Chasing Rainbows A Novel - By Long, Kathleen Page 0,10

I ever had lustrous tresses? I shoved a hand up into my unruly rat’s nest.

No.

Brittany lifted a phone from its cradle. “You’d better stay back.”

“Or what? You’re going to knock me senseless with the receiver?”

She shook her head again. “I’m calling security.”

“Again,” Diane said sweetly, trying to reach me across the counter. “She’s been under a lot of stress.” She uttered her next statement in her most threatening tone. “Bernie. Let’s go. Now.”

I shot her a warning glance and she backed off. I refocused on my targets. “Where’s the prevention cream?”

While Brittany dialed, Tiffany pointed to a row of boxes to my right. I won’t deny how happy it made me to spot her nervous swallow.

I plucked one box from the shelf and then a second, ripping open fancy cardboard tops and slamming expensive glass vials to the counter. “You two have no idea how much you need prevention cream.” I nodded as I worked. “Trust me. Otherwise, those superiority complexes of yours are going to leave permanent marks.”

I crooked my finger, encouraging them to come closer.

A voice from the loudspeaker called a code something or other to kiosk number fourteen.

“Bernie.”

I lifted my gaze to Diane’s and blinked. If I’d thought she’d been blotchy earlier, I’d been wrong. She’d moved beyond blotchy, beyond lobster, to full-out, flaming, fire-engine red.

I wondered if the kiosk twins had a cream for that.

“Get. Out. Of. There. Now.”

I thought about her request for a full second. Honestly, I did. Her tone was so convincingly authoritative I almost caved to her will, but then Brittany made a fatal mistake.

She spoke.

“Yeah. Get out of here now. You don’t belong here.”

Her words weren’t so much what pushed me over the edge. It was her tone. Her I-will-never-lose-my-perfect-figure-or-my-flawless-skin-and-my-husband-will-never-leave-me tone that sent me lunging for her creamy throat.

Unfortunately, the security guard grabbed me from behind at the precise moment I made my move.

An hour later, Diane and I were escorted out of the mall. She’d received a warning and I’d received a lifetime ban, but that didn’t scare me. I mean, what were they going to do, post my picture at every entrance? Hey. Maybe they’d use those little red circles with the lines through them.

Actually, the thought was rather funny.

Then I realized something.

I was smiling.

Maybe Diane had been right about feeling something. Anything.

Sure, our mall excursion hadn’t exactly left me happy, but it had left me feeling alive, and alive was good.

“You know what?”

“What?” Diane’s exasperated tone had persisted since I’d scaled the counter.

“You were right.” I nodded. “We should do this more often.”

o0o

Later that night I attacked the first cryptogram again. This time, I copied the encoded letters onto a sheet of paper and tried to remember how I’d worked these things once upon a time.

The process came back to me slowly...very slowly. I guessed at word patterns and placements, arbitrarily assigning the letter E where I thought it belonged. The solution took shape at a snail’s pace, but after almost an hour, there it was.

I studied the words, savoring the quote Dad had chosen just for me.

While the message itself was a little too borderline-cheerleader for me, I knew what Dad had been trying to say.

I slept soundly that night, as if my dad himself had told me somehow, some way, everything would be all right.

o0o

“The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.”

–H. T. Leslie

THREE

“IYWSLUK OC NJK LSN YR HKOXU NJK YXBZ YXK TJY PXYTC ZYW’SK CILSKG NY GKLNJ.”

-KLSB TOBCYX

Late the next afternoon, I sat on the floor, watching my brother, Mark, touch Dad’s sport coats where they still hung in the closet. He touched each sleeve, each lapel, as if the fabric might disintegrate beneath his touch.

He’d arrived not long after I had. He’d never been much for the pop-in, but my mother’s smile was evidence of how much his surprise visit meant to her.

She disappeared downstairs to make a snack, leaving Mark and me alone in the master bedroom, no doubt hoping we’d somehow discover the closeness we’d never shared growing up.

I’d lived in awe of my brother--older than me and seemingly wiser in every way. With eight years between us, he’d always seemed just out of reach. I’d had the sense he tolerated me, counting the days until he could leave his annoying little sister behind.

I’d been failing miserably at mastering roller skates when he’d been learning to drive. Once he left for college, he’d never looked back. The years spent apart showed