“Hercule Poirot.”
“Duh. I should have guessed.” He glanced at my vanity mirror, where the Elvis not-a-penny fortune was stuck into the frame alongside hisLOOK UP!playing card. He quickly took stock of my vase of lilies and the vintage Smith Corona on my desk before his gaze jumped to the adjoining wall. “Oh my God, are these your mystery books? Shit. You weren’t exaggerating.” He squatted in front of the bookshelves to browse. “Hey, it’s Nancy Drew. A ton of them.”
“Two different sets.”
“And who’s this? Billie Holiday?” He stood back up to look at the framed poster.
“She’s my style icon, with the big flower in her hair,” I explained. “Supposedly she burned her hair once with curling tongs right before she was going onstage to sing, so her friend went and got flowers to cover up the singed spot.”
“Didn’t know that,” Daniel said.
“And she was a great jazz singer, of course. No one could mistake that voice. The woman who owns the Moonlight, Ms. Patty—”
“The old woman who works the lunch shift? Really tall, husky laugh?”
I nodded. “She has a million old records. She used to let me listen to them sometimes when she babysat me. Anyway, I like how she sings all of these sad songs, like ‘Gloomy Sunday,’ but somehow her voice is comforting. It’s sort of like she’s commiserating with you.”
He looked at the poster and said, “I love it when they play her and Ella Fitzgerald in the hotel. My mom dances to a lot of old jazz standards. Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan. Billie Holiday’s kind of the best, though. Very nice. I approve.” He smiled at me, and I felt it in the bottom of my feet, warming me all the way into my chest. That smile was dangerous. I would know.
“Hey,” Daniel said, inspecting a couple of framed photos on the wall. “Who’s this? Same killer eyes. Not you.”
“That’s my mom,” I said.
“Jesus, she was gorgeous. Is that Mona... and a toy monkey?”
“That was her Frida Kahlo stage.”
“And this one,” he said, pointing to the other photo of my mother by herself. “She was a waitress? Wait. Is that the Moonlight?”
I nodded. “Worked there until I was five, I think? Then she started managing stores at Westlake Center. Then she worked at Macy’s... Then she was unemployed for a while. She sort of bounced around a lot.” I pointed to another photo of her, when she was a year younger than me—seventeen. She’d gotten her first job behind the counter at the cinnamon bun café near the harbor. In this photo, she smiled at the camera, showing off her apron, her name embroidered at the top. This was the last picture of her taken by my grandmother, and you could almost feel her sense of pride from behind the camera. Oh, how that changed.
“My mother was already pregnant with me when the photo was taken, but she didn’t tell them until much later, when she started showing,” I told Daniel. “The only person who knew was Mona.”
He squinted at the photo and then turned to me, a strange expression on his face. “Your mom’s name was Lily?” he said, eyes flicking to the stargazer in my hair.
I nodded once.
The lines on his forehead softened, and he looked at me with so much tenderness, my chest became hot and constricted. Without warning, tears brimmed, stinging the backs of my eyelids.
“I’m sorry,” I managed to say, talking around the knot in my throat. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s been eight years. I should be past all this.”
And I was, sort of? When I thought about my mom too much, my mind went into a horrible loop, because the thing was, I couldn’t remember a lot about her. She was pretty and had a dry sense of humor, and she smelled good. She was always working, never around enough, and I remember always wanting more of her. More of her attention and time. But the rest of my memories had been trampled under everyone else’s opinions of her. Grandma said she was rebellious and stubborn and never thought about consequences; Mona said she was loyal and determined and always tried her best. Maybe both of them were right.
“I can barely remember the real Lily anymore,” I said. “My strongest memories from back then are of Mona. How is that possible? How could I forget her?”
He didn’t say anything. He just wrapped his arms around me. I laid my head on his shoulder and clung to him. It felt like holding sunshine in my arms. As if I was starving and he was nourishment. It felt like forgiveness. Relief.
Warm hands cupped both sides of my head. I cleared my throat, sniffled, and then laughed, as if I were some sort of malfunctioning cyborg. “I seriously don’t know what’s wrong. Ugh, I’m so embarrassed. I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” he said, eyes shining. He swiped beneath my eyes with his thumbs. “You’re a little bit of a disaster, Birdie,” he murmured, but not unkindly.
“You have no idea.”
“I don’t mind. It takes a disaster to know one. And I’m a grade-A disaster.”
“Daniel?”
“Yes?”
