Searching for Tina Turner - By Jacqueline E. Luckett Page 0,20

the French ones, to show off her hips. Randall did not notice her hips or the jeans at the airport, just as at this minute, eyes closed in a trance of concentration, he doesn’t notice her nakedness.

The water sloshes against the sides of the long tub when Lena stirs it with her foot. When she steps in, Randall opens his eyes and leans forward. He cups her breasts and massages them in that way that always makes her moan. Lena pulls away before she does, before she starts something even her momentary meditation has left her still too upset to finish.

“I’m already feeling the jet lag.” Randall scoops hot water over his chest and head and repeats this motion two more times. Wrinkled eyebrows keep the rivulets from his eyes. “I’m ready to sleep in my own bed.” He swallows the rest of his wine with one quick swig, steps out of the tub, and dries himself roughly before going off to bed.

f f f

The rasp of Randall’s snores matches the sawing sounds of the final minutes of a movie on TV. Sleep is the only time that anyone would label Randall peaceful. If she is awake, when he lies motionless in the middle of the night like this, Lena often pokes his shoulder, his neck, his thigh in anticipation of the slightest movement: proof he is still alive and well. Half-open eyes tell Lena he is somewhere between dream and arousal.

Randall tugs her close, tickles her with his tongue in a new place, and she gasps from the sensation. They blend together in their familiar way. She surrenders to his touch, the bristle of his mustache, a hint of musk oil. There is no urgency to his movement, yet he comes swiftly, leaving Lena wanting more.

Chapter 6

Lulu and John Henry’s dream house looks the same as the day they bought it in 1965. The house is painted a pale color somewhere between beige and rust; a lamp that switches on at 4:30 p.m. and off at 7:30 a.m. every spring, summer, winter, and fall. Year round Christmas lights, more fragments than bulbs, loop under the eaves and around the three-sided bay window that dominates the front of the house.

Whenever Bobbie and Lena complained of how embarrassed they were by the lights and the hideous, old-fashioned paint, John Henry told them he didn’t have a problem with change as long as it stayed away from him. The biggest change he’d made in his life, he told his daughters every time, was coming to California, and, since he wasn’t a risk taker, he saw no need to push his luck.

“Lulu? You in the backyard?” Lena ducks around the low branches of the California oak where she and Bobbie always wanted John Henry to build a tree house. The limbs of snowball hydrangeas straggle over the path; low pink azaleas, in ironic harmony with the painted red cement, ramble below. Two garbage cans filled with dead leaves sit in the middle of the path. This Wednesday, like every Wednesday of the eighteen months since John Henry passed, Lena feels like she has become her father. She lugs the trash to the curb where neighbors’ cans jaggedly line the street up one side and down the other like whole notes in a measure of music.

Once done, she heads for the backyard. The yard that used to be John Henry’s pride and joy is unkempt in a way that shocks this daughter of parents once so fastidious: overgrown hedges, scraggly lawn, brown spots on camellia leaves, wiry rose bushes; an apple tree branch hangs doggedly parallel to its trunk.

Lulu’s posture is effortlessly straight-backed. She holds a tarnished brass nozzle attached to a green-striped garden hose in her left hand and listens intently to someone’s conversation on the other end of the cell phone squeezed between her right ear and shoulder. The bluish rinse that Lulu tints her thin, curly afro with glistens in the sun. Not one hair on her head is out of place, no wrinkles in her blouse, not a drop of water on her pants. Lena can’t help but smile at how beautiful her mother still is, how the color of her clothes warms her skin.

Phone still in place, Lulu holds two conversations at the same time. “Tell me your husband didn’t see you looking like that? At least you could’ve put on lipstick.” Lulu never goes without her trademark lipstick. Today, her fuchsia lips match the budding azaleas, her cardigan,