Read Online A Dress to Die For by Christine DeMaio-Rice - Free Book Online Page B

realize how lonely until he told me he’d fallen in love, but it all hit me right then. I feel so selfish, because you know… it was like he really was gone. It wasn’t a joke or a phase. I was really being left behind. I said awful things. I called him names I’d never call anyone. And then he left for work, and I never saw him again.” Mom sniffed, and tears rolled down her face.
    “Mom, please don’t cry,” Laura said, rummaging through drawers, looking for a tissue.
    “I can’t help but think I left you without a father because I was feeling jilted and I just had to insult him.”
    “What could anyone say that would keep a father from his children?” Not finding any tissues, Laura went to the bathroom and unspooled a bouquet of toilet paper. “Really, Mom, if all it took was you saying nasty things because you were hurt, he didn’t love us.”
    “He loved you ,” Mom insisted.
    Laura bent to look Mom in the eye. “No. He did not love Ruby and me. He never did. You loved us enough for two people. The end.”
    Mom shook her head and looked at her crumpled toilet paper. “You’re wrong.”
    “I’m wrong a lot. But I know what it feels like to be loved, and I know who loves me.”
    Mom shook her head, sniffed hard, and got herself under control. “I can’t tell you what to believe, Laura. When you’re ready to hear the truth, I’m here to tell it to you.”
    “Mom—”
    “Let’s go to bed.” Mom put her arms around Laura, kissed her on the forehead, and slipped out. The room seemed deathly quiet after the door closed.
    Laura wanted to go to Jeremy’s loft again and slide into bed next to him. If she could spin the energy to get out of bed and get dressed, she’d wake up to him and those big brown eyes.

CHAPTER 5

    Since being given five years of her life she’d forgotten, Laura found clips of memory popping up in her mind unbidden, as if someone behind her had the TV remote and was flipping around in the middle of a show. She couldn’t always catch more than a snatch of a voice or a swatch of color. Hair on Dad’s face. Him standing next to Mom, drying the dishes she washed. Someone stroking her hair while she watched TV. Sometimes she found objects jogged a memory loose, as if a tree had shaken, dropping fruit at her feet, finished and perfect in color and texture, but still not ripe enough to digest.
    The memory of the beads was different. As she cut the armhole seam on the Syracuse jacket, slicing through a thread and splashing beads on the floor, the remote control changed the show, and she saw Mom’s table in the rent-controlled apartment. Laura held a dish of seed beads in her left hand and a needle in her right. The vision started like the other reawakened memories, splashing on her ankles like a wave that had crashed at a safe distance. The rest of the memories had gone back out to sea. But the water got higher and more vivid with the smell of something Mom had been cooking and Laura threading the saffron orange beads with fingers as small as a doll’s. Mom sat across from her, threading at lightning speed and setting aside the rows of orange crystals to be applied to the dress. Thread, thread, thread. Bead, bead, bead. The tide of memory came in with the smell of the dishes in a clogged sink and the sound of the door opening as Dad came home, finally, and Laura was filled with love and relief even as she threaded five, six, seven orange seed beads.
    “Ow!” Kelly jumped away, holding her shoulder.
    “Laura!” Ruby shouted.
    “I’m so sorry!” Laura felt terrible for sticking the fit model while she pinned the sleeve head. She’d never stuck anyone. “Are you okay?”
    Kelly took off the White Plains jacket. The pinprick wasn’t bleeding. “You can stick your next model all you want.” She gave Laura the Big Eyes. Kelly wasn’t a giraffe, per se, but a fit model with a perfectly average body. She worked hard to keep it that way, standing for hours on end in high heels,