Read Online LimeLight by Melody Carlson - Free Book Online Page A

about right. And I could be very persuasive when needed. So I begged my mother to tell me the truth—who were her parents and why did we not have anything to do with them.”
    “And?”
    “She told me the truth.”
    “And?”
    Now I can tell that I have a captive audience in Michael, so I go with it, play up the drama. Who knows? Perhaps this story would make a good screenplay…although I have no idea how it would end. “It seemed that my mother’s family owned a rather large business in San Francisco, and they were quite wealthy.”
    “What’s their name? Do you know?”
    “I think it was Lawson, but I’m not positive. Mother was secretive about such things. I think she worried that I would try to look them up.”
    “Hit them up for money?”
    I sort of laugh. “I’m sure she thought something like that. I always wanted more…even as a small child. I had caviar taste on a tuna fish budget.”
    Michael chuckles. “Continue your tale, darling. This will make the trip go by so much faster.”
    “Oddly enough, Mother was only two years older than Gavin,” I say as I run their birth dates through my head.
    “Interesting…that would make her even younger than my mother.”
    “Younger than Gala?” I try to process this impossible fact. Could it be? “Yes, of course, you’re right. Although my mother seemed much, much older. But then poverty does that to a person, makes one old before one’s time. Anyway, when mother was a young woman, it seemed her parents had high hopes for her. I think she was their oldest daughter, a debutante, and an heiress. And, yes, she was quite attractive too. I remember being so surprised when I found a photo of her one day.
    “It was summertime, and I was sixteen and bored. I’d been poking around the house when I made my discovery. Perhaps she’d been looking at it herself, since it was lying on her dresser with an old handkerchief over it. The photo was good quality, obviously from a studio, and my mother had been about my age when it was shot. I don’t recall a date, but I could tell by her dress, which was an exquisite number in some sort of gauzy fabric trimmed in lace, and by her hairstyle, a sweet little bob, that it was taken in the twenties. I remember just staring at that image in wonder. She was so pretty and young, and her eyes sparkled.”
    “I’ll bet she looked like you, Claudette. I mean, when you were young.”
    “I thought that too when I saw the photo. That’s probably the only reason I realized it was her. When I flipped the photo over, it said, ‘Emma’s Sixteenth Birthday’ in delicate penmanship, and then I was certain. Even so, it seemed inconceivable that the girl in the photo was actually
my mother.
The same woman who wore her prematurely gray hair pinned up in a tight little bun and old-fashioned shoes that I wouldn’t be caught dead in. And the same woman who camouflaged her bony frame and sagging breasts beneath the horrible ‘day’ dresses she wore every day. She had two or three pitiful rags that she rotated, not that anyone would notice. How could that fresh-looking girl in the photo be the same worn-out woman whose hands were cracked and dry from taking in laundry? I knew it was true, but it just seemed unbelievable.”
    “Unbelievably sad for her…”
    “Yes…” I don’t admit to Michael that it was also personally disappointing to me as well. Or that, not for the first time, I secretly blamed my mother for the state of her marriage and for the way my father treated her. I’d been nagging her to take better care of herself, to use some cream on her hands, to fix her hair and get a new dress, try a bit of lipstick on those pale, tired lips. But she never listened to me. I felt that she was the reason my father strayed. He was an attractive man who kept up his appearance. Who could blame him for looking elsewhere? Why couldn’t she understand that?
    By the time I became a teenager, I would go far out of my way not to be seen or