Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories by Lucia Perillo Page B

work. But for the fair her short skirts were still made of denim, though store-bought now and finished at the hem. She liked to wear them with flashy heels in colors whose names Ginny remembered from the big crayon box: fuchsia, celadon, cerise. She also wore sunglasses, an extra pair of which she once tried offering to Ginny: “So you won’t be afraid of running into any of your kids or their parents,” she said. “Just in case you decide you wanted to cut loose.”
    “When have you ever known me to cut loose?”
    “Hey, Gin, I figure there’s a first time for everything.”
    Ginny made the comment that she was not the sister who usually needed a disguise, but this made Stella shake her head. “No, you don’t need a disguise when people see you wearing one every day. Get me out of a suit and no one has a clue.”
    “I was thinking more about your husbands.”
    “Oh, them.” Stella waved her hand in front of her face as though she were shooing away a cloud of gnats. “They already have their ideas about me.”

    THAT WAS HOW the Old West ended, that night Stella did her song and dance: I’ll be your hootchie-cootchie girl, you’ll be the jelly man . After everyone scurried away it was just Leroy on the stage, puffing his cigarette while Stella whooped. The barker rolled his eyes. “It’s that girl again. Your number one fan.”
    Leroy squinted and tilted his heavy glasses before he said, “Let’s have a look.” Then he made the barker push him down the ramp, so that he was there with the sisters on the wharf, peering up at them through his thick lenses. He looked at Stella, then Ginny, then back to Stella again.
    “That’s what I call groceries,” he said.
    Up close, Ginny could see that his shirt was cheap and crudely stitched. When Stella asked if he wanted something to drink, he scratched his shoulder against his chin, which had a few black hairs too sparse to qualify as a beard.
    “I s’pose I could do with a Coke,” he said.
    Ginny was dispatched to get it from the concession stand at the other end of the wharf. And while she waited in line, the evening dimmed — by the time she was headed back toward Stella with the cup in her hand, the bay was more black than silver where it stretched across the opening between stalls opposite the Old West’s stage. Farther north, on the other side of the bay, sat the pulp mill lit up like a steamship, its stacks churning out the vapors that reduced everyone who ventured down to the waterfront in those days to tears.
    She could not find Stella at first — she was not where Ginny’d left her — though eventually she spotted the wheelchair tucked behind the skee-ball booths and a shooting gallery. Stella was sitting slantwise on Leroy’s lap, her white shirt hanging on the back of the wheelchair, where it fluttered like a flag. Ginny knew that her sister was the one who’d done the unbuttoning, the Salmon Boy’s fingers sealed inside his fins.
    “Whoa. Double trouble,” he said when Ginny approached. But Stella was only annoyed.
    “What are you looking at?” she snapped.

    “OH, THAT WAS YEARS AGO,” Stella says, waving her hand across her face, again the gnats. She has her bare feet on the dashboard; she’s using the earstick of her sunglasses to dig mud from between her toes. The reason for the mud is that at around ten o’clock Stella had grown annoyed at the way her heels kept getting stuck in the cracks between the planks. And she’d flung her shoes off the wharf, hollering after them, “To hell with you!”
    That’s all it was: a woman standing with one leg crossed behind the other to peel the shoe off of her heel. Then other leg/other shoe. Then they both get fired into the drink.
    That’s all it was, a woman taking off her shoes and flinging them into the sea, and yet seeing this somehow made Ginny forget (for a minute) all her sister’s petty offenses throughout the years — after all, wasn’t Stella right, weren’t her