Life Sentences by Laura Lippman

Author:Laura Lippman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

SIRENS

THE WEEK BEFORE MY TENTH birthday party, my father suddenly became fixated on the idea that I must have a special cake. I had been trying to persuade my parents that this was an important birthday—two digits!—but hadn’t realized I was having any effect until my father decided that the cake was, in fact, a big deal.

“What kind of cake do you envision, Cassandra?”

“Yellow cake,” I said. “Chocolate’s not right for birthday cakes.”

“No, I mean, what is the theme?”

“The party has a mermaid theme,” I said, “so it should be a mermaid.”

“Sirens,” he said, “Lorelei.”

This worried me. “No, just regular mermaids, Daddy. Not the sirens. They were bad. Nice mermaids, like Hans Christian Andersen.”

“She had a bum life, you know that, right? When she gave up her tail for legs, every step was like walking on glass splinters, and the prince didn’t marry her.”

“That’s not the way it is in my storybook.”

“They sanitize the books, dumpling. All the stories. Trust me. But, okay, sweet, happy mermaids, frolicking on a sea of icing. It will be yours. I’ll place the order tomorrow.” The next night, he came home unusually animated, full of stories about the wonderful cake and how breathtaking it would be. “The people there, they listened to me,” he said. “They didn’t thrust a book at me, say, “This is what we can do.’ They’ve never done a mermaid cake, but they’re going to create one for Cassandra.”

“I don’t know why you couldn’t go to Bauhof’s, down in Woodlawn,” my mother said. But my father said this new bakery was much better. On Saturday, the day of my party, he made a great production of it: “I am Poseidon, gone to capture the mermaid and bring her back to do the princess’s bidding.”

“She’s a happy mermaid,” I called after him. “She’s not going to be a slave or walk on splinters.”

“She shall do whatever you desire,” he promised.

Almost four hours later, as my mother’s carefully planned party began to wind down, my father still had not arrived home. When the first parents began showing up, my mother put out the ice cream, explaining the situation in a low, tight voice. We ate the ice cream, not wanting it to melt. Fatima complained loudly about not having her cake and ice cream together. “It’s the whole point of birthday parties,” she said, and some of the other girls agreed. “You get everything. The cake and the ice cream and the ice cream is all three flavors, pink and brown and white.”

“Strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla,” I corrected, embarrassed by my father’s absence, aggrieved that Fatima would complain. My mother had always taken a dim view of Fatima’s manners. Perhaps she had a point.

“You’re vanilla,” Fatima retorted. “And that’s the one everyone likes least.”

“We should sing and figure out a way to have candles, even if there isn’t cake,” said Tisha, our peacemaker. They did, with me blowing out the candles in an old pair of candelabras festooned with grapes, one of my parents’ wedding gifts.

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