The Diamond Lane by Karen Karbo

Author:Karen Karbo [Karbo, Karen; Smiley, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780990437024
Publisher: Hawthorne Books

14

MOUSE THOUGHT THE ACCIDENT HAD CHANGED SHIRL, just as Dr. Klingston predicted. Her evidence was their driving over the hill to the Valley six-thirty Christmas morning to open presents with Shirl and Auntie Barb.

Shirl demanded that Mimi, Mouse, and Tony come over in bathrobes and pajamas. Any attempt to dissuade her produced a fit of rage or sulking. Mouse and Mimi pleaded. Couldn’t we have Christmas at the apartment, then shower and dress and…? Couldn’t we at least dress? We’ll bring over our presents and we can open everything together….

Shirl, backed by Auntie Barb, who accused Mimi and Mouse of willfully making Shirl’s already tough life hell, insisted they go straight from bed to bucket seat without stopping to comb their hair or rinse the sour night taste from their mouths. She wanted them no later than six-thirty, the better to duplicate the inhumane hour Mouse and Mimi used to awaken her and Fitzy, then just her, on the innocent and greedy mornings of Christmas past.

“She’s always been a Christmas Nazi,” said Mimi as they jounced over Laurel Canyon. “I don’t see anything different this year. It’s always one thing or another. She was always after Ivan to dress up like Santa. You can imagine Ivan as Santa.” No way was she, Mimi, going to drive anywhere in her highly unreliable Datsun in a bathrobe. She wouldn’t even take the garbage out in her Ugly Pants, the brown Stretch Levi’s for Gals Shirl had saddled her with last Christmas. This morning, after her run and a Merry Christmas wakeup call to Ralph, she put on paint-speckled gray sweats and a T-shirt. She put on makeup – only enough to look normal, not beautiful – and brushed her teeth. She still had a warrant for her arrest out on account of all her parking tickets, and was not about to get pulled over by a cute cop, then hauled off to jail in a patrol car, Clearasil dotting her face, her rotting coffee-stained robe flapping open as she was marched up the courthouse steps. Shirl would just have to be unhappy. She, Mimi, would just have to suffer being accused of ruining Shirl’s day. She would be anyway. After all, it was Christmas.

There was no traffic, save a few hyperoutfitted, tortured bicyclists with stringy overworked flanks pumping up the hill. The air was tinged with the smell of ponderosa pine, the sky white with dry desert cold. Later, it would be as warm as any late spring day.

Unlike Mimi, Mouse liked Christmas. It was the one day a year when she didn’t feel compelled to think up ways to raise money for her documentaries. It was a true holiday. She dangled her arm out the window, hand patting the breeze. The day she bought her new green silk blouse she also splurged on a lavish purple terrycloth bathrobe with a hood.

Tony wore a brown-and-gold silk dressing gown his mother had sent him from Hong Kong. He sat wedged in the backseat,

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