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Her husband Ramon had left her after her fifth son, Carlos, was born. Ramon had never seen Carlos because he ran off while Dolores was in the hospital. “There I was paying God’s price for Eve’s mistake and suffering the pain and agony of birth and the FUCKER”—she always said that word so loudly that Vibro imagined it as capitalized—“ran off with that WHORE.” Ramon, according to Dolores’s contacts, was living in SIN with the WHORE in Mexico City, which was the SODOM and GOMORRAH of the modern world, according to Dolores.

  “What has SHE done now?” Dolores inquired. She stopped typing, which meant she was giving Vibro her full attention. Dolores always referred to Jennifer as SHE.

  “It’s her never-ending saga of SPECIAL FRIENDS,” Vibro said, deciding she liked using capital letters for emphasis.

  Dolores nodded and said, “I don’t know why you stay. Find yourself a nice woman who adores you and kick her ASS out.”

  “Would you have kicked Ramon’s ASS out if you’d known he was cheating?” Vibro asked. She leaned over to see what Dolores had gone back to typing. Dolores’s attention span was even worse than Lexus’s. Dolores’s hung around long enough to dissect, discern, debate and dismiss all within three minutes—tops. If Dolores had been into politics instead of polemics she would have been dangerous. The world would’ve been nuked several times over.

  “No, I would have cut his penis off, run it over with his riding lawn mower, picked up the pieces, put them through a food processor, added cream cheese and served it to him on a Triscuit.”

  “Wow, I don’t think you’ve spent enough time on your plan,” Vibro said.

  “I have lots of lonely hours in the middle of the night to refine it.”

  “So you never got over it?”

  “No. There is something about betrayal that sticks with you.” She pounded her heart with her fist.

  This was true, Vibro thought. She didn’t know how she’d get over it even if she tossed Jennifer out. How could she trust another woman not to do the same thing? It wasn’t like she could run a personal ad that said, “Looking for someone who won’t treat my heart like a bounced check.” Wouldn’t that just be announcing that she was an easy mark?

  She was. That much was obvious. Jennifer had a nice place to live and a girlfriend who fucked her, who paid most of the bills and who let her do whatever she wanted—including fucking other women. What better way to have your cake and eat it too? Vibro wondered how many others there had been—other than the one before this one before the other one after the one on the couch. That sentence said it all—Jennifer was a serial cheater. There had been others. There would be more.

  Vibro leaned over and studied the title of Dolores’s latest manifesto. She put out one a week without fail on her website, “God and Gals.” The title of this one was Mary Magdalene was Not a WHORE.

  “Do you always capitalize the bad words?”

  “Always,” Dolores said and she went back to her typing.

  Vibro resumed sitting atop her desk, which was good. Because had she not gotten out of the way, Mary Lou Bausch would have floored her as she burst into the room and slid into her desk like she was sliding into home plate.

  Mary Lou was a cowgirl-gone-city. Meaning she wore short blue jean skirts with bedazzled pockets on the back and tight-fitting Western shirts—her breasts were always threatening to pop out of her shirt like a jack-in-the-box. She looked like a barrel racer gone slutty. She also resembled Barbie’s sidekick Skipper with her blond ponytail, her just-right tan and her blue eyes.

  She was not, however, a cowgirl. She’d never ridden a horse, stepped in a cow pie or, much to her dismay, gotten laid in a barn. She was from New Jersey.

  Her crème de la crème oddity, however, was the fact that her body carried the name of each boyfriend she’d had since she was eighteen and old enough to get a tattoo. Now over forty years of age, she had seventy-five tattoos. Vibro thought she should be a public service announcement for not tattooing your boyfriend’s name across your body.

  The Chink came out of his office and pointed at the clock. She was only an hour and a half late for her shift. “I’ll skip lunch,” Mary Lou said and gave him the finger and began writing her quota of fifty fortunes—which she’d likely finish in the next ten minutes, based on past performance. The Chink shrugged and went back into his office. Despite her personal problems, Vibro chuckled. Where else could you work that allowed you to flip off your boss and not get fired?

  Mary Lou looked up from her scribbling. “The REASON I was late,” she said, this in capital letters so The Chink could hear, “was that I got another tattoo. See,” she said, lifting up her sleeve to reveal “Rodney” in cursive with a rope wound around it. “I think he might be my last tattoo.”

  “Because you’ve run out of room?” Vibro inquired. Mary Lou did not tattoo from her bicep and down on her arms or from the upper thigh to her ankles on her legs. She was a mid-body only tattoo girl. “Everyone has their limits,” she’d said.

  “No, silly, because he’s the one. I can feel it.” She smiled and looked off into space, the very epitome of that moronic cliché of the lovelorn gazing off into the sunset. She looked like she needed Rodney right now. If Vibro ever did fall in love again she’d have to emulate that look—it was a good one.

  Dolores rolled her eyes heavenward but said nothing.

  “That’s great,” Vibro said. “I hope you’ll both be very happy.” She went back to checking her phone bill. The number of Jennifer’s texts had continued to climb exponentially. She wished she could figure out who the other woman was, but the number was blocked—most likely with good reason, seeing as Jennifer was probably fucking around with another woman’s girlfriend or worse yet a life partner. Nothing was quite as much fun as breaking up a long-term relationship. Knowing Jennifer she considered it a major coup.

  Why did women do that to other women—gay or straight? Stealing another person’s significant other was wrong. Would they like it if someone did it to them? The whole philandering infrastructure would come crashing down if married people were off limits to single people or if people who were in bad relationships were not shopping around for a new partner before they dumped the one they had. Was that what Jennifer was doing? She was going to dump Vibro when she found someone better? It was like sexual test driving.

  She went back to work and wrote, “Love is like toe fungus. You should see a doctor,” and forty-nine more very poetic, very morose fortunes.

  Chapter Six

  The Setup

  “I need a flat head,” Pen said.

  Sparky handed over the screwdriver without reservations about Pen’s knowledge of tools—after all, the kid had taken a couch apart. Who could doubt her prowess now? Sparky studied the diagrams for putting the bookcase together. She was having trouble visualizing it. The glass doors were throwing her for a loop. She swore people in foreign countries got a kick out of torturing do-it-yourselfers. She envisioned them sitting around and coming up with diabolically complex and misleading instruction manuals meant to drive the average American to furious distraction and hair-pulling. After which these same countries would sell Rogaine to these same do-it-yourselfers.

  However, having experienced the “can’t fit the couch up the stairs” incident she’d come to the conclusion that buying furniture that came in boxes was mandatory—otherwise you’d need to have a degree in quantum physics to figure out how to fit it up the stairwell. Would she have to live forever in this apartment because, once assembled, her furniture would be too large to fit back through the stairway? And if so, was that such a bad thing? She had to admit she enjoyed being a Moonie. Lexus had given her the official bumper sticker “Moonie-2.” They all had them. The words were printed in hot pink on a black background. She was “Moonie-2” because she lived in Apartment Number 2.

  There had been no sightings of Wesson, aka the Eye-Biter. Sparky was still anxious. She kept expecting Wesson to jump out at her, jab a finger in her face and say something like, “You think
you can just dump me like this?”

  She put her concerns out of her mind. She was getting better at this, sort of a drag-and-drop mental process. Taking her bad thoughts, visualizing them as the icons of files or folders and moving them to her trash bin. She did this now with her fears of an E.B. sighting and went back to studying the bookcase assembly directions.

  “I have a confession,” Sparky said, looking up from the diagrams. They were both sitting on the living room floor.

  “What?” Pen said. She looked on guard.

  “I can’t follow this,” Sparky said, pointing at the directions.

  “You’re an electrician, right? I mean, you gotta…” Pen stopped.

  “That doesn’t mean I can put furniture together. Wires go certain places and I’ve been trained and I do it all the time.”

  “I think I got it. I try to kinda see what it looks like in my head, ya know.”

  “Well, then it’s a good thing I’ve got you or I’d be in big trouble.”

  “Ya know, I think it’s pretty cool that you left that woman, the one that bit your eye. That you’re, like, fixing your life and stuff,” Pen said. She didn’t look at Sparky when she said this.

  “I think you’re doing a pretty good job with your new life too.”

  “I got it easy—mine came with furniture.”

  “Sure, rub it in,” Sparky said.

  Pen laughed. It warmed Sparky’s heart to hear her. In her experience, kids that had to grow up fast were always too serious.

  “You know, if you ever need to talk about anything…” Sparky said.

  Pen didn’t meet her eye. “Lexus said you used to hang out with kids like me.”

  “I did. A good friend of mine, her sister died on the streets so we went to help out.”

  “That was nice.”

  “So if you got a problem or something I could try to help,” Sparky said.

  “Thanks.”

  That appeared to be the end of the conversation.

  They worked in silence until Pen broke it. “I’m kind of mad at my mom.”

  Sparky hazarded a guess. “Because she died?”

  “Yeah, that and how she raised me. I feel kinda like I don’t fit in.”

  “Fit in where?”

  “Here, like I don’t have the right kind of…I don’t know, like, manners,” Pen said. She didn’t look at Sparky while she screwed in the hinges on the bookcase doors.

  “Oh, well, those are things you can learn. We all have to learn them. You can ask me things about manners.” Sparky passed Pen the other door to the bookcase. It seemed Pen could talk better if her hands were busy and she didn’t have to look at Sparky.

  “I don’t wanna make mistakes.”

  “You know, what you do is copy other people. Just watch what they do. I mean, not like people picking their noses or scratching their butts…” Sparky glanced over at Pen.

  “I wouldn’t do that, no way,” Pen said. She outright laughed.

  There was a knock at the door. Sparky got up and answered it. It was Lexus. “Is Pen with you?” There was anxiety in her voice—motherly anxiety.

  “I’m here. I left you a note,” Pen said, her tone verging on the defensive. No one had probably cared about where she was before. Sparky wondered how Pen was going to react to helicopter parenting. The gay parents she’d known were all hyper-parents. She didn’t foresee Cheryl and Lexus being any different.

  “I know you did,” Lexus said, waving the note. They looked at each other and both started to say something and stopped.

  “You go first,” Pen said. A good move on her part, Sparky thought. Always let the other guy go first, that way you had time to fix your answer if it didn’t correspond with what the other person said. She’d avoided more than one eye-biting using this method.

  “I wasn’t hovering.”

  “I know,” Pen said.

  “Whew, I’m glad we got that out of the way,” Lexus said. She smiled. “I’m new at this, you know.”

  “It’s okay, I kinda like it. You know, like, you cared,” Pen replied.

  They did a knuckle bump. Buddy-mothering, Sparky thought.

  “Another reason I came up here was to invite Sparky to the little dinner soiree we are having this evening,” Lexus said, switching back into her hip-dyke-in-charge mode.

  “I don’t know,” Sparky hedged. Dinner parties were not her thing. She and the Eye-Biter had secluded themselves in their own private hell for so long, Sparky wondered if she were capable of a dinner party anymore.

  “Is there going to be lots of forks and things?” Pen asked.

  Lexus cocked her head. “Not that I’m aware of. We’re having fondue. I found this adorable fondue set in a Family Value Thrift Store, brand new, not even out of the box, and I built the dinner party around it. Fondue is so seventies. We can make it like a culinary history lesson and discuss some of the social ramifications about what life was like back then—most of us having not been born at that time, we won’t have personal experiences, but that does not mean we can lack empathy for that period.”

  Pen glanced at Sparky. “Really?” Pen said. Obviously dinner parties with a history lesson theme were out of her ken as well, Sparky thought.

  “Why did you want to know about the cutlery?” Sparky asked.

  “Martha Sue said that lots of forks meant fancy,” Pen said.

  “It’s fondue. There’ll only be one fork apiece,” Lexus said.

  “Should I stay in my room?” Pen said. She didn’t meet Lexus’s eyes.

  Sparky thought Pen looked like she might want to stay in her room.

  “No, of course not. I think children should be engaged in social events as much as possible—I mean not raves or anything but certainly a fondue party.”

  “I don’t know how to fondue,” Pen said.

  “Fondue is a little pot with hot oil in it. You stick food on your fork and put it in the hot oil to cook,” Sparky said.

  “Can I make a peanut butter sandwich if I don’t like fondue?” Pen said.

  “By all means. It starts at seven thirty. I better get chopping. That’s the downside of fondue—everything has to be in little tiny pieces.”

  “Do you want us to come help?” Pen asked.

  “‘Us’?” Sparky said.

  “I helped you with the furniture—you can help me chop.”

  “That would be fantastic! Cheryl categorically refused and she’s at work until six so it was really a no-go from the get-go.” Lexus stopped. “Should I be letting you use a knife? You’re only ten.” Her brow furrowed as she appeared to study the problem.

  “I used to cook Martha Sue’s black tar heroin. I had to cut it up first,” Pen said.

  Lexus stuck her fist in her mouth and her eyes widened. “Really?”

  “Naw, I was just joshing ya,” Pen said.

  Lexus put her hand over her heart. “Don’t scare me like that.”

  “Sorry,” Pen said. But she didn’t really look sorry.

  “Okay, we’ll help,” Sparky said, winking at Pen.

  “That’s fabulous!” Lexus fairly skipped out of the room.

  “You know if the Eye-Biter had been that easy to please, I’d still be there,” Sparky said, setting down the instructions.

  “But then I wouldn’t know you,” Pen said, tightening the final screw on the bookcase.

  “Maybe in our next lives we could meet each other without the death and destruction part,” Sparky said.

  “That’d be great,” Pen said, handing Sparky her tools back. She smiled.

  “You have a very nice smile,” Sparky said.

  “I should smile more often, huh?”

  “Yes, you should.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Making of Swans

  “I can’t believe she enlisted you guys,” Cheryl said, snagging a baby carrot and popping it in her mouth.

  Sparky and Pen were helping Lexus in the kitchen. It was a tight fit. The Moon Street kitchens were not l
arge. Sparky tried not to feel claustrophobic. Wesson had cornered her in their small kitchen on more than one occasion during arguments. Perhaps this was another Post-Wesson Stress Disorder symptom—fear of small kitchens.

  “We volunteered,” Pen said.

  “Besides, Lexus told us all sorts of stories about you,” Sparky said.

  “Stories?” Cheryl looked alarmed.

  Lexus laughed. “OMG, you’ve led such a torrid life, a veritable cornucopia of drug-induced and brothel-oriented living, full of lies, corruption and thievery.”

  Sparky smirked, then reflexively covered the smirk with her hand. Such a gesture in her previous life would have caused much consternation on the Eye-Biter’s part. Smirking was not allowed. Sparky realized that she was like a POW released and thrown back into the world—culture shock was inevitable.

  They were sitting at the kitchen island. Sparky had studied its construction and wondered if she could make one. Lexus had purchased it pre-fab from IKEA. The apartments were mirror images of each other, only where Sparky’s had next to nothing in it, Lexus and Cheryl’s was full of warmth, life, charm and furniture. They’d redone the cabinets and painted them a pristine white and put brushed nickel handles on them. All the appliances were retro-water tower green, including the rounded old-style fridge. It was like stepping back into time with June and Ward Cleaver, only it had a new-age hip edge to it.

  “I don’t see you as a Fagin,” Sparky said.

  “You like Dickens?” Lexus was thrilled. She clasped Sparky by the shoulders. “Please tell me you’re a reader.”

  “I used to have a leather-bound boxed set of Dickens.”

  “You used to have a lot of things,” Pen said.

  “You said it, kid,” Sparky said. “‘Used to’ being the operative words.”

  “Well,” Lexus said, “allow me to show you my personal library.”

  “There’s lots of books,” Pen said. She pulled the broiled croutons from the oven. The green oven mitts reached her elbows. They were going to have a chef salad with the fondue. Chef salad was another first for Pen.