Blue Moon by Luanne Rice Page A

“I don’t remember that.”
    “They fought all the time. I remember sitting on the stairs, listening to them fight in the dining room. Nothing violent or anything,” Nora said, seeing Bonnie’s expression. “Usually about money, the business, one of us. They didn’t know I was listening. I felt like I ought to be able to make them stop, but there was nothing I could do.”
    “I never knew they fought,” Bonnie said. She was stunned by Josie’s fit, which was louder than ever. If she heard those screams coming from a neighbor’s house, she would call the police.
    She remembered that when her kids were little, when one of them would skin a knee, or have a temper tantrum, everyone wouldwant to help. Her mother would make funny faces, her father would hold out a nickel, her sisters would hover close, making soothing sounds. But all her children ever wanted was Bonnie. She’d hold them and rock them and kiss their scrapes.
    Bonnie and Nora sat silently at the kitchen table while the voices of their niece and sister rang through the house. The pitch grew higher, more frantic; Josie was clearly hysterical.
    “So mean,” Josie cried. “They hate me. They hate me.”
    “No they don’t, they love you,” Cass said.
    “They hate me.”
    “Big kids like to play alone sometimes.” Cass’s voice, though still steady, was full of tears and frustration.
    Josie wept, her cries still punishingly angry, as if she hadn’t heard a word her mother said.
    Bonnie yearned to stand up, grab Josie and Cass, and shake both of them. Instead, she reached for Nora’s hand. Nora gave it a squeeze, and Cass’s two older sisters sat together, holding hands, as they listened.

6
    N ora hardly ever felt like smoking anymore. She still carried her cigarettes with her, and occasionally she would reach for one, from habit. She would get as far as placing it between her lips before discovering she didn’t want it at all. The other day at Bonnie’s, when Cass had finally gotten Josie to calm down, Nora had lifted the child into her arms for a hug. Although she had stopped crying, Josie’s chest heaved in big, shuddering breaths. “Your hair smells pretty, like shampoo,” Josie had said, with difficulty, into Nora’s ear.
    It had amazed Nora that after crying so hard for so long, Josie had any breath left to talk.
    “Thank you,” Nora had said. While Bonnie sat Cass down and poured her a cup of tea, Nora had played with Josie, letting her try on her silver bracelets and jade beads, until her breathing returned almost to normal. It was the first time Nora could remember anyone telling her that her hair smelled pretty.
    Nora had conditioned her hair and decided to persuade it back to its natural auburn color. She had stripped off her bright-red fingernail polish and applied shell pink. Standing before her refrigerator, looking into its open door, she felt dismayed to discover it contained only two open bottles of white wine, a six-pack of Narragansett beer, a container of clam chowder so old it was tinged blue, and the unopened currant preserves Bonnie had given her for May Day two years ago.
    On her day off, Nora went grocery shopping at Almacs. She filled her cart with whole-wheat bread, boneless chicken breasts, mineralwater, cranberry juice, broccoli, carrots, one baking potato, and a lemon-scented air freshener. Grocery shopping was new for Nora; in the past, she had been known to run into a store for some peanuts, olives, or pickled onions, but she always ate her meals at Lobsterville. She wheeled her cart slowly, as if she were taking her first steps.
    For a long time—years, actually—Nora had thought of herself as someone with hair of straw, a washed-out face, the body of a cornhusk doll. Bonnie had turned forty blooming like a rose, treating herself to a fabulous masquerade party to which people brought presents. That everyone loved Bonnie was obvious to Nora, who had sat in the Kenneallys’ TV room in a rented flapper