I put my guitar in place on the stage, up against the piano. No one ever played the piano, except the occasional drunk goofing off. Mostly it just helped define the lines of the stage, so no one would trip over the corner.
“Something came up,” I said. “Had to get it sorted.”
“Things always seem to come up,” Lourey said, tugging at one of her braids. Her bright red lips twisted as she thought about it. “Right at curtain, actually.”
Shanny peered at me with concern. “You don’t look so good. Are you able to go on?”
Rooster, tuning her bass, shot Lourey a look. I wasn’t supposed to see it.
“Yeah, it’s— I’ll tell you later. Let me have five minutes and then we’ll kick it off.”
“Sure,” Lourey said, setting her guitar aside. “Sure, we’ll take a break before we even start. Makes sense.”
I hopped off the stage and headed down the service hallway toward the door that led to the apartment, but I really didn’t want to go upstairs and stir up the dogs. Oona would be home by now, too, and what I needed was a few minutes of silence.
The door to the ladies’ john opened at my shoulder. The band had access to the narrow toilet stall at the back of the storeroom, but that little closet had terrible lighting and stayed fifteen degrees colder than any other part of the pub. Most of the time, there was a draft wailing through there that was absolutely the source of the McPhee’s ghost story. If the ladies’ john was unexpectedly free…
It was. The door closed behind me, snapping off the racket of the pub. I went to the sink, wet a paper towel, and pressed it to my face. A pin in my hair was loose. Swiss cake rolls, I remembered Primary Jim calling them, and smiled into the mirror.
Bathrooms were such great places to sing. I was still fixing my hair and humming a warm-up when Marisa walked in. I slid right into the low swing of the chorus to Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”
“Funny,” Marisa said. “Look, I didn’t come to ask you for anything—”
“Come on,” I said. “You’re just trying to rattle me now.”
We were looking at each other’s reflections, not directly, and it helped. I didn’tfeelrattled, actually, not anymore. I felt calm and righteous, like I’d been singing all night bathed in the adoration of a rapturous crowd.
“But I did need totellyou—”
“You get to come and say whatever-it-is to me, as long as it’s on your schedule?” I said. “You could have come any day of my life since—sinceever. But you didn’t. You managed to keep all your say-somethings to yourself. But now that you’re ready to talk, I have to drop everything and listen. Is that right? Do I have that right, Marisa?”
She looked tired, suddenly. “I hate that you call me that.”
“Your name?”
“You know youcould—”
The bathroom door wrenched open. Marisa dove forward and clutched at the sink. In the open doorway, Rooster stood wide-eyed in her va-va-voom sweetheart-necked dress. “Sorry,” she squeaked and retreated.
Marisa was still panting into the mirror.
“You’re a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs,Marisa,” I drawled.
“Why are you talking like that?”
I pulled out the tube of lipstick I’d stowed in my dress. “You’d expect a steelier nerve from a lady who used to live on the streets.”
Marisa’s eyes met mine in the mirror, then swept past to her own reflection. What she saw seemed to surprise her. She fixed her bangs, brushing them to the side. Maybe, until she’d seen herself there in the glass, she’d forgotten who she was. Maybe she’d slipped sideways through time into a moment when she’d been about my age, using bathrooms like this to shoot up.
“Where did you get the nameDevine?” she said.
“I chose it,” I said. “That’s the great thing about being abandoned. You don’t have to cling to any labels your parent slapped on you. And I talklike thatbecause I do, okay?” I slid into my stage persona, a voice sweet as blackberry jam on a biscuit. “This is my rodeo and those folks out there aremyclowns.”
“It’s a put-on,” Marisa said, and for the first time all night, she sounded sure of herself. “Have you ever been to the country? Have you been outside of Cook County?”
“I’ll be anyone I want to be,” I said. “You don’t get a say in who that is. And if you would stop trying to make me feel bad about my life and let me get back to living it, you’ll find that it’s not a put-on. It’s a role. I’m thestar—the rodeoqueen. And you might be treated to a hell of a show.”
Marisa watched as I touched up my lips, rolled them, and puckered—smooch—at the mirror. Blood red and ready to slay.
