Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee(2)

“Leather?”

“For seven bucks?” Delia starts sniffing the air like a bloodhound. “It reeks in here.”

“Whatever, weirdo,” I say.

“It’s, like, kerosene-y and skunky.”

I sniff so hard I get light-headed. “Nope. Nothing here.”

“Is it Buford?” Delia says, casting a glance at the back seat, where my basset hound, Buford T. Rutherford B. Hayes, is sprawled like a tan garbage bag of dog Jell-O, looking doleful. Looking maybe even a bit more full of dole than usual, sensing he’s being scapegoated.

“Buford is innocent before God, Delia Wilkes. How dare you? And why would he smell kerosene-y and skunky?”

“Because he has, you know, flaps. And he’s farty.”

“Well, one, I gave my farty, flappy dog a bath like a day ago. And two, I know his bouquet, and it’s not so chemicaly.”

Delia sniffs again, harder, closing her eyes. “So you can smell it.”

“Yes, Hannibal Lecter, I can now,” I say. “My car smells like a gas station that hosted a skunk orgy. I get it.”

Delia says nothing but lifts one of her black-vinyl-clad legs to her nose. She sniffs a couple of times, drops her leg, and looks out the window silently. Guiltily, if we’re being honest. A tiny smile tugs at the corners of her mouth.

I pounce. “Oh ho ho! What did you discover?”

“Nothing.” The corners of her mouth lift a little higher.

“Has the stink hunter become the stink hunted?”

“I want you to know that this smell is not issuing forth from my ass.”

“Issuing forth? Who says that?”

“I’m just saying, my ass is clean.”

“Mmm-hmmm.”

“Don’t give me a skeptical mmm-hmmm. These pants didn’t smell when I opened the package yesterday. It’s like a heat-activated funk.”

“Mmm-hmmm.” The AC in my Kia Rio definitely isn’t keeping up with the late-April heat. It feels like spring stumbled while carrying a load of summer in its arms.

“Seriously,” Delia says. “How do you de-reek vinyl pants? Run through the car wash while wearing them?”

“Are you even sure they’re vinyl as opposed to skunk leather?” This whole situation is so quintessentially Delia. If you told me that Delia had ordered a pair of pants off Ebay for seven bucks, I would assume that they’d arrive smelling like cyborg sweat. It’s the kind of luck she has. One time she found a spider in a banana. As in, she opened the banana and boom—spider.

We pull up to a red light. The driver next to me gives me a long stare. Fair enough. It’s not every day in Jackson, Tennessee, that you see two girls dressed like vampires—wearing red-lined black capes—driving down the street. We’re both also sporting some dramatic makeup because we don’t have time to apply it at the studio. Arliss runs a very tight ship.

“By the way,” I say, “don’t you owe someone an apology?”

“Sorry for accusing your car of smelling.”

“No.” I turn back to Buford and nod. He glances up with a hangdog expression. I think the word hangdog was invented to describe expressions like Buford is giving me, because he literally looks like a dog that’s melting off a hanger. “Him.”

Delia turns back and grabs Buford by the jowls and scratches his head and neck vigorously. “Oh, aren’t you a good boy and not a stinky boy. Auntie Delia’s sorry for saying that you smelled like a skunk soaked in kerosene when it was Auntie Delia all along.”

He whimpers and lays his head back down on the seat. He hates us both. I mean, we basically torture him…but in a loving way? Is that a thing? He’s like four hundred in dog years, and he’s profoundly over our nonsense. He never signed up for this.

I try to tell him Mama loves you with my eyes. “Can you even imagine the assault you’ve been mounting on poor Buford’s nose?” I say to Delia. “His sense of smell is a million times better than ours.”

“He’s fine. He probably likes it. Dogs eat their own puke.” Delia’s phone buzzes. She pulls it out like it’s a live cicada in her pocket, stares at it for a couple of seconds, and puts it away with a faint sigh. Probably her mom having some weird deal. By now, I know better than to ask. But I do anyway. “Your mom?”

Delia usually has an air of nervous good cheer before we film, but the good-cheer part flickers from her face like a lightbulb not screwed in all the way, leaving just the jittery energy. “Waiting on an important email.”

Delia is not the important-email type. “College stuff?” (She’s also not the college type. More like community college, which is where she’s going.) She shakes her head. “My dad.”

“He get in touch with you?”

“I saved up and hired a PI to track him down.”

“Seriously? You walked into a PI’s office like an old-timey dame?”

“No, I emailed her like a new-timey dame. She’s supposed to get back to me today.”

“Do you not have an aunt or an uncle or something who knows where he is?”

“His dad died when he was a kid. His mom died when I was like three. I think he has a couple of half siblings that not even he knew. We’re not in touch with any of his aunts or uncles. I’d have had to hire a PI to track them down.”