Jane sounded hurt, although she was still laughing. “You know, I don’t think I ever used the gift certificate. I mean, after everything happened.”
The light changed, and they barely made it through the intersection this time, moving at a snail’s pace. She watched the boy swim through the weeds by the side of the road until they gained on him, pulled ahead, and finally passed him. In the rearview mirror he looked almost motionless.
She turned back to Jane. “Look, pull the car over. Do you want me to get you the newest Baby-Sitters Club book? They’re probably on number ten thousand by now.”
It worked. Jane laughed and turned the music up.
In Montrose, they parked the car outside a hair salon that had a tattoo parlor upstairs. They got out, and Jane took a deep breath. This must be where Jane went to feel like Houston was her city, not just some place she accidentally wound up because her parents lived there. The sad part was Jane’s pride in her insider knowledge, as if it were hard-won. As if anyone couldn’t walk into any city and find the artists and gays and addicts and tattoo parlors within half an hour by bumming a couple of cigarettes and picking up the free papers on the street corner.
The salon was full of clients, but the woman behind the counter eyed Julie and said she could get her color started and then cut her next customer’s hair while the dye was processing. Julie eased into the chair, felt the woman’s fingers in her hair, and saw her look down critically; she said, “Short and red,” fast, before the woman could comment on her roots. The woman met her eyes in the mirror and said, “Okay, hon, let me get the book.” She left and came back with a floppy binder full of inch-long swatches like the silken manes of tiny horses or trophies of all the girls she’d ever been. Julie pointed to one, and the woman nodded. “Oh, sure, number eight, that’ll look good on you,” and she disappeared into the back to mix the dye.
Jane stood behind her, looking at her face in the mirror. “Mom’ll freak,” she said. “But I think it’s going to look amazing.”
“What do you want to do while I’m cooking?”
“Look at magazines, I guess.” Jane shrugged. Julie could see the realization dawning in Jane’s eyes that there was nothing particularly special about this place. Anywhere must seem hip when you’re getting your hair dyed to piss off your mom.
That gave Julie an idea. “You could go upstairs,” she said. “Get a tattoo while you’re waiting.”
“Think I’m made of money?”
“Don’t you have a credit card?”
“Mom cosigned. It’ll show up on her bill.”
A wave of generosity, accompanied by the need to get Jane out of the room before it became obvious she had roots, made Julie point at her Anna-bought purse on the floor. “She gave me a couple hundred bucks. Why don’t you pay for my hair with your card, and I’ll give you the cash? You can spend it upstairs.”
Jane hesitated.
“Don’t tell me you don’t have your next one already picked out.” Julie predicted something small and discreet, but visible.
“I was thinking of a little outline of Texas on my left ring finger,” Jane admitted.
“So get one!”
“Mom will see,” Jane said. “I figured I’d wait —”
“Until what? Until you’re thirty? Come on, quit hiding who you really are.”
She could tell Jane was eating this up. “You’ll be okay down here?” she said, reaching for the purse.
“Yeah. I don’t mind magazines.” It was true. She used to ogle them in their plastic folders at the library when Cal dropped her off to study for the GED. Once she’d even smuggled a Better Homes and Gardens into the restroom and ripped out a picture of a fluffy white cake surrounded by silver and gold Christmas ornaments — not for the recipe, just the picture. Now the magazine cake was crumpled in a dumpster somewhere in Jersey Village, where the bus had dropped her off, along with her shoes, a cheap gold necklace with a dangling horse charm, and her backpack full of souvenirs. All her earthly possessions. Except —
She lurched forward, but it was too late; Jane was already digging through the floppy bag. Before she could even form the words Give it to me, I’ll find it, Jane had the wallet in her hand and was fanning the ATM-fresh twenties out of its pocket. Julie sat back quickly, willing Jane not to notice the IDs in the wallet, the phone in the inner pocket of the purse, or her own momentary panic.
But Jane just beamed at the stack of bills. “Thanks!” she said and headed for the stairs.
Just in time. The hairstylist was back in a black apron holding a bowl full of glowing red paste in one hand and a brush in the other. “This is going to be gorgeous,” she said, “trust me,” and Julie did, she really did. She leaned back and felt the cold goop applied to her part. “We’re getting rid of those nasty roots first,” the stylist said and continued to chatter, the way good hairdressers do when they can tell you don’t want to say much. At one point she said, “My sister and I are like y’all — we look so different, people never believe we’re related.”
She let the stylist tilt her chin down toward the floor and finally figured out something that had been bothering her since her arrival in Houston. It had been nagging at the corners of her vision everywhere she went, from Target to the therapist to Bobby’s Pool Hall to the weathered-brick coffee shop where Jane had insisted on stopping for pastries on the way to the hair place. Something not quite right, some quality that made the whole city feel like a stage set. Now, surrounded by other clients and with her head pointed floorward, looking under the table with its big mirror, she could see them propped up on footrests on the other side, all in a row: the shoes.
They were pristine. The patent-leather flats so shiny, the soles of the Reebok sneakers fluorescent yellow, the miraculously white leather sandals with gold lions on them framing brightly polished toenails without a single chip. Staring at the floor, she cast her mind back through the past few weeks and saw a parade of flip-flops and leather boots looking as unscuffed as if they’d just come out of the box. She could see, framed by the black plastic smock, her own feet perched on the silver bar in Jane’s Converse, which had felt comfortably worn. Now she noticed that the tiny holes in the canvas — one near the right toe, another on the side, another near the heel — were too perfectly placed. She’d worn through shoes before; the canvas should have been frayed under the laces, the holes should have bloomed unattractively along the seam of the heel, not in neat little ovals in the middle of the fabric, and the rubber should have been thin enough under the soles for her to feel every pebble on the sidewalk. These weren’t worn; they were distressed.
She imagined a city divided between those like herself and the kid with the oversize pants — people whose shoes endured a constant pounding, scuffing, sweating, straining, and staining with grass and mud and soft, oozing tar — and those who whooshed past them in SUVs, the ones who never walked more than twenty steps outside each day, much less to a bus stop or convenience store, and whose shoes, therefore, never wore out.
She wished for a moment she could tell Cal.
Not Jane, though. Jane had never walked anywhere. She would have found ways to rebel against Anna and Tom without ever having to rebel against that.
The hairdresser tilted Julie’s head back up, and she glanced at the ceiling, hoping, for Jane’s sake, that the needle upstairs wasn’t hurting her too much.
If Tom suspects the ovarian cyst is not an ovarian cyst, he doesn’t say anything about it, and I, in return, say nothing about the gun that appeared in his hand last night. After we settle Julie on the sofa Monday morning with hot tea and the remote control, she turns on a cable movie that’s already halfway over, one of those holiday-themed romantic comedies with six different plots so isolated from one another that most