Single Wife by Nina Solomon

Author:Nina Solomon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2003-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

17

A GRIMM TALE

Kane did not call the following day or the next. It wasn’t noticeable at first. His calls were not all that regular—varying from once or twice a day to once a week, or even less frequently. It wasn’t that he wasn’t calling, it was the way in which he wasn’t calling that Grace knew was somehow different.

She’d already left two messages for him. The first was to provide an excuse as to why Laz couldn’t make hockey that night—a fundraiser his mother had roped him into—and the other was to try to make amends for the other night. Both calls went unanswered.

Another stack of mail had materialized on the front hall table. Grace likened the pile of mail that had begun to overrun her life to the suburban phenomenon of trying to maintain a manicured lawn, the bills like stubborn dandelions and the junk mail like fallen leaves. She wished taking care of the bills were as simple as upgrading to a more powerful leaf blower or a more potent weed killer.

Among the bills, she saw a letter from A Perfect Match. Ordinarily, she would have just ripped it in half, but after the meeting with the strange Mr. Dubrovsky, her curiosity was piqued. When she opened it, she saw that she’d been mistaken. The letter was from the lipstick company, informing her that they needed an additional five dollars and ninety-five cents per tube and another sample of the lipstick, if possible, which would have to be sent to the laboratory in Minnesota for further analysis.

Grace was disappointed. She was almost certain she didn’t have anymore Velvet, but she went into the bathroom and dug into her vinyl makeup bag on the off chance that she had missed it. She stored the bag on the windowsill above the broken radiator because her mother once told her that the shelf life of makeup is shortened if it’s exposed to heat or humidity, advising her to keep her extra lipsticks in the freezer. If Grace followed all of her parents’ advice on proper storage, her freezer would be filled to capacity with film, batteries, stockings, and makeup, probably even Duro-Lites.

The bag overflowed with tester-sized tubes of moisturizers, eye shadows, perfume samples, lip and cheek stains, shimmery face powder, white lip gloss, metallic eyeliner, and an array of age-defying lotions that her mother had given her, none of which Grace ever used. Francine gave leftovers; her mother gave beauty products. Grace always felt a pang of guilt when she even entertained the idea of tossing the entire makeup bag in the garbage, just as she would have felt if the did the same with Francine’s meatballs.

She was about to give up her search when she noticed an orange pump bottle containing a hydrating body mist called Happy. She read the directions on the back of the bottle: Spray it. Be Happy. Enticed by the promise it made, she opened the top and sprayed it over her neck and forearms. It couldn’t hurt, her mother would say.

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