But I waited, watching him until he was out of sight, before I turned and went up the stairs.
Mira was in her room with Cat Norman; I could hear her alternately cooing and chastizing him. I closed the windows in the back room, gathering up the papers and placemats, then turned off a few lights and went outside to retrieve the windchimes from the birdbath, where they’d landed. The inside of the house felt unsteady and loose, like it had been breathing hard, all the pent-up air pushed out and away.
In Mira’s studio, cards were strewn everywhere, some open, some shut. As I collected them I read each one, each separate way of saying I’m sorry . . .
. . . for your loss, for it is hard to lose one who added so much.
. . . for he was a good man, a good father, and a good friend.
. . . from all of us who worked with her, and whose lives she touched.
. . . he was a friend and companion, and I will miss seeing you two walking each morning together.
Dead ex-husbands, dead co-workers, even dead dogs. Thousands of apologies over the years.
I dried myself off and fixed some soup, then sat down to watch wrestling, out of habit, alone, as Mira moved around upstairs, running water for her nightly bath. Rex Runyon and Lola Baby had reconciled, but there were already problems. The Sting Ray and Mr. Marvel’s partnership was being sorely tested by several ongoing defeats to Tiny and Whitey, and during a match between some unknown and the Swift Snake the referee was thrown completely out of the ring onto the ground, landing with a crash. And the crowd roared.
During a commercial I flipped a few channels and found my mother: some news program was covering her antifat crusade through Europe. She was in London now. On TV my mother looked even better than in person: her skin glowed, her smile was broad. For the first time I realized how similar she and Mira were—the way they waved their hands around excitedly while they talked, drawing you in.
“So, Kiki,” said the interviewer, a round-faced Englishman with a clipped accent, “I understand you have a new philosophy you’re speaking about on this trip.”
“That’s right, Martin!” my mother replied cheerily in her go-go-go infomercial voice. “I’m speaking to everyone out there who sees themselves as a caterpillar, but knows that somewhere in them lives a butterfly.”
“A caterpillar?” Martin looked skeptical.
“Yes.” My mother leaned forward, fixing her eyes on him. She said, “There are a lot of people out there, Martin, who are watching this as they’ve watched a million other fitness shows and infomercials, longing for results. But they’re caterpillars, watching butterflies. And there’s a crucial step in there. They still have to become.”
“Become.” Martin shifted his clipboard to the other leg.
“Become,” my mother repeated. “And that’s where I come in. I am the work between those caterpillars and this world of butterflies. They all have the potential. It’s been there all along. They just have to become.”
And there was that sparkle in her eye, bright enough to reach across an ocean and still get me. My mother believed, and she could make you do it, too. She’d believed me all the way out of forty-five-and-a-half pounds. She’d believed us from living out of the car to having anything we wanted. And now, she would believe millions of people from depressed, Burger King-scarfing caterpillars into gorgeous, thin, brightly colored butterflies.
Later, as I put away the dishes, I caught a glimpse of myself in the window: my hair different, the new shape of my eyebrows affecting my entire face. A work in progress, Isabel had allowed as she stood back and admired what she’d done. I’d been a caterpillar for so long, and although I had shed my cocoon in losing my fat, my coat, and the years that led me here, I wasn’t a butterfly yet. For now, all I could do was stand on the ground and look up at the sky, not quite ready yet to leap and rise.
Chapter eight
As the weeks passed, I got somewhat more used to being with Mira in public. The bike didn’t bother me much anymore, or the clothes, unless she was really suited up, which was rare enough so that it was ultimately avoidable. It was the reaction of the rest of the world—the rest of Colby—that remained hard to take.
It wasn’t just Bea Williamson, of course. There were the women at the library who rolled their eyes when they saw Mira coming. The men at the hardware store who stifled their laughter as she picked intently through the screw section, pink purse tucked under her arm. Some people just smirked, ducking their heads. But others made it clear how they felt.
“So, Mira,” a man had said at the drugstore, where we were buying Super Glue for more fix-it projects, “the annual Fourth of July church bazaar is coming up soon. I’m sure we can count on you to be a star customer, can’t we?”
Or at the supermarket, in a hushed whisper from a pack of women huddled by the frozen foods, while Mira chose some cookies: “My goodness, Mira Sparks certainly does like those sweets, doesn’t she? And it shows.”
The fat jokes, for obvious reasons, were the worst. But I didn’t say anything; this wasn’t my fight. And if it was killing Mira, as it would have me, she hid it well. I only wondered if one day she would break altogether from the strain of holding it all in.
The closest we’d ever come to talking about it was one day at the Quik Stop, after some woman had complimented Mira, quite snidely, on her Terminator sunglasses.
“She’s not very nice,” I’d said tentatively as Mira got on her bike.