Lone Star

“Going to Barcelona is also an education, Mom,” Chloe muttered. She really didn’t want to face her dad’s questions. What was she supposed to say? We’re going to get two rooms, and the girls will stay in one room, and the boys in the other? What kind of naïve fool for a parent would believe that?

“Yes, an education in boys,” said Lang. “What are you going to tell us, that you’ll get two rooms and you and Hannah will stay in one and the boys in the other?”

There you go. Didn’t even have to say a word.

“Your plan,” Lang continued, “is to rove around Europe for a month with your boyfriend on your hard-earned college savings. This is something you’re seriously proposing to your father and me?”

Dad is not here, Chloe wanted to say. She didn’t know of whom she was more afraid. Dad never really liked Mason, that gentle kid. She didn’t know why. Everyone loved him. “We could go to Belgium, too, if you want.”

“Are you weak in the head? Why would I want this?”

“You mentioned Belgium. I could bring you back some chocolates.”

“Your father gets me a Whitman’s Sampler every Valentine’s Day. That’s enough for me.”

“Belgium is safe.”

“Is Mason safe?”

“Hannah will be with me. She’s nearly a year older. She’ll protect me.”

“Chloe,” said her mother, “sometimes you say the funniest things. That girl couldn’t protect a squirrel. She can’t protect herself. I trust Mason more than I trust Hannah.”

“See?”

“More, which is to say nothing. How much is two times zero? Still zero, child.” She raised her hand before Chloe could come back with a wisecrack. “Enough. I have to slap these Linzers together and then get dinner on. Your father will be home soon. Go to the music room and practice.”

“I’m going to be eighteen, Mom,” Chloe repeated lamely.

“Yes, and I’m going to be forty-seven. And your father forty-nine. I’m glad we established how old we are. Now what?”

“I’m old enough to make my own choices,” said Chloe, hoping her mother wouldn’t laugh at her.

To Lang’s credit, she didn’t. “Can you choose right now to go play a musical instrument,” she said. “Piano or violin. Pick one. Practice thirty minutes.”

“Hannah wants to talk to me before dinner.”

“Well, then, you’d better jump to it,” said Lang, her back turned, an icing sugar shaker in her hands. “What Hannah wants, Hannah gets.”

3 (#ulink_96c6fd5a-f573-582a-8bf0-ad2082614165)

The Perils of College Interviews (#ulink_96c6fd5a-f573-582a-8bf0-ad2082614165)

CHLOE SPRINTED FROM HER HOUSE ACROSS THE FLOWERBEDS and brush to Hannah’s next door.

Since the divorce five years ago, Hannah’s mother had been involved with revolving boyfriends, and consequently their yard never got cleaned up. “Why can’t she do it herself?” Lang would demand. Blake and Mason offered every month to help, but Terri didn’t want to pay them to do it. And she didn’t want them to do it for free because that was asking men for a favor. So she lived surrounded by unkempt backwoods, in wild contrast to Chloe’s parents’ approach to their house and their rural life. Lang allocated part of every day to weeding, mowing, cleaning, planting, raking, leafing, clearing, maintaining. The birches and pines were trimmed as if giraffes had gotten to them, and all the pine cones were swept up and placed in tall ornamental wicker baskets, and even the loose pebbles were picked up and arranged around the flowerbeds and bird houses and vegetable gardens. It was quite telling that Terri and Lang lived next door to each other for almost twenty years and yet didn’t know each other’s birthdays. Lang never said a thing, and kept Jimmy from saying anything, but Chloe could tell by her father’s critical expression when he spoke of “that family” that he looked forward to the day Hannah might become a friend of the past. There are two kinds of people in the world, Jimmy Devine said. Those who try to make everything they come in contact with more beautiful—and then there is Terri Gramm.

Before Chloe knocked, she stopped by the dock and stared out onto the lake, the railroad across it, the bands of violet mackerel sky. She imagined a lover’s kiss in the Mediterranean breeze, the mosaics of streets, parades down the boulevards, music, ancient stones, and evening meals. Beaches, heat, flamenco, bagpipes. Passion, life, noise. Everything that here was not. She imagined herself, fire, flowing dresses, abundant cleavage, no fear. Everything that here she was not. Her heart aching, she knocked on Hannah’s porch door.

Hannah’s mother was on the couch watching Wheel of Fortune.

“Hello, Mrs. Gramm.”

“Hi, honey.” Terri didn’t turn her head to Chloe. “Are you staying for dinner?”

“No, my mom—”

“I’m joking. We got nothing anyway.”

Hannah pulled Chloe into her bedroom and slammed the door.

“Did she say no?”

“Of course she said no.”

“But was it no, we’ll see, or was it no like never?”

“It was no like never.”

“But then she started asking you all kinds of questions?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s yes. They never ask anything unless it’ll be yes eventually. Give her a week to think about it. She has to talk to your dad.”

“You think I’ll have a better chance with him?”

“No. But he might give you money.”

“For Barcelona?”

“We’ll figure it out. We have bigger problems right now.”

“Bigger than my mom saying no?”

“Yes.” Hannah was biting her nails. Perfect Hannah with her perfect teeth was biting to the nubs her ugly nails at the end of her perfect long fingers. “How likely is it, do you think, that Blake and Mason are actually going to go?”

“A hundred percent.” Chloe pulled her friend’s twitchy hand out of her mouth. “Stop doing that. Don’t you know what Blake is like?”

Hannah didn’t reply. She was too busy bloodying the tips of her fingers.

Chloe plopped down on Hannah’s lavender bed. The girl turned up her music which was already plenty loud. She did it so her mother couldn’t hear her, but the result was that Chloe couldn’t hear her either. Hannah had a barely audible soprano, like a low hum, and over the high treble strands of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” she was nearly impossible to make out.

She lay on her bed next to Chloe. “Chloe-bear, I’m in trouble.”

“What?”

“I have to break up with him and I don’t know how to do it.”