The Summer That Melted Everything(72)

Arms around each other, they placed the trust in their feet as they closed their eyes. Her face tucking into the white roses on his. I watched them until she kissed him. Lips on lips and I dived into the pool, staying under until I thought my lungs would burst into bright, turquoise shards.

When I surfaced, I saw the smashed birthday cake dropped on the concrete by the pool. Red rose frosting and cake as white as the white high heels clanking on that very concrete. Alvernine, come with her green polka-dot dress and its silk that clung to her braless form and her sexy-as-hell curves.

And sexy is what Alvernine was, with her full lips and slim cigarettes. She was a woman known to turn an ashtray into a tool of seduction. Her heavy brow made her eyes seem pillowed in a sort of jungle-cat way. I thought, there is where men go to die. There is where they are devoured by the jaguar.

Though it was from her Dresden got the red hair, Alvernine took to dyeing her own a light strawberry blond, ironing it straight and smooth. And while she was covered in freckles just like Dresden, Alvernine lessened her darker freckles and successfully hid the lighter ones on her face with makeup, which she would also apply to the freckles on her body.

What it must’ve been like to be such a woman’s daughter. No wonder Dresden felt hideous and imperfect in the presence of her mother, who by her own guilt had failed to ever call her daughter beautiful.

As Alvernine stood shaking in fury before Sal and Dresden, I didn’t know what she was more upset about. The cut roses or having caught her daughter dancing with a black boy.

I pulled myself up out of the pool just as she was reaching for Dresden.

“You stay away from her.” Sal raised his fist as if he were willing to use it.

“Don’t you dare try to intimidate me.” Alvernine pointed her finger in his face, her nail perfectly filed and polished in a spectacular red. “I’ve dealt with your kind before, believe me. Now, you get away from my daughter. And you get my roses off of you.”

She ripped the roses, the white petals tossing into the air and falling around them as the closest thing to snow to have ever fallen in the middle of a heat wave.

“Momma, don’t hurt him,” Dresden pleaded, her frightened hand reaching through the falling petals toward her mother.

“This is all your fault.” Alvernine grabbed Dresden’s hand, jerking her. Sal tried to pull Dresden back to him, but Alvernine pushed him away. In the struggle, Alvernine yanked a rose off Dresden’s chest. As she clutched the rose in her hand, she stared at the bruise that’d been revealed on Dresden’s skin.

“What is that?” Alvernine squeezed the rose in her hand until the petals looked like guts oozing between her fingers. “This boy give you that bruise?”

“No, Momma.” Dresden was giving her softest tone. “You did.”

“Nonsense.”

“When you hit me, Momma.” Dresden barely spoke above a whisper, I knew, for her mother’s sake.

“A slap here and there. We all have slaps done to us. I did. Nothin’ to cause a bruise like that. It was this beast. This devil, he’s done this to you.”

“They’re more than slaps you give me, Momma.” Dresden began pulling the roses off herself. “You don’t remember because you drink more than you should.”

As Alvernine stared at the bruises, she dropped the one rose she held. It landed on the ground like a wadded-up tissue. She blinked over and over again. A robot malfunctioning and desperately trying to get her system back to its perfect way.

“You’ve hurt me, Momma. You’ve hurt me and—”

“No.” Alvernine spun around, her hands up to her neck and its choker, like a pearl noose. “I would never hurt you.”

“But you did.” Sal was loud and bold. Unafraid, as she slowly turned to him and his accusation.

When she slapped his cheek, he neither frowned nor retaliated. He merely turned his face up toward hers as if silent hurt was the loudest scream in the world.

She raised her hand again, but Dresden quickly stepped in and took the slap for him.

“You still believe you’ve never hurt me, Momma?”

Alvernine lowered her hand to her stomach like she was sick. She was a woman coming undone, one perfection at a time.

“Come on, Sal.” Dresden grabbed his hand, and together they turned toward the hill behind the house.

“Where are you going?” There was a tinge in Alvernine’s voice. Helpless, frightened even. A hard dose of reality she’d been given. A real bang, and I almost felt sorry for her. “Baby, come back.”

They were running away from her, though Dresden had difficulty with the leg, they were still running faster than Alvernine as she chased, all the while screaming for her baby to come back. Her arms stretched toward them. Her heels something she went down by. Landing on the side of her face. Her lipstick, an awful smear out to her cheek. Her knees two pink things as she rolled onto her back and held herself at the ears, maybe only to check the jewels dangling there.

Her crying had made her mascara look like a whole herd running from her eyes. Rhinoceros wires stretching down her face. Over the blush and freckles, which were small unlit things. Not like the freckles of her daughter. Her daughter who had stopped running when she heard her mother’s falling cry.

Dresden would have returned to her mother, had Sal not gently squeezed her hand and whispered something in her ear. Whatever he said made Dresden turn from her mother.