According to my best friend, brushing your lips will make them appear fuller. I didn’t care all that much, but she insisted.
I throw the brush down when I taste blood.
Jade gasps, her crystalized blue eyes bugging out of her head.
“That actually worked, look!” She pushes her eyeshadow palette across the plastic fold-out table in front of me.
I flip it open, hold the internal mirror in line with my now crimson red puffer-fish lips.
“Yeah, and it fucking hurts.” I laugh, pressing them together, returning the palette to her open makeup bag, swallowing the taste of metal that slides over my tongue and down my throat.
“Beauty is pain, my girl,” she mumbles, brushing a little harder.
I roll my eyes, snatching my Diet Coke and taking a cool sip. I reach for one of Jade’s fluffy makeup brushes and bubblegum pink blushes, starting on my cheeks.
We are outside, at the back of the trailer and the last of the day's bright yellow sun is melting to fiery orange, dappling through the tall trees scattered around us.
The warm breeze pushes its trembling hands through my hair, guiding the ironed strands away from my face and over my shoulders.
“Do you think tonight—” I begin, when I hear a delicate knock on the side of the trailer, and one of my favorite human’s soft voices behind it.
“Laikey, are you in, sweetheart?”
I smile, raise my chin. “Around the back, Nan!” I call out.
Jade pushes out of the fold-out camper chair when we see my grandmother's perfectly styled short white hair peek around the corner of the trailer. It’s blow-dried back off her wrinkled face like it always is, not a lock out of place.
“Nanna June,” Jade greets her with a smile, wrapping her in a hug.
Nan does her best to tuck her small chin into Jade, welcoming the warm gesture, only, both of her frail and shaking hands are struggling as she clasps tightly to a duck-egg blue porcelain casserole dish, painted with budded coral tulips in front of her. Delicately, she pushes it into Jade's stomach. “Would you take it, dear?” she croaks.
“Oh, shit, sorry,” Jade says, relieving my nan of the weight. “Crap, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to swear. It just, ugh, slipped out.”
Jade berates herself, and I snort. Nan does much the same before releasing a high-pitched, yet quiet laugh that is so uniquely hers it has me smiling, then frowning, when it slips into a cough that has her weathered face turning beetroot red.
She looks at Jade with watery eyes, retrieves a handkerchief from the front pocket of her three-quarter cotton cream pants, dabbing beneath wrinkled eyes.
“It’s like you young things think us old folks have never cussed before,” Nan states with a final cough and a swipe of her nose.
I grin, push up from my own chair, reaching for her and drawing her in for a hug. Nan’s arm trembles when she wraps it around me and I relish the feeling of being in the safety of my grandmother's arms.
“Bad girl,” I tease, pulling back, grabbing onto her shoulders.
She pinches my hip, like she always does.
“Nan!” I laugh.
And she chuckles with me, so does Jade, then she’s reaching for something tucked into her front pocket.
“I made you girls something,” Nan tells us.
Jade and I look at each other, smiling. It was so like Nan. Whether she was in the kitchen cooking, or at the kitchen table with her sewing machine, or adding another plant to her already abundant garden, she was using her hands and her brain. She was keeping herself busy.
Nan takes two long pieces of pink and red gingham ribbon from her pocket, shakes them out, then extends her tired arms toward us.
We take them from her, appraising them.
“I found one of your old dresses from when you were little, Laikey, in storage. It was the one with the big?—”
