That and the rum still humming through my veins. I’d hardly settled back against the vinyl seat when Lorraine whipped a plastic cape around my shoulders. “So a new haircut can get me hot sex?”

Lorraine and Jenna laughed in unison, the husky harmony hinting that they’d both had hot sex at least once. “It’ll take more than a cut,” Lorraine said, walking in a circle around my chair.

I was glad she did that rather than spinning me. I don’t know what had me more worked up, the idea of changing my hair—or the idea of hot sex. But apparently Lorraine didn’t think redoing my hair would be enough to get it. No doubt I needed exercise, new clothes, new makeup, new attitude…

“A dye,” Lorraine said, bobbing her double chin in agreement with her own wisdom.

“Red,” Jenna said with the firmness of conviction.

“Red?” I gasped.

“You always wanted red hair.”

News to me. I’d had wants back then besides getting out of the West Side? “I did?”

“You wanted to be Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.”

“I wanted to be a prostitute?”

Jenna laughed. “You never said you did, but we watched that movie a million times.”

“So, Pretty Woman it is!” Lorraine declared, slapping her pudgy palms together in gleeful anticipation of making me look like a prostitute.

I gulped, but I didn’t argue. Heck, who would be brainless enough to fight looking like Julia Roberts? The only drawback I could foresee if Lorraine actually succeeded was that I’d have to admit Mom was right. Eddie never would have left me if I’d looked like Julia when we were married.

Lorraine fingered through my hair with one hand while grabbing up a plastic cap with the other. “So, was he a cheater or a beater?”

I choked. “What?”

“Cheater or beater?” she repeated her question. “Like Jenna’s Todd was a cheater. So where’d you hide his body, Jenna?”

Obviously the O’Briens had spawned another neighborhood legend. But like the famous mob boss Jimmy Hoffa, Jenna’s ex would probably never be found. A smirk slid across Jenna’s mouth, but she didn’t look up from her paperwork. “I’ll never tell.”

“Cheater,” I admitted. The second I made the confession the drone of the dryers died, and a bunch of permed heads swiveled toward me.

“Who cheated, dear?” Mrs. Milanowski asked. “Your grandmother? Nobody’s that lucky at cards.”

“Her Eddie,” Lorraine explained. I guess there was no such thing as discretion in a beauty shop.

“He’s not my Eddie.”

“I heard about your divorce, Mary Ellen,” another perm-head piped up. “That’s too bad. It’s so hard on the kids.”

What about me?

“He was the cheater,” Lorraine supplied, in case anyone had missed it. She clicked her tongue in disgust. “With all the diseases out there now, it’s almost better if they’re beaters. Safer.”

Without lifting her head from her study of Lorraine’s business records, Jenna snorted. “You’re sniffing too much perm solution, Lorraine.”

“My figures can’t be off—I have a real good accountant,” she defended.

Jenna shook her head. “The math is fine. Some of your ideas aren’t. Getting knocked around is not safer.”

Lorraine crossed herself. “Forgive me. Your poor mama…”

“Is back at Mary Ellen’s house playing cards.” Jenna waved a hand in dismissal of Lorraine’s concern. “She’s fine.”

“What she put up with from your father…”

Jenna shrugged. “It’s over now.”

I shivered despite the warmth of the plastic cape. I’d grown up in this neighborhood. How come I wasn’t as strong and resilient as these women? I hadn’t pushed Eddie down the stairs or dismembered him. How come I just wanted to pull my lank, drab hair around my face and hide?

But Lorraine had my hair, yanking, clipping and spreading goo on it. An hour later, when she whipped off the plastic cape and whirled me toward the mirror, I concluded that I didn’t look like Julia Roberts at all. Probably the baggy jeans and Czerwinski Butcher Shop sweatshirt ruined that image.

But I wasn’t bad. The red was deep and rich, and it had conditioned my hair so that it flowed around my shoulders in thick, soft waves.

“That other woman. The one from the cannibal movies…” Mrs. Rewerts lifted her hand and shook it in the air. “You know the one. She has that color hair and Mary Ellen’s same green eyes.” The other women nodded in agreement and stroked my fragile ego with oohs and aahs.

“Julianne Moore?” I looked like Julianne Moore? She’d do. And maybe, so would I. I turned toward Jenna, who had put down her paperwork to study me. “What do you think?”

“What do you think?” she countered.

I shrugged and watched the rich waves dance around the shoulders of my bloodstained sweatshirt. “I like it.”

She nodded. “Yeah, me, too.”

And I knew she wasn’t just stroking my ego. Jenna wouldn’t do that, not the Jenna I’d known eleven years ago and not the one I was getting to know again. Maybe we would never regain the friendship we had once shared, but I hoped we could forge a new relationship. I really needed a friend.

CHAPTER G

The Girls

“Mommy, you look like a movie star!” Shelby shrieked before vaulting into my arms. Although Amber had come to the kitchen, too, when Jenna and I walked in, she hung back. A book clutched in her hand, she studied me from behind the glasses that had slipped to the end of her cute little nose.

“So what do you think?” I asked. Although only ten and a half, Amber was wise beyond her years. Maybe it came from all the reading, or from some recessive gene that had skipped Eddie and me. But she was one smart kid, and I valued her opinion.

A slow smile spread across her bow-shaped lips, and she nodded, her perpetual ponytail bobbing at the back of her head. “It’s smokin’!”

“Who’s smoking?” Mom asked as she lumbered up from the cellar with a jar of stewed tomatoes in her hand. She set it on the counter without taking her gaze from my new hairdo. “Lorraine is a little too wild for the West Side.”

Translation: In Mom’s eyes, I did look like a prostitute. Good.