His mother hadn’t liked it when Papa had allowed Oscar to cut his favorite doll’s hair so she would match him. She’d taken it away, told Oscar he didn’t deserve to have such pretty dolls if he wanted to uglify himself.
That was the only time he’d ever seen Papa get truly angry. Oscar still remembered the sharp snatch, the way Papa’s gentle hand had closed around that doll, swiping it from his mother’s grip and handing it back to him. They hadn’t talked about it in his room, but later that night, Oscar had heard his papa say that if his mother ever called Spike ugly again, he’d… Papa had never finished that sentence, but Oscar guessed the one half was enough because his mother had never called him ugly with Papa in the house again. And Oscar had never told him about the other times. Because Papa hadn’t said what he would do. What if he left?
“Can I have one?” a small voice asked.
Oscar looked down at the kid who’d stopped in front of his stand, no older than eight. The store had only been open an hour and a half, but it was already teeming with customers, chattering happily as they walked out with their full-sized bottles and palettes of whatever samples they’d taken from Oscar.
“Daniel, those are for grownups.” Oscar looked up at the woman. She gave him an apologetic smile, tugging on Daniel’s hand. “Come on, let’s go.”
“It’s no bother. They’re free,” Oscar said, shrugging. “You can have whatever you want. Most people are taking the face cream, but the blush looks quite nice, to be honest.”
He passed the woman a small round plastic tin of cream blush, tinted a shade of coral Oscar thought would complement her skin.
“Can I have this too, Mom?” Daniel wrapped a hand around a mini eye-shadow palette of glittery blues. “Please?I want to make my eyes look pretty, like yours.”
“The man has already given us a gift,” the woman said, smiling down at her child.
Oscar wished he had no cause to envy them. But there was no bitterness around the green that settled in his chest. As the woman sighed and put the blush down on the stall edge, something lit up in Oscar, something that wished all the children in the world could have someone like Daniel did. Someone like Papa.
“We’ll take the eyeshadow, then.” She smiled at the sight of Daniel’s widening grin, then turned to nod at Oscar. “Thank you.”
“I’ll put it in a bag for you,” he said, reaching for the palette. “You have very good taste, Daniel. Do you want to see all the colors or are you settled on blue?”
“Blue’s my favorite color,” Daniel said.
“Then blue it is.”
Glancing over his shoulder, Oscar couldn’t see any of the cashiers, the counters crowded with people waiting in line, so it was far easier to take the paper bag and put both the eyeshadow palette and the cream blush in for the two of them.
“You don’t…” the woman started to say, eyes widening.
“Nice people deserve to have nice things,” Oscar replied. “Have a wonderful day.”
He watched them go, Daniel bouncing beside her, twirling around while the two of them chatted, peeking into the bag together as they walked away. The next person to stop by his stall was a teenage girl. By the time she picked a tub of face cream, the woman and Daniel had disappeared.
The next three hours were a nightmare. Oscar could barely keep up with all the people swarming to his stall for samples, hands grabbing at products, each person trying to take far more than was reasonable, but he managed to calm them, to shut them up by offering two things instead of one, spritzing sweet perfume on strips of paper that drove them into the store to spend their money.
Oscar wondered how these people were paying for their expensive makeup, given none of them were at work on a Monday morning, but thenheearned a living, and he never stepped foot outside the house to earn a cent. So who was he to talk?
The tidal wave of eager shoppers ebbed at lunchtime, and with the calm came hunger. Oscar’s stomach grumbled, but he hadn’t brought anything to eat, and there was no chance he’d be allowed to leave his stall long enough to buy and eat something.
Oscar busied himself with rearranging the stall, realizing as he restocked his display that he would have to slow down if he wanted to earn at least eight hours’ pay for Aaron. He handed out the next few samples more conservatively, smiling politely at each passerby and offering the items that hadn’t been too popular, keeping the face creams and the blushes hidden in the bags beside his feet.
Maybe Oscar should have spent the next few minutes crouched down on the ground lining them up like ducks, like the dolls in his childhood room back home. Maybe then, he would have been invisible enough. Maybe then, he would have skirted past the chaos waiting to unfold, the chaos he could smell as surely as the fresh baguettes from across the street as her breath caught in her throat.
Oscar knew that gasp.
And still, his eyes shot up to blue. But this was not the ocean he had come to rest in every night, nor the soft calm sky of Lina’s joy. This was Arctic frost, and Oscar was stark naked in its path.
The last time he’d seen his mother was on that cold rainy evening when he’d gathered whatever he could slide off the surfaces of his bedroom furniture and stormed out of their home, never looking back. He’d made it his life’s mission to steer clear of her haunts, to deny himself his favorite cake because she liked the apple pie the same place made, to stick to his own apartment on the side of town too dodgy for her standards.
Oscar swallowed, unable to tear his gaze from hers. Four years.
His mind wandered to Aaron, sitting in bed with his knitting, Lu curled up at his feet, purring away the agony of missing a mother. He thought about Gemma, the breaking vase, the son who loved her but couldn’t have her.
“Hi,” he said.
He wished Lina were here. He wished he could freeze time and whip out his phone, that he could text her and interrupt whatever class she must be in to ask her whether she remembered words. Lina always knew just what to say.
