Mary Jane by Jessica Blau (debian ebook reader TXT) 📗

song ended when I finally lifted my head. My skin was instantly chilled, electric, as I saw that my mother was smiling. Her bottom lip quivered, just slightly.

“Oh my goodness.” Her smile broadened and that electric feeling turned into a buzzing that covered my body in something thatfelt like happiness. I could tell just then that my mother was proud of me.

16

“MARY JANE!” Izzy threw her arms around me and clasped on like a little vine. “I missed you so much!”

I looked behind me at my mother. She was smiling. It was hard not to smile at Izzy Cone’s exuberance, her curls, her unbridledaffection. I leaned down and kissed the top of Izzy’s head. Her loamy smell was so familiar, so close to my heart.

At the sound of footsteps, my mother and I both looked up the narrow staircase, made narrower by the stacks of books and laundrylined up on one side. Mrs. Cone trotted down, barefoot as usual. She was in jeans and a soft orange sweater that showed nothingof her nipples. Her red hair was darker than it had been at the end of the summer, and her lips were waxy and bright withlipstick. “You’re here!” she said. Mrs. Cone hugged me, and then she stuck out her hand and grasped my mother’s hand morethan shook it.

“We have to hurry!” Izzy said.

“Let’s go!” Mrs. Cone said. “Izzy and I made cookies. The radio’s on already.”

The house was narrow with windows only in the front and back. We walked past the living room into the eat-in kitchen thatlooked out to the tiny backyard. On the center of the round oak table was a plate of chocolate chip cookies, the edges blackenedand burned.

“Do you want coffee?” Mrs. Cone asked my mother. “I started to make a pot this morning, then got distracted and never finished.”She laughed and my mother laughed too. I think Mom had grown used to Mrs. Cone by now. We’d been coming every week since Jimmy’salbum was released. My father never asked where we went on Sundays after church. As far as I knew, he was content sittingalone in the kitchen, eating the lunch my mother had left out for him.

“Let me help,” my mom said, and she and Mrs. Cone went to the counter and quietly talked while Izzy took my hand and led meto a seat.

A silver transistor radio with a long antenna sat on the table. It looked exactly like the one I had purchased at RadioShackwith my summer earnings. The volume was on low, but I could hear Labelle singing “Lady Marmalade.” It was one of my favorite songs and I’d recently bought the 45. Izzy turned up the volume and climbed into my lap when Labellestarted singing in French. “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” Izzy sang, and I laughed and hugged her and kissed her some more.

“Do you girls want milk?!” Mrs. Cone shouted as if we were down a hall although we were only a few feet away.

“Yes!” Izzy said.

“Sure,” I said.

“I think you’re right about the witch,” Izzy said. We’d been discussing her every time we saw each other. And last Friday, when I’d babysat Izzy at the Roland Park house where Dr. Cone now lived alone, we searched for the witch using flashlights I’d found in the mudroom.

“She definitely moved out, right?”

“YES!” Izzy pumped a tiny fist. “And I haven’t seen her here, either.”

“Nope. I told you, witches don’t like row houses. She’ll never show up here.”

“But, Mary Jane—” Izzy turned and leaned into me; her face grew dark and serious.

“Yeah?”

Izzy whispered. “I found makarino cherries in the fridge.”

I whispered back. “Your mom put them there.”

“She did?” Izzy still whispered.

“Yes. She did.” I’d run into Mrs. Cone at Eddie’s last week. We’d been standing right at the maraschino cherry jars and Iconfessed to having told Izzy about the witch who had stocked the fridge with maraschino cherries. She had laughed, pickedup a jar, and then put it in her cart.

“So there really is NO WITCH here!” Izzy grabbed a black-bottom cookie and bit into it.

My mother and Mrs. Cone brought two glasses of milk and two suede-colored coffees to the table. They were chatting like anytwo mothers might. It was nothing like the conversations Mrs. Cone used to have with Sheba, but it didn’t sound fake, either.

“Divorce is never easy,” my mother said. As far as I knew, she didn’t have any friends who were divorcées.

“No, but Richard makes it easier than most. It was such a strange summer, you know. Truly amazing and beautiful in so many ways. But it made me see things about myself. Ways that I’d compromised who I really was and what I really wanted.”

“You had wanted to marry a rock star,” I said quietly. Then I jerked my head down toward Izzy in my lap. Thankfully, she wastuned out, focused entirely on the cookie that was breaking into rock-hard shards in her hands.

“You remember! Yeah. I did.” Mrs. Cone’s face looked more freckly in the sunlight pouring in through the window. I could seethe younger version of her: fat-cheeked, strawberry-haired, dreaming of tattooed lead singers and a life entirely unlike herown mother’s.

“How much more do we have to wait?” Izzy turned in my lap to face me. She had chocolate goo on her teeth.

My mother lifted her wrist and looked at her watch. “Six minutes.”

“Six minutes.” Izzy shoved the last crescent-moon wedge of cookie into her mouth.

“I’ve gotta tell you,” Mrs. Cone said to my mother, as if the interruption from Izzy hadn’t happened, “how relieved and liberatedI feel just being me. Not a doctor’s wife. Not a Roland Park housewife. Just me!”

“Being a wife is a lot more work than husbands ever give us credit for!” my mother said.

“How much longer now?” Izzy asked.

My mother looked at her watch again. “Five minutes.”

“WAIT!” Izzy shouted. “I want to tape-record it.” She tumbled out of my lap and ran from the room. I could hear her feet clunkingup the stairs.

“Oh,