Lone Star

Lang placed her hand on her husband’s chest, on Chloe’s father, Jimmy Devine. “Jimmy,” she said mildly. “Wait.”

He waited.

“I didn’t misspell it, Jimmy,” Lang said. “Look.”

She thrust Chloe’s birth certificate into his face. Jimmy stared, perplexed. Plain as noon, printed in black, with a raised seal from the state of Maine confirming the official nature of the words was “Divine.” Preceded by “Chloe Lin.”

Jimmy understood nothing. “For eighteen years you knew the registrar’s office misspelled our kid’s name and you never told me?”

“Oh well.” Lang patted him. “Nothing we can do about it now. Let’s sign and go.”

“Nothing we can do about it?” he bellowed. “Of course there’s something we can do about it.”

“Not in time for her to get her passport for Europe.”

“She can’t have a passport with her name misspelled in it, Mother,” Jimmy said in his best no-arguments-will-be-entertained chief-of-police voice. “A passport is good for ten years. But a mistake like this is forever. No.”

“Jimmy.”

“No! I said we will fix it and we will fix it.”

Lang did not raise her voice. “It’s not misspelled, Jimmy,” she said. “That’s what I told the lady to write.”

“What lady?” He was dumbfounded.

“The lady at the hospital who came to take the baby’s name for the birth certificate. I told her to write Divine.”

“Well, the idiot clearly didn’t hear you correctly. She needs to be fired. Chloe is not going to have the wrong name on her passport because of a typo.”

“It’s not a typo, Jimmy. I spelled it out for her. I told her to write D-I-V-I-N-E.”

There was commotion at the post office. A man was taping a box shut, the plastic ripping off loudly. The metal door to the postmaster’s quarters slammed, a phone trilled, somebody laughed.

Jimmy was mute.

“It’s not a typo,” Lang repeated. “I wanted her to be Chloe Divine.”

“You made a mistake.”

“I wrote Divine on purpose.”

“But our name is Devine! With an E!”

“I know that. But not her name.”

Jimmy stammered. “What are you saying, woman? That you deliberately gave my daughter a different last name from her father?”

“Same name. One letter different.”

“That’s a different name!”

“No. Just one different letter.”

“A different name!”

“Jimmy.”

Jimmy was hyperventilating.

Chloe hid her amusement. She knew her mother was being disingenuous, for no one knew the power of a letter or two better than Lang, who could have been Lin, which meant beautiful, or Liang, which meant good and excellent, or Lan, which meant orchid, but instead she was Lang, which meant sweet potato. Lang knew the difference between Devine and Divine very well, which is why she changed it in the first place, why she wrote it with an I, why she kept it from her husband for nearly eighteen years. She knew. Divine: altogether marvelous and lovely, celestial and glorious, of the gods, with the gods, exquisite, heavenly, limitless and great. Divine.

15 (#ulink_c315cb6d-4c16-5fbb-be55-e87b89d678f8)

She Will Be Loved (#ulink_c315cb6d-4c16-5fbb-be55-e87b89d678f8)

AT THE END OF JUNE, CHLOE WENT TO HER PROM. IT WAS held in the glass ballroom at the Grand Summit Hotel in Attitash, at the foot of the White Mountains. All the boys dashing, all the girls beautiful. Chloe tried not to judge through her mother’s eyes: who was on parade at a bordello? A few would’ve fit that description. Mackenzie O’Shea in particular. The trouble with Mackenzie was that she thought herself to be quite a tasty morsel. Chloe couldn’t figure out why Mackenzie annoyed her so much. Plenty of girls at the prom were dressed much sluttier.

Mason did his best to match his cummerbund to Chloe’s funky pewter jewelry and silk silver dress, but he was more granite than metal. Hannah, of course, was a tall glass of water in a clingy mango dress, almost like a slip, with shoulder straps and a bare back, but Hannah had nothing to reveal under her dress except skin, no folds, no fat, no breasts, no sags, nothing unseemly, nothing out of proportion, nothing to make her self-conscious. Her dress was low-cut, but because she was so slim, she didn’t look slutty, she looked royal. Chloe, on the other hand, couldn’t wear anything low-cut for obvious reasons, and she couldn’t wear anything too high-necked because then she looked like a retiring female politician. She couldn’t wear an open-back dress because she required a full-back bra to contain what she normally contained under three or four layers of clothing. Summer was always a challenge. She opted for lifeguard bathing suits—red and two sizes too tight—that slammed anything that might bounce against her sternum. Unfortunately, bathing suits were not a dress option for the prom.

After searching for most of her senior year, Chloe finally found something she could wear—a flapper dress, vintage and hand-beaded in glass. It had a cascading fringe, a straight fall and an almost modest V-neck. She wriggled into a square-necked black Spanx slip to cover up her cleavage, and after putting on black eyeliner and black satin sandals, was generally pleased with her almost Audrey Hepburn–like appearance. She left her hair mirror-shiny and down, and wore a red lipstick and a red rose corsage to contrast with the silver beads. She also contrasted well, she thought, against Mackenzie’s pink tutu of a dress, against the girl’s infuriatingly long legs and cheap stilettos. Mackenzie’s straps looked ready to snap at any moment—on her shoes and her shoulders. What a mess that girl was. Why didn’t the boys think so?

While Hannah and Taylor and Courtney spent the day fussing with their hair and makeup, Chloe was done by one. She then sat on her manicured hands and waited, dreaming about Europe and fretting about traveling from Riga to Barcelona.

“It’s two thousand miles by train, Chloe,” Blake had said to her. “What’s the big deal? In July a band of men travel two thousand miles up the French Alps on their bikes. It takes them three weeks. You’re telling me we can’t do the same sitting on a train?”

Chloe had been wrong about Blake. As soon as he heard of the new plan for Europe, he produced maps and atlases, guides on the Baltics, a Latvian–English dictionary, several National Geographics about flying around the Baltic Sea, the 1915 partition of Poland, and a story on the last of the Polish Jews. Absurdly, he acted more excited about going to Riga than to Barcelona. He told her he had always wanted to visit Vilnius. Chloe corrected his geography, told him Vilnius was in Lithuania, not Latvia, and he corrected her right back, telling her that you couldn’t get to Poland from Latvia without first going through Lithuania and the Gates of Dawn. Jostling Hannah, shaking her like a bear shakes a rabbit in his mouth, play punching Mason, filling his notebook with pages and pages of notes and facts and stories and asides about Riga and Vilnius and Warsaw, a thrilled Blake acted as if it was paradise already.

For the prom Jimmy lent the four of them his Durango, and Blake drove them to Grand Summit. Initially they had planned to rent a white limo and go in style, like some of the other kids. But now that they had the expanded trip to the post-Communist world and three weeks of travel to budget for, no one wanted to plonk down eight hundred bucks on a limo. To save money, Blake and Mason even said they would forego tuxes, until Janice put her foot down, thank God, and paid for their tux rental herself.

The girls had seen their boys in suits once before, at a funeral, before Chloe and Mason started dating, but tonight was different. Mason, of course, was groomed like a country-club lawn, but even Blake made an effort to comb his hair and trim his stubble. It was funny how he tried to fit his all-over-the-place self into a black tux and patent leather shoes. Though he looked handsome, he didn’t look as if he were born to it. After the first fifteen attempts to fix his crooked bow tie, Hannah gave up.

Chloe and Mason had been nominated for prom queen and king. The king and queen were voted on as a pair, and Chloe knew she was holding Mason back from winning. Without her he would have been prom king for sure, but she was never going to be prom queen, not even in a dress with beads shimmering and clinking like champagne glasses. It’s an honor just to be nominated, cooed Taylor, trying to stay positive.

The week the nominations had come out, Chloe had found an anonymous note stuffed into her locker. How does it feel to know you are keeping that boy from winning what is rightfully his? Chloe threw the note in the trash, but she thought about it now, on the dance floor with Mason. She couldn’t ignore the sense that other girls were appraising them, and concluding that she wasn’t good enough for that boy.

Fed up with their imaginary glances, Chloe excused herself. In the bathroom, she took off her dress and squirmed out of the suffocating Spanx. Her liberated breasts rose up in rebellion out of their gunmetal V. With cleavage on display, she looked much less like Audrey Hepburn and more like a squat Sophia Loren. Perhaps this was a more fitting look for an almost prom queen.

She strode out into the ballroom where Mason was waiting. The way he smiled at her, it was worth it to overlook for tonight one of her mother’s more critical mottos against revealing clothing.

Mason was a great and special boy. Although he wasn’t much of a dancer, tonight he kept up with Chloe song after song, dancing alongside Blake and Hannah, doing the Macarena, seeing how low he could go under the limbo stick. Pretty low, it turned out. Lower than Blake, even. She touched his face as they danced. She kissed him. On the dance floor she was almost allowed to do this. The Academy’s six vile lunch ladies had transformed themselves into equally vile prom chaperones. They waddled between the tables like malevolent mallards, quacking. What are you doing? You’re sitting too close. No public displays of affection, go dance, but respectably. Are you finished with your dinner? You haven’t touched your steak, your mother and father will be pleased to see their hard-earned money going into the garbage. Fix the straps on your dress, young lady, Miss Divine, your dress is riding inappropriately low. Miss Divine, I’ll thank you to keep your hands on the table, not on your boyfriend’s lap. Mr. Haul, please remove your paws from your date’s bare back. Miss Gramm, do you have a shawl you can throw on? You look cold. Miss Divine, do you have a shawl you can throw on? Mason, honey, you look wonderful tonight. As you were, dear boy. As you were.

Although the occasion was jolly, Hannah seemed less jolly than usual. When they had a minute to themselves on the dance floor, Chloe pulled Hannah close. Keith Urban’s “You’ll Think of Me” was playing.

“What’s the matter with you?” she said to her friend.

“Nothing. Why? Do I seem off?”

“Little bit.”